The Murder of William Terriss and the Tangental Angus Connection

This post, in all honesty, has very little to do with Angus.  Rather it concerns a late Victorian murder whose victim, William Terriss, was one of the most famous actors of his day. The man who killed him was an Angus man, known as Richard Archer Prince, though this was not his real name. 

William Terriss

The Killer

There is relatively little known about the murderer of Terriss.  He was born in 1858 as Richard Millar Archer, son of a ploughman at Baldoran, just north east of Dundee (in Strathmartine and Mains parish, by my reckoning?).  One of nine children of his father, he was a product of his second marriage to Margaret Archer.  There was something backward about the boy and he did not flourish at school.  He had the reputation for being soft in the head.  Years later, with hindsight, his mother Margaret blamed his deficiency on a time when she left him out in the sun when he was an infact while she worked in the field.  he was never the same afterwards mentally.  Richard left school at 14 and went to work at a shipbuilders, but found his true vocation by getting small parts as an extra in the local theatres in Dundee.  After his parents migrated to London in 1875, the boy joined them soon afterwards, and by the latter part of the next decade he was getting various small acting parts in London theatres.  In the following decade he made the acquaintance of one of the luminaries of the West End, William Terriss.

   Terriss took pity on the young Scotsman, getting him minor roles and other work in the theatres.  As Prince had little real talent for acting, he was frequently unemployed and his situation was exacerbated by alcohol dependency, which in turn made underlying mental problems worse. He was known by the unkindly nickname of 'Mad Archer' among his associates. In between the sparse acting jobs, between May 1895 and July, 1897, Prince retruned to Dundee to work at any labouring job he could manage to get.  Inevitably, perhaps, there was disagreement between the young man and his benefactor.  In 1897, Terriss had helped Prince get a small part in 'Harbour Lights', a play he was starring in, which must have been a relief as Prince was close to desitiution.  But there was a falling out and Terriss's patience snapped.  The young Scot said something about him and was sacked.  Yet, to his credit, the great actor continued to send him small sums of money via the Actors' Benevolent Fund and still tried to suggest him for small acting parts.  By late 1897 Prince was in desperate trouble.  All of his clothes were in the pawn shop, save those he wore.  He was living only on bread and milk and he was behind on his rent at his lodgings at Buckingham Palace Road.

The Victim

   Like many bucaneering Victorians, William Terriss was a restless adventurer who could turn his hand to many things.  At birth, in 1847, he was William Charles James Lewin.  Among his formative, character building occupations was silver mining in America and (of couse) sheep farming in the Falkland Islands. He took up acting in his twenties and soon became a phenomenally successful stage star.  It is hard, of course, to judge the ingredients which made bygone actors successful if they existed before their talents could be captured by film or sound recording.  According to the biographer of Terriss:

He was cheery, he was electric, he was sympathetic; when he came upon the scene he brightened everything. If the audience had lapsed into lethargy, he was the one to arouse it, and to stir his colleagues to impulse. He felt what  he did, and meant what he said. He was held in good faith by the public; he never took a liberty with them, and never let his interest flag the last night as well as the first, to good houses or to bad, he never lost the grip of his part. [The Life of William Terriss, Arthur J. Smythe, 1898, p.152.]

The Murder, the Aftermath

    There was an ugly scene at the Vaudeville theatre on 13th December 1897, when Prince attempted to gain access with an invalid pass and was ejected. The very next night he gained access to the dressing room of Terriss and the men had an arguement. Prince was convinced that the famous actor was the root cause of all his miseries and was actively blocking him from progressing in the acting profession. 'That man's becoming a nuisance,' Terriss remarked, with understatement, afterwards. Two days later Prince was denied funds from the Actors' Benevolent Fund. That same afternoon William Terriss occupied himself by playing cards with some friends.  He took a cab to the Adelphi around seven and was looking for the key to the side-door in his coat when he was stabbed three times.  A friend of the actor caught the assailant, who was unresisting.  William Terriss died after a few minutes.  A few weeks before his death he had discussed a play where a character was attacked with a knife and remarked to a friend: 'Ah, no! horrible ! I could not bear that scene with the knife ; to be stabbed like that seems terrible. I should not like to take that part.'

   His murderer told the police, 'I did it for revenge. He had kept me out of employment for ten years, and I had either to die in the street or kill him.'  Prince appeared before the courts on 13th January 1898.  He was found, after trial, to be guilty,, but not responsible for his actions because of his mental condition.  He was confined to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. There he busied himself with organising entertainment for fellow inmates and conducting the prison orchestra.  He died, aged 79, in January 1937.

   There was an immediate reaction to the death of the famous actor.  The Prince of Wales contributed to a wreath, one of over a thousand floral tributes which honoured Terriss.  Queen Victoria herself wrote a letter of condolence: '...She deeply feels the loss which robbed the English stage of one of its brighest ornaments'.  And yet, his own profession felt bitter at the fact, as they saw it, that his murderer essentially escaped proper punishment because of the status of his profession. Sir Henry Irving bluntly said, 'Terriss was an actor, so his murderer will not be executed.'

   Legend has it that Terriss's last words were, 'I shall come back.'  And he did.  He is alleged to haunt Covent Garden tube station which, although it is near the Adelphi, has no direct connection with the incidents surrounding his death.  His shade is also supposed to have been seen, emerging from a geenish light, on the Strand.  It seems that the ghost mostlyfaded away by the 1930s, though it shad a notable last burst of activity in 1928, being seen in Maiden Lane outside the theatre in that years and also inside the Adelphi itself, where it garbbed and bruised the arm of a young actress in a dressing room.  There were several encores in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but subsequently Terriss - known for his geniality as 'Breezy Bill'- seems to have achieved eternal rest. Hopefully.