Murder Capital : Suspicious Deaths in London, 1933-53 [1 ed.] 9781847799753, 9780719091971

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CULTURAL HISTORY OF MODERN WAR

Murder Murder capitalCapital Suspicious deaths in London, Suspicious deaths 1933–53 in London, 1933–53

Ja n e Brooks C hr istin e H a llett

Amy Helen Bell Amy Helen Bell

Murder Capital

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MURDER CAPITAL Suspicious deaths in London, 1933–53 Amy Helen Bell

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Amy Helen Bell 2015 The right of Amy Helen Bell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 9197 1 hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by JCS Publishing Services, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk

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This book is dedicated to my father ‘Big Ed’ Bell, with thanks for his encouragement and support.

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Contents List of figures page viii List of tables ix Acknowledgements xi Maps xiii Introduction 1 1 London crime scenes of the 1930s 27 2 Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45 59 3 Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45 86 4 Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53 113 5 Infanticide in London, 1933–53 140 6 Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53 163 Conclusion 199 Bibliography 205 Index 231

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Figures 1 Westminster Institution dining room, 1934 (© The National Archives, CRIM 1/748) page 33 2 Westminster Institution sitting room, 1934 (© The National Archives, CRIM 1/748) 33 3 Back stairway at Bellometti restaurant, 1933 (© The National Archives, CN 27/10) 40 4 Suspicious deaths by year in London, 1933–53 69 5 Suspicious deaths by relationship in London, 1933–53 70 6 The back garden at 9 Goring Way, 1942 (© The National Archives, CRIM 1/1337). 74 7 Richmond Way, Hammersmith, 1941(© The National Archives, MEPO 1/1351) 98 8 St Luke’s Churchyard N7, 1946 (© The National Archives, CRIM 1/1799) 176 9 Medwin Street SW4, 1950 (© The National Archives, CRIM 1/2098) 185 10 Ferndale Road SW4, 1950 (©The National Archives, CRIM 1/2098) 187

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Tables 1 London Metropolitan Police divisions in 1934 page 7 2 Alleged prostitute victims in Metropolitan London, 1933–53 45 3 Indictable offences and arrests in London, 1938–45 68 4 Crimes committed by servicemen and civilians in London, July 1942 93 5 Maternal deaths from abortions in London, 1933–53 118 6 Sentences for abortion-related manslaughter in London, 1933–53 130 7 Infanticides and murders of children under one year of age in London, 1933–53 143 8 Custodial sentences for infanticide in London, 1933–53 146 9 Suspicious deaths in Metropolitan London Police divisions, 1945–53 168 10 Suspicious deaths involving firearms in London, 1945–53 180

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Acknowledgements Not long ago I was sitting in the dentist’s chair when he asked me how long I had been working on my book. ‘Ten years’, I replied. The stunned silence that followed was finally broken by his assistant, who said, ‘Wow, I was not expecting that.’ Such a long project is necessarily indebted to many people. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my colleagues and students at Huron University College and Western University in London, Ontario, who have listened to the unfolding of this project at seminars, conferences and in late-night phone calls. I am also grateful to colleagues for organizing conferences, appearing on panels and sharing their work with me: thanks in particular go to Andy Davies, Neil Pemberton, Ian Burney, Stephen Brooke, Allyson May and Rachael Griffin. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and the editorial and production team of the Manchester University Press for their professionalism and dedication. All historical research depends on good stewardship of the records, and I owe thanks to the archivists and librarians at The National Archives at Kew, the London Metropolitan Archives, the British Library Newspaper Reading Room, Colindale, the Metropolitan Police Heritage Centre, the Imperial War Museums and the Wellcome Library. Thanks too go to the Metropolitan Police and The National Archives for permission to reproduce crime scene photographs. I am also grateful for, and pleasantly surprised by, the continued support of friends and family members who have been traumatized by my dinner-party conversation for years. Thanks to my beautiful children, George and Annabel Heath, whose happiness has been my refuge, and who allowed me to copyedit while watching cartoons. And the greatest thanks to my husband Rupert Heath, agent and proofreader extraordinaire. Consider your contract permanent. I also want to acknowledge the people whose stories fill this book. When I began this project, I was a (relatively) young recent graduate, intrigued by the idea of uncovering the secrets of suspicious deaths during the war. As my family life moved through the same transitions that led to violence in these cases – pregnancy, motherhood, learning to live as a family – my sense of historical detachment from the names

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xii Acknowledgements in the registry evaporated, and I felt the sadness of their painful ends. The accidental death of my brother Eric in 2011 taught me the devastation that sudden death can bring to a family. My research also revealed the extent to which famous investigators into violent crimes – detectives, forensic pathologists and in some cases barristers – built their reputations on publicizing their roles in solving the goriest of crimes. Often the most famous victims were women who had been dismembered or mutilated: Dr Bernard Spilsbury with Cora Crippen, Dr Keith Simpson with Rachel Dobkin and later Margery Gardner, Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Cherrill with Evelyn Oatley, Margaret Lowe and Doris Jouannet. As I stood at the podium or sat at the computer retelling the details of these deaths, it was sometimes hard not to see myself as feeding a public desire for vicarious violence. Reading a letter in which pathologist Keith Simpson asked for copies of photographs of a baby who had been stabbed thirty times to show in his lectures at Hendon College brought home to me the necessity of restoring to the dead the dignity taken from them by their untimely ends.1 By considering the lives as well as the deaths of the victims of violence, I hope that I have paid them my respects in this book.

Note 1 The National Archives (TNA), MEPO 2/8770.

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Y

S

J

X

N

C

E

H

City

A

F

M B

T

K

G

D

R

L

V P Z W

Metropolitan Police District boundary

0 0

Suspicious deaths

Divisional boundary

1-9

Areas acquired in 1947 (Police Act 1946)

10 - 19

miles kilometres

20 - 29

5 10

30 +

1933-39 A B C D E F G H J K L M

-

3 8 12 12 13 16 9 5 10 8 11 11

N P R S T Ta V W X Y Z Total

-

13 3 9 14 6 1 15 14 22 19 8 242

(Note: Ta = River Thames)

Suspicious deaths in the London Metropolitan Police district, 1933–39

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Y

S

J

X

N

C

E

H

City

A

F

M B

T

K

G

D

R

L

V P Z W

Metropolitan Police District boundary

0 0

Suspicious deaths

Divisional boundary

1-9

Areas acquired in 1947 (Police Act 1946)

10 - 19

miles kilometres

20 - 29

5 10

30 +

1940-45 A B C D E F G H J K L M

-

4 11 13 19 8 8 14 10 24 15 11 9

N P R S T Ta V W X Y Z Total

-

18 16 10 34 25 5 18 12 31 16 10 341

(Note: Ta = River Thames)

Suspicious deaths in the London Metropolitan Police district, 1940–45

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Y

S

J

X

N

C

E

H

City

A

F

M B

T

K

G

D

R

L

V P Z W

Metropolitan Police District boundary

0 0

Suspicious deaths

Divisional boundary

1-9

Areas acquired in 1947 (Police Act 1946)

10 - 19

miles kilometres

20 - 29

5 10

30 +

1946-53 A B C D E F G H J K L M

-

4 19 11 28 13 33 7 18 17 14 14 11

N P R S T Ta V W X Y Z Total

-

25 11 16 15 16 4 18 16 32 12 16 370

(Note: Ta = River Thames)

Suspicious deaths in the London Metropolitan Police district, 1946–53

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Introduction London: murder capital Since the seventeenth century, the city of London has evoked images of crime and disorder in the popular imagination.1 Murder Capital will examine a twentieth-century London, one both real and imagined, as the site for the commission, investigation and popular perceptions of suspicious deaths, or unexpected deaths whose circumstances required further investigation. Suspicious deaths reveal moments of personal and communal crisis in which individual impulses and social pressures converged in a moment of irrevocable violence. This study will compare such deaths across the various boundaries of the city, and demonstrate how deadly violence changed in character during and after the Second World War. Police investigations, newspaper reporting and crime scene photographs will uncover intimate details of the daily lives of London’s inhabitants and the transformations wrought by war in the fabric of the city itself.2 While many of the more notorious murders under discussion were widely represented in the press, Murder Capital will also examine categories of suspicious deaths left out of the imagined spaces of crime in London. Police files describe familial murders, women’s deaths from abortion and infanticides, which were never reported in newspapers and did not appear in the official Home Office statistics, pointing to the gaps in our understanding of criminal and everyday London and its people in this period. In the first half of the twentieth century, murder rates in the capital reflected the national rate, which dropped steadily from 9.6 per million in 1900 to a low of 6.2 in 1965.3 For example, according to the 1930 Report of the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis, London had twenty-one murders, forty-one manslaughters and eight infanticides, equivalent to 8 per million inhabitants, very close to the national rate of 7.5.4 Despite this equivalence, twentieth-century London remained a focal point of the national interest in crime, as suspicious death investigations took place within an established narrative of crime, criminal justice and punishment unique to the city. London was steeped in the historical, dramatic, literary and

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2  Murder Capital journalistic narration of murder. Its historical importance as the centre for criminal prosecution at the Central Criminal Court or the Old Bailey, as the hub of the legal profession and national jurisprudence, under the jurisdiction of the nation’s oldest and largest police force, and as the home of a powerful daily press gave suspicious deaths a visibility and a historical context not to be found elsewhere.5 London was also the scene of infamous unsolved murders in recent memory: the poisoning of barrister Charles Bravo in Balham in 1876, the Whitechapel murders of 1888, the Charing Cross trunk murder of 1927, and others which provided years of speculative fodder for the popular press. The criminal trials of murderers who were caught, such as Dr Thomas Neill Cream, convicted of poisoning prostitute Matilda Clover in 1892, and Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, convicted of killing his wife in 1910, highlighted the theatrical drama of Old Bailey trials: the gruesome details of poisoned and dismembered bodies, the dogged detectives who tracked down the killer, the emphatic and dispassionate medical experts testifying for the prosecution and the climactic final verdict and capital sentence. Added to this, London was the backdrop to early fictional detectives such as Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket of Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins’ Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone (1868) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared in 1887.6 Suspicious deaths took place in familiar criminal landscapes in which specific neighbourhoods and addresses became associated with the finding of bodies, the commission of crimes or the residence of killers. The printing of photographic images in newspapers, as printers’ blocks from the 1850s and as halftone images from the 1890s, also helped to create a visual language of crime associated with the capital city. The juxtaposition between London’s reputation for violent interpersonal crime and its importance as the capital of Great Britain and the largest city in Western Europe also reinforced public fears that the city was in danger of being overwhelmed by the poverty, disease and crime which had threatened its prosperity since the nineteenth century.7 Mid-twentieth-century London was the capital of the British Empire, dominant in international finance, the centre of a national transport system and the bureaucratic and governmental centre of England and the United Kingdom. London was a political hub, hosting Parliament and, from 1888 to 1965, the London City Council, the most powerful local government institution in Britain.8 It was the centre for many professions, for the arts and for the law courts. Well-to-do patrons helped to fund the largest service and luxury market in England, fed in part by the imports from the Port of London.9 But from the late Victorian era there had been an uneasy

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Introduction 3 sense that all of this power could be under threat. London suffered particularly acute social and economic problems due to its rapid growth, which brought problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, social and economic dislocation and rising levels of crime.10 Many nineteenth-century middle-class men and women, including journalist Henry Mayhew, scientific explorers Charles Booth and his cousin Beatrice Webb, and missionary William Booth (unrelated to Charles) of the Salvation Army, sought to uncover an authentic vision of the poverty and crime in the capital’s slums.11 As Heather Shore observed, ‘The Victorian “underworld” is vicariously lived through the lives of the middle class social investigators who recorded the lives of the criminal and dangerous classes, and through the gaslit lens of Whitechapel, circa 1888.’12 These accounts used the metaphors of darkness, jungle, labyrinth and a descent into a mysterious and terrifying world, which they sought to quantify and make known.13 Suspicious deaths in mid-twentieth-century London, and the manner in which they were investigated and reported, were framed in these older narratives of the city`s vulnerability and potential savagery, conditions the bombing raids and threatened invasion of the Second World War only intensified.

London’s criminal geography This book examines the investigation of suspicious deaths in the middle of the century to illuminate changes in the pattern of violent crime over a period of great social upheaval and physical destruction. The institutional divisions of neighbourhoods and police districts delineate a criminal geography of London as viewed from above, while the more intimate landscape of rented rooms, alleyways, hotels, lodging houses, pubs and public parks exposes the individual scenes and the circumstances where deadly violence took place. Crime scene photographs taken by police photographers also suggest how crimes were framed in relation to the landscape of the city and existing urban visual narratives, and how they brought to light the hidden urban spaces and textures of everyday life. The individual stories revealed by these unhappy endings tell us not only how people died, but how they lived, and the family tensions, unwanted pregnancies, sexual violence and chance encounters in emotionally heightened circumstances that led to their untimely ends. The suspicious death and its moment of crisis, as detailed in police files, trial depositions, newspapers reports and memoirs, reveal glimpses of the motives, relationships, conflicts and living arrangements of people in London.

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4  Murder Capital Between 1933 and 1953 the social makeup and physical landscape of London underwent rapid and fundamental changes. As the Metropolitan Police evolved as an institution of social and spatial control, the way in which crimes were defined, discovered and investigated also changed. This period saw a transition from Victorian policing to more modern methods of collecting information at crime scenes and tracking criminals.14 In 1933, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Trenchard, instituted a new system of tracking crimes in the capital, including a careful ledger of all deaths by violence in London to be forward annually to the Home Office.15 The suspicious deaths recorded in these ledgers reveal the changing patterns of violent crime in London. In the 1930s, suspicious deaths illustrate the strains of economic hardship on the family, the difficulties faced by European refugees and the dangers of prostitution. The Second World War brought a temporary lull in the numbers of suspicious deaths, as conscription, full employment and evacuation of children caused a change in the demographic and lightened some economic hardships. As the war dragged on, however, the tensions exacerbated by raids and shortages and the influx of soldiers and deserters congregating in the capital brought the numbers of suspicious deaths up again. In 1946, many former soldiers returned to their families carrying service revolvers, the fatal results leading to the highest murder rates in the period. The bomb sites and rubble left behind by the raids were used by killers to conceal their crimes well into the 1950s. The shift from murders within the family to assaults by strangers led to extensive changes in how crimes were investigated by coroners and police. In family murders the guilty most often confessed, or killed themselves. Neighbours and acquaintances in the community were also an important source of information. But these tools could not be used when the perpetrator or victim was not known in a city with an increasingly itinerant population. Case files from the 1940s show that police were more willing to turn to the growing circle of forensic experts to find links between the killer and the victim. The one category which defied police investigative attempts, as it had done for many years, was the killing of newborn children, whose abandoned bodies left the fewest clues and whose deaths were almost always listed as unsolved. This book will examine the periods from 1933 to 1939, from 1939 to 1945 and from 1945 to 1953, ending with the discovery of John Christie’s victims at 10 Rillington Place and the challenges the crime presented to police investigation and British justice.

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Introduction 5

Histories of crime Murder Capital will be the first analysis of suspicious deaths in twentieth-century London. It examines an era of profound change in the types of murders committed and how they were investigated, and it bridges the gap between studies of Victorian crime and policing and histories of criminology and forensics in contemporary England.16 The book also reveals a hitherto unexplored facet of the war’s effect on London’s populace and criminal justice in Britain as a whole. The approach combines a social history of violent crime and its investigation with a consideration of the spatial geography of crimes in London and an analysis of the forensic investigation of the crime scene itself. Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton’s innovative research on twentieth-century British forensic cultures has made the modern crime scene the object of historical study, and has shown how scientific investigative practices were subject to social and institutional forces.17 Scholars working with Victorian texts, such as Judith Walkowitz, Simon Joyce, Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard, have outlined Victorian criminal geographies of crime and danger, and emphasized the importance of gender and class in understanding narratives of crime.18 Historians examining the social histories of crime, such as Mark Roodhouse, William Meier, Julia Laite and Matt Houlbrook, have examined patterns in other types of twentiethcentury crime in London, including prostitution, theft, homosexuality and black marketeering.19 In all these studies, the space of the crime and its situation within the city is fundamental to its discovery, its investigation and its cultural associations. Narratives of crime in London have relied since the early modern period on understandings of space, both literal and imagined. Recent work on early modern London has highlighted the metropolis’ importance as an area of shared cultural values: an imagined community in which landmarks and buildings had ‘multiple temporal and topographic meanings’.20 One of the most enduring ways in which the city was understood was through the mapping of the physical locations of crimes and crime-ridden areas. In the sixteenth century, certain London neighbourhoods were identified in the popular imagination as ‘nurseries of vice’.21 Fed by broadsides describing London murders in great detail, popular interest in crime helped to create what Leigh Yetter has called an early modern ‘popular landscape of crime’.22 Similarly, Miles Ogborn and others have mapped eighteenth-century ‘spaces of modernity’ in London, exploring the complex and interconnected topography of transformations in institutions, experiences and identities.23 More

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6  Murder Capital recently, historians have examined Victorian geographies of dirt and cleanliness in London, in particular nineteenth-century sanitary reform as an aspect of the expanding and industrializing metropolis.24 My aim is to use these concepts of the city as a set of overlapping spaces of control, knowledge, resistance, disorder and difference in order to examine the criminal geography of London in the twentieth century. The book will examine the institutional ordering of the city according to the top-down maps of police divisions and boundaries and the investigations of individual crime scenes. Newspaper coverage will suggest some of the social and cultural meanings associated with crime in the capital, and how these tended to focus on particular neighbourhoods such as Soho. Crime scene photographs presented as evidence in criminal trials will also indicate how these deaths were framed and situated within existing visual narratives of the city.25 The archival sources reflect the perspective of the institutions and individuals who defined, investigated and prosecuted crime. But the police files also offer hints of resistance, such as the abortionist Florence Taylor framing her abortion of a woman who later died as an act of compassion: ‘I didn’t know her name. I did it because I was sorry for the poor little thing,’ and Christopher Craig defying the police with his underage status from a Croydon rooftop in 1953, shouting, ‘Come on, you coppers! I’m only sixteen!’26 London emerges in these criminal investigations as a complex mosaic in which cosmopolitan and commercial spaces abutted dingy flats, waste spaces, alleyways and parks, and after 1940, bomb sites, shelters and other physical legacies of the war.

Policing in London Modern policing in London was from its inception based on the physical and investigative control of urban space. In 1829, the Metropolitan Police Force replaced the piecemeal system of parish constables and watchmen with seventeen police divisions in a sevenmile radius from Charing Cross, excluding the City.27 In 1839 the second Metropolitan Police Act expanded the area to include the whole of Middlesex and those parishes in the counties of Surrey, Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent up to fifteen miles from Charing Cross. The main unit of administrative control was the division. By 1934 the Metropolitan Police district was divided into twentyfour divisions of widely varying sizes (see Table 1). For instance, A Division of Westminster had an area of 1.88 square miles, and a force of 694, while S Division Hampstead was the largest with an area of

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Introduction 7 Table 1: London Metropolitan Police divisions in 193429 Inner divisions: A, C, E A stations

Cannon Row, Rochester Row, Hyde Park (Westminster or Whitehall)

C stations

Vine Street, Great Marlborough Street, Tottenham Court Road (St James’s, Mayfair and Soho or Westminster)

E stations

Bow Street, Gray’s Inn Road, Hunter Street, King’s Cross Road (Holborn)

Semi-outer divisions: B, D, F, G, H, L, M, N B stations

Walton Street, Gerald Road, Chelsea, Walham Green, North Fulham (Chelsea)

D stations

Albany Street, Marylebone Lane, St John’s Wood, Paddington (Marylebone)

F stations

Hammersmith, Kensington, Notting Hill, Notting Dale, Chiswick, Shepherd’s Bush (Hammersmith or Kensington)

G stations

City Road, Old Street, Islington, Dalston, Commercial Street (Islington, King’s Cross or Finsbury)

H stations

Arbour Square, Leman Street, Bow, Bethnal Green, Limehouse, Poplar, Isle of Dogs (Whitechapel or Stepney)

L stations

Brixton, Clapham, Nine Elms, Peckham, Camberwell, Carter Street (Lambeth)

M stations

Southwark, Tower Bridge, Grange Road, Deptford, Rotherhithe, Kennington Road (Southwark)

N stations

Stoke Newington, St Ann’s Road, Holloway, Highbury Vale, Caledonian Road, Somers Town, Kentish Town (Stoke Newington or Islington)

Outer divisions: J, K, P, R, S, T, V, W, X, Y, Z J stations

Hackney, Victoria Park, Leyton, Leytonstone, Woodford, Loughton, Claybury, Barkingside, Wanstead, Walthamstow, Chingford, Waltham Abbey (Hackney or Bethnal Green)

K stations

East Ham, Barking, Dagenham, West Ham, Forest Gate, Plaistow, Canning Town, North Woolwich, Ilford, Chadwell Heath (East Ham or West Ham)

P stations

Lewisham, Brockley, East Dulwich, West Dulwich, Sydenham, Southend Village, Beckenham, Penge, Bromley, Farnborough, Chislehurst, St Mary Cray (Lewisham or Peckham)

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8  Murder Capital R stations

Blackheath Road, Westcombe Park, East Greenwich, Woolwich, Plumstead, Shooters Hill, Bexley, Belvedere, Erith, Eltham, Lee Road, Sidcup (Greenwich)

S stations

Golders Green, Finchley, Hampstead, West Hampstead, Barnet, Whetstone, South Mimms, Shenley, Potters Bar, Edgware, Bushey, Elstree, Hendon (Hampstead)

T stations

Ealing, Southall, Norwood Green, Acton, Brentford, Twickenham, Hounslow, Teddington, Staines, Harlington, Hampton (Twickenham or Hammersmith)

V stations

Wandsworth, Putney, Kingston, Surbiton, East Molesey, Richmond, Barnes, Wimbledon, New Malden (Wandsworth)

W stations

Balham, Wandsworth Common, Earlsfield, Tooting, Mitcham, Sutton, Epsom, Banstead, Lavender Hill, Battersea (Balham or Clapham)

X stations

Harrow Road, Kilburn, Harlesden, Willesden Green, Harrow, Pinner, Wembley, Wealdstone, Uxbridge, Hayes, Ruislip, Greenford, Northwood

Y stations

Wood Green, New Southgate, Winchmore Hill, Tottenham, Edmonton, Hornsey, Highgate, Muswell Hill, Enfield, Enfield Highway, Southgate, Cheshunt (Highgate or Holloway)

Z stations

Croydon, Streatham, Gipsy Hill, Wallington, Kenley, Norbury, South Norwood (Croydon).

86.81 square miles and a force of 954. Each division was headed by a superintendant who reported to the Commissioner.28 These police divisions varied greatly in size and character. Divisions A, C and E, based in Cannon Row, Savile Row and Bow Street, were responsible for the West End, with its pleasure seekers, businessmen, monarchy and government. They had to oversee official events as well as monitor heavy traffic. By contrast, K Division in the East End covered thirty-two square miles, with a workingclass population of 568,000 people in 1953, mainly employed in factories and the docks.30 Each police division was further divided into subdivisions, which were governed by sub-stations or several sectional stations (see Table 1). The areas were further divided into beats for uniformed constables to patrol on foot, in order to familiarize the constables with local habits and to deter crime by their physical presence.31

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Introduction 9 In the early 1930s, the Metropolitan Police began to shift away from the policy of constant physical presence in London towards a technological and investigative control of urban space. In 1932, Commissioner Lord Trenchard abolished the timed beat system as part of his wide-ranging reforms of the force. By the late 1930s blue police telephone boxes and pillars and wireless cars were the conduit between policemen and civilians on the street and the local police station.32 By the 1950s there were 400 telephone boxes and 117 wireless cars patrolling the Metropolitan Police district, twentyfour hours a day.33 From the information gathered on the street, a virtual London was recreated in the basement of the headquarters at Scotland Yard. From 1933, local stations called in details of the daily activities, which were collected in the Information Room.34 Maps of London were spread onto four glass-topped tables, on which markers were set, representing all the vehicles and boats in commission. These central maps reconstituted the spaces of London in order to discover patterns and to distribute manpower. Each division also created its own district map of local crimes in order to identify the patterns of individual criminals.35 Mapping became an integral part of crime investigation and control, reinforced by the increasingly detailed crime statistics kept by each division.

Crime statistics The Metropolitan Police gathered statistical data on suspicious deaths in several formats: the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s Report, the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales and the Criminal Statistics for England and Wales, presented annually to Parliament. Suspicious deaths differed from the statistics of other crimes that were known to the police or reported, since their investigation depended on the discovery of a physical body under suspicious circumstances. Debate surrounding criminal statistics’ reliability has formed an important part of the criminal historiography of England.36 Historians looking at the long view of crime from medieval to modern times, such as Elias’ 1939 account of the ‘civilizing process’, have argued that the institution of police forces was an important step in reducing levels of violent crime, as it shifted the responsibility for prosecution and investigation of murder from the victim to the state. This in turn, according to Elias, made the murder statistics kept by the police much more reliable, as the number of homicides which were concealed, settled out of court by vendettas or compounded by money payments were reduced to

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10  Murder Capital insignificance.37 By the 1960s the reliability of English homicide statistics began to be questioned, notably by J.D.J. Havard, an ambitious physician who also held a law degree, in The Detection of Secret Homicide.38 He argued that many homicides were successfully disguised as natural deaths and bypassed the police altogether: ‘The high rate of detection for murder, as shown by the criminal statistics, relates only to those cases which have been identified as homicides, and may therefore have lulled us into a false sense of security.’39 In 1998 statistician Howard Taylor claimed that the remarkable consistency of murder rates, which between 1880 and 1966 kept to a cumulative average of 150 a year with a band of 20% variation on either side of the average, suggested that police forces in England and Wales consciously underreported murders.40 He posited that, while the quantity and quality of crime reported to the provincial and metropolitan police forces remained beyond the forces’ control, ‘how they were recorded and processed was a matter of policy and that policy was set by the Chief Constable ... [Therefore a] reading of the statistics greatly assists in the reconstruction of supplysided quotas, policies, priorities and politics that underlay criminal justice.’41 Taylor’s argument has received strong criticism, notably from Robert Morris, who pointed out that the Treasury did not place a budgetary restriction on murder trials, and that to ration the number of reported crimes would have required a conspiracy of huge proportions.42 The under-reporting of crime did not require a conspiracy, however, so much as shared mutual interest in keeping the number of unsolvable crimes down, which is reflected in other primary sources. Historians of crime examining nineteenth-century coroners’ courts have also uncovered a reluctance to classify suspicious deaths as murder. Until 1926, all sudden or suspicious deaths in England and Wales were investigated by a coroner working with a jury of twelve men in the presence of the corpse.43 Mary Beth Emmerichs’ study of over 1,000 samples of nineteenth-century London coroners’ verdicts that did not result in criminal indictments found only five verdicts of ‘wilful murder by person unknown’, suggesting that coroners’ juries were hesitant to bring in a verdict of wilful murder.44 John Archer’s study of reports from coroners’ courts in Victorian newspapers in North-West England suggested that the victim’s status in society partly determined whether a case remained unprosecuted, with infants, foreigners and female partners making up a substantial number of those whose deaths were downgraded or ignored by policing authorities and the judicial system.45 This trend reflected the lower social value of these victims as well as the smaller chance of conviction for murder.

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Introduction 11 Anecdotal evidence from police memoirs corroborates the streetlevel under-reporting of suspicious deaths, described by Howard Taylor as an ‘open secret’ among police forces.46 Frederick Wensley, who worked as a beat constable in Whitechapel in the 1890s, recalled in his memoir how bodies in the streets were explained away: It was not in those days a very extraordinary thing for a dead body to be found in the street during the night or in the early morning hours, and it was significant that this usually occurred not far from houses to which all sorts of bad characters were known to resort. Few of these cases were classed officially as murder. Injuries might, in some instances, have been self-inflicted or have been brought about by some drunken accident. No one could say that it was not so, but that there had been foul play was often likely ... Who was to say in which of a dozen houses of ill repute it had taken place, or who of scores of roughs were responsible?47

Alec Hatch, a Metropolitan Police constable in the 1970s, recounted that on his beat deaths which were unlikely to result in a criminal conviction were disguised as falls down the stairs.48 The Metropolitan Police files from the 1940s also suggest ways in which the number of suspicious deaths could be kept low, such as the exponential increase of abortions ruled as self-inflicted in 1943 and 1944 (see Table 5). While these examples suggest that official records be used with caution, they also demonstrate the importance of context in the classification of crime. Without full details, it remains impossible for the historian to reclassify potentially suspicious deaths. As Stefan Slater, Dick Hobbs, Louise Jackson, Julia Laite and others have argued, mid-twentieth-century crime was defined by policing predicated upon local knowledge gained on ‘the beat’.49 Crime was therefore understood, and to a large degree accepted, in the context of a geography shaped by race, ethnicity, class and gender, as well as preconceptions about the neighbourhood in which a crime took place. It is therefore vital to consider the immediate situation where the body was discovered in the context of the wider area of which the crime scene was a part. The legal framework governing murders and manslaughter was also shifting in this era. The Infanticide Acts of 1922 and 1938 lessened the penalties for a mother who killed her infant, while the 1938 Criminal Justice Bill unsuccessfully called for an experimental five-year suspension of the death penalty. The midtwentieth-century criteria for classifying, investigating and punishing death by violence reflected broad and long-lasting changes in social attitudes to crime, punishment and criminal justice.

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12  Murder Capital

The Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence In 1933, the year in which this study begins, Commissioner Trenchard introduced a new system of keeping crime figures, which required every reported crime to be recorded unless the report was erroneous or malicious. Before this, reports for which no corroboration could be obtained could be struck out at the discretion of the local superintendant.50 The Metropolitan Police also began to keep a ledger of deaths by violence to be forwarded to the Home Office in regular instalments. The Register of Deaths by Violence records each case chronologically, beginning with the date and place of the discovery of the body in a column on the left, and ending in the final verdict and the sentence in a column on the far right.51 In the twenty-one years between 1933 and 1953 the Registry details 953 suspicious deaths, excluding those categorized as vehicular manslaughter. Of these cases, police files are archived for 360 cases, approximately 150 of which were open for public viewing in 2013.52 The National Archives also holds police files on crimes which are not included the Register. These ‘extra’ files are indicative of the types of crimes which are left out of the official statistics and why. In some cases the charge was thrown out or the crime ruled to be in self-defence, suggesting that the judicial verdict of the story altered the categorization of the crime. The police case records contain a summary of the crime and depositions from witnesses, and some also include post-mortem reports, photographs, editorial comments by other police detectives or superintendants, newspaper clippings, anonymous letters and occasionally forgotten pieces of material evidence. The City of London Police also investigated suspicious deaths during this time, but no files on these investigations or on crime statistics are currently archived. As Clive Emsley recounted, most English police forces had dismal archival practices, and documents were invariably thrown away after a few years, unless they were taken home by senior officers and later donated.53

Crime scene photography Depositions from some of the criminal trials at the Central Criminal Court are also available at The National Archives, including photographs submitted in evidence.54 Crime scene photographs presented as evidence suggest how suspicious deaths were framed and situated within the social and physical landscape of the city. The photographs also reflect the two competing influences on

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Introduction 13 crime scene photography: photography as an objective institutional tool for capturing a momentary reality and preserving the scene of the crime, and photography as a subjective art form reflecting the shifting aesthetics and genres of urban photography. Photography had been used by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Scotland Yard and the Prison Commission as a method of recording evidence and identifying criminals since the late 1860s. The earliest surviving archived crime scene photographs in England were taken at a farmhouse in Orgreave, Staffordshire in 1895.55 As photographic techniques improved, the institutional use of photography widened; John Tagg has gone so far as to suggest that the needs of the British police service spurred the technological development of photography: portable cameras made possible the photographing of fingerprints in situ at a crime scene, and advances in the use of filters aided the photographic detection of forgery.56 While photography was used by criminologists such as Francis Galton to create composite photographs of criminal types, it was more often used for criminalistics: the detection of particular criminals through identification photographs.57 Both identification photographs and crime scene photography were pioneered by Alphonse Bertillon at the Parisian Prefecture of Paris.58 He devised a method of photographing the crime scene using a limited number of shots from standard angles, including from above with a high tripod, to document the scene before it was disturbed by investigators; his methodical approach was quickly adopted by police photographers elsewhere.59 In London, the Photographic Branch developed first as part of the main CID at Scotland Yard, then moved to Fingerprint Branch (C3) in 1934.60 In 1933 the Photographic Department took 45,522 photographs, and in 1934 the number increased to 70,218.61 In 1934, police photographers recorded 251 crime scenes in London and attended court 322 times. The goal of crime scene photographs was to preserve the crime scene and to capture the moment of criminal discovery. J.A. Radley, in his 1948 book on photography and crime detection, argued that the photographs were a form of visual note-taking for the detective: Photographs fulfil the place of memoir, to produce an impression from the facts observed ... With regards to the actual scene of the investigation, Hans Gross lays down as an inviolable rule that ‘one must never alter the position, or pick up, or even touch any object before it has been minutely described in the report.’ By means of photography, an accurate record of the scene can be made in a few minutes.62

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14  Murder Capital Crime scene photographs were framed to include the body itself, points of entry and exit, all places where traces of crime were found or were expected to be found, and the scene from the point of view of witnesses. Photographs allowed the detective to preserve a perpetual crime scene, to which the detective and possibly the judge and jury could travel by viewing the pictures.63 The photograph had a privileged evidentiary position, for, ‘unlike other forms of visual representation, the photographic image was considered to be a direct, unmediated copy or index of its subject in the natural world.’64 But since all photographs employ subjective conventions such as framing and focus, they can never be an exact reflection of their subjects.65 Lorraine J. Daston, Peter Galison, Jennifer Mnookin and Jonathan Finn have shown that photography’s claim to objectivity cannot be attributed to its chemical and mechanical processes, but is a historical construction based on cultural values as much as on epistemology.66 Crime scene photographs of suspicious deaths in London reveal hidden spaces in the metropolis, and how the space of the photographic frame was used by the then-anonymous police photographer to reflect contemporary notions of crime and the urban visual narratives of poverty, vice and ruins. The multiple meanings of crime scene photographs can be understood according to Roland Barthes’ influential definition of the two elements of historical photographs: studium, the general documentary quality of photographs as ‘good historical scenes’, and punctum, the aspect of a photograph that pricks, marks, wounds, ‘is poignant to me’.67 In crime scene photographs, the evidence of the crime acts as the punctum, the element of the image which arouses an unquenchable interest, as a ‘subtle beyond – as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see’.68 Crime scene photographs also visually linked crimes to a criminal urban topography in which place played a vital role in what Dominique Kalifa has called ‘the construction of crime realities’.69 By linking each crime to its setting, each dead body to its spot in the street, the crime scene photographs of the Identité Judiciaire in Paris and the CID in London added to existing urban criminal geographies.

