Introduction: The Best We Can Do (1958) is the true and famous account of the trial of John Bodkin Adams.
The prosecution of Dr John Bodkin Adams for murder at the Old Bailey in London in March 1957 will go down in history as one of the great English criminal trials. Other doctors have been tried for murder, but not since Dr William Palmer of Rugeley was convicted at the same court in 1855 (almost a hundred years before), had it been alleged that a medical man used his professional skill in order to kill a patient. Adams's trial lasted for three and a half weeks - that is seventeen days in court - and was in 1957, the longest murder trial held in England.
In 1956 - the year of his indictment - Dr Adams was fifty-eight. He was born and brought up a Methodist in Ulster Ireland and had been in private general practice at Eastbourne for over thirty-five years. The practice was large and lucrative, many of his patients being rich, old and female. He lost his father when he was fifteen and his only brother at eighteen. He qualified at Belfast at twenty-two, came to Eastbourne at twenty-three and remained there until his death in 1983. He was a zealous non-conformist churchwarden, taught Sunday school and was chairman of the local YMCA; his hobbies were motoring and clay-pigeon shooting. He never married and lived alone in a large Victorian house, looked after by a devoted elderly housekeeper.
During the summer of 1956, Eastbourne buzzed with rumours about Dr Adams and a number of 'mysterious deaths'. In September, Scotland Yard sent senior detectives to investigate. Stories began to appear in the Press and were soon taken up by the (unfettered) international Press, who freely described Dr Adams as a latter-day English Bluebeard.
In December, the Doctor was arrested for the murder of a Mrs Morell. The preliminary hearing before the Eastbourne Magistrates' Court in January 1957 lasted a fortnight, and was conducted in public in spite of an objection by defence. The prosecution alleged that the Doctor had also murdered two other rich patients for gain. These allegations of triple murder by a well-known local figure were publicized to all; very few people could have remained ignorant of the Press view of the Doctor's guilt.
Dr Adams was committed for trial in London instead of at the Lewis Assizes in Sussex because of possible local prejudice. The exhumation of the bodies of two other patients of Dr Adams, on the day after he was charged with murder, hugely served to increase curiosity and prejudice. Nothing was ever heard of the result of these investigations, so it is fair to assume that they disclosed nothing incriminating.
Dr Adams was held in custody in Brixton Prison from 19 December 1956 until 18 April 1957; the actual trial began on 18 March 1957. As the case opened, the Eastbourne GP's future looked short and bleak. The sensational trial that followed enthralled the hanging public but conflicting expert evidence and a brilliant young defence lawyer gradually turned the tables. It should be borne in mind that at the time, capital punishment had not been abolished. Therefore the death penalty was still mandatory for a conviction of murder.
Sybille Bedford's classic account of the case vividly recreates the tense courtroom atmosphere and the unfolding drama of a key trial in British legal and medical history.
About the author: Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, and was privately educated in England, Italy and France. She published her first book, A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller's Tale in Mexico in 1953. Three years later, she published A Legacy, which was described by Nancy Mitford as 'one of the very best novels I've ever read'. Since then, she has also written the novels A Favourite of the Gods (1965), A Compass Error (1969), and Jigsaw (1989), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Best We Can Do: The Trial of Dr Adams (1958) started her on a new direction, and she attended some of the most important criminal and political trials of our times, notably the Auschwitz trial at Frankfurt, the trial of Jack Ruby in Dallas, and the Lady Chatterley's Lover case. Her researches in England, France, Germany and Switzerland produced material for her book, The Faces of Justice, published in 1960. She was the author of As It Was (1960) and the two volume authorized biography of Aldous Huxley.
Sybille has contributed literary criticism and articles on travel, food, wine and the law to numerous publications, including The New York Times, Esquire, Life magazine, TLS, Observer, Harpers and Queen, Vogue, the New York Review of Books, the Saturday Evening Post and the Spectator.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Vice-President of PEN, an association of writers pledged to protect freedom of expression and promote literature. She was awarded the OBE in 1981 and a Companion in Literature in 1994. Her final work was Quicksands, a memoir published in 2005.
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