37 Facts About George Edalji

George Ernest Thompson Edalji was an English solicitor and son of a vicar of Parsi descent in a Staffordshire village.

George Edalji became known as a victim of a miscarriage of justice for having served three years' hard labour after being convicted on a charge of injuring a pony.

George Edalji was initially regarded having been responsible for the series of animal mutilations known as the Great Wyrley Outrages, but the prosecution case against him became regarded as weak and prejudiced.

George Edalji was pardoned on the grounds of the conviction being an unsafe one after a campaign in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took a prominent role.

The difficulty in overturning the conviction of Edalji was cited as showing that a better mechanism was needed for reviewing unsafe verdicts, and it was a factor in the 1907 creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal for England.

George Edalji's mother was Charlotte Edalji, the daughter of a Shropshire vicar.

George Edalji's father was the Reverend Shapurji Edalji, a convert from a Bombay Parsi family.

The right to make this appointment lay with the bishop, and the Reverend Mr George Edalji obtained the position through the previous incumbent, his wife's uncle, who arranged it as a wedding present.

The senior George Edalji was a more assertive vicar than his predecessor and was sometimes involved in controversy about parish business.

Anonymous threatening letters were sent to the vicarage in 1888, when George Edalji was twelve and a half, demanding that the vicar order a particular newspaper and threatening to break windows if this was not done.

George Edalji offered to drop the case if Foster confessed, but she refused and went to live with an aunt.

Letters purporting to be from the Reverend Mr George Edalji were sent to other vicars.

Brookes and the Reverend Mr George Edalji called in the police, and Sergeant Upton again found himself investigating poison pen letters to the vicar.

Mr George Edalji threatened to complain to higher authority about the conduct of Anson.

Brookes came to believe that George Edalji was the author of the 1892 poison pen letters.

George Edalji said that Edalji had smiled at him in the railway station, to which Brookes had responded with a disagreeable look, thereafter, Brookes asserted, the letters began to refer to him as "sour face".

George Edalji was hired at a legal firm as a trainee solicitor and scored exceptionally high marks in his professional examinations but was not taken on as a newly qualified solicitor.

George Edalji was described as looking younger than his age, of a rather peculiar appearance, and solitary, being given to taking evening strolls by himself.

Several others named in the letters were schoolboys whom George Edalji regularly commuted with in the same train compartment.

George Edalji believed that Edalji was the author of the letters, but someone of his professional status could have had no involvement in the animal maimings.

The exact nature of circumstantial evidence that led to suspicion falling on George Edalji is unknown, but according to what Anson privately alleged years later, George Edalji had a reputation for roaming the area at night and, on two occasions, trails of footprints from attack locations seemed to lead to the vicarage.

Inspector Campbell sent a constable to the railway station where George Edalji was waiting to catch his train, asking him to help with inquiries, but he declined and left for Birmingham.

The next day, police searched the vicarage and found a case with four razors in the bedroom that George Edalji shared with his father.

The vicar protested that his son did not have the key to the locked door of the room in which they slept, but contemporaries did not consider the by then 27-years-old George Edalji sleeping in the same room as his father a normal arrangement.

George Edalji consistently maintained that he was innocent of all charges.

George Edalji pleaded not guilty to injuring the pony; an indictment was not tried for sending a letter threatening to kill a policeman.

The prosecution accused George Edalji of having left the house and attacked the pony in the early hours of the morning.

George Edalji's defence did not hire experts to testify about his poor eyesight, nor did George Edalji himself mention it at trial, only subsequently was it to be the main grounds for his campaign to be recognised as innocent.

George Edalji later said that he had been told by his lawyers that the prosecution case was so weak it was unnecessary to bring up how poor his vision was, but he admitted that he could move about at night quite well as long as the road was a main one and familiar to him.

The initial prosecution theory about the mutilations having taken place in the evening was contradicted by much evidence and the case against George Edalji was weakened as a result.

George Edalji was convicted and sentenced to seven years hard labour.

Some legal figures thought that it was improper under English evidence law as it then was for George Edalji to be sent for trial charged with separate offences of sending a threatening letter and a pony maiming, and then having evidence about letters used to help convict him of the maiming, which was the sole offence for which he was then being tried.

Conan Doyle became an active investigator, going to the crime scenes, interviewing participants, and critiquing the reliability of the witness who testified that peculiarities found in the handwriting of George Edalji occurred in the 1903 pseudonymous 'Greatorex' letters to police, which named George Edalji as a culprit in the animal mutilations.

Newspapers suggested that visual impairment would have made it impossible for George Edalji to have committed the crime.

George Edalji was buried at the local Hatfield Hyde Cemetery.

In 2013 Solicitor-General Oliver Heald said that the trial of George Edalji had been a farce.

George Edalji's case was the subject of the 1966 German feature film Conan Doyle und der Fall George Edalji.