Memoirs and autobiographies Contemporary memoirs published by policemen, pathologists and coroners who worked in the period were influential in creating popular understandings of crime.70 While Stefan Petrow rightly refers to most early detective memoirs as ‘self-congratulatory and sanitized accounts’, memoirs can provide a powerful insight into individual investigative

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Introduction 15 teams, and have most recently been used by Haia Shpayer-Makov and William M. Meier to trace changes in detective practices.71 The memoirs of atypical outsiders give more nuanced views of the force, such as the thoughtful autobiography of homosexual Metropolitan policeman Harry Daley and that of post-war Police Commissioner Sir Harold Scott, a professional civil servant who accurately narrated a history of the Metropolitan Police’s transformation in the post-war world.72 The biography of coroner Bentley Purchase also reveals the influence of coroners’ investigations on the police.73 While the Coroners Amendment Act of 1926 curtailed coroners’ independent and judicial power by requiring that inquests be adjourned while police inquiries were made and that coroners’ verdicts be consistent with criminal proceedings, coroners’ public inquiries could be instrumental in gathering enough evidence for police to begin criminal investigations. For example, Purchase’s crusade against abortionists in St Pancras in the 1940s led to increased prosecutions in the area. Post-1926 inquest records are far scarcer than nineteenth-century samples, as the Act allowed coroners to commission a post-mortem examination before deciding on the necessity of a full or public inquiry. In 1938, 46% of deaths in suspicious circumstances in England were decided without recourse to a public inquest, and as inquest numbers fell, so did the number of London coroners.74 In 1930, London had six coroner’s districts, which were reduced to five in 1940 and four in 1943: Western, Northern, Southern and Eastern. During the war, Defence Regulation 30A (April 1941) waived the necessity for inquests on airraid victims, asking only that a coroner hold a private inquiry and, if satisfied, issued a certificate to the registrar, who registered the death in the ordinary way.75 Coroner’s court records for this period were considered to be the coroner’s personal property and most records were destroyed.76

Newspapers Records of inquests do survive in reportage in local newspapers, which are excellent sources for all three types of London courts: coroners’, magistrates’ and criminal, as well as local information about police investigations. In this period, Londoners were well served with several national daily newspapers, such as The Times and the Daily Mirror, and over thirty local newspapers, which became an increasingly important point of contact between the urban police and the public.77 The detailed narration of local crimes and the police requests for readers to offer up information encouraged citizens to

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16  Murder Capital view police work as an entertainment as well as a civic responsibility. Dramatic crime reporting flourished in the absence of restrictions on court reporting first introduced by the Criminal Justice Act of 1967, and with the potential of a capital sentence for a murder conviction until the suspension of the death penalty in 1965.78 The analysis of newspaper content presents several methodological challenges for the historian, as crime reporting shared page space with a wide variety of local, national and international news in both the national dailies and weekly local newspapers. As Adrian Bingham has argued, historians must examine editorial policies, specifically which crimes were reported and which were not.79 As seen in Chapters 4 and 5, women’s deaths as a result of abortions were rarely reported in the press, while infanticides tended to be reported with marked sympathy for the mother. The content of the newspaper coverage itself also reveals what aspects of crime were considered newsworthy. As seen in Chapter 1, crimes were reported according to neighbourhood rather than individual details, and the more sensational crimes between strangers were given much more coverage than less dramatic domestic murders. Lastly, the effects of crime reportage on public debates and social attitudes must be considered. The 1938 Infanticide Act, which raised the age of a ‘newly born’ child to twelve months, was almost certainly influenced by the press outcry against women being formally sentenced to death in the courtroom for killing their babies, even though they were certain to be later reprieved. Perhaps the most profound effect of crime reportage on public attitudes is one of awareness; because large categories of suspicious deaths were not reported in the press – in particular women’s deaths after abortions – they were not part of the contemporary consciousness of crime and have been excluded from subsequent historical memory.

Perpetrators, witnesses and victims Taken together, these sources present a picture of violent and suspicious deaths in London from various complementary perspectives. Glimpses of perpetrators and victims appear in criminal depositions and newspaper court reportage, while reports, notes and memoirs written by police detectives and pathologists disclose how violent crimes were discovered, investigated, categorized and prosecuted. What emerge from these files are glimpses of unhappy moments in a city suffering from material privations, the dangers of war and the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth and family life in the mid-twentieth century. I have chosen to use the real names

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Introduction 17 of the people involved in these cases, as their police and court files have been released by The National Archives under the thirty-year disclosure period. The National Archives and the Home Office take their responsibility to balance the need for public access of information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) with the need to protect vulnerable parties very seriously, and carefully review each case’s potential to harm the living before releasing files.80 I also believe that to disguise the identity of perpetrators or victims is to deny them historical agency, and to reduce their lives to one moment of violence. As Geoffrey Reaume has argued in the context of mental patients, naming the marginalized restores a dignity and humanity to those whose stories have been reduced to a diagnosis, or in this case a verdict.81 Debates on the identification of victims and perpetrators of Nazi euthanasia, of apartheid-era violence in South Africa and of the systemic abuse of First Nations children in Canadian residential schools have all testified to the ethical and historical importance of naming the people involved, and of documenting and restoring their individuality and essential humanity.82 My aim in this work has been to approach each person in these histories with compassion as well as dispassion, which I hope is apparent in the chapters that follow.

Chapter outlines Murder Capital will begin in Chapter 1, ‘London crime scenes of the 1930s’, with a broad survey of the criminal geography of 1930s London, using police files, newspaper accounts and memoirs to examine the spatial distribution and the institutional investigation of suspicious deaths. The resulting maps show how areas formerly associated with crime, such as the East End and Southwark, were eclipsed in the 1930s by the suspicious death rates in neighbourhoods to the west and north, with their shifting populations and high levels of unemployment and poverty. Although stranger murders in London’s cosmopolitan Soho captured newspaper headlines in the 1930s, this chapter reveals a picture of home-grown violence in which most victims and perpetrators knew each other. The most common victims were the most vulnerable: wives, children, infants and prostitutes. The Second World War permanently transformed the physical landscape of London and accelerated changes in the governance and policing of the city. Chapter 2, ‘Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45’, will explore how the war exacerbated existing family tensions, in these cases with deadly results. Domestic killings in wartime London were characterized by familial conflicts,

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18  Murder Capital neuroses amplified by separations and raids, and opportunistic attempts to dispose of inconvenient wives in the wartime rubble. Wartime domestic crimes occurred all over the city, taking place in shared private spaces ranging from lodging houses to suburban villas. These cases reveal instances of domestic situations gone wrong, often triggered by external events such as bombing raids or changes in circumstances such as a pregnancy and a bringing to light of buried secrets. While domestic homicides necessitated police exploration of a subterranean geography of hidden crimes, Chapter 3, ‘Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45’, will explore how the war affected crimes between relative strangers in pubs, in shelters and on the streets of London. During the war, London became a much more anonymous city. Londoners left their familiar neighbourhoods as the result of evacuation, conscription, directed labour and internment, while refugees, soldiers, war workers and deserters poured into the city. The number of suspicious deaths between people whose relationship was fleeting or unclear rose exponentially during the war. Bombed-out houses, alleyways, shelters and pubs were the scenes of chance and brutal deaths, many of which remained unsolved. These deaths expose the wartime tensions in the city and highlight the difficulties of police investigations when there was no prior connection between the perpetrator and the victim. In response to more challenging investigations and lower numbers of detectives, police began to use forensic sciences, for example by using military databases of fingerprints. Chapter 4, ‘Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53’, will examine the network of secrets surrounding women’s deaths as a result of illegal abortions in London between 1933 and 1953. Coroners’ reports, police files, newspaper articles and criminal depositions uncover glimpses of the motivations of women seeking abortions and of their abortionists. Testimonies and letters also demonstrate how the two found each other through complex networks of referrals that spread across the United Kingdom. While the Register of Deaths by Violence excluded many women’s suspicious deaths from abortions in which criminal charges were not brought, cases from the Register still provide a compelling geography of criminal abortion focused in the districts of London north of the river, taking place in flats, lodging houses, hotels and in doctors’ surgeries. Chapter 5, ‘Infanticide, 1933–53’, investigates cases of infanticide and infant murder. In London between 1933 and 1953, twenty-three mothers killed themselves and their infants and fifty-nine women were prosecuted for infanticide, or killing their infant while their mind was

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Introduction 19 disturbed. The sixty-three infant bodies discovered in London’s parks, rivers, train stations and alleyways proved more difficult to trace. With few ties to the world, the tiny bodies testified to the crimes least likely to be solved during these years. Unlike suspicious deaths committed by strangers or women’s deaths as a result of illegal abortions, which increased during the Second World War, the numbers of infanticides and infant murders in London declined in the war years. The final chapter, Chapter 6, ‘Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53’, presents London after the war as a city transformed. The return of civilians and soldiers, the presence of deserters, the increase in the availability of firearms and the difficulties of dealing with post-war austerity and settling back into peacetime life led to a surge of violence after 1945. After the war the pattern of suspicious deaths shifted; the numbers of infanticides and women’s deaths from abortion dropped under new social provisions for mothers and families, and murders using firearms increased. Diminished policing manpower and a mobile population led to an increasing reliance on forensics in solving suspicious deaths, with the reorganization of the former Hendon Police Laboratory in Whitehall in 1948–49. The importance of forensics to murder investigations was made publicly apparent by the physical examination of 10 Rillington Place after the discovery of John Reginald Christie’s serial murders in 1953. That same year the capital sentencing of nineteen-year-old Derek Bentley and twenty-one-year-old John Michael Davies in separate cases added to the critical interrogation of the justice system which had sent Timothy Evans to the gallows for Christie’s crimes three years before. Together these cases illustrate the reworking of the familiar criminal anxieties about London and a profound uneasiness about the war’s lasting effects on the young, about the destructive potential of youth gangs and about a post-war masculinity both weakened and coarsened by the years of conflict. Even as Londoners sought to put the effects of the war behind them, they continued to struggle with its legacy.

Notes 1 See Leigh Yetter, ‘Criminal Knowledge: Mapping Murder in (and onto) Early Modern Metropolitan London’, London Journal, 33:2 (July 2008), 97–118; and John Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2 For more on comparative approaches to crime, see John Carter Wood, ‘It’s a Small World After All? Reflections on Violence in

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20  Murder Capital Comparative Perspectives’, in Barry Godfrey, Clive Emsley and Graeme Dunstall (eds.), Comparative Histories of Crime (Cullompton: Willan, 2003), pp. 36–52; and John Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 2004). 3 Joe Hicks and Grahame Allen, ‘A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics since 1900’, House of Commons Research Paper, 99:111 (21 December 1991), 14. 4 TNA, MEPO 4/179. An incomplete series of annual reports from 1887 to 1984 is archived in MEPO 4. 5 See Adrian Bingham, ‘Reading Newspapers: Cultural Histories of the Popular Press in Modern Britain’, History Compass, 10:2 (2012), 140–50; and D.G. Boyce, ‘Crusaders without Chains: Power and the Press Barons 1896–1951’, in J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate (eds.), Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1987). 6 See Simon Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 7 See Richard Tames, London: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), John Eade, Placing London: From Imperial Capital to Global City (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000); Celina Fox (ed.), London: World City, 1800–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Hamish McRae and Frances Cairncross, Capital City: London as a Financial Centre (London: Methuen, rev. edn, 1991). 8 For more on London local government, see Andrew Saint (ed.) Politics and the People of London: The LCC 1889–1965 (London: Hambledon, 1989); D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones (eds.), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989); Ken Young and Patricia L. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change 1837–1981 (London: Edward Arnold, 1982). 9 For more on the London economy, see David R. Green, ‘The Metropolitan Economy: Continuity and Change 1800–1939’, in Keith Hoggart and David R. Green (eds.), London: A New Metropolitan Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), pp. 8–33; Douglas H. Smith, The Industries of Greater London (London: P.S. King & Son, 1933); and James Frederick Patrick Thornhill, Greater London: A Social Geography (London: Christophers, 1935). 10 Gareth Stedman Jones observed that Imperial London was often compared to Rome, impregnable from without, and vulnerable to the mob within. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 14–15. 11 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See also Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual

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Introduction 21 Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 12 Heather Shore, ‘Criminality, Deviance and the Underworld since 1750’, in Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash (eds.), Histories of Crime: Britain 1600–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 120–40, 120. 13 See Joachim Schlör, trans. Pierre Gottfried Imhof and Dfydd Rees Roberts, Nights in the Big City: Paris, London, Berlin 1870–1930 (London: Reaktion, 1998), p. 121. 14 See, for example, Gary Mason’s The Official History of the Metropolitan Police (London: Carlton, 2004); Peter Kennison and David Swinden, Behind the Blue Lamp: Policing North and East London (London: Coppermill, 2003); and David Swinden, Peter Kennison and Alan Moss, More Behind the Blue Lamp: Policing South and South East London (London: Coppermill, 2011). 15 TNA, MEPO 20/3, Metropolitan Police: General Registry: Registers of Murders and Deaths by Violence 1933–1944; and TNA, MEPO 20/4, Metropolitan Police: General Registry: Registers of Murders and Deaths by Violence 1945–1953. The registers continue into 1966. 16 See, for example, Rosalind Crone, Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Katherine Watson, Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and their Victims (London: Hambledon, 2004); Randall McGowan, ‘Getting to Know the Criminal Class in Nineteenth Century England’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 14:1 (1990), 33–54; Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson (eds.), Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panic and Moral Outrage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); David R. Foran et al., ‘The Conviction of Dr. Crippen: New Forensic Findings in a Century-old Murder’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 56 (2011), 233–40; Fraser Joyce, ‘Expert, Laymen, and the Identification of Cora Crippen: An Exercise in Medico-Legal Cooperation’, Medico-Legal Journal, 79:2 (2011), 58–63; and Lutz Roewer, ‘DNA Fingerprinting in Forensics: Past, Present, Future’, Investigative Genetics, 4:22 (2013), n.p. 17 Ian Burney, Neil Pemberton and David Kirby, ‘Introducing Forensic Cultures’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44:1 (2013), 1–3; Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, ‘Bruised Witness: Bernard Spilsbury and the Performance of Early Twentieth-Century Forensic Pathology’, Medical History, 55:1(2011), 41–60; Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, ‘The Rise and Fall of Celebrity Pathology’, British Medical Journal (14 December 2010), 1319–21. 18 Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard (eds.), London Gothic: Place,

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22  Murder Capital Space and the Gothic Imagination (New York: Continuum, 2010); Joyce, Capital Offenses; and Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight. 19 Mark Roodhouse, Black Market Britain: 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); William M. Meier, Property Crime in London, 1850 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). 20 Chris R. Kyle, ‘Afterword: Remapping London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71:1 (2008), 243–53, 244-5. 21 Beattie, Policing and Punishment, p. 1. 22 Yetter, ‘Mapping Murder’, 112. 23 Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (New York: Guilford, 1998), p. 238. 24 See Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008); and Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox (eds.), Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007). 25 See Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 26 TNA, MEPO 3/1027 and 2/9401/1. 27 See Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (London: Longman, 2nd edn, 1996); Stephen Wade, Square Mile Bobbies: The City of London Police 1839–1949 (Stroud: The History Press, 2008); and Ernest Nicholls, Crime within the Square Mile:The History of Crime in the City of London (London: J. Long, 1935). 28 TNA, HO 45/24897. 29 While the letter designation of the division remains the same, the individual names by which they are referred to can vary. TNA, MEPO 2/2710. 30 Harold Scott, Scotland Yard (London: Andre Deutsch, 1954), p. 36. 31 Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby: A History of Policing from the 18th Century to the Present (London: Quercus, 2009), p. 41. 32 See Scott, Scotland Yard; and F.J. Crawley, ‘The Technique of Investigation of the English Detective’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 154 (November 1929), 219–22. 33 Scott, Scotland Yard, p. 93; and Terence Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 35–42. 34 The Victoria Embankment site was the site of the headquarters from 1890 to 1967. 35 Scott, Scotland Yard, p. 93. 36 See Beattie, Policing and Punishment; J.S. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of

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Introduction 23 Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent, 1560–1985’, Past and Present, 130 (1991), 70–106; Lawrence Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300–1980’, Past and Present, 101 (1983), 22–33; J.A. Sharpe, ‘The History of Violence in England: Some Observations’, Past and Present, 108 (1985), 206–15; and J.J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society in Nineteenth Century London (London: London, B.T. Batsford, 1967). 37 See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000); and Ted Gurr, ‘Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence’, in Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (eds.), Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 295–353. 38 J.D.J. Havard, The Detection of Secret Homicide: A Study of the Medico-Legal System of Investigation of Sudden and Unexplained Deaths (London: Macmillan, 1960). 39 Havard, Secret Homicide, p. 200. 40 Howard Taylor, ‘Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s’, Economic History Review, 51:3(1996): 569–90. 41 Howard Taylor, ‘The Politics of the Rising Crime Statistics of England and Wales 1914–1960’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 2:1 (1998), 5–28, 25. 42 John Wallis, ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics? Nineteenth-Century Crime Statistics for England and Wales as a Historical Source’, History Compass, 10:8 (August 2012), 574–83, 578. See also Robert Morris, ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Criminal Statistics in England and Wales’, Crime, History and Society, 5:1 (2001), 111–27. 43 Rab Houston, ‘The Medicalization of Suicide in Scotland and England’, in John Weaver and David Wright (eds.), Histories of Suicide International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 91–118. 44 Mary Beth Emmerichs, ‘Getting Away with Murder? Homicide and the Coroners in Nineteenth-Century London’, Social Science History, 25:1 (Spring 2001), 93–100. 45 John Archer, ‘Mysterious and Suspicious Deaths: Missing Homicides in North-West England 1850–1900’, Crime, History and Society, 12:2 (2008), 45–63. 46 Taylor, ‘Rationing Crime’, 587. 47 Frederick Porter Wensley, Forty Years of Scotland Yard (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 87. 48 Alec Hatch, former Metropolitan Police constable, private correspondence with author, May 2003. 49 Stefan Slater, ‘Containment: Managing Street Prostitution in London, 1918–1959’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010),

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24  Murder Capital 332–57, 338; Dick Hobbs, Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Julia Laite, ‘Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early TwentiethCentury London’, History Workshop Journal, 65:1 (2008), 96–116, 108; and Louis Blom-Cooper and Terence Morris, With Malice Aforethought: A Study of the Crime and Punishment for Homicide (Oxford: Hart, 2004). 50 Scott, Scotland Yard, p. 57. 51 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4. 52 Files exempted from the thirty-year rule are closed for seventy-five or a hundred years, depending on the nature of the crime and the presence of surviving family members. 53 Clive Emsley, private correspondence with author, 4 November 2010. 54 TNA, CRIM 1: Central Criminal Court: Depositions: Statements on oath used in evidence in trials at the Old Bailey and pardons if granted. 55 TNA, ASSI 6/30/4. From the late 1860s, prisons also began to photograph inmates. See TNA, PCOM 2/290: Home Office and Prison Commission: Prisons Records, Series 1. 56 John Tagg, ‘Power and Photography – Part I. A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law’, Screen Education, 36 (Autumn 1980), 17–55, 23. See also Thomas Thorne Baker, The Kingdom of the Camera (London: George Bell, 1934); TNA, MEPO 3/1999, Detection of forgery by use of filtered light and enlarged photographs; and TNA, MEPO 2/6854, Production of blocks for publication of photographs in Police Gazette 1934–46. 57 Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, ‘Making Space for Criminalistics: Hans Gross and Fin-de-Siècle CSI’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44:1 (March 2013), 16–25, 17–19. 58 Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 59 See Bertillon’s crime scene photographs in Eugenia Parry, Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886–1902 (London: Scalo Editions, 2000); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Album of Paris Crime Scenes’ attributed to Alphonse Bertillon, www.metmuseum.org/ collections/search-the-collections/284718. 60 TNA, MEPO 2/5938, Metropolitan Police: Office of the Commissioner: Correspondence and Papers. Criminal Investigation Department, Photographic Section. 61 TNA, MEPO 2/5938, Memo 16 January 1935 signed ‘Photographic

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Introduction 25 Department’. The large increase was due in part to the creation of divisional albums identifying individuals and their positions. 62 J.A. Radley, Photography in Crime Detection (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd, 1948), p. 15. 63 See Jennifer L. Mnookin, ‘The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 10 (Winter 1998), 1–74. 64 Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. xi. See also John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 3; Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photography and the Material Performance of the Past’, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 130–50; and Jennifer Tucker in collaboration with Tina Campt, ‘Entwined Practices: Engagements with Photography in Historical Enquiry’, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 1–8. 65 Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image, p. xii. 66 Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010), Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image and Mnookin, ‘The Image of Truth’. 67 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 26. 68 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 59. 69 Dominique Kalifa, ‘Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, French Historical Studies 27:1 (2004), 175–94. See also Thomas Cragin, Murder in Parisian Streets: Manufacturing Crime and Justice in the Popular Press, 1830– 1900 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006). 70 TNA, MEPO 3/734. 71 Stefan Petrow, ‘The Rise of the Detective in London 1869–1914’, Criminal Justice History, 14 (1993), 91–108, 103; Haia ShpayerMakov, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Meier, Property Crime in London. 72 Harry Daley, This Small Cloud: A Personal Memoir (London: Weidenfeld, 1987); and Scott, Scotland Yard. 73 Robert Jackson, Coroner: The Biography of Sir Bentley Purchase (London, Harrap, 1963). This biography was based on numerous private conversations with Purchase and his colleagues. 74 Ian Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest 1830–1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 167. 75 TNA, MEPO 3/3066 and 30/41/68. 76 Surviving records are deposited in a 10% sample at the London Metropolitan Archive, although, as W.F.G Dolman, HM coroner for the Northern District pointed out, Coroners’ Rule 57 restricts

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26  Murder Capital access to inquest records to ‘properly interested persons’, generally confined to family members, insurance companies and witnesses at the inquest. The Coroner’s Court Register is open to the public, but it is sketchy in detail and includes only name, age, date, cause of death and verdict. Dr W.F.G. Dolman, private correspondence with author, 21 June 2001. 77 Andy Croll, ‘Street Disorder, Surveillance and Shame. Regulating Behavior in the Public Spaces of the Late Victorian British Town’, Social History, 24:3 (1999), 250–68. 78 Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice since 1945, p. 33. 79 Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Jane L. Chapman, Gender, Citizenship and Newspapers: Historical and Transnational Perspectives (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 80 In an email denying me access to a closed file, Freedom of Information Assessor Yudit Collard Treml explained: ‘The National Archives and the Home Office must also continue to protect public confidence that victims, victims’ families and mentally disturbed defendants are allowed to be given privacy.’ Private correspondence re: Freedom of Information Request: Reference F0022732, 15 July 2010. 81 Geoffrey Reaume, ‘Portraits of People with Mental Disorders in English Canadian History’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 17:1 (2000), 93–125. 82 See R. D. Strous, ‘To Protect or to Publish: Confidentiality and the Fate of the Mentally Ill Victims of Nazi Euthanasia’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 35:6 (June 2009), 361–4; Heather Pringle, ‘Confronting Anatomy’s Nazi Past’, Science, New Series 329:5989 (16 July 2010), 274–5; Sabine Hildebrandt, ‘The Women on Stieve’s List: Victims of National Socialism whose Bodies Were Used for Anatomical Research’, Clinical Anatomy 26:1( Jan. 2013), 3–21; Marlene Brant Castellano, Linda Archibald and Mike DeGagné, From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008); J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996; James L. Gibson, ‘The Contributions of Truth to Reconciliation: Lessons from South Africa’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50:3 (Jun., 2006), 409–32; Rosemary Nagy, ‘After the TRC: Citizenship, Memory, and Reconciliation’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 38:3 (2004), 638–53.

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1 London crime scenes in the 1930s Introduction Suspicious death cases in the 1930s portray a London whose brilliant public and commercial life concealed a darker and shabbier poverty. Although stranger murders in London’s cosmopolitan Soho involving foreign restaurant workers and prostitutes captured newspaper headlines in the 1930s, this chapter also reveals a much more intimate picture of violence in which most victims and perpetrators knew each other, and in which women and children were the main victims. Parents driven to desperation by unemployment and poverty killed their children or spouse, and often themselves. Botched abortions resulted in women’s bodies found in West End hotels and dumped in alleyways. This chapter will explore the criminal spaces of the 1930s as facets of what Matt Houlbrook has called London’s ‘discontinuous sites of sociability, pleasure and danger’.1 Police records and statistics, newspaper accounts and memoirs detailing suspicious deaths show how areas associated with crime in the nineteenth century, such as the East End and Southwark, were eclipsed by the volume of suspicious deaths in neighbourhoods to the west and north, with their shifting populations and high levels of unemployment and poverty. The maps of suspicious deaths also reveal the anachronistic spaces of London in the 1930s: the traditional working-class neighbourhoods and Victorian workhouses about to be swept away by the Blitz and post-war rebuilding in the centre of the West End. This study begins in 1933, the first year in which a Register of Deaths by Violence – detailing suspicious deaths, or deaths which required police investigation in Metropolitan Police divisions – was kept for the Home Office, ushering in a new era in crime investigation in the capital.

London crime in the early twentieth century London in the 1930s was still marked by the traumatic effects of the First World War of 1914–18. The First World War foreshadowed the material and imaginative transformations in London which would

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28  Murder Capital follow the Second World War.2 Over 124,000 Londoners were killed in combat, corresponding to 10% of men in their twenties and thirties.3 The German air attacks on London between May 1915 and October 1918 killed 670 civilians, and signalled a new era of warfare which was: ‘technological, remote ... disrupting the familiar spatial discontinuity between the battlefield and the homeland’.4 London’s port, rail and road networks experienced a huge influx of soldiers and supplies destined for the Western Front, and the city’s industries were turned over to war production. The war had also had important effects on urban crime and policing. During the war, civil unrest was evident in numerous labour strikes, street violence between soldiers and riots against Germans and Jews in 1914, 1915 and 1917.5 Over 32,440 German, Austrian and Hungarian aliens had been arrested and interned by 1915.6 The war also led to public concerns about the rise of the ‘amateur’ prostitute and sexual behaviour of girls. By 1917, 2,284 Voluntary Women’s Patrols were policing open spaces looking for improper behaviour.7 These patrols, established by the National Council of Women in 1914, were absorbed by the Metropolitan Police in 1918 and by 1923 had full powers of arrest and special duties including advising young girls and investigating sex offences.8 The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) of 1914 was used to expand police powers of search, seizure and arrest, and to regulate daily life in the capital, including imposing price controls, curfews and limiting pub opening hours to six hours a day, restrictions which remained in place until 1988.9 Regulation 40b, passed in 1916, made possession of both cocaine and opium illegal for the first time in Britain. Despite predictions that the capital would suffer at the hands of demobilized soldiers, violent crime was relatively uncommon in London during the 1920s and 1930s.10 Public fears of criminal violence in British media and culture focused not on the frequency, but on the novelty of crime in interwar London: illegal drug subcultures in 1918, racecourse gang wars in 1922 and 1925, and the increasingly mobile criminal underworld in 1932 and 1933.11 Marek Kohn has argued that cocaine and opium use was portrayed in London newspapers as the legacy of Canadian and American soldiers arriving in the city with ‘snow on their boots’.12 The death by overdose of the young actress Billie Carleton on 27 November 1918 exposed the drug underworld in London and the intersections between commercialized entertainments, vulnerable young women and the evil influence of suspected foreign drug-dealers like Limehouse restaurateur Brilliant Chang.13 Concerns with the incursion of foreign criminals into London also surface in Heather Shore’s study of the territorial battles between rival London racecourse gangs, in which gang members

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  29 were constructed as ‘un-manned by war and violence; un-English, and even alien, in the case of Italian and Jewish gang members’.14 The potential criminal use of new technology influenced public fears of ‘motor bandits’ and ‘smash and grab raiders’, targeted by a Private Member’s Banditry Bill sponsored by MP Hall Caine in 1933.15 Yet, according to Alyson Brown’s analysis of Dartmoor Prison records of 1932, relatively few prisoners who had used motor cars in their crimes had been convicted of crimes of violence.16 Neither were these new types of metropolitan violence reflected in the Register of Deaths by Violence from 1933 to 1939, in which no homicides or manslaughters involving illegal drugs (excluding abortifacients) or persons killed by motor bandits (excluding vehicular homicides) appear. While the fatal stabbing at the Wandsworth Greyhound Stadium on 1 September 1936 of Massimino Colombo in an affray brought the race-gang turf wars back into the public eye, the two accused men were given lenient sentences as they had had saved the life of a prison guard when in Brixton on remand.17 The first victims of motor bandits and smash and grab raiders only appear during the Second World War, with the shooting of barmaid Gwendolyn Cox during a robbery in 1940, and the death of Captain Ralph Binney, who was killed trying to stop a getaway car in Lombard Street in 1944.

