At two of the clock on the morning of December 7, 1838, flames burst forth from the offices of the Newcastle Savings Bank. When the blaze had been subdued, the constables entered to ascertain its origin. In the clerks’ office, Joseph Millie lay upon a hearthrug, his skull grievously shattered. His pockets were crammed with coal. In the adjoining room, Archibald Bolam, the actuary of the establishment, appeared insensible. Slight wounds scored his neckcloth and grazed his throat. The scene suggested at first a felonious assault, followed by arson intended to obliterate its traces; yet the bank’s books and papers remained, for the most part, undisturbed.
Bolam regained consciousness and recounted to the officers what he claimed to have endured. For some time past, he maintained, he had been plagued by threatening anonymous epistles. On the preceding evening, a note slipped beneath the bank doors warned that misfortune awaited him at home. He had consequently retired to his lodgings for tea, while Millie departed the office on his own affairs.
According to Bolam, he returned to the bank at about half-past seven o’clock. Finding the outer door locked, he admitted himself with his own key and put it into his pocket. Millie, stretched upon the rug, seemed merely asleep; Bolam knew his colleague also possessed a key and was accustomed to locking himself in. As Bolam approached his desk, he fancied he heard a movement behind him. A man in disguise, his face blackened with soot, struck him upon the temple. Bolam sprang toward the window, raising an alarm. The intruder pursued him, warning that if he made further outcry he should share the fate of the other man. A second blow felled him beneath the window; whilst prostrate, he felt the edge of a blade pressed against his throat.
He affirmed that he lost his senses, only reviving when he heard stirrings in the other room. He dared not summon aid. Bolam further declared that he had burnt the earlier threatening letters; that which he had retrieved that night from beneath the waiting-room door was said to have remained on his desk. He described his assailant as a man of short stature, speaking in a rough, perhaps disguised, voice. A few shillings were found in Bolam’s pockets. He believed he had left four pounds ten shillings in his desk—funds entrusted to him by a Mr. Airey to be banked on the morrow—and eighty pounds in the inner safe, a sum reserved for current disbursements. Of aught else, his memory was a void.
The bank, however, bore no tokens of a plunderer’s raid. Most of the books and documents were uninjured, the flames having spared them. The outer iron door of the strongroom stood ajar, but the lock of the inner safe was fast. Bolam asserted he had left his key upon his desk; it was nowhere to be found. The inner safe remaining locked, the scene lent no credence to a straightforward robbery.
At the coroner’s inquest, Bolam’s answers appeared confused and at variance with physical testimony. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against him, and he was committed to prison. Superintendent Stevens nevertheless pursued the investigation. At Bolam’s residence, officers discovered the missing bank key and a substantial sum of gold secreted behind books. Witnesses placed him at home at an hour later than he had sworn. A renewed search of the bank revealed further discrepancies: no blood was found where Bolam claimed to have lain unconscious, whereas his garments bore stains consistent with a wound sustained while seated. Moreover, three of the most recent account ledgers had vanished.
These discoveries fed the conviction that Bolam had fabricated the narrative of an assault to divert scrutiny from Millie’s death and the concealed money. The missing ledgers pointed to an embezzlement, yet Pelham deemed it an extravagance of villainy to slaughter a colleague and fire a building merely to destroy papers that might have been disposed of by simpler means. Amidst fierce public outcry, manifold motives were assigned to Bolam. The chronicle favoured the theory of an altercation: Bolam, it was conjectured, had struck down his associate with a poker in a sudden paroxysm of fury, subsequently firing the premises and inflicting his own wounds. The chronicler advances this quarrel as the solution ultimately embraced by the jury, though what ignited the dispute remains unrevealed.
Millie was a widower and the father of four children. The chronicle depicts him as a man who, despite heavy misfortunes, strived to rear his family in credit and respectability. It was Bolam who had procured his appointment at the bank, at an annual salary of sixty pounds. Following the catastrophe, the trustees afforded immediate succour to his orphans. Nor did public sympathy end there: in less than a month, a public subscription had raised one thousand pounds for their support.
The Crown proceeded against Bolam upon the capital charge of wilful murder. At the Spring Assizes of 1839, an indictment was preferred; but owing to the vehement agitation of the populace and the hazard of prejudice, the trial was postponed to the summer. On July 29, at Newcastle, the proceedings commenced before Baron Maule. The case for the prosecution occupied the greater part of two days, after which the defence called an array of witnesses to testify to the prisoner’s unblemished character.
In his summing-up, Mr. Baron Maule reviewed the proofs advanced to establish murder, yet refrained from treating the hypothesis of an affray as an established fact. The evidence revealed no prior rancour or malice aforethought, and the learned judge invited the jury to weigh an alternative verdict: Bolam might have caused Millie’s death in the course of a sudden quarrel, wherein blows were exchanged. A sudden heat of passion, he observed, might have wrought the fatal issue, supplying Bolam with a frantic motive to feign an assault to evade the penalties of the law. Baron Maule remarked that this view had been urged by neither party, leaving it entirely to the jury’s discernment. After a deliberation of three hours, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter—an English legal designation distinguishing culpable homicide from murder, which by no means implies that the fatal blow was struck without design.
Archibald Bolam was thereupon sentenced to transportation for the term of his natural life, and sailed from the realm.