Shot twice in head, his eye hanging out

How did a jealous penniless actor end up shot twice in the head outside the back of his former home, carrying a home-made cosh in his pocket – and why did neither his former lover or son, who were in the flat above, not investigate? Historian JAN BONDESON tells the story of the Clifty Gardens Mystery – and why the flat’s location was a mystery for decades.

Thomas Weldon Anderson, born in late 1861, changed his name to Weldon Atherstone when he became an actor.
A tall, handsome man with an excellent voice, he specialized in Shakespearian productions.

He married young actress Monica Kelly in 1888 and they had a son, Thomas Frederick Anderson.

The crime writer Isobel Mary Thorn, pen-name Elizabeth Villiers, claimed the actor was an angry, jealous man, and the baby “a forlorn mite, with bickering parents”.

The couple did have another son, William Gordon Anderson, and two daughters.

Weldon Atherstone kept touring in the 1890s but never progressed to more important roles.

In the late 1890s, he left his wife for good. In July 1899, when in the play The Power of Gold at the Theatre Royal in Sheffield, he met the young actress Elizabeth Earle.

She was pretty, with soulful eyes, and a mass of curly hair. They fell in love.

She moved in with her mother in a ground floor flat at No 17 Clifton Gardens, in Prince of Wales Road, Battersea in 1902. Atherstone lived there when he was not on tour.

No 17 Clifton Gardens is a three-story building with a flat on each floor. Ground floor flats had a tiny front enclosure and a small yard at the rear.

There was a small alleyway between No 17 and 19 – a school at the time, with only a small wall between the two.

Old Mrs Earle died in 1905, and Elizabeth made her living teaching students at the Academy of Dramatic Arts and private pupils in her flat.

The two Anderson boys worked as east London labouring men, and she gave them some acting lessons for free.

The boys became very fond of her. But Weldon Atherstone’s acting career was slowly going downhill.

He would recite the ballads of George R Sims at music halls and could still enthral audiences, but rowdy yobs would sometimes mimic his sonorous voice, using naughty phrases of their own.

In 1906, Miss Earle’s flat was burgled, and gas meter broken open.

The former actress began to worry. The landlord offered her the first-floor flat instead.

In January 1907, there was a strike among music hall performers, for better pay and conditions.

Weldon Atherstone was one of the ‘blackleg’ performers at the Euston Palace of Varieties.

He shared the stage with American singer Belle Elmore – also known as Mrs Cora Crippen, wife of a doctor.

As the years went by, Weldon Atherstone became increasingly paranoid. He was jealous of Elizabeth Earle, and forbade her to take any male drama students, fearful they might have impure designs on her.

When Atherstone went to see Elizabeth Earle in May 1910, he challenged her about entertaining a lover. He struck her across the face.

Hargrave Adam, a crime writer with good police contacts, said Atherstone was familiar in lowly pubs near the Strand.

In the evening of July 16, 1910, the now 35-year-old Elizabeth Earle was with Thomas Frederick Anderson, 21, in her flat.

There were two loud shots from the rear yard. Elizabeth thought someone was shooting cats, but young Anderson speculated the shots might have been designed to frighten off a burglar.

Neither of them went downstairs to investigate.

But soon a police sergeant came to No 17 – chauffeur Edward Noice had at Battersea Bridge Road police station reported two shots, and a man leaping down from the wall of No 19 Clifton Gardens and running down Rosenau Road towards the river.

Elizabeth Earle told him that she had also heard the shots.

Anderson accompanied the policeman down the cast-iron stairs into the rear yard. They found an unconscious man lying in the downstairs scullery.

He had been shot twice in the head, and one eye was hanging down his cheek.

Two doctors arrived, but the victim died soon after. Thomas Frederick Anderson showed no sign of recognizing him.

Police found the victim was carrying a large, home-made cosh and was wearing carpet-bag slippers.

Detective Inspector Geake, who took charge of the case, also found a business card.

He asked young Anderson if he knew a Weldon Atherstone.

Thomas could not believe his father was the victim. But later, at the mortuary, he immediately identified the Clifton Gardens murder victim as his father.

So who were the suspects in the murder?