London in the 1930s While public concerns about crime in the metropolis focused on a perceived increase in modern technology and new types of criminals, the patterns of suspicious deaths in the 1930s follow a Victorian contrast between extreme poverty and a booming consumer culture and glittering nightlife. Between the wars, the population in the Metropolitan Police district increased from 7,488,382 to 8,655,000, and that of Greater London from 8,611,314 to 10,324,002.18 Almost 2 million migrants, a third from inner London, the rest from elsewhere in Great Britain, settled in suburban London in the interwar years, coming back into central London to work and socialize.19 Like other capital cities, London was a political and administrative centre, a global financial centre and the hub of the national rail and road system. It was also a cultural centre, home to book publishers, theatres, operas and other cultural institutions. London in the 1930s had Europe’s largest and richest consumer market, including a huge middle class whose jobs in civil service, professions, commerce and finance were secure even in an economic depression.20 In 1932 London had an unemployment rate among insured workers of half the national

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30  Murder Capital average: 12.5% compared to 26.8% in the North-East and 37.3% in Wales.21 National companies, institutions and societies set up their headquarters and offices in central London, and most of London’s industries and services aimed themselves at the expanding domestic market, including building, laundry, transport, the hotel and catering trades, electrical engineering, food processing, paper and printing, and the production of cars, motorcycles, aircraft, bicycles, artificial silk, furniture, electrical cables, lamps and electric appliances.22 The electric street lights and illuminated signs of the West End signalled an area dedicated to pleasure in shops, restaurants, cinemas, clubs, dance halls, theatres and hotels.23 Yet this modern prosperity was laid over a city that, compared to other European capitals in the 1930s, remained unmodernized, with many buildings still resting on their pre-1666 Great Fire foundations.24 Class lines were embedded in the urban geography; West End directories demonstrate the persistence of elite addresses from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, while old neighbourhoods of dilapidated terraces and sunless alleyways surrounded the street improvements of Regent Street, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue in the early nineteenth century.25 Photographs taken for the Survey of London in the 1920s and 1930s reveal nowvanished shadowy streets of buildings that ranged from dingy to derelict. The contrast between poverty and affluence was especially visible in Westminster, where Millbank by the Thames was notorious for its bad housing, and the monuments of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey coexisted with squalid areas like Grub Street, York Buildings and Scotts Rents, a set of mean eighteenth-century cottages at the south-east corner of Smith Square.26 The localized extreme poverty that had so shocked nineteenthcentury observers like Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth still persisted into the 1930s.27 While official unemployment levels in London were low during the Depression, the capital had the nation’s highest level of overcrowding.28 Jerry White estimated that in Campbell Road in Islington in the 1930s, at least one-third of households were overcrowded.29 Tony Parker, growing up in Shoreditch in the 1930s, recalled how all neighbourhood life was lived in the street, framed by shabby high terraces with boarded-up windows. As there were five or six families living in each house, the front doors were always open, with people moving about in the street all day long, women pushing pram-loads of washing to the baths, out-of-work men loafing, kids fighting and chasing each other: ‘All the time there was something happening, something was going on: there was movement, noise activity, a great pulse, everyone was part of in the bloodstream of the

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  31 street. There were no colours, only various shades of grey, but it had its own real vitality and life.’30 By the end of the 1930s the younger inhabitants of these traditional working-class areas had begun to drift out of the neighbourhoods, lured by high adolescent employment in the West End and the new-built council estates – trends that would be exacerbated by wartime destruction and relocations.31

The visual contrasts of urban poverty London in the 1930s was characterized by fragmented spaces and deep divisions, and by the juxtaposition of glamour and poverty, cheap sordid pleasures and a desperate shabbiness. These contrasts were famously captured in Bill Brandt’s groundbreaking collection of photographs, The English at home (1936), which visually contrasted the stratifications in contemporary English society. In one doublepage spread, a photograph captioned ‘East End playground’ shows ragged children playing in the street, while on the opposite page welldressed children cavort among helium balloons in a well-appointed sitting room at a ‘Kensington children’s party’.32 Brandt’s photographs were part of a larger evolution of British documentary photography. In 1926, Scottish filmmaker John Grierson had coined the term ‘documentary’ to describe a photographic approach which depicts reality while at the same time imbuing facts with feeling for a social purpose, which had a profound influence on 1930s photographic practices.33 Press photographers such as Humphrey Spender at the Daily Mirror popularized the use of an unobtrusive 35mm camera to record scenes of street life and urban poverty. Spender was a founding member of the Mass Observation social survey organization, which used photography as form of documentation and/or surveillance, and both he and Humphrey Spender were contributors to the immensely popular leftist photojournalism magazine Picture Post, which was published from 1938 to 1957.34 Crime scene photography in the 1930s followed Bertillon-esque conventions and was also influenced by the documentary genre, in that it sought to reveal something that was hidden, and to emphasize the visual contrast between the degraded body of the victim and the ordinariness of its setting. Crime scene photographs used framing and contrast to critique the inequalities of London, and in the case of the murder of George Hamblin, the 1834 Poor Law System. The murder of forty-eight-year-old George Hamblin in the Westminster Institution in the Fulham Road revealed persistent Victorian patterns of poverty and vice. The Institution was a workhouse which had

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32  Murder Capital been bought, along with its former infirmary, renamed St Stephen’s Hospital in 1924, by the London County Council in 1931.35 Inmates, of whom there were 1,370 on the night of the murder, wore uniforms and had to apply for passes to leave. On 26 October 1934, Hamblin was murdered by twenty-eight-year-old George Frank Harvey, who struck him on the head with a hammer and robbed him.36 Harvey then left the institution in a panic and used some of the stolen money to rent a room in Victoria. He made no attempt to flee, spending the money on alcohol and prostitutes and hiding the rest with his workhouse shirt in the Marylebone Blue Hall cinema. He spent two nights drinking with and confiding in prostitute Clara Barnes, after which she turned him in to the police.37 He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. One crime scene photograph in the police files shows the institution dining room and its dreary shabbiness, with plates chained to the wall to keep them from being stolen, and the only furniture a long narrow bench (see Figure 1). Hamblin’s body was found in the locked storeroom opening from the dining room, which served as his personal sitting room. The crime scene photographs depict a comfortably furnished space reflecting Hamblin’s privileged position in the institution, ostensibly because he sometimes acted as a batman for officers (see Figure 2). However, the betting slips scattered on the floor and around the body provided a clue to the real source of his comforts: Hamblin had been acting as a bookmaker throughout his fifteen years’ residency in the institution. The contrast between the two crime scene photographs reflected the contradictions that underlay Hamblin’s murder and the Poor Law workhouse system itself. The empty space in the foreground of the first photograph highlighted the poverty and dreariness of the institution, punctuated by the chained plates and their suggestions of animality. In contrast, the photograph of Hamblin’s sitting room was much more tightly framed, showing the textural variations of Hamblin’s personal possession and material comforts: furniture, pictures and crockery, punctuated by the lightcoloured betting slips. The visual contrast between these two spaces as portrayed in the photographs testified to the inequalities and injustices that underlay the workhouse system. The Westminster institution was an anachronistic space, still redolent of a Victorian system of penalizing the poor through separation and hard work. The crime scene photographs use framing and contrast to offer their own critique of the disparities and corruption of the workhouse system.

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Figure 1: Westminster Institution dining room, 1934 (TNA, CRIM 1/748)

Figure 2: Westminster Institution sitting room, 1934 (TNA, CRIM 1/748)

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34  Murder Capital

London policing in the 1930s When Clara Barnes, the prostitute to whom Harvey confessed, wanted to turn him in, she knew where to find the nearest police station, perhaps from her personal experiences of arrests. The 180 London police stations, and the 221 blue police telephone kiosks on the streets of London by 1933 demonstrated the extent to which the prevention, policing and investigation of crime had been woven into the fabric of the city.38 London’s position as the centre of administration and government in the United Kingdom had made it the birthplace of pioneering police investigative teams, including the Metropolitan Police in 1829, the CID in 1878 and the Mobile Patrol Experiment, or Flying Squad, in 1919.39 From its beginnings, the Metropolitan Police sought to impose order on the streets of the capital. Policemen on their beats monitored public spaces on a regular basis, in an attempt to quash crime and misdemeanours such as drunk and disorderly behaviour. Policemen were expected to know by sight and name all the inhabitants of their district, especially known troublemakers.40 The policeman’s local knowledge was essential in solving crimes of all kinds. Despite the popular image of the stranger lurking in the dark alleyway, most suspicious deaths in the 1930s took place between people who knew each other. In many of these cases the perpetrator turned himself or herself in, confessed immediately when questioned or committed suicide, precluding the need for further detective work. From the first decade of the twentieth century, the police sought to use technology to extend their control over the city and create a panoptical overview of crimes and criminals in the city. The telephone, the wireless, mobile patrols in automobiles, fingerprinting and photography were all deployed to trace the movements of a suspect in the city, and to link them to material clues and forensic evidence of the crime.41 In 1933, as part of Lord Trenchard’s reforms, district maps were introduced in the Information Room at New Scotland Yard, showing each division on a large-scale map, with coloured flags used to denote the type of crime and coloured pins to show the time of day.42 Divisional maps were also used in divisional headquarters, visually representing the overlapping geographies of crime and control in London. These innovations allowed Scotland Yard to expand its control over the local divisions, with city-wide maps showing a unified urban geography of crime and a central repository of crime statistics to be forwarded to the Home Office as part of the attempts to use technology to rationalize and control crime.43 In 1933, twenty-nine suspicious deaths discovered in London were recorded in a special ledger by a secretary at the Metropolitan Police

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  35 headquarters. Four were bodies of newborn babies whose parents were never identified. Twelve were murders followed by suicide within the family, and four were murder-suicide attempts in the perpetrator’s home, with nine other murders making up the balance.44 The columns for each entry in the Register noted where and when the body had been discovered (though not by whom), the details of the victim, the details of the perpetrator and date of arrest, the date of the trial and the outcome if known, as well as a brief description of the crime. These descriptions often include a small space for the clerk to inscribe a motive, which in the 1930s often reflected poverty and desperation. On New Year’s Day 1933, Alice Bailey was killed by her unemployed husband and on 28 June, kitchen hand Minnie Barry was killed by her unemployed boyfriend. On 1 February Gladys Bond’s lover killed her and himself, recorded as ‘Motive financial and drink’, and on 22 May two-year-old Ellen O’Hearn was murdered by her father, who then committed suicide: ‘Motive unemployment, bad health and depression’.45 These killings within the family show the extent to which economic depression could lead to personal desperation in the 1930s. Suspicious deaths in the 1930s clustered along the north side of the river. Pathologist Dr Bernard Spilsbury’s post-mortem notes showed a pattern of murder along ‘the rather squalid arc which leaves the river at Fulham and sweeps round by Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush, Notting Dale, Paddington and Islington to merge in the East End’, and the Metropolitan Police files confirm this observation.46 Of the inner-city districts, the highest numbers were in C Division, which included Soho, with thirty-six suspicious deaths, moving northwards to D Division in Marylebone, which had fifty-nine, and northwards to F Division in Kensington and Notting Hill, which had fifty-seven. These areas of London were very mixed, ‘where the shabby genteel merges into the slum’.47 They included the gaudy entertainments of the West End, the leafy park of Holland House, the expensive flats and pleasant squares of South Kensington as well as the poorer areas of Notting Dale and Notting Hill, which were so dangerous that the policemen had to patrol in pairs.48 In the outer districts, eighty-five suspicious deaths took place in the enormous X Division, which swept westward from Paddington to Uxbridge and comprised forty square miles. Sixty-three suspicious deaths occurred in S Division, including Hampstead and points north-west, many of them discovered on Hampstead Heath. N Division, comprising Stoke Newington and North London, had fifty-six suspicious deaths. These neighbourhoods were areas of itinerant populations and families living close to the edge, for whom further financial strain could bring on a violent crisis.

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36  Murder Capital Crimes of desperation feature heavily in suspicious death cases of the 1930s, often following a period of unemployment. On 27 December 1937, thirty-four-year-old Richard Stanley Fordham walked into King’s Cross police station and said, ‘I think I have done my wife in. She is covered in blood.’ Police officers returned with him to his dingy flat on 55 Penton Street, Islington (E Division), and found a woman with terrible head injuries in the bed, the walls spattered in blood, and a hammer nearby. Later Fordham said, ‘I don’t know what made me do it. I just hit her and hit her. For the last few weeks I have been vacant.’ Fordham was a pastry cook who had been unemployed for some time, and the tensions of the family Christmas celebration had contributed to the Boxing Day killing.49 Another familial financial crisis led to the death of Mary Ann Orme, an eighty-three-year-old widow, who died in her North Kensington flat on 17 January 1938 after a suicide pact with her daughter Phyllis Tuffney. The pair had been desperate over the failure of their small display business.50 The daughter lived, and was found guilty of attempted suicide, though not of murder, and sentenced by a compassionate judge to only fourteen days’ imprisonment.

Murder-suicides Women like Miss Orme, who had tried and failed to support themselves and their dependants, featured heavily in familial murdersuicides in the 1930s. These cases reflect the social and economic isolation identified by Victor Bailey as central to the incidence of suicides in Victorian Hull.51 Loneliness, unemployment, social disgrace, illness, bereavement and old age were all isolating factors that could lead to murder-suicides. As psychiatrist Peter Sainsbury noted in his study of suicides in London between 1929 and 1933, the experience of urban living in ‘the impassive indifference of the metropolis and its capacity to engender feelings of insignificance and loneliness among its residents’ had a direct correlation with suicide rates, which were highest in areas that provided opportunities for solitary living.52The case of Mrs Carmen Swann illustrates the social and spatial isolation that underlay many suicides of the 1930s. On 7 February 1936 she rented a room for herself and her eight-yearold daughter in Clarendon Court, Maida Vale, in which she could be ‘very quiet’. The next morning the staff found the girl dead and her mother in a critical condition.53 Mrs. Swann was the thirty-two-yearold widow of a man who went insane and killed himself. She tried to work to support her daughter but found out she was in an advanced

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  37 stage of tuberculosis. When she came out of the sanatorium, she had no money, and decided to kill herself and her daughter, whom she feared would develop insanity or tuberculosis. In her statement to the police she said, ‘I think I was absolutely right in what I did. My conscience is perfectly clear. I am not necessary to anyone. I don’t see how any man-made law can condemn me for what I have done.’ Because she pleaded guilty she was sentenced to death, which was commuted to penal servitude for life.54 Isolated by mental illness, bereavement, disease and poverty, Mrs Swann felt she had no other option for herself or her daughter. While the Metropolitan Police investigated attempted suicides, of which there were 813 recorded in the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s Annual Report for 1933, successful suicides were the province of coroners, and the reported inquest testimony of the Paddington Coroner’s Court depicts the area’s economic desperation.55 Paddington was the first stop for many new migrants, such as poet Laurie Lee, who walked 100 miles from Stroud in Gloucestershire to Paddington in 1933: ‘There was a smell of rank oil, rotting fish and vegetables, hot pavements and trodden tar; and the sense of surging pressure, the heavy used-up air of the cheek-by-jowl life around me.’56 The close proximity of life meant that few crimes could take place unobserved. The Paddington coroner presided over four inquests of suicides who gassed themselves in lodging houses during the week of 1 February 1936. A young woman factory worker on Portobello Road killed herself because her lover had left her. A young clerk in Lancaster Gate Terrace committed suicide because, as his brother testified, his salary was only twenty-five shillings a week and his rent was seventeen shillings. A thirty-four-year-old head porter in Maida Vale gassed himself after his girlfriend left him, and a sixty-four-year-old widow who was too ill to work any more killed herself in Paddington.57 The high percentage of carbon monoxide in domestic gas in the 1930s also made suicide by gas relatively easy, as demonstrated by the overall decrease in suicide rates after the introduction of natural gas in England and Wales in the 1960s.58

Suspicious deaths in Soho Police divisions in the West End’s commercial areas faced the greatest policing challenges in interwar London. C Division, for example, covered most of the West End of London, and in 1926 included 620 licensed premises such as theatres, cinemas and cafés, pubs and clubs. While the division had an authorized strength of 442 men, at any

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38  Murder Capital one time 127 were engaged with traffic duty, 20 were tied up in court and 52 were on weekly leave.59 Commercialized entertainment and retail shopping brought pleasure seekers as well as shop assistants, restaurant and theatre workers, tailors and dressmakers and prostitutes into the area, as Soho in particular ‘became the dark industrial back region that serviced the front stage of the West End pleasure zone’.60 Suspicious deaths and homicides in Soho were much more likely to be reported in local and national newspapers as suggestive of its exotic neighbourhood character. As Martin Wiener has argued, since the nineteenth century certain types of violent crimes such as knifeslashing had been associated with Italians and other foreigners in Soho, and these associations often played out in crime investigations.61 Soho’s reputation as a centre for expatriate cultures and retributive violence is apparent in the investigation into the shooting of Dr Angelo Zemenides, a respected Cypriot community leader, in the doorway of his Hampstead home on 2 January 1933.62 Though the crime took place in S Division, the police investigation focused on Soho as the centre for the Cypriot community. Here the police were hampered in tracing his friends and acquaintances, since the victim had been their only translator. As The Times wrote, ‘One difficulty with which the police are having to contend is that Dr. Zemenides had so many friends and frequented so many cafes and similar places, especially in the Soho district, that the task of searching for his murderer is taking up a good deal of time.’63 It took plain-clothes detectives days in Soho cafés before Zemenides’ alleged secret was discovered: he had worked as a marriage broker providing foreign prostitutes with British nationality by marrying them to Cypriot-British men. The alleged killer, Theodosios Petrou, a pastry cook, had paid £13 to find a wife he could send out to work to support his family in Cyprus, but the girl declined and Zemenides refused to refund his money. The police believed that Petrou had shot Zemenides in revenge, though he was acquitted at trial on 17 March 1933. The Zemenides case highlights the double difficulties of police investigators in Soho: impenetrable social networks and expatriate communities speaking foreign languages. In police files concerning foreign suspects, the detectives frequently expressed their frustration at the communication barrier and voiced the suspicion that suspects could understand and speak better English than they professed to do. For example, police were sceptical of the request made by Anastasia Andreou, suspected of causing her daughter’s death by abortion in 1952, when she asked: ‘Oh Blimey, I would like an interpreter.’64 The Zemenides case was one of many 1930s murders which had associations with Soho. Soho has been considered from the mid-

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  39 nineteenth century to be an area apart from the rest of the West End, where successive waves of immigrants – French, Italian, Indian, Middle European and Chinese – settled. Bound by Oxford Street to the north, Shaftesbury Avenue to the south, Regent Street to the west and Charing Cross Road to the east, the streets still retain their seventeenth-century pattern.65 As Judith Walkowitz has shown, Soho’s ethnic diversity, modern cultural and commercial economies created a unique milieu that encompassed both working-class migrants and avant-garde artists and writers. While Soho’s cosmopolitanism created a zone of tolerance and freedom, it also created a ‘social scene marked by segregations, tensions and inequalities’.66 One outcome of this dichotomy was the violence that resulted from Soho’s particular combination of haphazard and professional crime, centring in the night-clubs and restaurants popularly known to be centres for vice.67 Described by Matt Houlbrook as ‘an enduring locus of immigrant, underworld and working-class sociability, represent[ing] a cosmopolitan nocturnal space in which the conventions of respectable urbanity could be discarded’, by the 1930s Soho had replaced the East End as the neighbourhood most associated with crime.68 Through the sensationalized accounts in the press and a proliferation of police biographies, Soho became synonymous with an ‘underworld’ of foreigners, criminal gangs, organized prostitution, and after the Second World War, male homosexuality.69 Ironically, the professionalization of crime in Soho simplified street-level policing. Policeman Harry Daley, stationed at Vine Street in C Division from 1935 to 1940, recalled that there were fewer actual inhabitants to monitor in the district: the drunks and layabouts were strangers and could be sent away, and the professional criminals treated the police with respect, for ‘it was essential to their rich living to be able to frequent certain streets without a hostile police on their trail.’70 The suspicious deaths associated with Soho during the 1930s included the murders of several prostitutes and of marriage broker and pimp Max Kassel on 23 January 1936. The sensationalism of the Kassel case, with the suspects being caught and tried in Paris, led to the home secretary being asked in the House of Commons whether he would ‘instruct the Metropolitan police to pay more attention to eradicating the criminal activities which are now prevalent in the district of Soho’.71 More respectable visitors were drawn to Soho by its diverse and exotic restaurants, which straddled ‘the decorous front stages of Soho’s food industry and its gritty back regions’.72 Soho restaurants, such as Boulestin’s (opening in 1927) in Covent Garden and the Ivy (opening in 1917) near Leicester Square, sought to exploit

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Figure 3: Back stairway at Bellometti restaurant, 1933 (TNA, CN 27/10)

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  41 the area’s architectural charm, combined with economical menus and exotic European cuisine to draw in a prosperous middle-class clientele. Bellometti’s restaurant was a well-known landmark in Soho Square, famous, as one former patron wrote, for the superb food and outstanding service.73 The front of the restaurant, whose colourful sign appears prominently in the 1931 Pathé film reel ‘The King’s English’, hid a seamier background, as seen in the murder of thirty-sixyear-old Polish chef Boleslav Pankowski in 1933.74 Cypriot Varnavas Loizi Antorka shot Pankowski on the back staircase of Bellometti restaurant where they both worked. Police Constable Middleton was on duty in Soho Square; hearing the shots, he ran to the address, arranged for the injured Pankowski to be taken to the Middlesex Hospital, seized the revolver, recorded Antorka’s confession in his notebook and kept all witnesses on the premises, an amazing feat for a single person.75 The crime scene photograph depicts the dingy back staircase where the shooting occurred, lit by a single dangling bulb, and furnished with a trestle table, rubbish bins and a box of empty bottles in the hallway (see Figure 3). The photograph is very tightly framed; the narrowness of the hallway is emphasized by the vertical lines of the staircase. The photograph exposes the claustrophobic closeness of the atmosphere, the grim textural detail of the kitchen debris and its sharp contrast to the opulence of the restaurant’s front. The shabbiness of the back staircase and Antorka’s desperation were secrets hidden behind the West End’s glittering lights and cheerful façade of consumer culture.

London neighbourhoods Crime scene photographs situated suspicious deaths in their immediate urban context: the room or street in which they took place. The manner in which crime was reported in the press also suggests that their geographical location in the city imparted each case with a distinctive flavour. Thus the murder of the outwardly respectable Antoniou Zemenides was referred to in The Times as the ‘Hampstead murder’, while the killing of Pankowski was labelled ‘Murder in Soho restaurant’.76 Certain types of crimes were expected to occur in particular districts of the city, and their geographical location in turn helped to shape popular understandings of London neighbourhoods, a process that had continued since the earliest broadsides. Neighbourhoods in crime reportage became a shorthand for depicting class, nationality and respectability. The names of the actual participants in these crimes were less important and rarely

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42  Murder Capital made the headlines. The ‘Pimlico murder’ of 1933 also had its roots in Soho. Nessar Hussain had been a chef, but had recently lost his position and was working for food in a restaurant in Gerrard Street in Chinatown. Hussain had married sixteen-year-old Mona Lavinia in 1929. Both had come to London from elsewhere – Hussain from India some years previously and Mona Lavinia in her teens from a Cumberland miner’s family.77 It was an unhappy marriage, as their neighbours testified, since Mona was living ‘a gay life’ working as a prostitute. A letter in her bag from another man precipitated a violent quarrel in their flat at 5 Churton Street in Pimlico on 17 May 1933 (B Division).78 Through the window, neighbours saw them struggling, and saw him slashing at her on the floor, hearing Mrs Hussain call, ‘Police, murder’, and one neighbour went to Rochester Row police station to fetch two policemen. Hussain would not open the door, but appeared on the bedroom balcony to explain that the couple were having a row as his wife had been drinking, and the police left, satisfied. Crime scene photographs of the house depict the balcony and large windows of the flat. When neighbours returned to the window they made out a bloody body on the floor and summoned the police again. Hussain had by this time departed, and Mona Hussain’s body was discovered with thirty-six stab wounds and a tuft of hair in her hand.79 The attempts of the neighbours to prevent the killing, and the capture of Hussein in Liverpool, brought the case much publicity, especially among other Indians in London who pressed into the spectator gallery first at the Westminster Police Court then at the Central Criminal Court to hear the case against Hussain on 29 June 1933.80 Hussain’s strange behaviour attracted the attention of journalists, who described his haggard appearance at the Central Criminal Court before Mr Justice Humphries: ‘Hussain presented a wild appearance in the dock with his shock of black hair and his coat torn. His shoes had been removed, and he was helped firmly by two warders. He seemed to take no interest in the proceedings.’81 He was found insane and unfit to plead and was ‘detained at His Majesty’s pleasure’ or given a sentence of indeterminate length. The Hussain case was unusual in that the neighbours became so involved in the quarrel: knocking on the door, calling the police, peering through the windows and gathering in a crowd outside. Their criticism of the lack of police action was echoed in the press, a charge which the superintendent of B Division considered in the police notes. In their defence, he wrote, the only illumination the officers had when interviewing Hussain was the light of a candle, as none of them was carrying a lamp. Hussain had been warned by neighbours knocking and had hidden his knife and wiped his hands, ‘in any case

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  43 his skin being dark bloodstains would not be very noticeable’.82 As in the press reportage of the racetrack gang wars of the 1920s, the police emphasized the foreign character of the suspect in order to mark his violence as particularly un-English. Yet his alien status did not absolve him of criminal responsibility. As in their belief that foreigners sometimes concealed their ability to speak English, the police were suspicious of Hussain’s appearance of insanity, and kept a detailed record of his calculated actions in trying to evade detection.83 At the same time, the superintendant tried to absolve the police for their inaction when called to the house, noting that they were instructed not to interfere between husband and wife: ‘Domestic squabbles in this neighbourhood are a daily occurrence and the Officers followed the usual routine method of dealing with these cases.’84 The superintendant’s remark highlights the importance of context to policing violence in the city. Although the constables had general instructions, how they actually behaved at scenes of crime helped to determine the resolution of the case. If their instructions were not to interfere, then they could not be blamed for doing nothing to prevent Mona Hussain’s murder. But in the public mind the situation had demanded more intervention, perhaps because the large windows gave the attack a public visibility missing from other cases of domestic violence.

Prostitution and public space The public reaction in this case demonstrates how police action in London needed to be, in Dick Hobbs’s phrase, ‘situationally justified’.85 While administrative, bureaucratic and legal procedures established a framework for policing, in practice action was based upon ‘an occupational culture predicated on the importance of knowledge gained on the beat’.86 Thus similar behaviour in different neighbourhoods would be treated differently by police, as Matt Houlbrook, Louise Jackson and Frank Mort’s studies of deviancy and London policing have shown.87 The geographical nature of policing was especially true in the case of crimes whose definitions were imprecise, like prostitution. Stefan Slater and Julia Laite have demonstrated how the perceptions and policing of prostitution in London were grounded in an urban cultural construction of ‘place’.88 Public opinion was another constraint, as officers had to uphold both personal liberty and public order on the streets. In the case of prostitution, police sought containment in West End areas, arresting a certain quota of prostitutes each year to show that the problem was

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44  Murder Capital being addressed, and leaving all but the most flagrant prostitutes alone in the East End. In an attempt to stop women moving to different districts to escape criminal records, prostitutes were added to the Metropolitan Police’s fingerprint schedule in 1917, as part of defining the permanent legal identity ‘common prostitute’.89 Women could be convicted of solicitation on the unsupported testimony of a policeman and would then become liable to be arrested whenever they appeared in public. Publicans and café owners could also be fined if prostitutes frequented their premises, even if they were not soliciting. As policeman Harry Daley opined, ‘Almost all the arrests [for prostitution] were illegal ... If the law required the men to give evidence ... the arrests would have stopped immediately.’ But the alternative, of ‘hundreds of prostitutes soliciting openly in the streets, both a tourist attraction and a national disgrace’, was a greater concern to the inspectors of Vine Street station.90 Although prostitution, or more specifically the crime of causing annoyance while soliciting in public under the Section 54(11) of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839, took place in every London district, it was more closely linked in police records and the public perception with the West End. According to Stefan Slater, 60% of arrests for prostitution were in Mayfair and Piccadilly, though this most likely reflected the complaints of the inhabitants of these wealthier areas rather than the actual incidence of prostitution. According to Roland Mathews, author of a fictitious memoir from the point of view of a prostitute, To beg I am ashamed, prostitutes in Piccadilly were the aristocracy of London.91 Away from the centre, standards fell for prostitutes and their clients, as older prostitutes moved east of Piccadilly Circus and north, with those past their prime hiding ‘in Wardour Street’s darkened doorways’, in the Euston Road and south at Elephant and Castle.92 Prostitution in the East End tended to be less commercialized and more integrated into the workingclass community – one reason for lower arrest rates.93 Soho was the most notorious haunt of low-class prostitutes, in part reflecting what police and the public saw as a dangerous ‘foreign element’ among the women and their supposed clients. In response to the ‘crisis atmosphere’, on 23 April 1936 the Metropolitan Police were granted permission to compile a photographic dossier of foreign prostitutes and their known associates, the first one of which listed 102 women.94 During the 1930s, the infamous Maltese-Sicilian Messina brothers began to build their vice and gambling empire in Soho, importing Belgian, French, Spanish and Italian women into London, setting them up in West End flats and taking a large cut (up to 80%) of their earnings, in the first British example of American-style syndicated

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  45 Table 2: Alleged prostitute victims in Metropolitan London, 1933–53 Alleged prostitute victim Louisa Harris

Year

Age Place

Division

1934

47

Barnes

V

Josephine Martin Eva Porter Constance Hind Beatrice Sutton Rose Field Elsie Torchon Rose Atkins Georgina Hoffman Catherine Laye Margaret Lowe Margaret McArthur Evelyn Oatley Jean Stafford Doris Robson Evelyn Hatton Eileen Cook Gertrude Rose Audrey Stewart Kathleen Lindsay Frances Mizzi Margaret Burke Violet Green Vera Crawford Rachel Fennier Hilda Freedman Winnifred Mulholland Margaret Reid Kathleen Rosam Agnes Walsh Eleanor McCombs

1935 1935 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1939

41 35 24 48 49 45 27 26

Soho Clapham Soho Clapham Islington Euston Rd Wimbledon Mayfair

C L C L G D V C

1940 1942 1942

35 43 35

Pimlico Euston River Thames

C C TA

1942 1942 1942 1944 1945 1945 1945 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1948 1948 1948

25 33 32 44 44 46 28 18 -25 30 34 41 59 25

Soho Bloomsbury Paddington Soho Bethnal Green Brixton Pimlico Victoria Soho Kentish Town Soho Bloomsbury Soho Covent Garden Brompton

C E D C G L B B C N C E C E B

Self-abortion Solved Suspect not guilty Solved Unsolved Solved Unsolved Unsolved Unsolved Unsolved Solved Unsolved Solved Unsolved Solved Unsolved Unsolved Solved

1949 1949 1950 1952

53 19 22 23

Paddington Maida Vale Paddington Charlotte St

D X D C

Solved Solved Unsolved Solved

Suspect not guilty Unsolved Solved Unsolved Solved Solved Solved Solved Solved

Source: Based on TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

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46  Murder Capital crime.95 Yet the suspicious deaths figures also challenge assumptions about prostitutes, for while they were well-represented in suspicious death statistics, housewives were more than four times more likely to be murdered, making up 124 of 953 suspicious deaths in this era (see Table 2).

Prostitutes and suspicious deaths The clandestine nature of interwar prostitution often led to the women’s isolation and vulnerability as they suffered violence at the hands of their protectors, harassment through the criminal justice system and routine client violence.96 Out of 953 suspicious deaths between the years 1933 and 1953, thirty-one victims were listed by the police as prostitutes, nine of whom were killed in or near Soho in C Division, and the rest elsewhere in the West End, in North London and in Clapham. In the six years between 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939, six women who had worked as prostitutes were murdered in London: in Barnes, Clapham, Islington, Wimbledon and the West End. Not all were ‘professional prostitutes’, earning their living solely through prostitution; some were married or cohabiting and had other jobs. Unlike most familial homicides, the suspicious deaths of prostitutes were widely reported in the press, in particular those that the police did not immediately solve. During the years 1935–36, a series of strangulations of prostitutes in London worried the police and the public, raising fears of another ‘Jack the Ripper’ haunting London’s underworld, although this time the fearful and exotic geography was not Whitechapel but the West End. The first death was that of forty-one-year-old Josephine Martin, originally from France, who went by the name of ‘French Fifi’. She was discovered by her maid on 4 November 1935 in bed in her flat in seedy Archer Street, Soho, strangled with a silk stocking. At the inquest, the police alleged that her death was a suicide due to money worries,97 but Bernard Spilsbury protested that he knew of no other case of a woman strangling herself to death, and that bruises to her abdomen suggested she had been held down. Also, no money was found in the flat, suggesting she had been robbed. The inquest jury brought in a verdict of murder by persons unknown, and no leads were found.98 One month later James Metcalfe was arrested and charged with assault and robbery against a prostitute in an attack of a similar pattern, but in spite of an exhaustive interrogation he would not admit any knowledge of Martin’s death. The superintendant of C Division then passed the case notes to the detectives working on the 1936 murder cases of Jeanette Cotton and

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  47 Constance May Smith. Jeanette Cotton or Cousins was not a prostitute, but had been found strangled by a silk neckerchief at 47 Leighton Street W1 (C Division) on 16 April 1936. The police file suggests that the perpetrator was a former tenant who had soiled his mattress with excrement and Vaseline and from whom Mrs Cousins was seeking compensation.99 Three weeks later on 9 May 1936, twenty-four-yearold Constance May Hind or Leah Hines was strangled with a piece of electric flex in her flat at 66 Old Compton Street (C Division).100 The Daily Mirror suggested that she had helped the police with inquiries into other murders and had expressed fears that she would have to pay a price for ‘talking to the cops’, an opinion also put forward in police files.101 In an attempt to find clues, Scotland Yard sent out six female detectives to question the ‘underworld women of Soho’.102 The Daily Mirror article concluded with the observation that ‘Threats of violence to women of men of Soho have increased during the last six months.’103 ‘Men of Soho’ here suggests foreign pimps and racketeers, though the meaning of the phrase would change to connote new types of vice after the war. The murder of Elsie McMahon, aka Elsie Charlotte Torchon, aka ‘French Marie’, a forty-five-year-old prostitute found strangled in her flat on the Euston Road on 16 August 1937, seemed at first destined to be another unsolved case.104 Newspaper articles and police notes suggested that she had been murdered for giving information to the police about the murder of Jeannette Cotton and others, but there were several key differences. McMahon did not earn her living solely by prostitution, but had another job. She was seen with a man she had picked up in a public house and the murder occurred after an afternoon of heavy drinking. The police notes also comment that, unlike the women killed in Soho, ‘In the Euston Road case the victim was a fat ugly oldish woman,’ the implication being that McMahon was killed because of the circumstances in which she found herself, not because she was targeted as a professional prostitute.105 Two years later, twenty-six-year-old Robert Dixon, also known as Norman Stephenson, committed a similar crime in Newcastle, and the Metropolitan Police travelled north to interview and fingerprint him. He was then brought to London and identified by others who had been in the pub on the afternoon of 16 August 1937, and his fingerprints matched those found on a freshly opened tin of salmon at 306 Euston Road at the time of the murder. In this case the positive witness identification was considered as important as the fingerprint evidence. Witnesses connected the two strangers, which was rare in cases involving commercial sex transactions, and Dixon was tried, found guilty and sentenced to sixteen years’ penal servitude.106

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48  Murder Capital Witnesses were also vital in tracing the murderer of twentynine-year-old Rose Atkins, found lying dead in Somerset Road, Wimbledon (V Division) on 13 July 1938 with her throat cut and tyre marks on her legs. After her picture was shown in the local newspaper, bystanders came forward to say she had been seen getting into George Brain’s company van, in which were found bloody rags and her handbag. Brain had been embezzling from his firm, and had also taken £12 from his pregnant fiancée. Once discovered, Brain fled, but was found by a young boy eight days later hiding on a cliff in Sheerness. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death.107 Rose Atkins’ family were greatly distressed by her description at Wimbledon Police Court as a prostitute, and her brother shouted ‘I want fair play!’ and was ejected.108 Detective Inspector Phillpott of V Division when questioned said she was a prostitute and had frequented the Inner Park Road for about three years. Atkins’ identification as a prostitute, seemingly without criminal convictions, showed how important local knowledge was to interwar policing, and how police testimony determined the legal definition of prostitutes as a fixed and permanent category.

