Prisoner in the Tower

Back from Italy, back from France came James Ramsay MacDonald last week to report to his King & country on the results of his peace pilgrimage. But Britons paid more attention to what was going on in the echoing, draughty drill hall of the Duke of York's Military School in Chelsea.

Not since the War has the British Press had a story quite so theatrical. It started month and a half ago with a sudden rush to buy sixpenny tickets for the Tower of London. Londoners in swarms learned that there was a real prisoner incarcerated in the Tower, held under the Official

Secrets Act. Here was a real attraction to place beside the Crown Jewels, Henry VIII's armor and the spot where Anne Boleyn lost her head. Playing up the mysterious Prisoner for all he was worth, London's Daily Express printed a picture showing Tower Green packed with spectators gawking at a tall soldierly figure in a Glengarry bonnet, inked out in silhouet. Even more tickets were sold at the news that the face under the Glengarry bonnet was young and good looking.

Slowly the drama developed. The Prisoner was Norman Baillie-Stewart, 24, a lieutenant in the aristocratic Seaforth Highlanders, a regiment still known north of the Tweed as the Ross-shire Buffs, whose Colonel-in-Chief is Edward of Wales (see cut). As a cadet at Sandhurst Lieut. Baillie-Stewart became still more intimate with the Royal Family by serving as orderly to Prince Henry, third son of George V. The charge against him was selling military secrets to a foreign power. Last week his court martial commenced.

It seemed almost as though the British Government were copying the famed Soviet propaganda trials of Moscow. Having attracted the maximum attention to the young Highlander by locking him up in a museum, the Government held the great treason trial not in a room in the War Office but out in the middle of a drill hall. Except when special witnesses were being examined, the Press was admitted; there were plenty of seats for the public. President of the court was Major General Winston Dugan, a former aide-de-camp of King George. On either side of him sat three other grave, ruddy-faced officers. Campaign ribbons glowed like little flower beds in the broad expanse of their khaki chests.

Saluting smartly, Lieut. Baillie-Stewart stepped to the witness stand. By King's Regulations an officer under arrest may wear neither sword nor spurs. As a Highlander Baillie-Stewart had been deprived of his Sam Browne belt. Just as the trial commenced a clergyman sprang up from the back benches waving a Bible and shouting:

'T protest in the name of Jehovah against this young officer being committed to the Tower."

He was removed and the trial proceeded. In a two-and-a-half-hour speech, the Prosecutor, Major Harold Shapcott, outlined the Government's case. Because Britain is not at war Lieut. Baillie-Stewart's life was not at stake, but there were ten charges against him. with a maximum penalty of 140 years in jail. On the plea that he was studying for staff college examinations, he had borrowed from the Aldershot Military Library the specifications and photographs of an experimental tank and a new automatic rifle for infantry, also notes on the organization of tank and armored car units. Without special permission he had visited Berlin on leave. It was charged that he sold his secrets to a mysterious German known as Otto Waldemar Obst. Major Shapcott pointed out that Obst sounds like Oberst which means Colonel. (That Obst means "fruit" was not brought for-ward.) For these secrets it was charged that Baillie-Stewart received two letters signed "Marie Louise," one containing ten -L-5 notes, the other four -L-10 notes.

"I am not mincing words!" cried Major Shapcott. ''The prosecution contends that Lieut. Baillie-Stewart sold his country for the sake of -L-50 or more."

There followed other testimony about the telephone number of the German War Office which for some reason he seems to have scrawled on a piece of paper, and the address of a cinemactress, unnamed.

The defense was as strange as the prosecution. Lieut. Baillie-Stewart's civilian counsel, Lawyer Norman Parkes, deposed that the mysterious Marie Louise was an actual person, a beauteous blonde of 22, introduced to the Lieutenant by the equally mysterious Obst.

"He would not say so," said Lawyer Parkes, "but she became infatuated with him. You will hear evidence that the accused always had a peculiar attraction for women, and a peculiar attitude toward them which perhaps I may best describe as a lack of chivalry."

This stirred General Dugan to the Hes of his field boots.

'"Do you mean to say," he roared at the prisoner, "that this Marie Louise paid you 90 pun' for immoral services rendered-- for you to be her paramour?"

"Yes," said Lieut. Baillie-Stewart, "I think it was given for the whole of our friendship."

Baillie-Stewart's mother, a Mrs. Elsie Beatrice Wright (the defendant changed his name from Wright to Baillie-Stewart in 1929) testified that she knew about the trips to Berlin but was not told about Marie Louise. "It was not natural that he would," said she.

Lieut. Eric Stewart Wright, a brother, gave evidence that he knew about Marie Louise and the money received and had called his brother a fool. He added: "Women were on his mind the whole time." As the defense rested, the prosecution which had been calling Lieut. Baillie-Stewart everything from a "kept man'' to a traitor suddenly announced that it would advise the court that it had "no proof of treacherous intention on the part of the accused."

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