George Edalji
| George Edalji | |
|---|---|
George Edalji
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| Born | March 1876 West Midlands, England |
| Died | 17 June 1953 (aged 77) Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England |
| Cause of death | Coronary thrombosis |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Solicitor |
| Known for | Great Wyrley Outrages |
| Parent(s) | Shapurji Edalji Charlotte Stoneham |
George Ernest Thompson Edalji (March 1876 – 17 June 1953) was a Parsi English solicitor and son of a vicar in a South Staffordshire village who served three years' hard labour after being convicted on a charge of injuring a pony. He was pardoned 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. Present-day commentators on the case see it as demonstrating pervasive racial prejudice and resentment toward incomers by highly placed traditionalists in provincial England.
Edalji was the eldest of the three children. His mother was Charlotte Edalji (née Stoneham), the daughter of a Shropshire vicar. His father was the Reverend Shapurji Edalji, a convert from a Bombay Parsi family. He had served as the curate in several parishes before being given the living as vicar of St Mark's, Great Wyrley. The right to make this appointment lay with the bishop, and the Reverend Edalji obtained the position through the previous incumbent, his wife's uncle, who arranged it as a wedding present. Livings were much sought after because they were scarce and conferred valuable emoluments.
The Reverend Edalji moved into the vicarage in late 1875, a large house with its own grounds; George, the first child, was born there soon after. The Reverend Edalji was more assertive than his predecessor and was sometimes involved in controversy about parish business. Many modern writers on the case express the opinion that rural English society was infected with backward racialist attitudes, and that this would have been particularly true of a village like Great Wyrley. An aristocratic former army officer named Captain the Honorable G. A. Anson was the Chief Constable of Staffordshire during the case. He is widely seen as having expressed a racist attitude toward the Edaljis.
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