The growth of forensics Metropolitan Police detectives investigating suspicious deaths in the 1930s used their local knowledge to look first at known suspects when a crime was committed, rather than examining clues at the scene of the crime.109 Even in cases where forensic evidence was present, such as the fingerprints on the tin of salmon in Elsie McMahon’s flat, police relied on the testimony of witnesses. But at the higher levels, the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office were investing in the increasingly specialized techniques of forensic science, establishing a police laboratory at Hendon Police College in 1934. In 1936 and 1937, the Hendon lab provided evidence in eleven abortion cases and twenty-five murders. In 1938, 149 cases were submitted for examination, including 720 samples for the Metropolitan Police and 830 samples for the provincial forces.110 Until the reorganization of 1948–49, however, the Hendon laboratory was treated with suspicion by detectives, and forensic specimen collection techniques had to be painstakingly taught.111 Most scientific examination in cases of suspicious deaths in London in the 1930s was done by forensic pathologists rather than forensic scientists, in a field dominated by Home Office consultant Sir Bernard Spilsbury.112 Spilsbury had made his name in the 1910

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  49 trial of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, when he famously identified the mass of flesh found buried in Crippen’s basement as Mrs Cora Crippen.113 As Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton have argued, Spilsbury’s reputation as a ‘celebrity pathologist’ made the encounter between the body and the pathologist a high-profile and personalized practice for the first time, and Spilsbury built his subsequent career in the mortuary and the witness box on sensational cases involving ‘exhumed, decomposed, and mutilated cadavers’.114 One typical case was presented to Spilsbury on 25 February 1935, when a porter found a parcel under the seat of an electric train between Hounslow and Waterloo, which contained the legs of a male person wrapped in newspaper tied up with string.115 Spilsbury believed that the toes may have been crushed in life by too-tight shoes, but there were no other identifying features. A month later, on 19 March 1935, three boys playing in the Grand Union Canal found a package containing a male torso in a brown woollen vest wrapped in an old flour sack, and Spilsbury identified it as from the same body. The police attempted to trace the body through the newspapers and the makers of the vest, to no avail. Spilsbury concluded that the body ‘very probably belonged to the homeless and friendless class’, and without the head and hands, it was never traced. Yet such a person would be more likely to have been left under a bridge and not dismembered with precision and disposed of in such a complex and risky way.116 The ‘legs on the train’ case was an archetypal modern urban crime, involving dismemberment and possible perversion (some versions of the case suggest that the legs were shaven and powdered and the toes pinched due to wearing of women’s shoes) and the use of the infrastructure of the city to dispose of the body and to successfully evade detection. Neither discovery is mentioned in the Register of Deaths by Violence. Whether that is because the body was not complete, because it fell between division boundaries or because it was a crime unlikely to be solved remains unclear.

Counting suspicious deaths Other 1930s suspicious deaths left out of the Register of Deaths by Violence are indicative of the ways in which such deaths were counted. Notes of these cases are found in other police files, most notably the registers of ‘interesting crimes in the Metropolitan Police district’ – the most recently opened file ends in 1941.117 These files demonstrate that, faced with financial and manpower constraints, individual superintendants still had the latitude to make decisions

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50  Murder Capital about resource allocation. The omission of these cases from the Home Office statistics suggests that the police chose to use their manpower on cases more likely to be solved. Even the format of the Register of Deaths by Violence shows the police’s investigative emphasis on pursuing a suspect: each entry begins with the discovery of the body, with descriptions of the suspicious circumstances and the obvious suspects, allocating subsequent spaces for the dates of the perpetrator’s arrest, trial details and verdict. Some entries were begun, then crossed out, perhaps because the deaths were reclassified as accidental or the charges were dismissed by a magistrate’s court. But it could also be argued that such omissions and false starts acknowledge that suspicious deaths were defined by social circumstances, and that when the context for the discovered body was unclear, no crime could exist. Likewise if the jury acquitted a suspect, either the real perpetrator had not been found, or no crime had taken place. In the interests of keeping down the numbers of unsolved crimes, the Metropolitan Police evidently often chose the latter interpretation. Police files from 1935 show two cases in London divisions which did not appear in the Register: a woman’s death from abortion in X Division and an infanticide in D Division. In 1936, four cases were left out: an assault resulting in manslaughter in Ealing (T Division), a wine porter in Perivale, Middlesex (X Division), who strangled his wife and was convicted of manslaughter, a watchman at the Kew Fair Ground at Kew Green (V Division) shot by a sixteen-year-old boy, and a man who attempted to carry out an abortion on his wife, causing her death in F Division. In 1937, four cases were again left out. A woman killed her drunken and abusive common-law husband with a piece of glass in H Division, which the coroner’s jury ruled to be justifiable homicide. The police of T Division in Hounslow exhumed the body of fifteen-year-old Daisy Skeels after receiving an anonymous letter, and the inquest jury found a verdict of manslaughter against her twenty-six-year-old boyfriend. The decomposed body of a newborn female child was found in a paper bag outside the White Horse public house in Church Road, Willesden (X Division), and two brothers were abandoned by their parents in a flat in T Division and left to starve to death. In 1938 a woman’s death from abortion in D Division was also not included in the Register of Deaths by Violence. These cases offer some clues about what kinds of crimes were left out of official statistics: usually cases in which a coroner and/or his jury had returned a verdict of murder, but for which there had been little police investigation. They were also crimes in which the judicial results, if any, were for manslaughter, suggesting the importance of context for classifying crimes and the tendency for police to record

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  51 the story backwards according to the ending. Omitting cases unlikely to result in a judicial verdict of murder from reports to the Home Office would also be a way to keep crime statistics down and the solve rate high.

Conclusion Suspicious deaths in London between 1933 and 1939 reveal a city on the cusp of profound changes. Most violence took place within the family, motivated by poverty, unemployment and ill health and set in dingy flats, workhouse rooms and lodging houses. The suspicious deaths which attracted the most public attention centred on Soho, and involved people classified as ‘foreign’ or as victims of ‘foreign gangs’. Soho cases also uncover the forgotten underside to the commercial entertainments of the West End and testify to the layers of economic and physical exploitation hidden behind restaurants, shopping arcades, theatres and other public amusements. Suspicious deaths investigations in the 1930s reveal a London divided and fragmented between Police divisions, between social classes and between lawabiding citizens and those in the criminal underworld. The effects that the Second World War would bring to the personal and family lives of Londoners would have far-reaching and long-lasting effects, as the succeeding chapters will show.

Notes 1 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 8. 2 Susan R. Grayzel, ‘“A Promise of Terror to Come”: Air Power and the Destruction of Cities in British Imagination and Experience, 1908–39,’ in Stefan Goebel and Derek Keene (eds.), Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 47–62. 3 Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 699. 4 Inwood, A History of London, p. 702; Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (London: Granta, 1992), p. 27. 5 Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby: A History of Policing from the 18th Century to the Present (London: Quercus, 2009), p. 191. 6 Matthew Stibbe, ‘The Internment of Civilians by Belligerent States during the First World War and the Response of the International

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52  Murder Capital Committee of the Red Cross,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 41:1 (January 2006), 5–19, 7. See also Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War. Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011); and TNA, CAB 24/23/59, Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest, 1917. 7 Alyson Brown and David Barrett, Knowledge of Evil: Child Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century England (Cullompton: Willan, 2002), p. 69. 8 Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 9 Alexander Pulling (ed.), Defence of the Realm Manual: 4th Enlarged Edition, Revised to May 31st, 1917 (London, HMSO, 1917). 10 See Clive Emsley, ‘Violent Crime in England in 1919: Post-war Anxieties and Press Narratives’, Continuity and Change, 23 (2008), 173–95. 11 See Kohn, Dope Girls; John Carter Wood, ‘Criminal Violence in Modern Britain’, History Compass, 4:1 (January 2006), 77–90; Heather Shore, ‘Criminality and Englishness in the Aftermath: The Racecourse Wars of the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History 22:4 (2011), 474–97; Alyson Brown, ‘Crime, Criminal Mobility and Serial Offenders in Early Twentieth-century Britain’, Twentieth Century History, 25:4 (2011), 551–68. 12 Kohn, Dope Girls, p. 73. 13 Kohn, Dope Girls, pp. 7, 67–104. 14 Shore, ‘Criminality and Englishness’, 475–6. 15 Keith Laybourn and David Taylor, ‘Cars, Crime and Coppers: Combating the Smash and Grab Raider’, in Policing in England and Wales, 1918–1939: The Fed, Flying Squads and Forensics (London: Palgrave Connect, 2011), pp. 186–207, 186. 16 Brown, ‘Crime, Criminal Mobility and Serial Offenders’. 17 ‘Dog Track Affray’, The Times (18 November 1936), p. 9. See also TNA, MEPO 20/3, 2/4979 and 3/912; TNA, CRIM 1/882. 18 Inwood, A History of London, p. 708. Interwar migrants included the Irish, Indians, Cypriots, European Jews and Britons from elsewhere. See Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Andy Bielenberg (ed.) The Irish Diaspora (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000); Anne J. Kershen, Strangers, Aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields, 1660–2000 (London: Routledge, 2005). 19 See Stephen Halliday, Underground to Everywhere: London’s Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital (London: The History Press, 2001); P.J. Waller (ed.), The English Urban Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins,

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  53 A History of London Transport: The Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2006). 20 Inwood, A History of London, p. 725. 21 T. Hatton, ‘Unemployment and the Labour Market in Interwar Britain’, in R. Floud and and D. McCloskey (eds.), The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1994), p. 360; and Inwood, A History of London, p. 724. 22 Inwood, A History of London, p. 724. 23 See Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Bronwen Edwards, ‘Making the West End Modern: Space, Architecture and Shopping in 1930s London’ (PhD thesis, University of the Arts London, 2004). 24 The attempt, from the 1890s, to record the lists of buildings of historical and architectural interest in London became the Survey of London. See Hermione Hobhouse, London Survey’d (Swindon: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1994). 25 See P.J. Atkins, ‘The Spatial Configuration of Class Solidarity in London’s West End 1792–1939’, Urban HistoryYearbook, 17 (1990), 36–65; Lynda Nead, ‘Animating the Everyday: London on Camera circa 1900’, Journal of British Studies, 43 (2004), 65–90; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); and Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 26 Philip Davies, Lost London 1870–1945 (London: Transatlantic Press, 2009), pp. 188–90. See also his Panoramas of Lost London: Work,Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870–1945 (London Transatlantic Press, 2011). 27 Inwood, A History of London, p. 748. See also C.A. Linsley and C.L. Linsley, ‘Booth, Rowntree and Llewellyn Smith: A Reassessment of Interwar Poverty’, Economic History Review, 46 (1993), pp. 88–104. 28 For more on Britain during the Depression, see John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump: Britain in the Great Depression (London: Routledge, 3rd edn, 2010); Keith Laybourn, Britain on the Breadline (London: Sutton, 1990); and Martin Pugh, We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (London: Vintage, 2008), ch. 5, pp. 76–101. 29 Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 1986). 30 Tony Parker, The Courage of his Convictions (London: Hutchinson, 1960), p. 25. 31 Inwood, A History of London, p. 771. 32 Bill Brandt, The English at Home (London: B.T. Batsford, 1936), pp. 57–8. 33 ‘Flaherty’s Poetic Moana’, New York Sun, 8 February 1926,

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54  Murder Capital reprinted in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition (New York: Norton, 2nd edn, 1979), pp. 25–6. 34 See the exhibit ‘Mass Observation: This is Your Photo’ at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2 August–29 September 2013 and Humphrey Spender’s photographs for the Daily Mirror in ‘Lensman’ Photographs 1932–52 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987). 35 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), H59/SS/A/03/001, Plan of Westminster Institution and Saint Stephen’s Hospital, Fulham Road, ground floor layout. 36 See Robert Jackson, Coroner: The Biography of Sir Bentley Purchase (London: Harrap, 1963), p. 305; and ‘Alleged Murder in Workhouse: Sir B. Spilsbury’s Evidence’, The Times (17 November 1934), p. 4. 37 TNA, MEPO 3/1696, CRIM 1/748; and ‘Murder in London Institution: Inmate’s Body Found in Locked Room’, The Times (27 October 1934), p. 9. 38 Sir Basil Thomson, The Story of Scotland Yard (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1935), p. 329; and Robert W. Stewart, ‘The Police Signal Box: A 100 Year History’, Telephone File website, www. britishtelephones.com/police/boxes.pdf, p. 8. 39 See Paul Begg and Keith Skinner, The Scotland Yard Files: 150 Years of the C.I.D (London: The National Archives, 1990); Douglas C. Browne, The Rise of ScotlandYard: a History of the Metropolitan Police (London, George Harrap, 1956) and Bernard Scarlett and Lucas Norman, The Flying Squad (London: Arthur Baker, 1968). 40 See Jerry White, ‘Police and People in London in the 1930s’, Oral History, 11:2 (1983), 34–41, Robert D. Storch, ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850–1880’, Journal of Social History, 9:4 (1976), 481–509; Miles Ogborn, ‘Ordering the City: Surveillance, Public Space, and the Reform of Urban Policing in England 1835– 6’, Political Geography, 12:6 (1993), 505–21. 41 See Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 42 The maps were periodically photographed for a permanent record. Reginald Morrish, The Police and Crime Detection Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 20–1. 43 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. See Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (Harlow: Longman, 2006); and David Barrie, Police in the Age of Improvement: Police Development and the Civic Tradition in Scotland, 1775–1865 (Cullompton: Willan, 2008). 44 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 45 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 46 Douglas G. Browne and E.V. Tullet, Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Cases (London: George G. Harrap, 1952), p. 282. 47 Browne and Tullet, Bernard Spilsbury, p. 350.

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  55 48 Holland House was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940, and the remains sold to the London County Council in 1952. The grounds and surrounding area are known today as Holland Park. 49 Mr Justice Goddard described it as a ‘motiveless murder and an insane act’, and sentenced Fordham to be detained at His Majesty’s pleasure. Islington and Holloway Press (22 January 1938), p. 7. 50 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 51 Victor Bailey, This Rash Act: Suicide across the Life Cycle of the Victorian City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 52 Peter Sainsbury, Suicide in London: An Ecological Study (London: Institute of Psychiatry, 1955), p. 76. 53 ‘Maida Vale Flat Mystery’, Bayswater, Paddington, Kensington, and West and North-West London Chronicle (15 February 1936), p. 3. 54 TNA, MEPO 3/872. 55 TNA MEPO 4/181. See John Weaver and David Wright (eds.), Histories of Suicide: International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 56 Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (London: Andre Deutsch, 1971), p. 25. 57 ‘Young Man’s Suicide at Lancaster Gate’, ‘Girl’s Suicide for Love’, ‘Maida Vale Gas Tragedy’ ‘Paddington Woman’s Suicide’, Bayswater, Paddington, Kensington, and West and North-West London Chronicle (1 February 1936), p. 7. 58 Norman Kreitman, ‘The Coal Gas Story: United Kingdom Suicide Rates, 1960–71’, British Journal of Preventive and Social Medicine, 30:2 (June 1976), 86–93. 59 Stefan Slater, ‘Containment: Managing Street Prostitution in London, 1918–1959’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), 332–57, 338. 60 Judith Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 21. 61 Martin Wiener, ‘Homicide and “Englishness”: Criminal Justice and National Identity in Victorian England’, National Identities, 6:3 (2004), 203–13. 62 TNA, MEPO 3/1678. 63 ‘Cypriot Teacher’s Death Police Inquiries into Suspected Murder’, The Times (5 January 1933), p. 12. 64 TNA, CRIM 1/2270. 65 Ann Saunders, The Art and Architecture of London (London: Phaidon, 1986), p. 166. 66 Walkowitz, Nights Out¸ p. 3. 67 Emsley, The Great British Bobby, p. 203. 68 Shore, ‘Criminality and Englishness’, 124. 69 Houlbrook, Queer London, p. 87. See also Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Frank Mort, ‘Scandalous

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56  Murder Capital Events: Metropolitan Culture and Moral Change in Post-Second World War London’, Representations, 93 (2006), 106–37; and Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996). 70 Harry Daley, This Small Cloud: A Personal Memoir (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), p. 148. 71 Hansard HC Deb., vol. 323, cols 793–4 (3 May 1937), http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/search/soho+1937?speaker=mrwilliam-whiteley See TNA, MEPO 3/795 for the police file on Max Kassel, aka Emil Allard. 72 Walkowitz, Nights Out, p. 92. 73 Neville K. Connolly, Called to be a Surgeon (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2009), p. 170. 74 ‘The King’s English’, Pathé film reel, www.britishpathe.com/video/ kings-english-aka-kings-english-reel-2. 75 TNA, MEPO 3/1682. 76 The Times (1 July 1933), p. 7. 77 TNA, MEPO 2/8591. 78 ‘Pimlico Murder Charge Accused Indian’s Alleged Threats’, The Times (3 June 1933), p. 14. 79 TNA, MEPO 2/8591. 80 West London Press (2 June 1933). See also ‘Pimlico Murder Charge: Indian Before the Magistrate’, The Times (22 May 1933), p. 11. 81 West London Press (30 June 1933). 82 TNA, MEPO 2/8591. 83 TNA, MEPO 2/8591. 84 TNA, MEPO 2/8591. 85 Dick Hobbs, Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 86 Slater, ‘Containment: Managing Street Prostitution in London’, 355. 87 Jackson, Women Police; Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); and Houlbrook, Queer London. 88 Slater, ‘Containment: Managing Street Prostitution in London’; and Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Julia Laite, ‘Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth-Century London’, History Workshop Journal, 65:1 (2008), 96–116. 89 Laite, ‘Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints’, 108. 90 Daley, This Small Cloud, p. 150. 91 Sheila Cousins, pseudo. Ronald Mathews, To Beg I Am Ashamed (New York: Vanguard, 1938). 92 Cousins, To Beg I Am Ashamed, p. 277. 93 Slater, ‘Containment: Managing Street Prostitution in London’, 340.

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London crime scenes in the 1930s  57 94 Stefan Slater, ‘Pimps, Police and Filles de Joie: Foreign Prostitution in Interwar London’, London Journal, 32:1 (March 2007), 53–74, 55. 95 See P. Jenkins and G.W. Potter, ‘Before the Krays: Organised Crime in London 1920–1960’, Criminal Justice History, 9 (1988), 209–30; Edward Smithies, Crime in Wartime (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982); and Rhoda Lee Finmore Immoral Earnings: or Mr. Martin’s Profession (London: M.H. Publications, 1951). 96 Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 149, 168. 97 TNA, MEPO 3/1702, Police report, 14 May 1936. 98 ‘French Fifi Was Strangled’, Daily Mirror (27 November 1935), p. 7. 99 TNA, MEPO 3/1706. 100 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 101 ‘Strangled Girl “Split to Cops”: Vengeance Theory’, Daily Mirror (23 August 1937), p. 2. 102 ‘Six Women are to Search the Underworld’, Daily Mirror (13 May 1936), p. 3. 103 ‘Six Women are to Search the Underworld’, Daily Mirror (13 May 1936), p. 3. 104 ‘New Clue in “French Marie” Murder’, Daily Mirror (25 November 1937), p. 1. 105 TNA, MEPO 3/1722. 106 TNA, MEPO 3/20. 107 TNA, MEPO 2/4979. 108 Her brother had quarrelled with her four years before and had not seen her since. ‘Brother of Slain Girl Explains Outburst’, Daily Mirror (10 August 1938), p. 6. 109 Morrish, Police and Crime Detection Today, pp. 50–1. 110 Of these cases, thirty-three were medical, sixty-seven were chemical and forty-nine physical. TNA, MEPO 2/7282. 111 Norman Ambage and Michael Clark, ‘Unbuilt Bloomsbury: Medico-Legal Institutes and Forensic Science Laboratories in England between the Wars’, in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds.), Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 297-8. Home Office regional laboratories were also established in Birmingham in 1937, Preston and Cardiff in 1938, Wakefield in 1941 and Newcastle in 1956. 112 For more on forensic pathology in this period, see Amy Bell, ‘The Development of Forensic Pathology in London, England: Keith Simpson and the Dobkin Case, 1942’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 29:2 (2012), 43–63. 113 Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, ‘Bruised Witness: Bernard Spilsbury and the Performance of Early Twentieth-Century English Forensic Pathology’, Medical History, 55:1 (2011), 41–60.

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58  Murder Capital 114 Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, ‘The Rise and Fall of Celebrity Pathology’, British Medical Journal (14 December 2010), 1319–21. 115 TNA, MEPO 3/1698. 116 Browne and Tullet, Bernard Spilsbury, p. 323. 117 TNA, MEPO 2/4979, ‘Interesting Crimes in the MPD 1935–1939’.

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2 Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45 Introduction The Second World War permanently transformed the physical fabric of London and the mental landscape of Londoners.1 Wartime London was a fraught and tense city, riddled with xenophobia, subject to relentless propaganda, shortages and endless rules and regulations.2 Police investigations explored an underground geography of buried crimes, which were part of a wider context of wartime subterranean secrets. The Cabinet War Rooms, the nerve centre of the government nestled in the basement of the New Public Office Building, symbolized the covert underground war business which underlay Whitehall and in whose secrecy the Cabinet, government departments, the press and civilians colluded.3 The strain of secrecy and worry created what a contemporary study of London soldiers’ families described as a ‘universal atmosphere of war, worry and fear’ which was ‘felt to some extent by all, either as something intangible or focused on what was concrete and immediate’.4 The threat of death from above and the concerns of those separated from their families – evacuees from their parents, soldiers from their sweethearts, interned aliens and refugees from their kin – created a subtext of fear in the city. This tense emotional atmosphere had very little public outlet during the war and surfaced in wartime fiction describing the city as ‘a hallucinatory, claustrophobic and labyrinthine realm’ of underground shelters, blacked-out streets and menacing strangers, and in the visual iconography of ruined cityscapes in wartime films, novels and photographs depicting the partial, broken and destroyed.5 Anxieties about national and personal survival coloured attitudes towards wartime suspicious deaths. Londoners expressed their ambivalent attitudes in their personal writings, as they discussed murder trials with a combination of apathy and anxiety. Commentators either downplayed single murders in the face of wartime mass deaths or worried that the atmosphere of violence was encouraging people to kill. Strict censorship of the press and personal correspondence

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60  Murder Capital limited the expression of these fears to personal diaries, archived or published after the war. For example, Mrs Hilda Neal, who ran a typist’s agency in Kensington, confessed her anxiety in her diary at the end of 1941 about the increase in violent crime, writing that the police were investigating four separate murders in London.6 American journalist Quentin Reynolds, watching the Old Bailey trial of Mrs Florence Ouida Ransom for murder, found the whole scene anticlimactic: ‘Sixteen thousand decent neighbours of mine have been killed since September 7th. Naturally it was hard to feel any sympathy or feel that it was important that a half-balanced degenerate woman had just been sentenced to die.’7 Wartime suspicious death investigations expanded on the anxieties expressed in newspaper accounts of police investigations and criminal trials by exposing the material and psychological conditions of war that led to personal violence within the family. The psychological and social effects of war had a profound influence on the wartime family, as revealed in cases of suspicious deaths. The notion of ‘home’ as defended by wartime propagandists as a place of safety and refuge worth fighting for hid a reality in which those at home were vulnerable to attack by enemy bombs from the outside and attack by family members on the inside.8 The emotional strain of bombing raids, concern for other family members, the physical discomforts and enforced confinement of sheltering and the competition over scarce goods were factors that led to the eruption of deadly violence within the family. Domestic killings were prefaced by familial conflicts exacerbated by the tensions of war, neuroses amplified by separations and raids, and the opportunities for concealing bodies offered by wartime rubble. The largest increase in familial killings were instances of ‘mercy killings’ of sick or aged family members and women’s deaths resulting from abortions, with murders committed by parents decreasing and spousal murders remaining fairly constant until the post-war reunion spike in 1945–46. The geography of wartime domestic crimes encompassed the entire city in a noticeably broader sweep than pre-war cases, taking place in shared private spaces ranging from rented rooms to flats to suburban villas. What these suspicious deaths have in common is a domestic situation that had gone wrong, triggered by external events such as bombing raids or a private event such as a pregnancy and bringing to light secrets, debts, deceptions, resentments, fears and jealousies. During the first year of the war from September 1939 to the autumn of 1940, vulnerable civilians were evacuated from the capital and the bombing raids against London began. During this period the Metropolitan Police’s Register of Deaths by Violence recorded three

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   61 mercy killings by those who sought to protect a loved one from the effects of war.9 Two of these were in the East End, the area hardest hit in the bombing raids. From 1941 and 1943, as bombing shifted away from London and the pressures of rationing and conscription increased, the Register recorded intensive police investigations into three cases of husbands who attempted to use the social dislocations of war, as well as the physical rubble of the bombs, to cover up the murder of their wives. These wartime domestic murders reveal both an emotional landscape of domestic unhappiness and a sinister subterranean and wasteland geography of hidden bodies buried beneath the bombers’ destruction. The long family separations also led to violence in the later years of the war, as pregnancies and infidelities strained relationships.

Crime in wartime Edward Smithies, William Meier and other historians examining crime during the Second World War have argued that war led to an increase in crime on the most mundane level due to the long lists of new rules governing the blackout, rationing, conscription and sedition that had to be obeyed.10 Local and national governments demanded sacrifices of civilians beyond any peacetime conception and required much higher standards of acceptable conduct. Despite the threat of fines or imprisonment, many civilians sought to evade or ameliorate new strictures in a flourishing wartime underground economy of rationed goods.11 According to post-war Police Commissioner Harold Scott, wartime restrictions led to an erosion of a sense of personal duty and respect for the law, and to a long-term increase in levels of crime in London: ‘A war to the death like the last one, in which the State perforce made great inroads on the liberties of the subject and the rights of property, was hardly the school in which one could expect respect for the law and the rights of others to flourish.’12 As new laws and regulations multiplied, an already stretched Metropolitan Police Force had to struggle to keep up. Police officers worked with civil defence workers, notably the Air Raid Precaution, or ARP, wardens, to enforce the new regulations dealing with the blackout, sedition and rationing. The dangers and temptations of a city under siege also led to a rise in crimes of violence, and to crimes described by pathologist Keith Simpson as: ‘a steady flow of rapes, assaults, abortions, infanticides and breaking into “deserted” houses all arising from the changes in life that were thrust by service conditions on ordinary people’.13

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62  Murder Capital

Civilian evacuation The institution of the family came under intense pressure in the Second World War, as families had to contend with separations, the disruptions of raids and material privations. The first dramatic change in everyday family life in London began on 1 September 1939, two days before the declaration of war. On 1 September 1939, as German forces began to move into Poland, 600,000 people left London, including 390,000 unaccompanied schoolchildren and their teachers, 250,000 mothers and young children, 5,500 pregnant women and 2,400 disabled people, depleting the capital of one-fifth of its population.14 In England as a whole, 1.5 million people were moved in the voluntary government scheme named ‘Pied Piper’, while 2 million were evacuated privately, totalling 3.5 million mothers and children moved in the first weeks of war.15 The experience of evacuation proved difficult for large numbers of children, hosts and parents, and in the absence of air raids one-third of the schoolchildren evacuated from London had returned by January 1940. Further waves of evacuation followed periods of severe raids; the names of these operations showed the low numbers: Plan ‘Trickle’ moved 160,000 children in 1940 and Plan ‘Rivulet’ moved 20,000 following the V-1 attacks in 1944.16 By this point private plans made up the majority of evacuations. As Geoffrey Field has shown, the class and regional conflicts highlighted by the first waves of evacuation were the main reasons behind the failure of the state-sponsored scheme.17 Evacuation had an enormous emotional and psychological impact on children, witnessed by numerous contemporary sociological surveys of evacuated London children in their new billets.18 The effects on parents were less well-documented, but fears for their children’s safety were doubtless instrumental in both the evacuation of children and their early return home. In December 1939, veteran Sidney Charles Pitcher of Hackney killed Arthur Haberfield at 7 Terrace Road, Hackney (J Division). Police notes record that he had been depressed because his children had been evacuated, and he was found guilty but insane.19 The strain of the experience of separation and of threats of enemy also led one mother from Wood Green, thirty-eightyear-old Lily Wright, to gas herself and her nine-year-old daughter Pamela on 16 February 1940. Pamela had just been brought home from her billet because of her mother’s fears of what she believed was an imminent German invasion. Trial testimony revealed that the harsh treatment of Czech and Polish civilians at the hands of the Germans had been a preoccupation of Wright’s in the weeks before the murder. Pamela died but Mrs Wright survived to be charged with murder.

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   63 The Wright case was followed closely and sympathetically in the press. Mrs Wright was described in her first court appearance as a ‘pathetic figure’ whose ‘face was white’ and who ‘looked worried’.20 During her trial, the North London Press called her a ‘devoted mother’, who often burst out crying in the dock during testimony about her daughter’s death, sobbing on the shoulder of the court matron who came to sit next to her.21 While she had at first denied knowing anything about Pamela’s death, in court she suddenly shouted out, ‘Yes I did it!’ and had to be carried away, weeping. Both her husband and Mr F. Clayton, for the director of public prosecutions, told the court that Pamela’s evacuation had psychologically affected Mrs Wright, who had idealized her daughter. Mrs Wright was accordingly found guilty but insane. The headline in the North London Observer announcing that the verdict was ‘Feared Nazis, killed baby’ – an exaggerated description of a nine-year-old child and an echo of the stereotypical image of the German Hun, with a baby impaled on his bayonet.22 Pamela Wright’s death documents London civilians’ fears for themselves and their loved ones in the face of threatened enemy attack. Such anxieties had been acknowledged by the evacuation scheme, by the organization of civil defence schemes and by the restrictions put on civilian behaviour in all areas, which sought not only to repel invaders but to control outbreaks of civilian fear and desperation like that suffered by Mrs Wright.