The police suspected the young man seen leaving the crime scene after the shots rang out was the murderer.

The chauffeur Edward Noice, and four witnesses who had seen the fugitive running down Rosenau Road towards Petworth Street, described him as 23 to 30 years old – between 5ft 3 ins and 5ft 6ins tall.

Mr Noice was certain the man he had seen was not the tall, lanky Thomas Frederick Anderson.

At the inquest, it was suggestive Weldon Atherstone had gone to No 17 Clifton Gardens to spy on Elizabeth Earle, armed with a cosh.

His pocketbook had cryptic notes indicating he was convinced Miss Earle was seeing a rival.

But the four men named in the pocketbook were all cleared by police.

Newspaper headlines were dominated by the sensational Crippen case, in which Atherstone’s erstwhile acting colleague had been found murdered at No 39 Hilldrop Crescent.

But there was speculation Atherstone had arranged a meeting with a rival on the fatal evening.

Elizabeth Earle gave the impression of being prostrate with grief, but she did not attend Atherstone’s funeral; nor did the actor’s widow.

All four children were there and many old theatrical colleagues sent wreaths. In illustrations, Weldon Atherstone is handsome and youthful-looking.

But Thomas Frederick Anderson is awkward-looking, with a long nose and a pinched face, and much older than 21.

Elizabeth Earle is the same as the youthful-looking photograph of her; the change in the shape of her face was down to ill-fitting dentures.

It was rightly considered peculiar that she and Thomas Frederick Anderson had not investigated the gunfire in their small rear yard.

Young Anderson faced questions about failing to recognize his father, but blamed the darkness of the evening and the facial injuries.

His younger brother William Gordon Anderson had attended a cricket match in Willesden and then returned to his lodgings.

The inquest returned a verdict of murder – and there matters have rested ever since. Most commentators say the morbidly jealous Atherstone had gone to spy on Miss Earle – but a burglar burst into the yard, and when the actor attacked him, he was gunned down.

Hargrave Adam, who saw a file on the case, suggested Atherstone had brought the gun along, but it had been turned against him in the struggle.

Crime historian Jonathan Goodman’s theory was that Elizabeth Earle had conspired with the two Anderson brothers to murder Atherstone, an unsatisfactory lover and father, and a lousy actor who was sponging on them.

Or had the killer’s intention merely been to give Atherstone a fright, or beat him up, only for things to go wrong? Nor is there an obvious motive for the murder. The two Andersons appear to have been closer to their father than their mother, and the Elizabeth Earle does not seem like a suitable person for a murderous conspiracy.

The burglar hypothesis is in my mind fully credible, but why would an armed burglar want to break into a house in a lower-class part of London, wearing an elegant suit?

Home-grown burglars seldom carried loaded firearms. At one stage, I had suspicions against Miss Earle. Had she also changed her name for her acting career, or married another in secret, under her real name?

But my old friend, the late Richard Whittington-Egan, has demonstrated Elizabeth Earle was born in America in 1875 – she had not even lied about her age.

The murder house at No 17 Clifton Gardens has long been presumed to be lost. There is no Clifton Gardens today, nor in early editions of Bartholomew’s Reference Atlas of Greater London.

Richard Whittington-Egan pointed out that Clifton Gardens was not situated off Prince of Wales Road, but actually in that street.

It was once the name for the terrace of houses between Battersea Bridge Road and Rosenau Road.

One of the houses still has a plaster plaque saying Clifton Gardens. The layout of the murder house at No 17 has not changed much since 1910.

No blood-stained spectre wearing carpet-bag slippers has haunted it, waving its cosh about in rage.

In his collection, Richard Whittington-Egan had the carved stone figure of the head of a man, from above the portico of a house in Rosenau Road; the sole surviving witness to the flight of the Clifton Gardens murderer.

Sometimes London’s most fascinating mysteries are its forgotten ones.

This is an edited extract from Jan Bondeson’s Murder Houses of South London (Troubador Publishing, Leicester 2015).

The main authority on the case is R. Whittington-Egan, Mr Atherstone leaves the Stage (Amberley Publishing, Stroud 2015).