In 1906, Dartmouth Borough Council was involved in an event for which there is only one word: tragedy.
Like many great tragedies it involved money, power, pride and most of all shame, and its ability to drive a man to terrible acts.
At the centre of this sad tale is Arthur Smith, the surveyor in charge of all building and maintenance at Dartmouth Borough Council properties.
The scandal started when it emerged that Mr Smith had kept the proceeds after selling the lead off the roof of a demolished house. The clerk to the council realised six months afterwards the £27 had not been paid into the council accounts. He demanded Mr Smith repay the money, which he did, but the cat was out of the bag.
Suddenly the town was full of rumour and suspicion. Mr Smith was under pressure, and the council failed to act. Here was a man on £170 a year, living a life of someone earning much more.
The suspicions led to two men running for council at the 1906 elections, pledging to ‘find the truth’.
Bill Atkins and Edward Back took it upon themselves to be the new brooms that would sweep corruption out of the borough council.
They were duly voted in, on the back of a wave of public condemnation towards the council for not rooting out the truth sooner.
Cllrs Atkins and Back soon started to bring the truth into the light, and it appeared worse than anyone could have imagined: Mr Smith had bought 5,000 bricks using the council’s money to repair just six manholes – and yet all the bricks had disappeared. He had accepted £500 from the Britannia Royal Naval College for work and never paid it to the council. He had purchased high quality bricks from suppliers, but poor quality ones had been used in council work: he was accused of swapping the high quality ones for poor and pocketing the difference.
It then emerged he had been employed by local builders whilst also working for the council, and that the only entry he had made in his stock book (a basic requirement of his role was to keep track of the materials held by the council) was the one he had made when he first started the role six years before.
As if this were not enough, he was also taking payments – allegedly backhanders - for every building he commissioned from local contractors.
He was, in fact, beginning to look decidedly guilty.
Cllrs Atkins and Back could smell blood, and stepped up their investigations and their very public calls for the council to answer the question everyone was asking: how could they not have known?
Then it transpired they DID know, about some of it at least.
Cllr Medway and Alderman Pinney, who were part of the council committee that was supposed to monitor the work of the surveyor, admitted they had known that the money from the sale of the lead had not been paid in six months.
There was, as the papers say, uproar.
A special investigation into the surveyor was called. Atkins and Back spent much time crowing about their success in rooting out corruption.
Then, as the meeting to discuss the accusation convened on a dark November night, Smith failed to show.
Instead, Smith’s friend, Lewis Wallis, entered the council chamber, ashen faced. Smith had been, to all intents and purposes, getting ready to give an account of himself to the councilors earlier that evening.
He had written three letters and handed them to his assistant to post.
He had then locked the door and put a shotgun to his head, killing himself as his friend Wallis tried to break into his office, shouting to him to stop.
The councilors were dumbfounded.
Suddenly the story, told in such enthusiasm in the local press, was turned on its head: the townspeople, who had been calling for Mr Smith to lose his job, went into mourning, flags were flown at half mast, and the fingers of accusation were pointing firmly at Cllrs Atkins and Back. The accusers had one charge: hounding a man to suicide.
There was an inquest, which featured many angry exchanges between the solicitor acting on behalf of Smith’s family and the town clerk, Sydney Pope. It emerged that there had been plenty of evidence that Smith had been in an agitated mental state, and the council had been well aware of this. The accusations of hounding a desperate man began to look more than just accusations.
Smith was found to have had shot himself due to a ‘brain storm’ brought on by ‘cerebral influenza’ and the stress he was under.
All in all, the sad saga of Mr Smith the surveyor left no one covered in glory – not the surveyor, the town council nor the public at large.
First published By the Dart December 2015 Issue
