Catie Gilchrist reviews Downfall: The destruction of Charles Mackay by Paul Diamond for Australian Historical Studies:
‘In 1920, New Zealanders were both enthralled and appalled by the scandalous news that the barrister and long serving mayor of Whanganui, forty-four-year-old Charles Mackay, had tried to murder Walter D’Arcy Cresswell by shooting him through the chest in his office. Cresswell, who was a twenty-four-year-old returned soldier and aspiring poet and writer, survived the attempt on his life and twelve days later Mackay went on trial for attempted murder. The fact that Mackay was a progressive, well- educated, upstanding and seemingly honour- able married man with three daughters only added to the sensation. During the court proceedings it emerged that Cresswell had been threatening to expose ‘a certain disgusting feature in Mr Mackay’s character’ if he did not resign from the mayoralty. This then was the reason for Mackay’s actions; his closet homo- sexuality and his determination to keep his secret at all costs even if it meant silencing Cress- well by killing him.
The subsequent trial then was about an attempted murder (which Mackay pleaded guilty to) but also became an intimate exposé of forbidden sexuality. According to Truth, Mackay was another Oscar Wilde, ‘morally unclean, a pursuer of perverted and putrid plea- sures’. The trial also revealed the lengths to which some men went to find a ‘cure’ for their ‘affliction’ – an early version of the conversion therapies banned in New Zealand as recently as 2022. In 1914 Mackay had sought medical treatment for his ‘homo-sexual monomania’, reflecting ideas held at the time and popularised by sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, that same-sex desire was a nervous somatic condition. It was a disease to be cured by a doctor, rather than a crime to be punished by the law. The presiding judge, Sir
Robert Stout, who had known Mackay most of his life, was sympathetic to a degree; he believed homosexuality was a sickness which could be ‘improved’ with the right environment, but this was not enough to absolve Mackay and he sentenced him to a harsh fifteen years’ hard labour. Many unanswered questions about the affair remained, however, and became the subject of local gossip and sensational speculation throughout the newspapers of the day and even over the Tasman in Australia. How had Cresswell known about Mackay’s secret? Or had they been lovers? Why did he try to force Mackay to resign as mayor? Or were other political rivals working secretly against him, and Cresswell had just been their messenger boy?
Paul Diamond explores numerous threads of enquiry, leaving the reader to ponder and make up their own mind about the truth behind the whole tawdry affair. It is a useful technique when negotiating the silences and omissions of the historical record especially when such matters were at the time regarded as ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unmentionable’.’
Read the full review here.