Bombing raids In the summer of 1940, the military inactivity of the ‘Phoney War’ was shattered by the dramatic aerial combat of the Battle of Britain. The planes of the German Luftwaffe flew low over England, bombing Royal Air Force (RAF) airfields and radar stations in preparation for the German invasion, Operation Sea Lion. By September, having failed to deliver a knockout blow, the Germans shifted aerial targets to industrial and riverside targets in London, to disrupt British production, shipping and civilian morale. From 7 September to 18 September, London suffered massive daylight raids concentrated on the docks and industrial areas of the East End, a geographical concentration observable in the London County Council maps of bomb reports.23 Again failing to win a decisive victory in the air, the Luftwaffe shifted to safer night bombing and put plans for invasion on hold until following year. From mid-September to mid-November, German planes spread their destruction over London, each raid averaging 160 planes, 200 tons of high explosives and 180 incendiary

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64  Murder Capital canisters in a period that came to be known as the London Blitz.24 From November 1940 to May 1941 the nightly attacks were fewer but more devastating, as the Luftwaffe concentrated on other English cities. By June the London Blitz was over, though the devastating V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks of 1944–45 were still to come. London suffered the greatest civilian casualties of any British city during the war, with 29,888 civilians killed and 50,380 persons seriously injured.25 Between 1940 and 1944, 84,000 homes in London were totally destroyed, and 1.25 million rendered uninhabitable, with additional losses in the last year of war.26 Bombing raids also damaged the infrastructure of the city, rupturing sewers, water and gas mains, and cutting electricity supplies and telephone services.27 Londoners struggled to work on erratic public transport, through streets made almost impassable by debris, after long nights in shelters. In the years after the war, the nights of the Blitz became the centrepiece of a civilian memory of a dogged and steadfast good humour.28 But contemporary civilian diaries reveal private emotions of fear, anger and anxiety.29 While newspapers and propaganda presented London as a unified front, in reality the wartime city was socially and spatially fractured. Access to safety and amenities was tied to a Londoner’s class, age and gender, with the socially disadvantaged suffering the most. Though reportage was careful to present an image of all districts bearing the brunt of the attacks equally, the eastern side of the city suffered the greatest destruction. The oldest part of London, the City, endured the most physical damage, with complete devastation around St Paul’s Cathedral, although since the area was relatively uninhabited, few civilians were hurt. The same was true of other areas of central London given over to offices and institutions. In the Vine Street (C Division) area in western central London, policeman Harry Daley recalled enjoying the raids, since the only inhabitants on his beat were a publican and his wife who were safely ensconced in a shelter: When all available firemen and ambulances were engaged on the big disasters, we managed without help as best as we could – one bomb, one copper. On such a night I stood alone in one of our neighbourhood streets and saw the buildings on one side eaten up by flames; then the wind changed, the flames leapt across and with a roar devoured the other side of the street, and nobody could deny the spectacle was enjoyable.30

Other areas of London that suffered extensive damage had the highest concentration of population and the fewest shelter amenities. These were the three eastern boroughs of Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   65 Green, and the two central boroughs of Holborn and Shoreditch and the northern borough of Finsbury, which lost 19% of their built-up areas, putting enormous pressure on housing.31 Slater and Woodside’s survey of 200 London soldiers’ families between 1943 and 1946 found one-third living as semi-permanent guests with relatives, onethird living in makeshift, overcrowded and insanitary rooms, and only one-third having sole occupation of a house or flat.32 Destruction from the bombing raids in working-class areas exacerbated pre-war dispersals from the eastern and northern boroughs, which would continue in the post-war years.33 The areas of lightest damage were in central and West London: Chelsea, Westminster, Fulham, Kensington and Paddington only lost 5% of their developed land. From the beginning of the intensive air raids on London in September 1940, crime rates shot up as looting of damaged homes and businesses increased exponentially. Police notes suggest that looting was committed by all manner of Londoners: members of the public services, auxiliary firemen, demolition and first-aid squads, air-raid wardens, soldiers and civilians. The members of the various civil defence services in particular had ample opportunity for looting, as they worked in unsecured buildings without supervision, often at night.34 Magistrates were given the power to deal with the less serious cases of looting, and the maximum sentence was increased from three to twelve months.35 The extent of looting and other property crime undercut the popular images of a unified civilian population, joining in sing-alongs in the shelter, ignoring the bombs overhead. As Joshua Levine’s oral histories of Blitz survivors attest, Londoners felt their vulnerability and feared for their own safety and that of their loved ones.36

‘Mercy killings’ and raids Like the evacuation of children, the bombing raids put a particular strain on the family. The first shock of family separations and the bombing raids put enormous emotional and psychological demands on Londoners, especially those bearing the brunt of the attacks in the East End. William Pinckney, a veteran of the First World War, was greatly upset by the sound of the sirens, and after only three days of raids his young daughter found him hanging at his home in Shoreditch on 7 September 1940.37 The bombing raids and their associations with trench bombardments seem to have been particularly hard on men who had served in the First World War. The mental and physical strains of caring for vulnerable family members during the

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66  Murder Capital raids also led to two mercy killings in the first month of the raids, both taking place in the East End. James Miller was a forty-year-old man living alone in Bethnal Green as his wife and two children had been evacuated. He was working in the Rescue Squad of the City of London ARP, and according to police notes the death and destruction he had witnessed in the first month of raids made him very depressed. Because Bethnal Green had inadequate surface shelters, he and his extended family sheltered in Liverpool Street Underground station, huddled in blankets with hundreds of others on the platform floors. His seventy-five-year-old mother Ann, who lived next door with his two brothers, had great difficulty getting back and forth from her flat to the station, and sleeping in such cramped conditions. On 18 October 1940, James went to his mother’s flat and strangled her with a piece of flexible wire. He then surrendered at Old Street police station, saying, ‘I didn’t want to see her suffer.’38 He later told Detective Inspector Sullivan of G Division, ‘I did it to stop her being dragged round to the shelters.’ Miller was particularly affected by the raids, according to the police reports, because he had served in France in the First World War and had been gassed and temporarily blinded. His experience of both wars legitimized his fears of its consequences on his loved ones. Like Lily Wright, Miller was found guilty but insane and detained at His Majesty’s pleasure.39 The police were less sympathetic to Mrs Ida Rodway, a sixty-oneyear-old woman who killed her blind husband Joseph on 1 October 1940.40 They had been happily married for forty years, and when he lost his sight in 1939 she gave up work to look after him. But once the raids began, she had difficulty getting him into and out of the corrugated-steel Anderson shelter in the back garden of their Hackney home, and when their house was bombed on 21 September 1940, the couple had to sleep on the floor in Ida’s sister, Ethel’s back bedroom. Mrs Rodway became very depressed, her sister later testified, and said that she wished her husband had been killed. On 1 October, Mrs Rodway met her sister’s lodger on the Kingshold Road and asked him to get a policeman as she had just killed her husband.41 At the station, she told the officers that it had been too difficult looking after her husband in a strange house with only ten shillings of his old-age pension a week to live on. But the police were unmoved by what they saw as a ruse to escape punishment by posing as an overburdened housewife. The police report notes that she had £25 in cash and £29 in savings. As for her tale of a spur-of-the-moment killing, she had brought the knife from their bombed-out house a week earlier and had had it sharpened the day before. The police also noted the fact that she had inflicted twenty-four stab wounds.42 Others were more

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   67 touched by her story. The North London Police Court magistrate, Basil Watson, said in court, ‘It appears to be a very sad case. This woman ought to be represented by a solicitor at once.’43 The jury at the Central Criminal Court was also sympathetic and she was found guilty but insane.44 Wartime mercy killings also happened in middle-class families, as seen in two cases from January 1941. Forty-nine-year-old Elsie Owen, married name James, was killed by her husband on 14 January 1941 with a fork and a poker. Mrs James was a former concert violinist, and her husband Arthur Lloyd James, aged fifty-six, was a linguistic adviser to the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and secretary of the BBC advisory on spoken English.45 When police arrived they found a scene of great violence, and James told them, ‘We were so happy. I wanted her to die when she was like that. I have been in a Nursing Home with a nervous breakdown.’46 James had suffered a depressive psychosis brought on by the war and had been obsessively recording air raids in his diary.47 He was found guilty but insane, and committed suicide in 1943. Their comfortable Hampstead flat seemed to offer more respite from the war than those in the cramped and bomb-ravaged East End, but even though the couple had not suffered any material privations because of the war, the tension and foreboding of invasion were enough to spark violence and despair in the mentally vulnerable. On 5 January forty-eight-year-old Eva Jopling killed her seventy-seven-year-old mother in their house on the Lower Richmond Road in Mortlake (V Division). The two women had been living in their back room and the hall, with the mother sleeping in a recess in the hall whilst the daughter occupied a cupboard under the stairs. She told police she killed her mother to ‘save her from the terrible things they are going to do to me’. She was found unfit to plead and detained at His Majesty’s pleasure. These middle-class mercy killings were motivated by dread of what might happen, rather than the hardships of the present. As fears of invasion faded by mid-1941, and civilians’ experience of raids better prepared them to withstand them, there were no more wartime mercy killings by civilians recorded in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence. Servicemen returning to London on leave were less able to bear the effects of war on the family and were responsible for the next wave of mercy killings in March 1942. In Surrey, thirty-eight-yearold Edward Vincent D’Arcy strangled his mother, sixty-nine-year-old Anne Jane D’Arcy, and was found unfit to plead.48 In Hendon, thirtyeight-year-old Sidney Mills shot his father Frederick Archer Mills with his service rifle, as he was removing his spectacles after reading the morning newspaper.49 The elder brother had died and been buried

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68  Murder Capital the day before. Mills’ wife attributed the changes in her husband to his service in France and his evacuation from Dunkirk: ‘He has not been injured physically, but is of a more quiet disposition.’50 These soldiers, having already endured one separation from the family, could not bear another.51

Bombing raids and crime statistics According to the figures set out in the Metropolitan Police War Diary, crime, killings and suicides in London followed periods of intense bombing.52 The aerial attacks on London came in three phases: the 1940–41 Blitz by piloted bomber planes, the 1942–44 ‘tip and run’ raids by piloted bombers or fighter-bombers, and the 1944–45 attacks by V weapons. In 1944, 2,341 V-1 or flying bombs fell, destroying almost as many houses as in the Blitz, and killing 5,475 Londoners.53 The attacks by the much more destructive V-2 long-range rockets spanned the last winter of the war, from September 1944 to March 1945, and killed another 2,754 civilians. Police reports show how crime rates rose following these periods of aerial attack. Table 3 shows the incidence of indictable offences and arrests during the war years, most common of which were looting, housebreaking and petty theft, which follow the periods of bombing. In 1944 crime levels rose markedly, coinciding with the V-1 and V-2 attacks. However, the increase was maintained up to the end of the war and reached the highest figures from May to August 1945, so the increase cannot wholly be attributed to bombing. The statistics show a corresponding increase in arrests, which grew as a proportion of total crime in the Table 3: Indictable offences and arrests in London, 1938–45 Year 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 (to 31 August)

Offences committed 95,280 94,852 93,869 99,533 93,138 91,205 103,804 82,517

Arrests 21,333 20,134 20,209 25,472 25,414 23,452 24,796 18,671

Proportion of crimes prosecuted 22% 21% 21% 25% 27% 26% 23% 22%

Source: TNA, MEPO 3/3066 and Scott, Scotland Yard, 59.

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   69 years before the opening of the Western Front in 1944. What was more worrying to the public and police was the perceived change in who was committing these crimes in the capital: deserters, foreigners and ordinarily law-abiding citizens. Rationing and the shortages of goods led many Londoners to turn to the black market, expanding the frontiers of crime into everyday civilian life.54 If crime rates in general increased during the war, it is not clear whether this rise extended to crimes of violence. The conditions in London during the war years would seem to offer the perfect conditions to cover up murders, both for the murderer who wanted to evade detection and for the policeman who wanted to keep crime statistics down. The Metropolitan Police War Diary tersely stated: ‘The number of crimes of violence remained fairly steady throughout the war.’55 But the crime statistics in other police files reveal a marked increase. The Register of Deaths by Violence shows a change in suspicious deaths from between 29 and 43 a year from 1933 to 1939, to over 50 for every year during the war (see Figure 4). The largest increase was in the instances of infanticide and women’s deaths caused by abortions, with murders committed by parents decreasing and spousal murders remaining fairly constant until reunions brought a spike in 1945–46. From 1943, the number of murders committed by people whose relationship to the victim is unknown, or not clarified in police files, also shows a sharp increase from 1943 to 1953, as violence extended beyond the family (see Figure 5).

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 1953

1952

1951

1950

1949

1948

1947

1946

1945

1944

1943

1942

1941

1940

1939

1938

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1936

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0

Figure 4: Suspicious deaths by year, London Metropolitan Police District 1933–53 Source: TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

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70  Murder Capital 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Newborn bodies

Infanticide

Abortion

Parental

Spousal

Unknown

Figure 5: Suspicious deaths by relationship, London Metropolitan Police District 1933–53 Source: TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

While levels of all indictable crime may have dropped around 1943, the rate of homicides shows a steady increase over the war years. Home Office statistics indicate an increase in murders, manslaughters and infanticides ‘known to police’ in England and Wales, from 374 in 1938, 411 in 1939, with a slight dip in 1940 to 350 and 1941 to 397, rising again to 486 in 1942.56 The proportion of violent crimes prosecuted compared to crimes known remained steady at between 52% (1939) and 61% (1943), while the rate of convictions for crimes known actually rose from 22% in 1938, 29% in 1939 to 38% in 1940 and 43% in 1942. The highest rate of convictions were for infanticide and the lowest were for murder, whose conviction rates fell from 17% in 1938 and 1939 to 15% in 1942, 16% in 1943 and 12% in 1944.57 These statistics show the difficulties of categorizing suspicious deaths, as killings with no known suspect were classified as ‘murder by persons unknown’, while manslaughter, infanticide and concealment of birth depended for their classification on knowing either the circumstances of the commission of the crime, or the relationship of the suspect to the victim.

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   71

Policing, civil defence and mapping the city The increase in recorded crime suggests that the depleted wartime Metropolitan Police was still active in investigating suspicious deaths, aided by the proliferation of Civil Defence workers on the streets in London. Wartime civil defence was a complex patchwork of overlapping responsibilities, organized through the twenty-eight local borough councils. Alongside the borough councils, the Board of Guardians administered parish relief under the 1834 Poor Law, including care of the elderly, unemployed, unmarried mothers and orphans. The Air-Raid Precautions Act of 1937 put local authorities in charge of planning and carrying out schemes for neutralizing, reducing or repairing the effects of enemy action against the civilian population, though the ultimate responsibility for the schemes lay with the relevant ministry. For example, medical assistance and care of the dead were the responsibility of the Ministry of Health, as were water and sewer repairs. Emergency feeding of the homeless was the responsibility of the Ministry of Food, while clearing up rubble was the responsibility of the Ministry of Home Security. The London County Council (LCC) was responsible for fire and ambulance services, the evacuation of children and structural concerns in the fabric of the city such as drainage.58 In addition the Assistance Board area officers handled distress schemes and injury claims, local gas and electric companies were in charge of repairs, and the local military commanders were often in charge of unexploded bombs. Harold Scott, who would become the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police after the war, was appointed the chief administrative officer of the London Civil Defence Region in February 1939, charged with coordinating the ARP plans of London’s services, which existed under ninety-five different authorities and whose numbers were swollen by thousands of volunteers.59 In 1939 ARP set up a communication system similar to that being used by Metropolitan Police divisions. The control room of each borough’s ARP services was linked by telephone to the individual wardens’ posts, ambulance stations, first-aid posts and fire services in the neighbourhood. When a bomb dropped, the local warden completed a report form and telephoned its contents into the control room. There telephonists received the reports, pinned the location of each bomb on a large map of the borough and sent out the requested services. The ARP warden also had supervisory powers to enforce the blackout, to check mandatory identity cards and enforce other wartime regulations, reporting persistent offenders to the police. The police sought to maximize the supervisory role of the ARP

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72  Murder Capital wardens, consulting with local authorities to ensure that wardens’ sectors coincided with police war beats so that they could share local information.60 The Metropolitan Police continued to map crimes by division and followed a similar process of recording bomb-damaged areas as the ARP. A former conference room in Scotland Yard headquarters was converted into a War Map Room to show the place and nature of enemy air attacks using Geographic Map Company street maps with a scale of three inches to the mile. Once the Blitz began in September 1940, daily bomb report maps were made for the use of the Commissioner who no doubt compared them to the maps of crimes committed to identify patterns in crime resulting from war conditions and vulnerable areas that would need extra policing. The intensive mapping of the incidence of crime in London obscured the fact that the Metropolitan Police Force was itself struggling to keep officers in the streets. In 1939 the force numbered 19,500 men. On the outbreak of war both recruiting for and retirement from the regular force was suspended.61 Despite the 2,500 auxiliaries called up, the force was down to 4,000 men by the end of the war, and more than half of them left in 1945, after the laws which compelled them to stay were revoked.62 In addition, ninety-eight Metropolitan Police officers were killed on duty by enemy action and 210 were seriously injured. The CID was also understaffed; by February 1944 it was 212 police constables (PCs) under-strength, with 250 serving in the armed forces, twenty-eight killed in action and nine killed as a result of enemy action in London. This seriously taxed London divisions and in an endeavour to ease the situation some uniform officers were selected to be ‘aids’ to the CID and perform, temporarily, ordinary CID duties.63 Due to their limited wartime manpower, uniform policemen had to work twice the number of beats. They remained on the streets during air attacks and performed some of the same duties as ARP wardens. Nevertheless the supervisory capacity of police during the war was restricted, and consequently their successful investigation of calculated wartime murderers seemed even more commendable. Like the Londoner’s ubiquitous near-miss bomb story in which the teller only narrowly escapes death, the police’s investigative success in the midst of mass death underscored the powers of the police even while it suggested the possibility that other murders may have remained hidden.

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   73

Wartime domestic murders Three murderous husbands took advantage of the confusion and debris of war to cover up the murder of their wives in 1941 and 1942. In the first of these cases, on 25 May 1941 at an attractive suburban terrace of flats at 9 Goring Way, in Greenford (X Division) a neighbour observed Lionel Watson digging a pit in his backyard. When the neighbour asked if Watson was ‘digging for victory’ – i.e. preparing a vegetable garden – Watson mumbled a non-committal reply and turned away.64 A month later a foul smell started to waft over the fence, and the neighbour recalled this exchange and informed the police. Watson claimed that his wife Phyllis and two-year-old daughter Eileen were visiting relatives, but Phyllis’ ration book had not been used. On 30 June 1941, the police decided to excavate the garden where Watson had been seen digging, and found the bodies of Phyllis and Eileen. At first Lionel said that his wife had poisoned herself in an attempt to end her second pregnancy and had killed the child as well, and that he had buried them in the garden while in a state of shock. Subsequent police investigations revealed that Watson, a Bakelite moulder, had brought home cyanide from work, and traces of the poison were found on a file in the kitchen. It also emerged that he had married Phyllis bigamously and wanted to replace her with his younger girlfriend.65 That such a callous murder could occur in the pleasant suburban development of Greenford made it seem even more grisly. Greenford is a large and leafy suburb in the western borough of Ealing, absorbed into London in 1926 as part of the suburban expansion of the city. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the new London suburbs offered a chance for individuals to move up the social ladder and recreate themselves in an environment where old relationships could be shed and new lives imagined.66 What Shani D’Cruze has described as the ‘conservative modernity’ of suburbs like Greenford also offered new models of middle-class domestic lives based around companionate marriage.67 That violent domestic homicides could occur in the midst of this quiet respectability underscored its fragility and revealed a sinister side of suburbia.68 One crime scene photograph from the Watson case records the pleasant façade of 9 Goring Way, while another depicts the back garden from above, showing the dug-up and replaced paving stones where the bodies had been discovered (Figure 6). As in the case of George Hamblin in 1934, crime scene photographs use the contrast between the façade of the crime scene and the location of the body to draw attention to the disparity between suburban respectability and secret buried violence. The eye is drawn

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74  Murder Capital

Figure 6: The back garden at 9 Goring Way, 1942 (TNA, CRIM 1/1337)

to the light-coloured paving stones, juxtaposed with the dark edge of disturbed earth around them, symbolizing the sinister secrets which the police investigation had literally and figuratively uncovered. The Watson case was a twentieth-century version of the domestic gothic, in which seemingly innocuous surroundings conceal sinister secrets, including the macabre disposal of a murdered body.69 Cases like this were, according to D’Cruze, ‘reported frequently and fully enough to keep before the public gaze the potential instabilities in intimate relationships and household respectabilities’.70 Phyllis Watson apparently believed herself to be a married woman and wore a wedding ring, but Watson’s trial testimony demonstrated the illusory nature of their marriage, as he claimed he had not informed the police of her alleged suicide because he had married Phyllis bigamously and feared for his reputation: ‘I thought of my children, my job and my people.’ He also claimed he had removed her wedding ring before he buried her in the backyard because ‘she had a wish never to have jewellery on her’, throwing away (or more likely pawning) the symbol of the marriage that Phyllis had believed to be genuine.71 Crimes like

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   75 that of Lionel Watson hinted at a subterranean geography of hidden secrets even in reputable streets, behind the pleasant façades of Goring Way, and The Times headline for the Watson case described it not by neighbourhood but rather as ‘Bodies buried in garden’.72 The public was fascinated by the revelations of the bodies weighed down with paving stones that did not stay buried, and by the possibility that many more secret crimes could lie hidden and unpunished. Another nearly undiscovered body was dug up from the London rubble in 1942, in a case headlined by The Times as ‘Woman’s body found in crypt: husband charged with murder’.73 On 17 July 1942, a workman clearing up debris in the basement of a bombed-out Baptist chapel in Kennington Lane found a skeleton under a stone slab. At first it was believed to be an air-raid victim, but exhaustive forensic tests performed by pathologist Keith Simpson eventually showed her to be Rachel Dobkin, née Dubinski, the missing wife of the man who had been the firewatcher for the property next door.74 During his forensic examination, Simpson found a dried blood-clot over a fracture in the upper horn of the right wing of the voice box, indicating bruising and pressure while still alive. Such small and specific injuries, according to Simpson’s later trial testimony, only occur in cases of manual strangulation. Defence Counsel Mr F.H. Lawton suggested that cause of death could have been a splinter from a bomb fragment, but Simpson countered that he would have expected to have found it in the body.75 By helping to bring a murderer to justice in a capital case determined entirely by circumstantial evidence, Simpson staked his claim for his own professional authority and the capacity of forensic science to allay the fears that wartime murders would go undiscovered.76 Cases of hidden and decomposed bodies in which there was no direct evidence of murder required expert forensic medical knowledge to identify as murder and to prosecute.77 Many of the eminent forensic pathologists of the twentieth century made their names in such cases. Dr Bernard Spilsbury had famously solved the Hawley Harvey Crippen case in 1910 by identifying a body buried in the basement as Mrs Crippen by a small piece of flesh which bore a scar and a few strands of pubic hair.78 The Dr Buck Ruxton Case of 1936 had made the careers of the Scottish pathologists Dr James Couper Brash and Dr John Glaister, Jr as the dismembered bodies of Mrs Ruxton and her children’s nursemaid had to be reconstructed using a variety of innovative forensic techniques.79 Such cases had a special public fascination as they combined domestic tragedies with grotesque details of the disposal and retrieval of bodies. Like Spilsbury, Brash and Glaister, Simpson built his reputation on the analysis of

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76  Murder Capital dismembered murdered wives. Simpson’s second major case in wartime Greater London, though outside the Metropolitan Police district, again involved the body of a woman found in wasteground, in this case tied up in four potato sacks and dumped on the banks of the river Lea at Luton on 18 November 1943. Her face had been battered so severely that the police surgeon at first thought she had been shot. When Keith Simpson did the post-mortem, he noted she had been strangled and severely beaten, had had at least one child and was again five and a half months pregnant. The body was stripped clean of all identifying features, including clothing, dentures and jewellery. Retouched pictures of the victim of what came to be called the ‘sack murder’ were shown in shop windows, flashed on cinema screens and published in local newspapers, to no avail.80 Over 400 missing women from as far away as Ireland were traced or eliminated, with periodic public appeals to potential witnesses in Luton, and London dentists who might remember a woman who had only one molar remaining in her upper left jaw.81 It took three months for Chief Inspector Chapman to identify the woman as Irene Manton of Regent Street, Luton, through a dyer’s tag on a discarded coat near the scene. After being shown identification evidence from her dentist, her husband Bertie Manton admitted to killing her in a fit of temper, and disposing of her body and clothing, including the coat. He had then wiped down the house so that there was not a single fingerprint of Irene’s left, except on a neglected pickle jar in the basement, where there was one that corresponded to the body in the river. Bertie had told their four children that their mother had gone to visit relatives, and they had not recognized pictures of her body posted in the neighbourhood. Manton was found guilty and sentenced to death. His children helped to organize a petition for mercy, and a poignant contemporary photograph of his sixteen-year-old son shows him collecting some of the 30,000 signatures.82 Manton’s capital sentence was commuted, though he died three years later in prison.83

Pregnancy and domestic murder Irene Manton was pregnant, which was one of the main causes of friction between her and her husband. Wartime anxieties over housing, clothing, food and family separations exacerbated the difficulties of pregnancy. The Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence for the years 1933 to 1953 include seven cases of pregnant women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, as well as two suicide pacts. Pregnancy sometimes meant the exposure of an illicit relationship,

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   77 and according to Carolyn Conley had also been a causal factor in late Victorian English homicides, particularly those perpetrated by middle-class men.84 The murder of pregnant Iris Segwick by Frank Sanderson in 1944 illustrated some of the pressures pregnancy placed on a relationship. The couple had been together for four years, both living in South Dagenham.85 She fell pregnant, and he promised to marry her on 23 December 1944. She bought new clothes for the event and had her hair waved and ironed that morning, telling the hairdresser she was getting married the same day at Dagenham Church. No application in either name was found in the church records. When Sanderson did appear later in the day, they quarrelled, and he strangled her and set her room on fire. He had spent the money she had given him towards their marriage. Pregnancy could also confirm family opposition to a marriage. Seventeen-year-old Doreen Bawn of Harnworth fell pregnant by an ex-POW German farm worker in 1950. When her father forbade them to marry, Paul Klein ran into house, shot Doreen and then himself. Pregnancies highlighted the pressures of debts, financial difficulties, infidelities and jealousy – all factors in the Manton case. Murders of pregnant partners that took place at the end of the war highlighted the difficulties of wartime separations and post-war reunions. In 1944, Sidney Francis Buckley, who had deserted from the Royal Marine Engineers when his wife was due to give birth, beat his two-and-a-half-year-old stepdaughter to death in Battersea SW11 (W Division).86 He admitted that she had annoyed him with her ‘snivelling’, and he had lost his temper. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. In a petition for a review of the severity of his sentence he blamed the stress of war and of his family life: ‘I could not explain my action and can only account for it being caused by the blackout and the general anxieties I had over domestic matters,’ and asked that his youth and dependent family be taken into account.87 The competing demands for public sympathy were also characteristic of the murder of pregnant Kathleen Patmore by her husband Cyril, a soldier of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1945.88 On 4 August, a blood-covered Patmore hailed a taxi driver in Harlesden and told him, ‘Get the police, I’ve just killed my missus.’ When the police arrived at the flat, they saw the heavily pregnant body on the floor moving – it was the unborn child as Kathleen herself was dead. The child was not Patmore’s; he had been stationed in India when he received a letter from his wife saying she was pregnant. Another letter from his wife’s sister told him she had been associating with many men, including the Italian prisoner of war who had fathered the child. Patmore was

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78  Murder Capital granted twenty-eight days’ compassionate leave. Once home, he confronted his wife and during a quarrel he stabbed her. He claimed he only meant to scar her so no one else would have her, but stabbed her in the wrong place. Other witnesses at the trial disputed Patmore’s claims, testifying that Patmore had previously struck and threatened to kill her in front of witnesses. But the fact of her pregnancy when her husband was stationed overseas told against her in the eyes of the police and the public. The police notes opine, ‘The motive for the crime is most apparent and it cannot be disputed that the moral character of the deceased woman was of the lowest.’89 Patmore played on these sympathies when he recalled at trial one speech he had made to her: ‘How can you expect me to come and sleep with you, when you’ve been with another man. For years I’ve waited for this moment to return and have you for my own again and I was robbed of everything.’90 The jury was moved and found Patmore guilty of the reduced charge of manslaughter after only a short recess. However, the judge, Mr Justice Charles, disagreed with this verdict and sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment: ‘The jury have taken a certain view of your case, but I want to make it perfectly clear that it was their view and not mine,’ he told Patmore. ‘If manslaughter it be – and I am bound by the jury’s verdict – then it is a bad case of manslaughter, although, as your counsel has said, you were a sorely tried man. If you had not been so sorely tried I would have been bound to give you a very, very heavy sentence.’91 The judge cautioned, ‘If it is to be thought that men coming back who find their wives unfaithful are entitled to kill the erring wife then that would be the law of the jungle.’

Conclusion Although the Metropolitan Police’s Registers of Murders and Deaths by Violence kept during the war years cannot be compared to the currently sealed Police Registries of Interesting Cases to see what was omitted, inquest reports suggest there may have been more domestic murders than the police files recorded.92 A coroner’s inquest reported in the Boroughs of Stepney and Poplar and East London Advertiser investigated the murder of eighteen-year-old Charlotte Donovan and the suicide of thirty-year-old Private William Aish at Searle House, Ocean Street, Stepney, on 7 August 1940. Aish was about to be mobilized away from his family, his two children from a previous relationship and Charlotte, who was expecting another baby. That night he sent his children to his parents’ flat and when the family returned they found the couple dead. His note read, ‘I love Charlotte.

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   79 As I cannot live without her I am going with her.’ This case was not recorded in suspicious death reports, perhaps because there was no police investigation. Cases of domestic murder in wartime London reveal the intense pressure of the war on the family. Difficult material circumstances increased the tensions within families, while the conditions of war exacerbated existing psychological problems or domestic strife. Adult children faced with caring for their aged parents could foresee no alternative but to end their parents’ lives. Murderous husbands also sought to use the dislocations of war to cover up their crimes. Most vulnerable were the wives and girlfriends in cases where wartime scarcity, separations or pregnancies added to pre-existing tensions that flared into deadly violence. Police investigations of domestic crimes in which the body was hidden in wasteground were reliant on expert medical investigation to determine the cause of death, foreshadowing a shift in investigative technique that would help an over-stretched force. The deaths of William Aish and Charlotte Donovan on the eve of the bombing raids of the Blitz emphasize that in wartime London, home was no longer a space of safety. While domestic homicides necessitated the investigation of a subterranean geography of hidden crimes, the following chapter will explore how the war affected crimes on the surface – that is, between relative strangers in pubs, shelters and on the streets of London.

