THE ADVOCATE 945
VOL. 79 PART 6 NOVEMBER 2021
The scene of the drowning was not far from Bournemouth, where the
Rattenburys lived.
George Stoner managed to have his sentence commuted to life in prison.
He was helped, no doubt, by a petition signed by some 300,000 people who
felt that a sinister Alma Pakenham had provoked him to commit the murder
on her behalf. As it turned out, he was released to serve in World War II,
earning his eventual freedom through various acts of bravery. He died in
2000 at the age of 83 having lived in obscurity.
John Rattenbury, son of Francis and Alma, was born in Victoria in 1928
and orphaned in 1935. He eventually returned to British Columbia to live
with his grandmother in Vancouver, but when she died shortly after his
arrival, he lived with an aunt. While a student at St. George’s, he won a student
school-design contest (not knowing of his father’s career) and eventually
studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright with whom he worked,
among other things, on New York’s Guggenheim Museum. He died in Arizona
at the age of 92 in March 2021.
You can, perhaps, see how all of this might not fit on a Heritage Vancouver
plaque after all.
ENDNOTES
1. Anthony A Barrett & Rhodri Windsor Liscombe,
Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture
and Challenge in the Imperial Age (Vancouver:
UBC Press, 1983); John L Motherwell, Gold Rush
Steamboats: Francis Rattenbury’s Yukon Adventure
(2012); David Napley, Murder at the Villa Madeira:
The Rattenbury Case (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1988).
2. Cause Célèbre (1987) (directed by John Gorrie, starring
Helen Mirren, Harry Andrews, David Suchet
and David Morrissey).
3. Rattenbury: A New Canadian Opera by Tobin
Stokes.
4. Captain The Hon Ewen Montagu, CBE, QC, DL,
RNR, who was a junior barrister at the time he
defended Alma Pakenham, later became known for
his leading role in Operation Mincemeat, a military
deception operation that successfully misdirected the
German forces’ attention away from the Allied invasion
of Sicily in 1943. He was Judge Advocate of the
Fleet from 1945 to 1973.