Alma Rattenbury
Alma Victoria Rattenbury (née Wolfe, also Clarke, Radclyffe Dolling and Packenham; 1897/8–1935) was an English-Canadian songwriter and accused murderer.
Following her husband's death, she volunteered with the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service, and served with distinction in France.
Stoner's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but he only served seven years before being allowed to join the British Army during World War II.
Alma Victoria Wolfe[a] was born to a gold mining prospector and his wife, Elizabeth, who was reputedly related to the cricketer W. G. Grace.
Showing great musical talent, she was reportedly a soloist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra by the age of seventeen.
[3] In August 1915, the couple moved to England and her husband was granted a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in September 1915: he was posted to France in October 1915.
[4] Her first husband was awarded the Military Cross (MC) for leading a night raid to capture a crater from the Germans on 6 February 1916: he was injured and 40 British soldiers died during the action.
[4] Now financially independent, and influenced in part by the wish to see her husband's grave in France, she volunteered with the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service as a stretcher bearer and field ambulance orderly.
[1][3] On 6 January 1917 Alma arrived in Creil, France, to begin her work as an orderly at the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont Abbey.
[4] Orderlies were the lowest rank of the hospital hierarchy; they undertook strenuous and emotionally draining activities such as cleaning blood from the floor of the operating theatre, holding down men or their limbs as amputations took place, carrying stretchers of injured or dead soldiers up and down flights of stairs and changing bed linen.
[4] In the summer of 1917 an auxiliary hospital was set up at Villers-Cotterêts, closer to the front, and Alma was one of the first group to staff the converted wooden huts which had become fully operational in August.
[4] While in France she was attached to the French Red Cross and served with distinction, being awarded the Croix de Guerre with star and palm.
[4] However, Alma left Pakenham to return to her native Canada in March 1922; their marriage formally ended in divorce in 1925.
[1][4] Her songs were sung by the likes of Richard Tauber and Frank Titterton, and played by bandleaders such as Bert Ambrose.
[6] The couple married in late 1925 but the controversy that surrounded their infidelity and his subsequent divorce led to their decision to emigrate to England.
[7]: 6 The only major quarrel, in which Rattenbury gave Alma a black eye, occurred in July 1934 and was related to his depressive turns in which he would threaten suicide.
[1] Stoner turned 18 in November 1934 and at some point became the lover of Alma; her husband, Rattenbury, was a mari complaisant (i.e. he knew of and tolerated the affair).
[1] On 24 March 1935 Rattenbury was sleeping in an armchair in the drawing room when he was struck multiple times in the head with a wooden carpenter's hammer.
[4] He found Rattenbury lying on his bed in the downstairs bedroom, with a blood-soaked sheet wrapped around his head and without his trousers; he was unconscious.
[4][7]: 2 Alma was "highly excited, incoherent, and intoxicated" and, when the police arrived, declared that she was the one who had attacked her husband with a mallet.
[1] The following day, on 29 March, Alma and Stoner were both arrested and charged with murder at Bournemouth Magistrates' Court.
[8] The trial opened on 27 May 1935 at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales (the Old Bailey), before Sir Travers Humphreys.
[citation needed] Owing to the publicity surrounding the case, souvenir-hunters stole flowers from the grave and burgled Villa Madeira.