Notes 1 See Amy Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London 1939–45’, Journal of British Studies, 48:1 (January 2009), 153–75. 2 For more on the transformation of London during and after the war, see Angus Calder, The People’s War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969); Jean Freedman, Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London (Arlington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999); Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds.), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two Britain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995); and Joanna Mack and Steve Humphries, London at War:The Making of Modern London (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985). 3 See Victoria Stewart, Secret Histories: The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); and Richard Holmes, Churchill’s Bunker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 4 Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside, Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes (London:

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80  Murder Capital Cassell, 1951), p. 218. Their study was based on interviews with 200 London soldiers hospitalized between 1943 and 1946. 5 Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 2; and Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 3. See also Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds.) British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999); and Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 6 Imperial War Museums (IWM), Papers of Mrs Hilda Neal, Documents 11987. 7 Quentin Reynolds, A London Diary (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 124. 8 For more on the concept of ‘home’ as the centre of post-war national reconstruction, see Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40:2 (April 2005), 341–62; and Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–1964 (London: UCL Press, 1998). 9 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 10 Edward Smithies, Crime in Wartime (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982); and William M. Meier, Property Crime in London, 1850 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 11 Mark Roodhouse, Black Market Britain 1939–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For more on the wartime importance of food, see Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London: Penguin, 2011); and Ina Zweiniger Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 12 Harold Scott, Your Obedient Servant (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959), p. 55. 13 Keith Simpson, Forty Years of Murder (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), p. 31. 14 Niko Gartner, ‘Administering “Operation Pied Piper” – How the London County Council Prepared for the Evacuation of its Schoolchildren 1938–1939’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 42 (2010), 17–32. See also R.M. Titmuss, A History of the Second World War: Problems of Social Policy (London: HMSO, 1950); Carlton Jackson, Who Will Take our Children? (London: Methuen, 1985); Travis Crosby, The Impact of Civilian Evacuation in the Second World War (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Ben Wicks, No Time to Wave Goodbye (London: Bloomsbury, 1988); John Welshman, Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and John Welshman, ‘Evacuation and Social Policy during the Second

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   81 World War: Myth and Reality’, Twentieth Century British History, 9:1 (1998), 28–53. 15 Welshman, Churchill’s Children, p. 44. Juliet Gardiner, The Children’s War: The Second World War through the Eyes of the Children of Britain (London: Portrait, 2005); Mike Brown, Evacuees: Evacuation in Wartime Britain 1939–194 (Stroud: The History Press, 2005). 16 London Metropolitan Archive,‘The Evacuation of Children from the County of London during the Second World War 1939–1945’ (London: London Metropolitan Archive, 1997). 17 Geoffrey Field, ‘Perspectives on the Working Class Family in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945’, International Labour and WorkingClass History, 38 (2000), 3–28. 18 Susan Isaacs (ed.), The Cambridge Evacuation Survey (London: Methuen, 1941); and M. Cole and R. Padley (eds.), Evacuation Survey: A Report to the Fabian Society (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1940); Barnett House, London Children in War-time Oxford: A Survey of Social and Educational Results of Evacuation by a Barnett House Study Group (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947); Gertrude Wagner, Our Wartime Guests: Opportunity or Menace? A Psychological Approach to Evacuation (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1940). 19 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 20 ‘Mother is Charged with Murder’, North London Observer (23 February 1940), p. 1. 21 ‘Where did Pamela Wright Die?’, North London Observer (8 March 1940), p. 7. See also ‘Devoted Mother on Murder Charge’, North London Observer (13 March 1940), p. 3. 22 North London Observer (5 April 1940), p. 1. See Nicoletta Gullace, ‘Barbaric Anti-Modernism: Representations of the “Hun” in Britain, North America, Australia, and Beyond’, in Pearl James (ed.), Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 23 London Metropolitan Archive, London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939–1945 (London: London Topographical Society, 2005). Graphic artists at the Guardian have also mapped the incident reports of the London Fire Brigade of the first night of the Blitz, see www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/sep/06/ london-blitz-bomb-map-september-7-1940. 24 Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 788. 25 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. 26 C.M. Kohan, History of the Second World War: Works and Buildings (London: HMSO, 1952), p. 222. 27 See Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy and T.H. O’Brien, The History of the Second World War: Civil Defence (London: HMSO, 1955). 28 See Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the

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82  Murder Capital Second World War (London: Longman, 2004); Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds.), Millions Like us: British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); and Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Cape, 1991). 29 Bell, ‘Landscapes of Fear’; Susan Grayzel, At Home and under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Great Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 30 Harry Daley, This Small Cloud: A Personal Memoir (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), p. 178. 31 Ken Young and Patricia L. Garside, Metropolitan London Politics and Urban Change: 1837–1981 (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 15, 40. 32 Slater and Woodside, Patterns of Marriage, p. 216. 33 See Margaret Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957); Peter Wilmott, Adolescent Boys of East London (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Robert Wheaton, ‘Observations on the Development of Kinship History’, Journal of Family History, 12 (1987), 285–301; and J.A. Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England 1918–1945 (London: UCL Press, 1992). 34 TNA, MEPO 3/3066, Report dated 31 October 1940. 35 Arthur Marwick, ‘“People’s War and Top People’s Peace?”: British Society and the Second World War’, in Alan Sked and Chris Cook (eds.), Crisis and Controversy (London: Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 1976), p. 150. 36 Joshua Levine, Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women on Both Sides (London: Ebury, 2006). 37 ‘Sirens Worried Him’, East London Advertiser (7 September 1940), p. 5. On 25 October 1940, an unknown man shot himself with a homemade bullet in an air-raid shelter on Holloway Road, North London: ‘Shot Man in Air Raid Shelter’, London Independent (25 October 1940), p. 5. 38 TNA, MEPO 3/2171. 39 TNA, CRIM 1/1240 and MEPO 3/2171. 40 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 41 TNA, MEPO 3/2169. 42 TNA, CRIM 1/1239. 43 ‘Accused of Murder of Blind Husband’, The Times (2 October 1940), p. 2. 44 TNA, CRIM 1/1239 and MEPO 3/2169. 45 ‘B.B.C. Professor on Murder Charge; Wished his Wife to Die while Happy’, The Times (16 January 1941), p. 2. 46 TNA, CRIM 1/1280. 47 TNA, MEPO 3/2179. 48 TNA, MEPO 20/3.

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   83 49 TNA, MEPO 20/3, MEPO 3/2212. 50 TNA, MEPO 3/2212. 51 In 1944 Aircraftsman Taggart killed his wife and his children then himself, as he could not bear to be separated from them. TNA, MEPO 20/3. 52 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. 53 Philip Zeigler, London at War (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 289. See also Richard Anthony Young, The Flying Bomb (London: Ian Allen, 1978). 54 Though, as Mark Roodhouse argues, most Britons practised restraint when it came to the black market. Roodhouse, Black Market Britain. 55 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. 56 Including those crimes charged as ‘concealment of birth’. TNA, HO 329/123. 57 TNA, HO 329/123. 58 W. Eric Jackson, Achievement: A Short History of the London County Council (London: Longmans, 1965), p. 33. See also Young and Garside, Metropolitan London; Andrew Saint (ed.), Politics and the People of London (London: Continuum, 1989); and A.D. Harvey, ‘Local Authorities and the Blitz’, Contemporary Review 257: 1497 (1990), 197–201. 59 Scott, Your Obedient Servant, p. 108. 60 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. 61 By the Police and Firemen (War Service) Act, passed early in September 1939, the right of police officers to retire on pension was suspended, except for medical reasons or under special circumstances. The Police and Firemen (Employment) Order of June 1940 required police officers (including full-time paid auxiliaries) to continue in their employment until their services were dispensed with by the chief officer of police. Many of the auxiliaries were absorbed into the police force in 1945, having had five years’ experience. 62 Harold Scott, Scotland Yard (London: Andre Deutsch, 1954), p. 22. 63 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. 64 Jackson, A Short History of the London County Council, p. 112. 65 See the police and trial files at TNA, MEPO 3/2186 and CRIM 1/1337. 66 Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood Contract and Intimacy 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1996), p. 199. 67 Shani D’Cruze, ‘Intimacy, Professionalism and Domestic Homicide in Interwar Britain: The Case of Buck Ruxton’, Women’s History Review, 16:5 (2007), 701–22, 707. 68 D’Cruze, ‘Intimacy, Professionalism and Domestic Homicide’, 706. 69 See Wasson, Urban Gothic; and Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested

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84  Murder Capital Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 70 D’Cruze, ‘Intimacy, Professionalism and Domestic Homicide’, 715. 71 ‘Bodies Buried in a Garden: Murder Charge at Old Bailey’, The Times (8 September 1941), p. 9. 72 ‘Bodies Buried in a Garden: Murder Charge at Old Bailey’, The Times (17 September 1941), p. 2. 73 ‘Woman’s Body Found in Crypt: Husband Charged with Murder’, The Times (12 September 1942), p. 2. 74 TNA, MEPO 3/2235. 75 TNA, HO 144/21854. 76 Amy Bell, ‘The Development of Forensic Pathology in London, England: Keith Simpson and the Dobkin Case, 1942’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 29:2 (2012), 265–82. 77 See Norman Ambage and Michael Clark, ‘Unbuilt Bloomsbury: Medico-Legal Institutes and Forensic Science Laboratories in England between the Wars’, in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds.), Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 78 The identification of Cora Crippen was challenged in 2011 by a team of American forensic scientists from Michigan State University, who compared mitochondrial DNA from the remains presented at the Crippen trial with samples taken from Cora Crippen’s surviving relatives. They concluded that the remains could not be those of Mrs Crippen and were from an unknown male. See David R. Foran et al., ‘The Conviction of Dr. Crippen: New Forensic Findings in a Century-Old Murder’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 56:1 (2011), 233–40. 79 See Brash and Glaister’s forensic case-book: James Couper Brash and John Glaister, Medico-Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case (Edinburgh, W. Wood & Company, 1937); and R.H. Blundell and G. Haswell Wilson (eds.), The Trial of Buck Ruxton (London: Hodge, 1937). 80 ‘“Sack” Murder Mystery: Dead Woman Still Unidentified’, Dunstable Borough Gazette (10 December 1943), p. 1. 81 ‘Seventh Molar Map Provides Clue: Dentists’ Help Sought in Murder Riddle’, Dunstable Borough Gazette (26 November 1943), p. 1. 82 Photograph dated 30 June 1944, Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Editorial image #52275633. www.gettyimages.ca/detail/ news-photo/the-16-year-old-son-of-convicted-murderer-bertiehorace-news-photo/52275633?Language=en-US. 83 The Manton case did not appear in the Register of Deaths by Violence, although Scotland Yard detective Chief Inspector Chapman was involved in the investigation and details were reported

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Violent crime and the family in wartime London, 1939–45   85 widely in London newspapers. ‘Shot Woman Found in River’, Beds and Herts Saturday Telegraph (23 November 1943), p. 1. 84 Carolyn A. Conley, Certain Other Countries: Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), p. 114. 85 TNA, MEPO 3/2286. 86 TNA, MEPO 3/2279. 87 TNA, MEPO 3/2279. 88 TNA, MEPO 3/2302. 89 TNA, MEPO 3/2302. 90 TNA, MEPO 3/2302. 91 ‘Killed Unfaithful Wife: Five Years for Soldier: Judge Condemns the Law of the Jungle’, Willesden Citizen, Middlesex Independent and West London Star (6 October 1945), p. 1. 92 The Metropolitan Police files on ‘Interesting Cases 1941–47’ are closed. TNA, MEPO 3/2019.

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3 Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45 Introduction The Second World War’s exacerbation of family tensions created a pattern of domestic violence that encompassed the entire city. This chapter shifts focus from the effects of war on private life to explore how the war affected crimes between relative strangers in public spaces: in pubs, in shelters and on the streets of London. During the war, London became a much more anonymous, varied and cosmopolitan city. Casual encounters influenced by alcohol, sex, racial tensions and the obscurity of the blacked-out streets ended in a haphazard but deadly violence. Bombed-out houses, alleyways, shelters and pubs were the scenes of casual and brutal deaths, many of which remained unsolved. These suspicious deaths show the fault lines in the wartime city and highlight the difficulties of policing when the perpetrator and the victim did not know each other and were not known to local police. During the war, Londoners left their familiar neighbourhoods as the vulnerable were evacuated, war workers were transferred, soldiers were mobilized and enemy aliens interned. Meanwhile refugees, British and Allied soldiers, war workers and deserters poured into the city. Despite the bureaucratic demands of war which tracked people through identity cards, ration books, conscription, and directed labour, London as a whole was much more impersonal and cosmopolitan than it had been in the 1930s, as these disparate groups were brought together to wage the war under enemy fire and in a generalized state of anxiety and fear. The number of suspicious deaths between people whose relationship was casual or unclear (see Figure 5) rose exponentially during the war. The highest number of deaths by violence in the Metropolitan Police Register occurred in 1945, with sixty-six recorded suspicious deaths. The increase in deaths by violence was echoed in figures for all forms of criminal violence, including the near-doubling of numbers of felonious and malicious woundings from 1939 to 1945.1

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  87 The increase in casual and professional violence during the war was cause for public concern, more so than domestic violence, which was reported less often and then as a private tragedy. Violence outside the family seemed to provide evidence for the destructive effects of war on the civil and social structure of the city. Nineteenth-century policing and urban planning had fought against the urban slum and the criminal classes, and the physical destruction of London’s infrastructure seemed to threaten all the hallmarks of Victorian progress.2 As bombs destroyed street lighting, sewers and disrupted public transport and other symbols of technological innovation and civilization, new and dangerous areas were created in the city. Violent crime also became symbolic of a lack of wartime unity, civilian morale and national citizenship.3 This chapter will examine the new categories of people living in London during the war and the areas of conflict between relative strangers, such as public shelters, the streets, bombed-out houses, pubs, and flats used for casual sex or invaded for the purpose of robbery. In response to the new influx of refugees, servicemen, deserters, prostitutes and other migrants, the Metropolitan Police had to reorder itself and coordinate with the British and Allied armed forces, which would fundamentally change police investigative practices. The spaces where violence took place – pubs, shelters, flats and the streets – illustrate where and how public life was lived in the wartime city: where strangers met and who was there to witness their encounters. Most worrying to police and public was the rise in both professional and casual violence during the war.

Refugees On 1 September 1939, as German forces began to move into Poland, 600,000 people left London in official evacuation schemes, and many thousands more in private evacuations.4 At the same time refugees poured into the city, subject to curfews and surveillance by police, military and civilian informers. In 1940, pre-war German refugees were joined by approximately 55,000 Belgians and Dutch fleeing Nazi invasion, and 12,000 evacuated civilians from the British naval base at Gibraltar.5 Anxious about a potential invasion and the concentration of foreign nationals in the city, the new Churchill government ordered 2,000 German nationals in London rounded up under Defence Regulation 18(b) on 16 May 1940 and 1,500 German women on 26 May.6 On 24 June, at Churchill’s direction, 740 British fascists and 15,000 Class C aliens formerly seen as non-threatening were interned, including many Jewish refugees from Nazi oppression.7 Refugees also

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88  Murder Capital faced hostility from many Londoners. Home Intelligence reports from 1940 noted growing anti-refugee action in various boroughs of London: Belgian children were excluded from play-centres in Richmond, Belgians were booed on the street in Hammersmith and those with foreign-sounding names were victimized in Finchley.8 Even long-standing residents could be attacked; when Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, the windows of many Italian restaurants and cafés in Soho were smashed.9 The bombing raids of the Blitz and the German advance on Russia in 1941 added to their difficulties. A coroner’s inquest into the suicide of German refugee Georg Israel Müller, who lived in Primrose Gardens, Hampstead, testified to the difficulties refugees faced. In his two years in London, Muller had been hit by a car in the blackout, bombed out of his flat and feared for his wife and child trapped in Germany.10 A case reported in the Metropolitan Police Register on 10 October 1941 detailed the suicide pact of Jewish refugees Irene Coffee and her mother Margaret Brann, in Maida Vale W9 (X Division) which led to Mrs Brann’s death.11 Coffee was found guilty of wilful murder and sentenced to death, although she was later reprieved.12 While refugees show up occasionally in later war years as victims or perpetrators of deaths by violence, from 1940 the enormous demands of the military eclipsed what was for many a quiet desperation.

Servicemen British, Commonwealth and American soldiers feature heavily in recorded wartime crime, mostly as deserters. Soldiers and deserters were named in thirty-nine cases in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence during the war and were suspected in other unsolved cases. In the first four months of war in 1939, recorded crime in the Metropolitan Police areas declined by 10%, as criminal networks were disrupted and young men called up.13 Instead crime around military bases increased, and when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was sent to France professional thieves met with French receivers to set up large-scale theft of army goods.14 By June 1940 most of the BEF was home again, where it was joined by the remnants of continental armies, and the Free French Forces organized under General Charles De Gaulle.15 Over 370,000 Canadian soldiers were stationed in Britain prior to 1944, and 1.5 million American troops were stationed in Britain just before D-Day in June 1944.16 The presence of these soldiers stationed or on leave in London lured others to the capital as well. Prostitutes, young women looking for

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  89 fun, and homosexual men appear as victims in the Register of Deaths by Violence during the war years, and many unsolved cases were attributed to American or Canadian soldiers who had shipped out. British servicemen in London were not officially under the jurisdiction of the civilian Metropolitan Police. They were supervised by the Corps of Military Police, known as Redcaps because of their distinctive headgear of red-topped peaked caps or berets.17 London District Provost Company had three officers and 116 men in 1939, which expanded to eleven officers and 598 men by 1945.18 In theory, the military police were responsible for dealing with all crimes committed by military personnel, though the suspect was usually arrested by a Metropolitan Police constable, who then waited, sometimes anxiously, for his military counterpart to arrive.19 Metropolitan Police constables were also involved in tracing soldiers absent without leave.20 In several murder investigations, as in the case of a 1940 pub shooting in Covent Garden, the two forces worked together, and cases of murdered civilians were often turned over to civilian criminal courts. The Canadian and US militaries dealt with their own offenders, partly because of the need to maintain domestic support for the war. A liaison officer between the Metropolitan Police and the American authorities dealt with all cases of American servicemen arrested by civilian police.21

Deserters Between 1933 to September 1939, six servicemen or veterans were recorded as suspects in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence: one veteran, two aircraftmen, one English sailor, one Swedish sailor and one deserter from the British Army. The numbers of suspected soldier perpetrators would vastly increase during the war as a result of conscription. In September 1939, the National Services (Armed Forces) Act imposed conscription on all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one, including many thousands of unwilling recruits who subsequently deserted. In 1947 the national estimate of British deserters was 20,000, not including the US, Canadian and other Allied deserters, many of whom congregated in London’s relative anonymity.22 The Metropolitan Police believed deserters had a considerable impact on crime in the capital, since they had no ration books or identity papers and therefore had every inducement to prey on the civilian population.23 While some had to steal to live, others deserted for a combination of reasons; ‘decent non-criminal types found themselves locked up in a cell’, and protecting them made

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90  Murder Capital mothers, sisters and wives criminals as well.24 As police constable Harry Daley recalled, ‘Wandsworth was full of deserters and it was seldom a pleasure to catch them.’25 Deserters were easy scapegoats for those seeking explanations of violent crime, as desertion itself seemed to show cowardice and selfishness in a time of national peril. Despite these fears, William Meier has calculated that in 1944 and 1945 deserters made up only 7% of all persons arrested.26 Deserters appear in two kinds of cases of death by violence during the war: those arising out of domestic circumstances and those committed for robbery or other gain. Many, like the servicemen on leave discussed in the previous chapter, could not bear separation from their families. Charles Hamilton, a thirty-three-year-old deserter from the army, shot his eighteen-year-old girlfriend Amy Florence Wright on 23 October 1939, then shot himself.27 Likewise, Annie Imhof was shot by her deserter boyfriend James Edward Lawrence on 29 November 1940, who then shot himself.28 Lawrence was a veteran of Dunkirk who had deserted his regiment in Frome, Somerset, in July 1940 and moved to London, where he and Imhof planned to take over the running of a coffee shop at 94 Tooley Street SE1 (M Division). The more public and worrying types of violence perpetrated by deserters were the violent robberies and murders of strangers in the capital which first appear in the Register in 1941. On 5 June 1941, fifty-eight-year-old Herman Henrick Beer was shot in the London and North-Eastern Railway allotments on Church Road, Leyton (J Division), by nineteen-year-old deserter William George Layton. The motive was presumably robbery, but Layton was judged insane and unfit to plead.29 In the autumn of 1942 a wave of robberies and murders in London added to the anxiety surrounding deserters, as the crimes seemed to display a disregard for human life and law in pursuit of greed.30 Two men attacked Hatton Garden jeweller Hursch Weinstock on 12 December 1942, robbing him of £1,000 in jewels. On 15 October 1942, William Raven was battered to death by a bottle in his Baker Street flat by two men believed to be army deserters, who stole civilian clothing. George Gardiner, the station foreman of Kilburn station, was murdered by two unknown men on 13 December 1942. While fingerprint evidence showed that the two crimes were probably committed by different people, to the public it seemed to be one extended spree of violence. Two Canadian deserters were later tried for William Raven’s murder and G.F. Brimacombe was convicted and sentenced to three years’ penal servitude.31 These crimes showed a level of violence and lawlessness that in the 1930s had been associated with smash and grab raiders, but which had

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  91 then existed more in the public’s fearful imagination than the police statistics.32 That robberies with such a marked degree of violence were now being carried out by former servicemen implied a moral weakness in those fighting to defend Britain at a time of military desperation, and a corresponding brutalizing of civilian society whose effects were feared to be permanent. The murder of Gladys Lavinia Brewer and her two-year-old daughter Shirley Brewer by an RAF deserter and his wife at 1a Grove Flats, Grove Place, Ealing (T Division), in September 1943 was made even more shocking by the victims’ youth and vulnerability.33 The killers had left a note to Mrs Brewer’s husband near the battered bodies: Dear Ernie, I am sorry to do this to you, and Please God forgive me, but I am afraid your wife was very imorale [sic]. We are going the same way soon and I hope just as quickly. We didn’t know you personely [sic] but we knew your heart and beleive [sic] me when you get over the shock you will be better off. God forgive us.34

Twenty-two-year-old deserter aircraftman, Charles Koopman, who had been a former beau of Mrs Brewer, was found guilty and hanged. His wife, also called Gladys, was discharged as she had only removed the rings from the dead woman’s fingers. The extreme violence and paltry gains of this murder were typical of the murders committed by deserters, which added to the public perception that military training lent itself to violent criminality.35 Twenty-twoyear-old Iris Miriam Deeley of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) was found strangled with her scarf in the allotments at the Well Hall railway station in Eltham (R Division) on 14 February 1944.36 She had been seen on a train talking to a soldier, and a pair of men’s khaki gloves and size 10/11 men’s shoe prints were found at the scene. While the police hunted for these clues, the murderer was caught by chance. Police stopped Ernest Kemp in St Pancras station because he was in British Army uniform but carrying a US Air Force valise. At the police station he admitted having stolen it, and was also carrying Deeley’s wallet, clothing coupon book and large silver cigarette case. Deeley’s murder highlighted worries over female behaviour, in particular women’s wartime chastity and fidelity. Just as Koopman tried to exonerate his actions by accusing Brewer of immorality, so female victims’ association with the soldiers who subsequently attacked them had to be justified in order to maintain their innocence as victims. In this case, the police exonerated Deeley as ‘a woman of some education and of good class. As far as can be

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92  Murder Capital ascertained she was a person of reasonably good moral character.’ That she was engaged to be married to police officer W.J. Quill, then in the RAF, also lent her respectability.37 Deeley was excused from any moral culpability for leaving the train with an unknown man, as their shared uniform conferred a fellowship which made Kemp’s violation seem even more shocking.38 A similar anxiety about female behaviour underlay the most infamous wartime murder case, involving American deserter Private Karl Gustav Hulten.39 On 3 October 1944 he met eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Marion Jones in a tea shop. Both were taking advantage of London’s impersonality to create new identities for themselves; Hulten introduced himself as Ricky, a lieutenant in the US Army, and Jones told him she was a striptease dancer named Georgina Grayson. During their conversation, Jones told Hulten that she wanted to do something dangerous, like being a gun-moll, and he invented a past as a Chicago gangster. They then embarked on a six-day robbery spree. On 6 October the couple hailed a taxi on Hammersmith Broadway, driven by George Heath. Hulten shot Heath, Jones rifled his pockets and they stole his taxi. Hulten was later arrested getting into the taxi, which he had parked on the street outside another woman’s house. In this case, the US secretary of state ordered that Hulten be tried before a British court and not by court martial, as a British subject was concerned in his crimes. Both Hulten and Jones were subsequently convicted of murder at the Central Criminal Court and sentenced to death.40 The passing of the death sentence on Jones as a young woman with no previous record was controversial, and she was reprieved, although Hulten was executed on 8 March 1945. The callousness of the murder and the sordidness of the killer turned the ‘cleft chin murder’, as it was known, into a symbol of the moral degeneration of the nation. The link with fictitious American gangsters seemed to point to a national degradation and weakness, similar to earlier anxieties identified by Andy Davies as underlying the rhetorical link between Glasgow and Chicago.41 The murder itself and public interest in it reflect the deep 1940s fascination with interwar American crime fictions and films.42 The public interest in the crime and the outcry against Jones’ reprieve, including ‘SHE SHOULD HANG’ chalked on the walls of her hometown, was, according to George Orwell in his 1946 essay, ‘The decline of the English murder’, evidence of the ‘brutalizing effects of war’: ‘Indeed, the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period.’43 The outcry at the murder also pointed to fears that universal military conscription was allowing criminals to arm themselves at the state’s

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  93 expense, making deserters even more of a threat to the civilian population.

Crimes committed by servicemen The public’s anxiety over crimes committed by soldiers led to a private commission for the Metropolitan Police from the War Office to compare crimes in London committed by servicemen with those committed by civilians over a four-week period in July 1942 (see Table 4).44 In this month, 1,045 men in the services were charged, with 788 army personnel, fifty-three from the navy, forty-one from the RAF, thirty-seven Canadian troops, five Allied troops, sixty British seamen and sixty-one foreign seamen. In the same month 2,921 civilian men were charged (878 under the age of nineteen). Table 4: Crimes committed by servicemen and civilians in London, July 1942

Thefts Other indicted Drunkenness Absentees Deserters Non-indicted Total

Servicemen

Civilians over 19

136 28 68 536 186 91 1,045

650 44 419 – – 930 2,043

Civilians under 19 598 6 8 – – 266 878

All civilian crime 1,248 50 427 – – 1,196 2,921

Total

1,384 78 495 536 186 1,287 3,966

Source: TNA, MEPO 2/7078.

Almost 70% of the charges against servicemen were for absences without leave. The Metropolitan Police sought to reassure the War Office with the vague statement that ‘it is hard to say with more certainty, but it does not appear that the proportion charged with crime is alarming.’45 These statistics were originally to be compared with material supplied by the American forces, though this was never pursued. In their summary of the war years, the Metropolitan Police conclude that ‘offences of a criminal nature committed by members of the United States Forces in London were, on the whole, not excessive.’46 However, since the American armed forces policed their own troops and only in cases involving British civilians publicly

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94  Murder Capital disclosed details of crimes, the Metropolitan Police did not have a full picture of crimes committed by servicemen. The careful tone and the qualified and limited range of ‘not excessive’ also suggests the tensions between the Metropolitan Police and the American armed forces.47 Soldiers and sailors were suspected in forty-four cases of death by violence in the capital during the war years: eleven killed other men in fights, seven killed their wives, one soldier killed his wife and four children then himself, one killed his wife’s lover, two men killed a parent in ‘mercy killings’ and one soldier strangled a woman during a rape. In 1941, discontented soldier Philip Ward killed eight people and in 1942 four murders were attributed to ‘Blackout Ripper’ Gordon Cummins of the RAF, and five unsolved murders were attributed in police files to Canadian and US soldiers. These violent deaths suggest how personal motives were amplified by the separation of military service from ordinary life and an atmosphere of recklessness. The presence of weapons and the use of alcohol escalated fights and robberies to a deadly degree, and the number of guns used in violent crimes increased generally. Between September 1939 and August 1945 there were thirty-nine cases involving firearms recorded in the Register of Deaths by Violence. In the case in 1941, Philip Ward, a mentally unstable man who had been called up as a gunner in the army, rented a car on 11 November 1941 and drove around Chiswick shooting former members of the Chiswick Junior Conservative Club who had asked him to leave four years before.48 He killed eight people before the police ran him off the road in Stanmore Broadway, having chased him from F to S Division.49 In response to the double threat of an increasingly armed populace and a German invasion, the Metropolitan Police provided more guns to each station: subdivisional stations were issued with six pistols, sectional stations with three and divisional stations with ten pistols.50 The Metropolitan Police were also issued 3,350 rifles in July 1940, and after the .32 revolver was adopted in November 1940 25,000 revolvers and 500,000 rounds of ammunition was bought from the USA though the British Purchasing Commission.51 The proliferation of guns among police and veterans would later be a factor in the spike in family violence in the difficult years of post-war reunion and readjustment. In addition to cases in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence, anecdotal evidence from the memoirs of pathologists and coroners reveal incidents that did not make it into the Register statistics, suggesting that some murders involving soldiers were not recorded.52 In his memoir, pathologist Keith Simpson recalled examining the body of a prostitute strangled with a stocking in the lavatory of Victoria station in 1945. The shirt fibres found on her body

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  95 corresponded to the fabric of US Air Force uniforms, so the police checked service record fingerprints and found nine sets of matching prints on beer bottles in the room and on the bathroom washbasin. All nine men admitted being there, but no one confessed to being the final customer: ‘No charge was made, for there was uncertainty of who to blame, and trained fighting men’s services were vital in the European fray: more vital than the pursuit of other kinds of justice at that moment.’53 If this story is true, its omission from official records might suggest, as Howard Taylor argues, that the interest of the police and Home Office in keeping crime statistics down and the solve rate high led police forces to bury cases that could not be easily solved.54

Pubs In contrast to the homes across London which were the scenes of wartime domestic brutality, violence between strangers took place in urban spaces that were open to chance encounters. Conflicts were often fuelled by alcohol, sex and money: pubs and their cashboxes were a nexus of all three. Pubs were a popular meeting place and offered sociability and drink, though as the former increased in war the latter decreased as the supply of sugar and grain to breweries and distilleries fell.55 Pubs in London were part of a mosaic of metropolitan spaces gendered masculine, such as the elite spaces of gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall, the tailoring emporia of Savile Row and men’s department stores such as Simpson Piccadilly.56 A crime scene photograph taken at the Coach and Horses tavern in Wellington Street, Covent Garden, in December 1940 showed a typical Victorian bar of scarred wood and walls bearing a poster which read in part ‘HM Forces cannot be served refreshments between the hours of 5 am and 9 am’. Another photograph depicted a recruiting poster for ARP on the rear wall: ‘Wanted: warden for first aid parties: a real man’s job’.57 Pubs were masculine spaces characterized by heavy drinking, especially for soldiers on leave, and in which women could be vulnerable. In the investigation into the 1940 robbery at the Alexandra Park tavern in Wood Green it emerged that the three youths from Edmonton and one from Tottenham had travelled to Wood Green because one of them knew that a woman worked behind the bar and would be an easier target.58 The first wartime deaths by violence in pubs were two botched robberies in 1940 which attracted attention because of the vulnerability of the perpetrators, in one case three youths and in the other a shellshocked Canadian soldier. Unlike the robberies by deserters, in

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96  Murder Capital these cases violence was presented as an accidental byproduct of the inexperience of the would-be thieves. On 17 October 1940, during a heavy air raid in Haringey (Y Division), three young men came into the off-licence section of the Alexandra Park tavern on 94 High Road, Wood Green. One of them brandished a gun at the woman behind the counter, Mrs Gwendoline Wehrman, known as Miss Cox, demanding money. The gun went off, and she died almost immediately of a bullet wound to the chest. The three young men jumped into a motor car outside and drove away.59 As the bombs and shrapnel fell, police traced the youths by inquiring in cafés for witnesses who had seen young men with guns. Detectives from Edmonton Police traced eighteen-year-old Frank Greenaway and arrested him in Silver Street with his friend Colin Gray.60 Two other men, nineteen-year-old Felix Jenkins and eighteen-year-old Edward Hare, were also arrested and charged, and the gun was found in Jenkins’ mother’s locked sewing machine.61 The trial attracted intense public interest, and public opinion was divided between those who saw the young men as hardened criminals whose crimes had led to their inevitable fate, and those who believed the shooting was accidental and they should be treated leniently.62 The November trial at the Central Criminal Court was also heavily attended and reported. Despite the evidence of callousness – a friend of Greenaway claimed the latter told him: ‘You would have laughed last night, Johnny shot a woman’ – the youths all expressed contrition at the trial and were given sentences of three years or less.63 The Police Commissioner’s note in the file expressed his dissatisfaction: ‘The sentences awarded in this case appear to be particularly light in view of the very serious nature of the crimes they committed and it is evident that had their speedy arrest not been effected they would have continued in the commission of similar crimes of violence.’64 The perceived wartime increase in juvenile crime was attributed by social workers, teachers, police and other civil servants to the breakdown of the family and as a threat to national citizenship which would have devastating post-war repercussions.65 As a result, judicial sentencing of young criminals in the later war and post-war era would be much harsher, including death sentences given to nineteen-year-old Derek Bentley in 1952 and twenty-one-year-old Michael John Davies in 1953. A similar robbery in the Coach and Horses public house (E Division) ended badly; the nervous robber shot through his own wrist and killed barman Morris Sholman on 20 December 1940.66 Described by witnesses as a soldier wrapped in a muffler, police had to try to pick him out of the hundreds of British and Canadian troops billeted in the area. Inspector John Capstick of E Division asked the

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  97 Provost Corps of Military Police and the Canadian Provost Corps to assemble their soldiers, and hundreds of British and Canadian troops within a mile of Bow Street were rounded up from pubs, servicemen’s clubs and railways stations. One Canadian soldier reported that his friend, twenty-year-old James C.T. McCallum had had an accident, and McCallum was traced to the Trafalgar Hotel, Craven Street WC2, where he immediately confessed. His defence rested on his damaged nerves which had suffered in the bombing raids on Soho, and his desperation at being unable to convince his mother to approve of his marriage.67 Despite these pleas for sympathy he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. McCallum’s crime indicates the anxieties surrounding masculinity in wartime. He was a Commonwealth solider fighting for the mother country; his uniform conferred a corporate masculinity that his war nerves, his inability to marry independently and his physical nervousness at the time of the robbery belied. McCallum was unable to live up to the wartime ideals of masculine stoicism and sacrifice, and his crime, among others, pointed to the instability of British masculinity in wartime.68

Urban ruins Anxiety also suffused depictions of London’s embattled wartime landscape. One of the first civilian restrictions implemented in 1939 was the Control of Photography Defence Regulation, making it a crime to photograph militarily sensitive scenes, including soldiers, military installations, coastlines, street signs and bomb damage.69 Professional photographers had to acquire permits to shoot, and the publication of photographs of bomb damage in London was strictly regulated. Carefully composed photographs of ruins were used as propaganda to depict the destruction of individual historical landmarks, whose very singularity emphasized continued national survival and the cultural barbarity of the enemy. Society photographer Cecil Beaton published a collection of photographs of ruined London buildings in 1941 which displayed the ‘grandeur, tragedy and the strange vitality of wreckage’.70 His photographs were part of a wartime Gothic genre whose visual iconography of ruined cityscapes evoked both loss and survival. They were all similarly framed, with rubble in foreground and the ruined monument in the background, and often included an incongruous element such as sandbags to emphasize the contrast between embattled present and historical past.71 But even Beaton’s photography permit did not prevent a vocal crowd objecting to him

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98  Murder Capital photographing mannequin heads amidst the ‘cracked mirrors, glass fragments and wreckage of the ladies beauty shop’ on Albemarle Street.72 In a September 1940 diary entry, he described a confrontation with ‘the usual officious passer-by’ that ended with him being escorted to the local police station and warned against the dangers of antagonizing local opinion.73 The ruined landscape of war could also be physically dangerous by amplifying casual violence in the street. A fight on 5 October 1941 between five people along Richmond Way, Hammersmith, resulted in the death of sixty-year-old Benjamin Bell, who received a blow to the head when he fell against a stone coping and broken iron railings.74 Joseph Andrews was found guilty but bound over because Bell had struck Andrews’ wife, and Andrews was defending her. The trial photograph of the scene depicts the rubble in the street, possibly from bomb damage or a partial demolition of the iron railings for use as scrap metal in the war effort. The photograph renders the texture of the wall and the debris on the pavement in great detail (see Figure 7). The shallow focus and tight framing exaggerate the visual association

Figure 7: Richmond Way, Hammersmith, 1941(TNA, MEPO 1/1351)

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  99 with ruins, emphasized by the ghostly figure of a woman emerging from behind the railings on the right. The shrubbery spilling over the railings at the left of the photograph also hints at the remarkable verdancy of London bomb sites.75 As Leo Mellor has observed, photographs of London ruins depict a ‘rewilded metropolis’ in which ‘the ruin and the fragment, the incomplete or decayed structure ... offers an implicit dialogue with the past through its very existence’.76 The ruined railings, encroaching vegetation and shadowy spectator of this crime scene photograph hint that the danger inherent in these ruins was not only the violence that led to the death of Benjamin Bell but the potential end of national history in the darkest days of the war. The crime scene photographs of Richmond Way reveal a hidden witness, suggesting how often suspicious death investigations relied on people being seen and overheard in the capital’s streets. In 1942, Canadian soldier Joseph McKinstry was tried for the murder of Margaret McArthur, aka Peggy Richards, who was thrown from Waterloo New Bridge on 25 February.77 Three men who had been working on the bridge late at midnight overheard their argument and saw a drunken Canadian soldier pushing something into the case of his gas mask. When they returned in the morning they found McArthur’s broken body on the paving underneath the bridge.78 McKinstry was later seen in a canteen taking cigarettes from McArthur’s handbag, which he claimed McArthur had thrown at him. With the cooperation of the Canadian government, McKinstry was charged with murder but was found not guilty after a two-day trial, as there was no direct evidence for murder. According to Detective Inspector Smart’s notes in the police file, after McKinstry’s acquittal ‘his only comment was the rather ghoulish question as to whether he was entitled to the money in the dead woman’s handbag’.79 At all hours of day and night, witnesses were vigilant of suspicious behaviour around potential areas of wartime sabotage or espionage and willing to report unusual sights and sounds.

