Sir Cedric Hardwicke plays the leading role of Dr. Edward William Pritchard in a disturbing play about a serial poisoner. Pritchard, just 40 years old, at the time of his execution for his crimes, had a way of engaging pretty young women for his household, plying their affections with gifts, and then poisoning them. His wife mysteriously fells ill and declined each day in spite of Pritchard’s devoted medical care for her. At least, that’s the way it seemed from the outside. His mother-in-law was another victim. This does get the attention of the authorities, and Pritchard is tried and executed. The reporting of Pritchard was delayed by those who suspected his malfeasance because of his gentle manner and because they could not believed that he would do such a thing. There was a five-day trail in July 1865, and his execution was carried out at the end of the month, in front of thousands of spectators.
The story moves slowly, and Pritchard is very reassuring in his empathy and care of his victims. This makes the plotline quite unnerving if not creepy because you are listening to an emotionless serial killer who eliminates people for their own good and his own convenience. But he is so calm that the production is less engaging than it could have been. The story may be accurate, but the presentation is not compelling. The stark contrast of cold-blooded methodical murder with the calmness of Pritchard has no shock to it, and therefore, no real suspense, and cultivates no concern for the characters. It could have been better.
Wikipedia has a summary of Pritchard’s life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_William_Pritchard
Antony Ellis wrote the script in consultation with the writings of William Roughead, a Scottish lawyer and amateur criminologist. Over the decades, his compilations and documentation of crimes were well done and well-respeced. His work would become part of the “true crime” genre of writing and publishing. Roughead died about five months before this broadcast, having written about crime and criminals for decades. The work that Ellis consulted was one of Roughead’s earliest, The Trial of Dr. Pritchard, published in 1906. (It can be reviewed at The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/b22652309/page/n9/mode/2up). In surveying other Roughead works, it its fairly clear that his writings became a resource consulted in the 1953-1954 Elliott Lewis series, Crime Classics. The following paragraph opens the Pritchard work; items in bold are highlighted to indicate why the story was so gruesome to Roughead’s thinking, and what was missed in this production:
IN the notable series of evil and forbidding portraits which forms our national picture gallery of crime, the sinister presentment of Dr. Pritchard is entitled to an eminent place. Comprehensive as that collection, unhappily, is, it exhibits no more infamous example of unfeeling cruelty, masked by crafty dissimulation, in the relentless pursuit of a deadly purpose. The secret poisoner is the most dangerous of malefactors; and he is specially to be dreaded when, as here, he prosecutes his subtle design in the two-fold disguise of loving relative and assiduous physician. The relation that existed between the perpetrator and his hapless victims—the one his wife, the other her mother —the affectionate terms upon which they lived; the terrible suffering, which, in the case of the former, it was part of his nefarious scheme to produce and continue during long and painful weeks; and the fact that these two confiding women, in their dire necessity, relied for help upon the very hand that was mercilessly raised against their lives, combine to make this offence one of the blackest recorded in the annals of crime.
The Ellis script develops no sense of dread or imminent danger that would better engage their interest and attention. Listeners know what is going on, but their emotions are not stirred. Roughead’s comments in his 1906 work do a better job of that.
Roughead had additional comments about Pritchard many years later. Those observations can be found at in a 1951 book, Classic Crimes. Would that book’s title, with the words juxtaposed, serve to inspire the title of that Lewis series that had its premiere a year later?
The drama portion of this production was recorded Thursday, September 11, 1952 starting at 5:30pm. Rehearsals began at 1:00pm.
The script cover page has the word “Doctor” spelled completely and does not use the “Dr.” abbreviation.
This is the last of the four broadcasts with the members of “The First Drama Quartette.”
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP521006
THE CAST
SIR CEDRIC HARDWICKE (Dr. Pritchard), Joe Kearns (Officer / Druggist), Paula Winslowe (Mary), Alma Lawton (Ellen), Georgia Ellis (Lily), Norma Varden (Mrs. Taylor), Bill Johnstone (Manager / Inspector), Ben Wright (Gardner), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Dick Ryan (Captain McSorley), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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