Empire-shocking killing inspires thesis

Today Mary Kilcline Cody of the Australian National University will be awarded her doctorate for her thesis The Trial of Mrs Proudlock: Law, Government and Society in British Malaya, 1911.

Of course Cody's thesis is a scholarly work but she agreed yesterday that it was a blessing to be able to research and to write about the ramifications of such an intrinsically fascinating saga.

On her desk she has a photograph of the similarly-fascinated Maugham who, like her, heard the Proudlock story (he heard it in the 1920s) and found it irresistible. Maugham's story is The Letter and in 1940 it was made into the film of the same name, starring Bette Davis.

In her ANU office, with Maugham in his frame seeming to eavesdrop on us (for he really was a notorious eavesdropper, then using what he'd heard for his stories) Cody gave this reporter a precis of the true story.

In 1911 Mrs Ethel Proudlock killed William Steward on the verandah of her home in Kuala Lumpur. He was a friend of the family. He was a fellow colonial and it was a shocking event.

She claimed he'd tried to rape her and that she'd shot him in defence of her honour. But a magistrate found there was a [murder] case to answer because of how she'd followed him out on to the verandah and down the steps, blazing away at him as he fled.

Cody said there was a truly sensational trial in Kuala Lumpur in 1911. Newspapers across the globe carried the story. In local English-language papers it competed every day for sheer newsworthiness with the coming coronation of King George V. The judge and two assessors sentenced her to hang.

Cody believes, although her thesis isn't concerned with Proudluck's guilt or innocence, that Proudlock and Stewart were lovers and that Proudlock shot Stewart in a rage (hence all those shots) because he'd left her to go to his Chinese mistress.

''In any society being left is a bad thing,'' Cody explained yesterday (with Maugham almost seeming to take notes) ''but in this colonial society being [a white woman] left for a native woman is an enormous insult. I think she became enraged.''

Cody's thesis is about much more than can be done justice here but some of it is a study of the white Britons managing this corner of the Empire. So much about them emerged from evidence at the trial.

History has taught us, she says, to imagine little colonial communities like these (of 50,000 in Kuala Lumpur there were 695 white people) as ''an idealised, cherished, revered group'' consisting of the cream of the British upper classes. She says we get that impression from books and films but she's found they weren't like that in the Kuala Lumpur she's investigated.

''Through all the evidence given at the trial … about what they were doing on the night of the killing, what their relationship was to the accused, how they knew the individuals, where they knew them from … through all the evidence we get a picture we've never seen before.''

Fascinatingly, she says, we see ''They weren't the aristocrats of the colonial world. They were people who'd come mostly from England and who were extremely poor. They'd come out to better themselves. The Empire was a great opportunity for them. Proudlock's husband had risen in Kuala Lumpur to be acting headmaster of a prestigious school, but his father had been a pit boy in England [down the coal mines collecting the coal] from the age of seven''. In Malaya, Cody said, these colonial rulers found themselves administering people that they sometimes had called ''coolies'' when really ''their [the white people's] own families were white coolies.''