Racial tensions in London Several people also witnessed another late-night fight in the Euston Road and the subsequent shooting of Jan Pureveen or Paraveen, a twenty-seven-year-old Dutch seaman, on 12 January 1945, though they disagreed over what they had seen.80 A group of people were gathered around a coffee stall between numbers 135 and 145 Euston Road at about midnight: African-American US Private Robinson and his friend Mrs Alice Sheppard, two Dutch seamen, Jan Pureveen

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100  Murder Capital and Gerrit Bravenboer, another US private and two coffee stall proprietors.81 Pureveen was drunk and abusive and began taunting Robinson, shouting: ‘You black bastard, come into the street and have a fight.’ They scuffled briefly, then Robinson and Sheppard walked away in the direction of Upper Woburn Place. Pureveen shouted after them, ‘I will kill you, you black bastard.’ At that point another black man, later identified as Philip Berry, came from the direction of Woburn Place and shot Pureveen dead. It is not clear if Robinson and Berry knew each other, but identifying them and distinguishing between them were problems at the trial and in the case’s subsequent retellings, emphasizing the racism that had incited the attack in the first place. In Robert Jackson’s biography of coroner Bentley Purchase, the shooter is identified as Robinson, referred to as ‘the Negro’ who ‘grinned in a deprecating way and sensibly refused a challenge to fight’ but then returned with a revolver to do the shooting.82 Mrs Sheppard tentatively identified the shooter to the police as Philip Berry, and he was arrested several hours later at the Coloured Colonial Social Club at 5 Gerrard Street. Berry was an African Briton employed at the War Office as a stoker. The jury at the 12 March 1945 Old Bailey trial found Berry guilty and sentenced him to death, though no witness would identify him at trial and no weapon had been found, and the judge directed that there was evidence of sufficient provocation to bring in the lesser verdict of manslaughter. As in the infamous case against African-American GI Leroy Henry accused of raping a white woman in Combe Down in 1944, the court was willing to sentence a black man to death with very little corroborating evidence.83 A defence committee was set up to help Berry, and his capital sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment. Berry’s defence of an American soldier being subjected to racist abuse suggests the possibility of a powerful transnational racial solidarity in London.84 Although he denied the shooting, Berry told police officers after he was arrested that ‘No men are born niggers. They are born coloured. I am a man, not a child.’85 The owner of the Coloured Colonial Club, Ernest Marke, was a former seaman from Sierra Leone who had himself experienced unprovoked violence from white GIs.86 He described the shooting in his memoir as the heroic defence of a stranger’s rights: ‘[Berry] tapped the big man on the back and told him to lay off the GI. Naturally when the big bully looked round and saw that it was another nigger and a little one at that, he lifted his hand to hit Berry – but that was the last thing he ever did.’87 While colonial subjects and African Britons had experienced and resisted racism in British society in the 1930s, the scale of discrimination faced by African-American GIs, African Britons,

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  101 Africans and West Indians in wartime Britain had far-reaching postwar effects.88 It underscored African-American demands for greater equality, and was instrumental in destabilizing British efforts to bolster imperial loyalties in the West Indies and in Africa.89

Bomb sites These suspicious deaths show that altercations in London’s streets and pubs could be observed and overheard even at night and in the blackout. The bombing raids had also created new public spaces that were secluded but accessible: bomb sites. During the war London housed a secret world of bombed-out buildings used for illicit meetings, sexual activities and children’s games.90 Bomb sites were also places in which murder victims were discovered, whose killers were rarely traced. For instance, on 13 October 1941 the body of Maple Church, a nineteen-year-old clerk for Hackney Borough Council, was found in a row of badly damaged buildings at 225 Hampstead Road near Mornington Crescent.91 Her gas mask, handbag and torch were found scattered and her money was missing. She had spent the previous evening with a friend at the cinema in Leicester Square. Bentley Purchase believed she had gone to a pub with a man, probably a serviceman, and had gone to the bombed house with him for sex. Passers-by heard screams around 9:45 p.m. coming from the house, though nobody notified the police.92 After Gordon Cummins was found guilty of the murder of Evelyn Oatley in April 1942, the entry in Register of Deaths by Violence was amended with a note that he was responsible for Maple Church’s death. The mystery of the unsolved case as well as the paradox of the character of Maple Church, the respectable daughter and employee who had contraceptives in her handbag, exemplified the anxieties of a wartime London whose ruins framed deadly violence. Mrs Lucy Wirtz, who lived in the flats opposite the bomb site, told police it was an area known for criminal activity, and that men took advantage of the ruins to try to entice women in to the darkness: ‘Men hang about at night and I have been accosted three times within a distance of 100 yards ... I often hear screams and the sounds of running feet. I suppose the sounds I hear are of girls who have been molested running away in the blackout.’93 Mrs Wirtz was one of the few who hinted at the sexual danger posed by ruins in wartime, by reversing the popular image of female prostitutes luring men into darkness. Her description of the bomb site as a place of sexual danger for women was an unusual one, perhaps because it

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102  Murder Capital cast the threat of sexual violence beyond prostitutes and into the realm of a respectable woman like Maple Church. The two other cases of bodies found in bombed houses also suggest sexual danger. Eleven-year-old Sheila Wilson was found under the floorboards of a bombed house in Leahurst Road, Lewisham, in 1942, murdered by her neighbour Patrick Kingston, a former ARP stretcher-bearer injured in a raid.94 Forty-year-old Sarah Parry, found in a bombed house on the Kilburn Road in Hampstead, had been killed after a fight with James Christopher Walsh, who refused to pay for sex. According to Walsh, Parry used the bombed house regularly, as it was near the pub at the back of the Kilburn Empire.95 The wartime use of bombed houses shadowed that of the private home: bomb sites offered privacy for sexual acts and but gave little protection to the women who became victims therein.

Air-raid shelters Bomb shelters were also temporary wartime spaces that could be used for criminal purposes. The government’s initial shelter policy was based on population dispersal during short-term raids. Communal shelters were only provided for those caught in the street or at work, or when there was no room in the back garden for the corrugated-steel Anderson shelter. The beginning of long night raids in September 1940 led Londoners to basements, church crypts and Underground railway stations, despite the government’s pleas to stay away. Within a month the government had capitulated and reversed its policy, and by December 1940 many public underground shelters were provided with bunks and toilet facilities. The Metropolitan Police were responsible for the control of crowds queuing at the entrance and maintaining good order within, including ejecting those of ‘persons in an infectious or verminous condition’.96 Welfare marshals were later appointed to the shelters to replace the police in maintaining order and guarding against breaches of public morality.97 The shelters were also policed by a special squad of policewomen called the ‘Girl Protection Patrol’, which included an inspector, eight sergeants and thirty-one constables on guard against sexual immorality.98 In addition, plainclothes policemen were on hand to prevent shelters from being used for crime when deserted in the daytime, or from being used to hide stolen goods. Despite this police surveillance, two women were found murdered in air-raid shelters during the war. Evelyn Hamilton was found strangled in a disused shelter in Montague Place W1 on 9 February 1942.99 Mrs Hamilton was a chemist passing through

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  103 London on her way to Newcastle, and was missing a handbag that had held £80. The Daily Mirror linked her murder to that of Maple Church three months before, and likewise Hamilton’s murder was also attributed in the Register of Deaths by Violence to Gordon Cummins.100 Unfortunately no likely suspect appeared for the murder of Eileen Cook, also known as Humphreys or Irish Molly, a fortyfour-year-old prostitute found stabbed and strangled in a surface shelter in Bethnal Green Road E2 on 5 February 1945. The murder was never solved.

Prostitution in wartime Although the murders of prostitutes emphasized its inherent dangers, prostitution remained a very lucrative profession for women in London during the war. Even before the influx of soldiers, Inspector Sharpe of the Flying Squad estimated that prostitutes worked four hours a day and made £80 to £100 a week, compared to the £2 made by London shop girls.101 The wealthiest prostitutes obtained clients by referral, followed by those who solicited in the streets and brought the client to a room. Lowest on the rung were those who solicited and had intercourse outside, in pre-war times in parks and dark alleys, and during the blackout almost anywhere, prompting Quentin Crisp to declare that wartime London was ‘a massive Hyde Park’ and ‘a paved double bed’.102 The New London survey of life and labour estimated that the numbers of London prostitutes had increased from 3,000 in 1931 to 6,700 in 1946, based on the assumption that arrests before the court represented approximately one-fifth of the total number.103 According to Detective Inspector John Gosling, by 1945 space for commercial sex on London streets was at such a premium that new prostitutes had to arrange to have a space cleared, either with violence, or by buying a space from a prostitute who was retiring, with an agreement to share profits for a specified time.104 During the war prostitution was very difficult to police, and the Metropolitan Police official history of the war acknowledged that the police put their energies elsewhere.105 This laissez-faire police policy towards prostitution changed towards the end of the war when concerns about vice and organized crime in capital brought a renewed interest in prosecuting prostitutes.106 The contemporary prejudices against prostitutes were reflected in references to Gordon Cummins as the ‘Blackout Ripper’, and the evocation of Victorian attitudes to prostitution, sin and punishment, echoed in the present by writers of popular histories of crime who assume that all female murder victims were prostitutes. Donald

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104  Murder Capital Thomas mistakenly identified Jeannette Cousins/Cotton as a French prostitute run by a gang in Paris, and Simon Read wrongly asserted that Maple Church worked as a prostitute in the Soho area.107 In these cases, the line between crime fiction and reality has become blurred, to the detriment of historical accuracy.

Private rooms Just as bombed houses and abandoned shelters offered privacy for the violence committed for gain or pleasure, Londoners living alone were also vulnerable in their rooms and flats. On 13 April 1941 fiftysix-year-old George Ambridge was beaten to death and robbed in his rooms in 2 Hampton Road, Kilburn (X Division), and the man convicted of his murder eight months later was only tenuously linked to the crime.108 On 17 October 1941, widow Edith Humphries was found in bed with terrible head wounds in her first floor flat at 1 Gloucester Crescent NW1 (D Division).109 Another unsolved murder coming only four days after that of Maple Church was announced by the Daily Mirror headline: ‘Murder on the first floor back: London’s fourth in a week’.110 Two years later Maurice ‘Jack’ Horner died after being assaulted by a Canadian soldier named ‘Rex’ in his flat on 6 Maurice Walk, Finchley (S Division), on 2 April 1943. PC McLeod, a pensioner who had been brought back on duty, had given directions to a Canadian soldier seen leaving the flat that night, but had not asked to see the soldier’s papers, and he was never traced.111 While contemporary reportage painted Horner as a Good Samaritan who had offered a soldier a meal, the police file suggested that Horner was a homosexual who often picked up men in pubs and brought them home, with his wife’s acceptance. They suggested that Horner may have made advances to the soldier after a midnight meal and a cup of tea and the soldier beat him then robbed him. The crime was never solved. Soldiers were also suspected in the deaths of three prostitutes in the final years of the war, though none was charged. Forty-four-yearold Evelyn Hatton was found dead in her expensive Mayfair flat at 44 Duke Street W1 (C Division) on 16 December 1944.112 On 3 January 1945, Audrey Stewart was found suffering from severe head injuries in her thirty-shilling a week room in Sir George’s Drive, off Buckingham Palace Road SW1 (B Division).113 She was the middleaged wife of a leading aircraftman serving abroad and worked the Victoria and Piccadilly beats in slacks and white headscarf. Two possible airmen known to be clients were suspects; one had an alibi

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  105 and the other did not match the two fingerprints found on a whisky bottle in the room.114 American soldiers were also suspected of bludgeoning to death Gertrude Rose, a forty-six-year-old prostitute found dead in her Brixton flat with severe head injuries from her own shillelagh on 16 March 1945.115 She solicited in Leicester Square at night and Brixton during the day and was ‘renowned for her kindness and generosity’ among her friends.116 Pathologist’s assistant Molly Lefebure’s description of Rose’s kitchen suggests these motherly qualities: on the kitchen dresser were a tea-set, a tin of Poison Gas Ointment Number 1, a big box of face powder, a sewing basket, an American candy bar, a pink comb and a packet of cheap cigarettes.117 The only evidence of her profession were two pound notes found tucked under a cushion in the sitting room, and the many letters from American soldiers. Detectives travelled to interview the most ardent writer, Lieutenant Powers at his base in Shipdham, Norfolk, and were at first excited when clothing and shoes with reddish stains like dried blood were found in his room. Chemical tests, however, showed the stains to be silver nitrate, used by the US armed forces as a chemical prophylactic against venereal disease. After intercourse, a soldier would insert a small tube of silver nitrate into the canal of the penis, smear his groin with calomel ointment and wrap his genitals in a small canvas bag for four hours. The urine afterwards was a deep red colour, and the stains on Powers’ clothing were the result of an overenthusiastic relief.118 The police had no leads. A conference of the divisional detective inspectors of B, C and L Divisions discussed the possibility of connections between ‘three recent murders’, presumably including those of Hatton and Stewart, but concluded they could not be the work of the same perpetrator.119 Despite the forensic evidence that Gertrude Rose had been brutally bludgeoned while lying on her back on a soft surface, and that her hands and arms bore numerous defence wounds, the Southwark coroner J.W. Hulme asked the inquest jury to return an open verdict. He erroneously stated that an inquest had to name the presumed killer, and that Rose herself may have been the aggressor: The law would presume it to be murder unless it could be proved to be manslaughter or accidental, but if you brought in a verdict of murder you would have to say against whom. It cannot be said whether the woman herself was the aggressor. If it could be proved she was the correct verdict would be manslaughter. There is insufficient evidence to disclose what person inflicted these wounds and the only thing left for you to do is to return an open verdict.120

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106  Murder Capital Hulme may have been ignorant of the law, but his instructions also show a clear prejudice against Rose which was at odds with the extensive police investigation which took detectives far afield.

Conclusion The Second World War transformed the capital, as huge demographic shifts brought new international migrants to the city. Soldiers, deserters and prostitutes feature prominently in the Register of Deaths by Violence, as they came to a metropolis where they were unknown and where their occupations pushed them to the edges of civic society. Violent crimes took place in the shadows of wartime ruins and their suggestion of national destruction. Strangers met in the streets, pubs and cafés of Soho, Covent Garden and Leicester Square, and in the hidden world of rubble, shelters and bombed houses. Here people talked, laughed, drank together, had sex for pleasure or for money, fought, hit and robbed each other. Suspicious deaths investigations reveal instances where it all went wrong. The challenge of finding and tracing perpetrators among the shifting population of the capital made investigating violent crimes more difficult for the Metropolitan Police. As in cases of suspicious deaths as a result of illegal abortions discussed in the next chapter, police had to rely increasingly on forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony to counteract the anonymity of chance encounters in the capital.

Notes 1 Edward Smithies, Crime in Wartime (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 152. 2 Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008); Anne Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity: Women and the English Gas Industry, 1889–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1998). 3 See Geoffrey Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Robert McKay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); and Ken Wakefield , The Blitz Then and Now: May 1941–May 1945 (London: Battle of Britain Prints International, 1990).

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  107 4 See R.M. Titmuss, A History of the Second World War: Problems of Social Policy (London: HMSO, 1950); and Travis Crosby, The Impact of Civilian Evacuation in the Second World War (London: Croom Helm, 1986). 5 Joanna Mack and Steve Humphries, London at War: The Making of Modern London 1939–45 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985), p.  26; and Philip Ziegler, London at War (London: SinclairStevenson, 1995), p. 94. 6 Ziegler, London at War, p. 96. 7 Class ‘C’ Aliens had previously been considered of no security risk, and included many refugees from Nazi oppression. Both interned fascists and aliens shared quarters at Pentonville Prison for a few weeks. Terence Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice since 1945 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 20. See Matthew Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); James J. Barnes, Nazis in Pre-War London, 1930–1939 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); and Dave Renton, Fascism, Antifascism, and Britain in the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000). 8 See Mack and Humphries, London at War, p. 29. 9 Ziegler, London at War, p. 97. See also Judith Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 10 ‘Run Over and Bombed Out – Refugee who Committed Suicide’, Hampstead and St John’s Wood News and Golders Green Gazette (1 May 1941), p. 3. 11 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 3/2196. 12 ‘Death Sentence for Woman Refugee: Suicide Pact with Mother’, The Times (10 December 1941), p. 2. 13 Report of the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis (1939), in Smithies, Crime in Wartime, p. 47. 14 John C. Spencer, Crime in the Services (London: Routledge, 1954), p. 125. 15 In 1940 the Free French consisted of French troops in England, volunteers from the Anglo-French community and a few units of the French Navy. See Charles De Gaulle, Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964); and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, French First Army (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952). 16 See C.P Stacey, The Canadian Army, 1939–1945: An Official Historical Summary (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1948); and G.D. Sheffield, The Redcaps: A History of the Royal Military Police and its Antecedents from the Middle Ages to the Gulf War (London: Brassey’s, 1994). 17 Sheffield, The Redcaps, p. 145. 18 Sheffield, The Redcaps, p. 146.

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108  Murder Capital 19 Clive Emsley describes how Metropolitan PC Charles Hanslow was faced with 200 Canadian soldiers, some armed with tools from nearby roadworks, trying to rescue other Canadian soldiers being held at West End Central. Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby: A History of Policing from the 18th Century to the Present (London: Quercus, 2009), p. 238. 20 Emsley, The Great British Bobby, p. 237. 21 TNA, MEPO 3/3067. 22 Spencer, Crime in the Services, p. 52. 23 Report of the Commissioner of the Metropolis (1945), in Smithies, Crime in Wartime, p. 51. Harbouring a deserter was also a crime punishable by up to six months in prison, the harshest sentences brought upon business owners who wanted the deserter to work in return for food and shelter. 24 Harry Daley, This Small Cloud: A Personal Memoir (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), p. 197. 25 Daley, This Small Cloud, p. 197. 26 Meier, Property Crime in London, p. 113. 27 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 28 TNA, MEPO 3/2173. 29 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 30 ‘Two Hunted in Wave of Theft and Murder’, Daily Mirror (23 December 1942), p. 1. 31 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and CRIM 1/1540. 32 Alyson Brown, ‘Crime, Criminal Mobility and Serial Offenders in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Twentieth Century History, 25:4 (2011), 551–68. 33 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 34 TNA, MEPO 3/2260. 35 Meier, Property Crime in London, p. 112. 36 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 3/2269. 37 TNA, MEPO 3/2269. 38 See Sonya Rose, ‘Sex, Citizenship and the Nation in World War Two Britain’, American Historical Review, 103:4 (1998), 1147–76; and Sonya Rose, ‘Girls and GIs: Race, Sex, and Diplomacy in Second World War Britain’, International History Review, 19:1 (1997), 146–60. 39 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 3/2280. 40 TNA, MEPO 3/3067. 41 Andrew Davies, ‘The Scottish Chicago? From “Hooligans” to “Gangsters” in Inter-war Glasgow’, Cultural and Social History, 4:4 (2007), 511–27; and Andrew Davies, City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (London: Hodder, 2013). 42 Mark Roodhouse, ‘In Racket Town: Gangster Chic in Austerity Britain, 1939–1953’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 31:4 (2011), 523–41, 524.

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  109 43 George Orwell, ‘The Decline of the English Murder’, Tribune (15 February 1946) pp. 108–11. 44 TNA, MEPO 2/7078. 45 TNA, MEPO 2/7078. 46 TNA, MEPO 3/3067. 47 See David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (London: HarperCollins, 1995); and Juliet Gardiner, ‘Over Here’: The GIs in Wartime Britain (London: Collins & Brown, 1992). 48 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and CRIM 1/1366. 49 ‘Shooting Affair in London Streets: Soldier Charged with Three Murders’, The Times (4 December 1941), p. 8. 50 TNA, MEPO 3/3067. 51 TNA, MEPO 3/3067. 52 There is no record of this case in the Registries of Deaths by Violence (TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4) and I have failed to find it mentioned in the Resume of Important or Interesting Crimes Committed in the Metropolitan Police District between the Years 1935–9 in TNA, MEPO 3/4979. The file for 1941–47 is closed. TNA, MEPO 3/2019. 53 Keith Simpson, Forty Years of Murder (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), p. 203. 54 Howard Taylor, ‘Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s’, Economic History Review, New Series, 51:3 (August 1998), 569–90. 55 By 1940 beer production was down by one-twentieth and whisky by two-thirds. Norman Longmate, How We Lived Then (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 269. 56 For the importance of the pub to working-class and masculine identities generally, see Mass Observation’s The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study (London: Victor Gollancz, 1943); Amy MilneSmith, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Bronwen Edwards, ‘A Man’s World? Masculinity and Metropolitan Modernity at Simpson Piccadilly’, in David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short (eds.), Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), pp. 151–67. 57 TNA, MEPO 3/2174. 58 TNA, MEPO 3/2170. 59 Jenkins used his boss’s car, a Studebaker, as the getaway car. That same night they stole sixteen wireless sets from an electrical shop in Silver Street, which they sold to a receiver at Hill’s café for £18. ‘Counsel Tells Story of Alleged Hold Up’, Observer (15 November 1940), p. 5. 60 TNA, MEPO 3/2170.

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110  Murder Capital 61 ‘Counsel Tells Story of Alleged Hold Up’, Observer (15 November 1940), p. 5. 62 ‘Four Youths on Murder Charge’, Observer (25 October 1940), p. 2. 63 ‘Murder Charge – Bullet Produced’, Observer (22 November 1940), p. 5. For more on juvenile sentencing, see Basil Henriques, The Indiscretions of a Magistrate (London, George G. Harrap & Co., 1950); and Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 64 TNA, MEPO 3/2170. 65 See Kate Bradley, ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the Public Sphere: Exploring Local and National Discourses in England, c.1940–1969’, Social History, 37:1 (2012), 19–35; Kate Bradley, ‘Inside the Inner London Juvenile Court, c.1909–1950’, Crimes and Misdemeanours, 3:2 (2009), 37–59; and David Smith, ‘Official Responses to Juvenile Delinquency in Scotland during the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 18:1 (2007), 78–105. 66 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 3/2174. 67 TNA, MEPO 3/2174. 68 See Sonya Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes: Masculinities in Wartime Britain’, in Stephan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinity at War and in Peace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 69 TNA, CAB 75/12/12: Control of Photography. Defence (General) Regulations, 1939. 70 Cecil Beaton, History under Fire: 52 Photographs of Air Raid Damage to London Buildings 1940–1 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1941), p. vi. Recent work by Julia Torrie on the amateur photography of German soldiers in France suggests instead that Germans had a fond appreciation for French culture and architecture: Julia Torrie, ‘“Every German soldier Carries a Camera”: Photography, Tourism and the German Occupation of France, 1940–44’, lecture at Huron University College, 2 October 2013. 71 See Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds.) British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999); Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 72 Cecil Beaton, The Years Between: Diaries, 1939–44 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), p. 40. 73 Beaton, The Years Between, p. 40. 74 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 1/1351. 75 Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archeology and the British

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Suspicious deaths and strangers in wartime London, 1939–45  111 Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 9. 76 Mellor, Reading the Ruins, p. 3. 77 TNA, MEPO 3/2208. 78 Keith Simpson, Forensic Medicine (London: Edward Arnold, 1947, 1951 edn), p. 92. 79 TNA, MEPO 3/2208. 80 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2288. 81 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2288. 82 Robert Jackson, Coroner: The Biography of Sir Bentley Purchase (London: Harrap, 1963), p. 163. 83 Graham Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in WWII Britain (London: I.B.Tauris, 1987), pp. 1–4. 84 Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 85 TNA, MEPO 3/2288. 86 Ernest Marke, In Troubled Waters: Memoirs of my Seventy Years in England (London: Karia, 1986), p. 116. 87 Marke, In Troubled Waters, p. 141. 88 Daniel Whittal, ‘“In this Metropolis of the World we Must Have a Building Worthy of our Great People”: Race: Empire, Hospitality in Imperial London, 1931–1948’, in Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken (eds.), Africa in Europe (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 76–98, 77; and Daniel Whittall, ‘Creating Black Places in Imperial London: The League of Coloured Peoples and Aggrey House, 1931–1943’, London Journal, 36:3 (November 2011), 225–46. 89 See David Killingray (ed.), Africans in Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1994); Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull; and Sonya Rose, ‘Race, Empire and British Wartime National Identity’, Institute of Historical Research, 74:184 (2001), 220–37. 90 See, for example, John Boorman’s autobiographical 1987 film Hope and Glory, and Walter Probyn’s memoir, Angel Face:The Making of a Criminal (London: George Allen Unwin, 1977). 91 Jackson, Coroner, p. 117. 92 ‘Park Hunt for Clue in Murder’, Daily Mirror (28 October 1941), p. 16. 93 TNA, MEPO 3/2193. 94 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 3/2226. ‘Child’s Body Found under Floor’, The Times (21 July 1942), p. 2. 95 TNA, MEPO 20/4; Jackson, Coroner, p. 163. 96 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. 97 TNA, MEPO 3/3067. 98 ‘Special Squad of 40 Policewomen Will Patrol London where Incidents Reported’, Montreal Gazette (1 January 1941), p. 10; and

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112  Murder Capital Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War (London: John Murray, 2004), p. 72. 99 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 3/2206. An article from the Star observed: ‘Residents in Montagu-place include titled people’, Star (9 February 1942). 100 ‘Woman Found Strangled in Shelter’, Daily Mirror (11 February 1942), p. 4. 101 F.D. Sharpe, Sharpe of the Flying Squad (London: John Long, 1938), pp. 106–7. 102 Smithies, Crime in Wartime, p. 137, Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 154. 103 London School of Economics and Political Science, The New Survey of London Life and Labour,Volume IX: Life and Leisure (London: P.S. King and Son, 1935), p. 298. 104 John Gosling and Douglas Warner, Shame of a City (London: Panther, 1960). 105 TNA, MEPO 3/3066. 106 See Stefan Slater, ‘Containment: Managing Street Prostitution in London, 1918–1959’, Journal of British Studies, 49:2 (April 2010), 332–57. 107 Thomas, An Underworld at War, p. 3; and Simon Read, Dark City: Crime in Wartime London (London: Ian Allan Publishing, 2010), p. 65. 108 TNA, MEPO 20/3. After his release in 1955, O’Connor went on to become a celebrated BBC playwright, though he never received the pardon for which he fought. TNA, CRIM 1/1384. See ‘Jimmy O’Connor: Obituary’, Telegraph (5 October 2001). www.telegraph. co.uk/news/obituaries/1358481/Jimmy-OConnor.html. 109 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 3/2206. Jackson, Coroner, pp. 446–8. 110 Daily Mirror (15 October 1941), p. 1. 111 TNA, MEPO 3/2250. 112 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 113 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 114 Jackson, Coroner, p. 137. 115 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2219. She lived in Flat 4, Southey Road, Brixton SW19 (District L). 116 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. 117 Molly Lefebure, Evidence for the Crown: Experiences of a Pathologist’s Secretary (London: W. Heinemann, 1955), p. 207. 118 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. 119 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. 120 TNA, MEPO 3/2219.

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4 Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53 Introduction Women’s deaths as a result of illegal abortions were unique among the categories of suspicious deaths in London in that the victim conspired with her killer. Women seeking abortions, their helpers and their abortionists were all acting illegally and colluded in secrecy, which made tracing the abortionist responsible for a woman’s accidental death very difficult for the police. The Metropolitan Police investigations of women’s suspicious deaths as a result of abortions in the middle of the century reveal a secretive network operating in the capital, with covert referrals, hidden letters, clandestine visits and private rooms in which the operations took place. Even victims dying in hospital often refused to name their abortionist, leaving the historian the difficult task of interpreting these silences: were such women protecting their abortionists or afraid of criminal prosecution themselves should they recover? The coroners’ reports, police files, newspaper articles and criminal depositions reveal glimpses of the lives of women seeking abortions, of the motivations of abortionists and how the two found each other through complex networks of referrals that spread across the United Kingdom. Police notes reveal that women seeking abortions travelled to London from Liverpool, Berkshire, Surrey, Essex, Sussex, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Hampshire, Cambridgeshire and Scotland, making London the capital of medical and amateur abortions. Women’s deaths from illegal abortions are not generally considered in the historiography of crime, as they were seldom reported in the newspapers and rarely depicted in crime scene photographs or in popular culture. Such deaths were nevertheless significant to understandings of suspicious deaths and of contemporary police investigations. Women’s suspicious deaths as a result of illegal abortions made up 18% of the total recorded deaths in the Register of Deaths by Violence kept by the Metropolitan Police between 1933 and 1953, rising to a peak of 37% and 41% in the years 1943 and 1944.1 Deaths from abortion also reveal an unacknowledged

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114  Murder Capital effect of the Second World War on women; deaths were highest during the war as men’s absences meant there were fewer opportunities to legitimize pregnancies. The need for women to work, an increase in extramarital affairs and the difficulties of raising children under rationing and wartime privations were also likely factors leading women to seek abortions.

