Island Life - April/May 2010
history
Monson claimed that he had heroically swum ashore and taken
another boat to rescue him as he clung to a rock.
The arrival of a strange man on the night before the shooting
added to the mystery. He was named as Scott and on the
morning of the shooting had accompanied Monson into the
woods. When the police arrived, he gave a false address and
left. Monson later claimed that he was his bookmaker and his
real name was Sweeney.
The trial lasted for ten days. After the judge’s summing up,
the jury retired to consider their findings. It looked like an
open and shut case but when they returned, their verdict was
“not proven,” a provision in Scottish law that does not find the
accused innocent but states that the case has not been argued
beyond all reasonable doubt. There was naturally outrage in
the Hambrough family.
Three years after the murder, Alfred Monson was put on
trial for insurance fraud. In the same year he sued his wife for
divorce, naming Cecil Hambrough as the co-respondent.
Every year, on the anniversary of Cecil’s death, the family
placed an In Memoriam in the Glasgow Herald. It bore the
words: Vengeance is Mind: I will repay, saith the Lord.
Steephill Castle was the site of several tragedies. Prior to
its erection, Hans Stanley, who previously owned the house
which it replaced, killed himself by slitting his throat. John
Hambrough who built the castle in 1833-5 went blind before
it was completed, thus never seeing his handiwork. His son
Albert, a renowned botanist who was about to make a field
trip, was suddenly taken ill with a mystery condition and died
two years before his father, being buried at St Catherine’s at
Ventnor. After Cecil’s death, the house later passed to a wealthy
American industrialist, John Morgan Richards. His adored
daughter Pearl Craigie, who wrote novels under the name of
John Oliver Hobbs, died suddenly in London aged thirty-eight,
having left the castle that day.
Steephill castle was demolished in 1963.
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