Abortion in urban space Women’s deaths from criminal abortion reveal the institutional ordering of the city, both of the medical profession that was involved in a number of the high-profile cases and of the criminal investigations that followed suspected abortionists across London and England. While the Register excluded many suspicious deaths from abortions in which criminal charges were not brought, cases from the Register still provide a compelling geography of criminal abortion focused on the districts of London north of the river, and taking place in borrowed flats, rented rooms, at least one hotel and in doctors’ surgeries.2 The deaths recorded between 1933 and 1953 in the Metropolitan Police Register of Violent Deaths showed the most concentrated number of cases of maternal death in London as a result of illegal abortion: fifteen in F Division of Inner West London, which included the poorer districts of Paddington, Notting Hill and Notting Dale, as well as the more prosperous areas of Kensington. Bentley Purchase, who was known as a crusader against abortionists, was the local coroner, and his exhaustive investigations could have been a factor in increased prosecutions and better record keeping in the district.3 The two areas with the next highest numbers were larger outer districts: seventeen deaths occurred in N Division stretching north-east from Islington to Waltham Abbey and sixteen deaths took place in S Division, which reached north-west from St John’s Wood to Aldenham. In contrast, only three cases were recorded in V Division, which encompassed the south-west from Wandsworth to Surbiton, and one case each was recorded in A Division, Westminster and M Division, which stretched south-east from Southwark to Deptford. Recorded maternal deaths from abortions did not necessarily reflect their occurrence, since defining illegal abortion rested on complex forensic and legal tests. After the 1926 Coroners Amendment Act, post-mortems on suspicious deaths were increasingly performed by pathologists, and doctors were advised by detailed instructions in forensic textbooks how to recognize the signs of instrumental abortion.4 Patterns of police investigation also reflect the efforts of Spilsbury and

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  115 Purchase to convict professional abortionists, particularly doctors, whom they saw as preying on vulnerable women. Investigations of maternal death by abortion often crossed divisional boundaries as abortionists travelled to their clients or set up borrowed rooms outside their own districts. Police inquiries into the death of Phyllis Newberry in 1942 demonstrated the spatial and institutional range police had to cover in their investigations of women’s deaths as a result of abortion. On 22 July 1942 the body of a woman was found, dressed in meagre clothing and with no identification, in the forecourt of King George’s Hostel, a boy’s hostel in the Stockwell Road. The first post-mortem examination showed her to be four months pregnant, with no clear cause of death and therefore her death was automatically considered to be suspicious. Her fingerprints matched those of Phyllis Osbourne, who had been convicted of shoplifting in 1928. Police searched old voters’ lists and found her and her parents in Harringey between 1928 and 1930. A second examination by Dr Bernard Spilsbury confirmed death by shock from an attempted abortion, as well as signs that the vagina ‘had been well used’ and she had given birth to a child. The police therefore assumed her to have changed her name by marriage. Luckily her old Ministry of Labour files were cross-referenced to her married name of Newberry. The police traced her to her employers, Messr Booths’ Distillery in Turnmile Street EC1, where she had asked for a week off to go to see her evacuated daughter. Police eventually traced her Carrington Mews Dwellings, Mayfair. Her flatmate, Violet Mortlock, at first denied all knowledge of the abortion, then admitted it was to take place in Stockwell Street. She gave the police a letter that Phyllis had left in case something went wrong. The letter contained a diagram of the house’s position in Stockwell, as well as the name of Mr Fogelman, manager to Gosling, Chemist, Stockwell Road, who arranged the abortion. Police found a house at 25 Burnley Road which matched the description, leased to a Mrs Gould with one conviction for larceny but no suspicions of being an abortionist. Police raided the flat and found Mrs Gould in residence with a young pregnant girl. Gould eventually admitted that Phyllis had called on her to be aborted, and after she had died her body had been removed by Bernard Fogelman and Mrs Gould’s son Henry and dumped in the hostel yard.5 Phyllis’ death illustrates how the police used existing records to anchor the anonymous body dumped in a public space to precise geographical locations in the city: fingerprints, voter records and labour records all linked Phyllis’ body to specific addresses and spaces. Phyllis herself provided the final map that led police to her abortionist, noting both the geographical location and appearance of

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116  Murder Capital the house in Stockwell Road, and the professional coordinates of the chemist who had referred her there. The themes of secret maps, the professionalization of abortionists and the involvement of those in the medical profession recur in the police investigations of illegal abortions in this period, emphasizing the collusion of the outwardly respectable with the openly criminal. Phyllis Newberry’s police file ends with a letter from the Pharmaceutical Society requesting information on the case as it was deciding whether Fogelman should be removed from its register.

Abortions and public health The perceived prevalence of illegal abortions permeated midtwentieth-century debates on the professionalization of medicine, concerns for public health and maternal mortality and the capital’s high crime rates.6 Medical doctors were also struck off for performing illegal abortions: between 1900 and 1960, forty doctors were struck off the Medical Register for being convicted of performing illegal abortions, despite their privileged legal position.7 The investigations also suggest some of the motives of abortionists, women and their helpers. As Barbara Brookes has argued, illegal abortions in England were performed under a veil of secrecy which was only broken when something went wrong.8 In this sense criminal cases were atypical and do not reflect the number of successful abortions, which remain partially hidden. The police files of abortionists often included correspondence from previous clients whose abortions had been successful, and who were sometimes pressured into providing evidence against the accused or face criminal prosecution themselves. For example, Frederick Wall, accused of causing the death by abortion of Mary Jones in 1939, had among his possessions a letter from William Lyne, a dental surgeon from Leicestershire who with his wife Lilah had travelled to London to procure an abortion from Wall. In his police statement, Lyne asserted that he had chosen Wall because of his method of using an antiseptic solution rather than a speculum: ‘I would not have entertained the idea if I had not known he was in the habit of only using a syringe.’9 In this case the abortion, for which Wall charged £8, was successful and Lyne later wrote a letter to say that his wife had completely recovered. Cases of abortions that did go wrong do reveal some of the secrets that both parties had a vested interest in keeping, showing the commercial transactions surrounding abortions, how the parties contacted each other, where abortions took place and the motivations behind the actions of both women and abortionists.

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  117

Abortion and the law English laws prohibiting abortion, defined here as deliberately induced miscarriages, were open to wide judicial interpretation. Based on Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, the law prohibited ‘procuring miscarriages’, by defining what constituted an ‘unlawful’ abortion: ‘Whosoever, with intent to procure the miscarriage of any woman ... shall unlawfully use any instrument or other means whatsoever ... shall be guilty of felony’, left open the possibility that some abortions could be considered lawful.10 The Infant Life (Preservation) Act of 1929 suggested some circumstances in which this might be so: ‘No person shall be found guilty of an offence under this section unless it is proved that the act which caused the death of the child was not done in good faith with the purpose only of preserving the life of the mother.’11 By the 1930s, the accepted practice dictated that a premature termination of a pregnancy performed by a ‘duly qualified and registered medical man’ acting in good faith to preserve the life of the mother would not be prosecuted.12 Determining whether an abortion was legal therefore hinged on whether the abortionist was medically trained or not, whether they were acting ‘in good faith’ or from some other motive, and whether the woman’s life was in danger. The difficulties of interpreting this law were highlighted by the 1938 trial of obstetrician Mr Aleck Bourne for aborting the unwanted child of a fourteen-year-old rape victim. Bourne had performed abortions on under-aged girls before, but chose to draw attention to this case to highlight the problem of unclear laws on abortion and the differences in accepted medical practice between London and the provinces and between specialists and general practitioners.13 The Bourne case also revealed the extent to which class difference affected access to abortions: middle-class women could afford to pay medical specialists’ fees and thus had access to abortions which were in general safer and immune from criminal prosecution. While Bourne’s acquittal seemed to offer some protection to registered doctors, it may have increased police scrutiny on doctors; twenty-three of the forty doctors struck off the Medical Register between 1900 and 1960 for performing illegal abortions were struck off after 1935. The Bourne case also highlighted what was perceived to be a general increase in illegal abortions across Britain. In 1938 the InterDepartmental, or Birkett, Committee on Abortion was called to investigate the prevalence of criminal abortion.14 The professional experiences of the fifty-five witnesses, thirty of whom were doctors or midwives, were reinforced by Home Office records showing that

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118  Murder Capital the national annual average of seven convictions between 1900 and 1904 increased exponentially to fifty-seven convictions in 1937.15 The Metropolitan Police’s Register of Deaths by Violence from 1933–53 confirms the prevalence of death from abortion, identifying illegal abortions as a cause of maternal death in 176 out of 954 suspicious deaths (see Table 5). Police files, reports of inquests and records of criminal trials at the Central Criminal Court also document at least nine other women’s deaths from abortion in London in the same period not included in the Register.16 Table 5: Maternal deaths from abortions in London, 1933–53 Year

1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953

Total suspicious deaths 29 30 29 30 37 43 46 50 51 57 59 58 66 53 54 55 50 37 30 48 43

Womens’ deaths from abortions

Unsolved abortion Cases ruled death cases self-inflicted

0 3 2 0 3 10 7 5 13 9 22 24 19 8 9 4 8 6 7 9 7

0 2 1 0 0 0 1 2 1 0 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 6 0 14 13 3 0 0 0 0 0 1 4 5

Source: based on TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

This rise in the number of women’s deaths attributed to abortions could be linked to increased vigilance on the part of the Metropolitan

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  119 Police or a shift in the recording of doubtful cases. The rise was also attributed to the expansion of medical forensic expertise. After the Coroners Amendment Act of 1926, coroners increasingly turned to post-mortems instead of public inquests to determine the cause of suspicious deaths, potentially uncovering evidence of death difficult to see from a superficial examination of the woman’s body.17 As the Birkett Committee showed, the medical detection of illegal abortion grew as London autopsies were increasingly performed by pathologists rather than general practitioners.18 The increase in numbers could also be due to changes in record keeping as many hospitals were transferred from the jurisdiction of the Poor Law to local councils. For example, the numbers of women admitted as a result of abortions to London County Council hospitals rose from 2,667 in 1931 to 3,892 in 1937.19 Yet, despite a thorough investigation of the problem and its costs to maternal health, the Birkett Committee ended with no policy recommendation except to enforce the existing law more effectively. Only two committee members, Dr Watts Eden and Lady Ruth Balfour, supported the recommendation that local clinics provide information about birth control to women on request.20 Meanwhile Mr Justice McCardie of the High Court, King’s Bench Division drew public attention to the inconsistency of the law on abortion by refusing to inflict severe sentences on abortionists, stating that the laws should be changed.21

Investigating deaths resulting from abortion Contemporary legal and political battles over abortion reflect the complexities of the investigations of women’s deaths as a result of abortion. The cases in the Metropolitan Police’s Register of Deaths by Violence were arguably not typical of abortions because they were failures, but they do reveal how police investigations into deaths from illegal abortions worked. The first set of clues concerned the body of the woman itself. Coroners, policemen and police detectives had to assess if there were any suspicious circumstances at the scene where the body was found. Police were alert to signs of any physical evidence of instrumental interference at the scene of the suspicious death of a woman of child-bearing age, including blood, syringes, soap, surgical instruments, brown paper or rubber sheets. For example, police ultimately decided not to proceed with charges of manslaughter from illegal abortion against Dr Satpute of Hampstead in the death of Emma Parsley of Colchester because they were unable to find a pair of long forceps in his surgery with which he could have performed the

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120  Murder Capital operation.22 Even in the 1943 case in which police investigating the death of a woman in St John’s Wood were surprised by a doctor who let himself into the flat while carrying a knitting needle in his medical case, police found it difficult to prove criminal intent. At the inquest, the doctor was asked, ‘Do you knit?’ and he replied that he used the needle to clean out his pipe.23 Women abortionists similarly explained that their syringes were for personal use. The medical specialists performing the post-mortems had to examine the body for physical evidence of abortion, and to determine whether the injuries were self-administered or inflicted by someone else, in which latter case a police investigation would generally follow. As these cases reveal, the first evidence of a suspicious death as a result of an abortion was often found in the post-mortem examination. Pathologists who worked for London coroners were familiar with the medical signs of abortion, and Dr Bernard Spilsbury in particular was keen to prosecute abortionists.24 Often the case would go through a coroner’s inquest before enough evidence was gathered to press criminal charges. Bentley Purchase, coroner in St Pancras from 1930 to 1959, was also keen to expose abortionists and would adjourn an inquest into these cases as many times as he thought useful and appeal to the public for advice.25 He claimed that this often worked as people’s nerves broke, and he received many anonymous letters.26 In 1937 the Islington and Holloway Press reported his recalling sixteenyear-old waitress Ethel Robinson in the fifth hearing of the case, and exhorting her to tell the truth: ‘It is just as well at your time of life that you understand what truth is.’ The victim was a thirty-seven-year-old widow Mrs Violet Dakin, manageress of a café in Pentonville Road. The waitresses recalled a woman had visited the café just before the manageress had fallen ill, and the visitor had not been seen before or since. Although one waitress identified Mrs May Spriggins, sitting in court, as the woman who had been in the café, Miss Robinson would not identify her, leading Mr Purchase to adjourn the hearing for another week so she could think it over.27 Presumably he was not in this case successful, as the case does not appear in the Metropolitan Police Register and there is no record of criminal charges being laid. Abortions were usually performed in the second or third month of pregnancy. Two invasive methods were commonly used: inserting a long thin instrument into the cervix to force it to dilate and the womb to contract and expel the foetus, or using a syringe to inject fluid into the womb to separate the sac from the womb wall and thus bring on a miscarriage. The former method required a certain amount of medical skill to find and penetrate the cervix, and pathologists would look for marks on the cervix to indicate that an instrument had been

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  121 used and that the miscarriage was therefore not natural. The liquid most often used in syringing was soap, though in 1938 suspected abortionist Maud Spear produced a bottle of brown liquid from her bag and said, ‘That’s nothing, it’s only water and a drop of cold tea. That’s to impress them.’28 Death occurred most quickly in cases of shock: a sudden collapse from reflex vagal inhibition resulting from touching the cervix or from the effects of the fluid being too hot, too cold or too corrosive.29 Syringing could also introduce air into the womb, creating an air embolism that led to collapse in minutes. Because death was almost instantaneous, those present at the scene, in the words of forensic pathologist Keith Simpson, ‘are the persons who know what was going on at the time: they are almost certain to be responsible’.30 The use of instruments also carried the danger that the vagina or the uterus could be perforated, and even without injury a septic infection from unsanitary conditions could be deadly. According to the Birkett Report, one case of septic abortion arose from an abortionist practising in a single cubicle of the women’s lavatory in the rear of a public house in South London.31 As Simpson advised, the people present at a woman’s sudden collapse were often found to be complicit in the crime. They usually claimed either that the woman had been taken unwell in the street, or that her death was due to some other cause. On 31 December 1938 Rose Levy reported to the police of G Division in the East End that a woman had knocked on her door at 23 Brunswick Buildings, Goulston Street, Stepney, and upon it being opened, cried, ‘I have been robbed of my handbag’, collapsed and died. As a result of a post-mortem by Bernard Spilsbury, Levy was arrested for attempting to procure the abortion of Minnie Cohen and for causing her death.32 In this case the police were aided by Levy’s previous conviction for a similar offence. Similarly in November 1938, a Mrs Collins called the police to 44 Adelaide Road, Hampstead (S Division), saying a woman had taken ill in the street and been taken to her friend Mrs Hawke’s house for a glass of water, where she died. The post-mortem examination of the woman, again performed by Spilsbury, showed the death of Florence Martin was due to shock following attempted abortion. Nevertheless the women stuck to their version of events through the inquest, until police investigations in Kentish Town, Holloway, Highbury and Mill Hill revealed Mrs Collins to be a confirmed abortionist who had first met Mrs Hawke when performing an abortion on her. Mrs Hawke was brought in for questioning and eventually confessed her part in the crimes.33 Like prostitutes, abortionists in London were often defined as such

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122  Murder Capital in police records and therefore at trial by their reputation in a district, relying on the information of neighbours and acquaintances. The onset of war increased the number of abortions and offered new alibis for sudden suspicious deaths. Sixteen-year-old Anita Myerovitch, a shop assistant from Windsor visiting London with her sisters on 9 February 1945, died in Frederick Street (E Division) at the same time as a V-2 rocket raid. Her body was sent to the ARP mortuary with other casualties. ARP worker Mrs Beatrice McNab reported the death at the King’s Cross police station, describing how the girl had collapsed in the street outside her house when a rocket exploded.34 One of Myerovitch’s sisters corroborated this story, but Station Sergeant Martin was suspicious because no one had noticed the girl collapse during the raid, and death from bomb blast was almost invariably instantaneous. The body was transferred from the ARP mortuary to the St Pancras Mortuary, where the post-mortem examination by Bernard Spilsbury showed death from shock as a result of trying to abort a six-month foetus. Mrs McNab was later confirmed by the police as a professional abortionist by reputation, and was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to four years’ penal servitude.35 Along with evidence from the body itself, police also put suspected abortionists under surveillance. In 1938, again according to the Islington and Holloway Press, police put the house of a suspected abortionist in Pentonville Road under watch and interviewed women coming out, collecting enough evidence to charge two women. One of the women charged, Mrs Kitchener, said, ‘My husband has done this [informed on her to police] because I have left him. He will laugh now.’36 Dr Delbert Evans of Cavendish Square was suspected by police of performing abortions for twenty years before he was finally charged and convicted in 1944, because wartime regulations allowed police to ask women leaving his practice to produce their identity cards.37 Police detectives also relied on anonymous letters, such as the two kept in the police file inquiring into the death of Miss Rose Barrett, addressed to the ‘Officer in Charge, Stratford Police Court, Stratford’: ‘Go to 51 Armagh Road, Bow. Mrs. Hodges next door gave two of her daughters illegal obbortins [sic] ... She has just had one upstairs lodger and a few more in Armagh Road been done. £1 and £2 a time, nice work.’38 A second letter presumably followed Mrs Hodges’ arrest, as it congratulated the police: ‘Sir at last you have cought [sic] Mrs. Hodges’, and directing the police to the flats on Oldford Street to inquire about abortions she performed there, pointing to their illgotten money: ‘They used to go out nearly every night, and that is the money they were going to buy the house. She has earned £8 at

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  123 it she ought to be stopped the MURDERER SHE IS.’39 These wellinformed letters pointed to local suspicions and gave police direct instructions with the essential information of names, addresses and financial details. Like witnesses to suspicious deaths in the streets, accusatory letters show the importance of public surveillance in discovering and investigating women’s deaths from abortions. For corroboration of the charges against abortionists, police often threatened to prosecute women who had undergone abortions by the accused. In the case of Dr Erskine-Gray, a police surgeon charged in 1935 with abortion and manslaughter, witness for the prosecution Miss Sparks testified, ‘When I was asked by the police to make a statement I was told that unless I did so I would be under arrest.’40 In 1939 Dr Benjamin Ling prevented a patient suspected of having been aborted by him from testifying by marrying her, so she could not give evidence against him in a court of law.41 There were also ways in which the victims themselves could give evidence, such as Phyllis Newberry’s 1942 letter with a map and directions to the house where she was going for an abortion.42 Police could also attempt to persuade women in hospital with septic infections to name their abortionists and to give dying depositions in the presence of a magistrate, which would be admissible in a court of law. For example Miss Dorothy Glossop was admitted to the Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital in London with a ruptured uterus in February 1936. From her reluctant first statement, inspectors from Metropolitan Police F Division traced her alleged abortionist, Dr Laura Sanders-Bliss. But Miss Glossop died before an official dying deposition could be taken in the presence of a magistrate and her body was too decomposed to show evidence of instrumental interference, so charges were not laid.43

Women who sought abortions The police files in cases of maternal death from illegal abortion show the mixed reactions of friends and family, some of whom sought to cover up the crime and perhaps protect the abortionist, while others willingly gave evidence to the police, whether out of guilt at their complicity or anger at the abortionist. In the case of Mary Jones, the police file shows the convoluted negotiations that led to their being informed of her death. Mary Jones was a thirty-year-old barmaid at Henry’s Long Bar on Oxford Street who had been associating with a married man, James Bayles, when she became pregnant in 1939.44 She was determined not to have the child and made an appointment with an abortionist in Brockley (P Division) on 14 November. Jones,

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124  Murder Capital Bayles and a female friend went to the flat of Frederick Wall at 169 Crofton Park Road for the procedure, where Jones died of shock. According to Bayles, Wall begged the other two to protect him, saying, ‘You can’t do that [go to the police], if you and the girl go out, I will see that everything is all right, she’ll be lost. Lots of people disappear.’45 The three of them concocted a story of finding Mary dead after an appointment with a strange woman, but Bayles could not stick to this story and went to the police station. The inspector went immediately to the address, saw the body stretched half-dressed on the bed in a pool of soapy water and lying on a rubber sheet and brown paper, clear physical evidence of the attempted abortion. In this case, Mary Jones emerges as a vivacious and independent woman, whose personality can be imagined from Bayles’ affectionate portrayal of her. These cases sometimes reveal such personal glimpses and suggest some of the circumstances that motivated women to seek abortions in mid-century London. Of the 101 women whose occupations were listed in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence, half were listed as ‘married’ or ‘housewife’, two women were listed as single, and five were listed as widows. Of the rest, eleven worked in factories,46 nine were domestic workers,47 eight had clerical occupations,48 seven women worked in retail,49 five were conductresses for the London Transport Board, three worked in the arts,50 two worked for the WAAF during the war and two were teachers. The list also included a welfare officer, a student, a hairdresser, a waitress, a barmaid and a prostitute.51 The total number of married women may have been higher than this as they may have been listed in the Register under an occupation rather than as ‘housewife’ during the war, when the National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1941 conscripted first young unmarried women and later married women up to the age of 50 into war work,.52 Married women may also have been more likely to be investigated because of their reproductive knowledge and experience. Even when a woman was married, the child was not necessarily her husband’s. In the case of Mrs Rose Barrett in 1939, the lodger was the father, and the husband promised to help his wife end the pregnancy if she would stay in the marriage.53 Single pregnant women shared married women’s motivations for abortion, with some additional pressure as the social stigma against unmarried mothers was very strong, as the Birkett Committee noted.54 While the committee members wrote that they hoped that a more ‘humane and enlightened attitude’ would come with time, one main reason they opposed legalized abortions, even in cases of underage or incestuous unions, was that that to do so would encourage ‘loose conduct’ among women, reinforcing the assumptions that underlay the shamefulness

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  125 of illegitimacy.55 Mary Jones reportedly told her married lover she would not have an illegitimate child, probably out of fear of social disgrace or the loss of her job as a barmaid.56 All the occupations listed for the women seeking abortions would be difficult to continue with a child, and those who worked in service or for the WAAF would likely have been immediately dismissed if an illegitimate pregnancy had been revealed. The women’s ages recorded in the Register show a majority, like Winifred Barlow, in their twenties. Of the 165 cases in which age was given, seventeen were in their teens (10%), seventysix were in their twenties (45%), sixty-six were in their thirties (40%) and ten were in their 40s (5%). Like illegitimate births, aborted pregnancies were concentrated at the age at which women would normally be producing children.57

Abortionists Who were the abortionists who shared responsibility for these women’s deaths? In fifty of the 176 cases of abortion resulting in death, the victim was ruled to have induced abortion herself. The number of abortions determined to be self-induced peaked in 1943, with fourteen of twenty-two cases, and in 1944, with thirteen of twenty-four deaths. These were the years of foreign soldiers flowing through the capital before the D-Day invasions in 1944, as well as a period in which illegitimate babies could not be explained to husbands stationed overseas who had not been given leave since the beginning of the war. The registrar-general’s figures for England and Wales show 255,460 illegitimate births for the years 1940–45, over 102,000 more than in the period 1934–39, though many of these were pregnancies which would have been subsequently legitimized by marriage. While extramarital conceptions remained fairly consistent, the proportion regularized by marriage fell from 70% in 1938 to 37% in 1945, and rose again to 44% in 1946 and 56% in 1947.58 The high number of abortions categorized as self-inflicted could also have been a result of police reluctance to expend too much energy on investigating these crimes. The Register notes as well as reports from coroner’s inquests suggest that the question likely asked of pathologists was, ‘Could this abortion have been self-inflicted?’ If self-abortion was a possibility, the case was usually ruled so and closed. Of course, some abortions were clearly self-inflicted; for example in 1953 Eilleen Randall, a twenty-one-year-old housewife of 8 York Mansions, Chiltern Street W1 tried to abort herself by inserting tightly rolled spills of paper, tore her cervix and died of shock.59

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126  Murder Capital Accused abortionists ranged from local women, untrained professionals and those with medical training, including dentists, chemists and surgeons. Potential customers and abortionists contacted each other through letters, word of mouth and a secret network of referrals.60 Referrals were most often based on personal acquaintanceship. For example, twenty-seven-year-old shop assistant Maud Kitching was found dead on 8 May 1938, in the flat of her half-cousins Frank Stephenson and his sister Mary in Shepherd’s Bush Road, Hammersmith (F Division).61 Under questioning, Mary Stephenson admitted writing to a friend in Durham to ask the local abortionist Mrs Pigg for advice after a first attempt with Beecham’s pills had failed. Mrs Pigg had given Miss Stephenson the name of a Mrs Taylor of Elstree, who had moved to Hertfordshire from Durham three years earlier. When contacted, Mrs Taylor confirmed the appointment by letter, asking for £1 in advance, £1 after the operation and five shillings in expenses. Likewise in 1939 Rose Barrett’s sister-in-law’s friend Mrs Ash knew a reputed abortionist by sight in the market at Roman Road, Bow, and claimed to have made the appointment for Barrett in person, never knowing the abortionist’s name.62 These cases suggest not only the network of referrals among neighbourhood women known to each other, but how this network could stretch all over England, and in some cases into the rest of the United Kingdom. These networks were not necessarily female, as has been suggested, since at least two male abortionists were found with extensive correspondence. Letters from sixty-five women were found in Victor Graham’s home, while police found suspicious correspondence with women from all over England in the files of Georges Fossard, Comte de la Vatine.63 Of the recorded suspects in cases of women’s deaths from abortion in the Police Register, sixty were women and twenty-two were men. In the cases where men were charged, at least five were the fathers of the child and were charged with conspiracy to commit abortions. Like other female friends and family of the victim, they were the most likely to have their cases discharged, or to be bound over. Of the women charged, twenty-seven were listed as housewives, six as widows and nine women’s occupations were not given. Of the rest, two were in the field of medicine, one as a dentist and one as a chemist’s assistant, seven worked in restaurants, with two café owners, two café assistants, two chefs and one bottle washer, three cleaners or domestic helps, one shopkeeper, one porter, one factory hand, one telephonist and one receptionist. Of the men charged, two were surgeons, four were chemists and one was an unlicensed plastic surgeon. The rest were mostly semi-skilled labourers, with one soldier

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  127 charged and acquitted of arranging his girlfriend’s abortion. At least three men were considered by police to be professional abortionists: Georges Fossard, Comte de la Vatine, Victor Graham and Frederick Wall, a fifty-one-year-old leather goods manufacturer who was officially unemployed but who nevertheless had a comfortable flat with a telephone installed.64 The motivation and history of the abortionist was crucial to determining not only what kind of crime had been committed, but what the penalty should be. Because of the vagueness of the law, defining a criminal abortion depended on acting in ‘good faith’ and to preserve the life of the mother. Justice Macnaghten’s ruling in the 1938 Bourne case had expanded the criteria of ‘danger to life’ to include psychological considerations, though only for registered doctors who performed abortions.65 Nevertheless, to distinguish between amateur and professional abortionists, police had to consider to what extent the abortionist was acting in ‘good faith’. The problem for police, inquest juries and the public was how to interpret the motivations behind each accused person’s actions. Police generally determined the motives of abortionists on an axis of compassion versus profit. If abortionists, generally women, confessed and told police they were only helping another woman in a time of trouble, and furthermore if they did not take money, then they were treated leniently. If, on the other hand, they had reputations as abortionists, if they tried to cover up their actions, if they accepted large fees or if there was any evidence they had performed abortions before, then they were judged to be professional abortionists preying on vulnerable women for money and were sentenced accordingly. The police notes reveal how these factors were considered in each case, and the judges’ sentencing tended to follow the evidence presented by the police. The defendant treated most leniently in this sample was Mrs Elsie Louise Fantham, a war widow with young children, accused of using an instrument and causing the death of Mrs Edith Monroe in Peckham in 1950.66 Mrs Monroe had three children and did not want any more, and a friend of hers worked in the same parcels office as war widow Mrs Fantham, who agreed to help. When Mrs Fantham was arrested, she said, ‘This is what comes of doing a good turn. I shall have to take the rap. I suppose I will get seven years.’ At the police station she burst into tears and said, ‘My children! What is going to happen to them now?’ and told the whole story.67 The South London Advertiser headline ‘Sobbing mother faces manslaughter charge’ suggests the public sympathy for Fantham, whose distress on behalf of her four children put her firmly outside the realm of the professional abortionist.68 The jury at the Old Bailey found her

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128  Murder Capital not guilty of manslaughter, she pleaded guilty to using an instrument and was bound over for two years. Mrs Fantham presented the ideal example of a person whose misguided actions in helping perform abortions were innocent of any criminal intent. When Florence Taylor, accused in 1938 of manslaughter in the death of Maud Kitching, was tracked down and questioned by police, she also stressed her altruistic motives, saying, ‘I don’t know her name. I did it because I felt sorry for the poor little thing.’69 Yet the police judged her much more harshly, because she had given a false name when first questioned, because she was known as a professional abortionist in Durham and because she had insisted on being paid part of her fee in advance. Her case at the Central Criminal Court on 13 July 1938 was heard by Mr Justice Macnaghten, who presided over Mr Aleck Bourne’s case ten days later. In Macnaghten’s direction to the Bourne case jury he unfavourably compared Taylor’s case to Bourne’s: In that case a woman without any medical skill or any medical qualifications did what is alleged against Mr. Bourne here; she unlawfully used an instrument for the purpose of procuring the miscarriage of a pregnant girl. She did it for money. £2 5s. was her fee, and she came from a distance to a place in London to do it ... Within an interval of time measured not by minutes but by seconds, the victim of her malpractice was dead on the floor.70

Macnaghten was exaggerating the suddenness of Maud Kitching’s death for effect, but his criteria for condemnation were clear: Taylor performed the abortion for money, and as a result of her lack of medical training, which he refers to as ‘malpractice’, Kitching died. Taylor was guilty because her financial motive gave her criminal intent, and the result was a guilty verdict for the crime of manslaughter while Bourne was acquitted of abortion. When questioned by police, suspected abortionists tended to admit responsibility and stress their compassionate motives. When police traced Mrs Hodges, partly through the anonymous letters they had received, she admitted the crime right away, showed the police the syringe and the type of soap (Lifebuoy) she had used and told them it was her first offence, that she did not know the woman was dead, and according to the notes, ‘She expresses her regret for what she had done and says that she did it to help the woman who didn’t want the child and she thought that what she did would help her to get rid of the child without doing her any harm.’71 Yet the police were not swayed by her explanations and concluded, ‘There is no doubt

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  129 she is a skilled abortionist and although she has not previously been convicted, she has for some time been suspected of this type of offence.’ When Mrs Hawke eventually admitted that she had aborted Florence Martin in 1938 at her flat in Hampstead, she also claimed compassionate motives: ‘I only did it out of the kindness of my heart.’72 However, since she and her friend Mrs Collins had first told a story about finding Miss Martin already ill, had destroyed all the material evidence including the syringe before calling police and had lied at the coroner’s inquest, their pleas of good intentions were not believed. The police notes did not blame the coroner Bentley Purchase for failing to shake their stories, writing, ‘These women are extremely plausible and cunning and gave their evidence at Coroner’s Court with complete confidence although severely examined by the Coroner.’73 In return, Mr Purchase wrote letters of commendation for investigating officers Detective Inspector Smith and Sergeant West: ‘You will know how often it turns out that these cases eventually fail, and it was due to the untiring and intelligent work of these officers that this case became effective: I feel that their success should not pass unnoticed’.74 It was the very plausibility of women helping other women that, according to these officers, allowed cunning female abortionists to endanger others for profit and escape punishment. Police notes in cases of deaths from abortion record the various acts believed to distinguish the professional abortionist from the amateur, including lying and destroying evidence. Paradoxically, while a level of technical sophistication distinguished medical abortions from illegal abortions, as seen in Mr Justice Macnaghten’s praise of Aleck Bourne as a man of the ‘highest skill’, advanced medical knowledge on the part of amateur abortionists was regarded by police and the courts as evidence of experience in performing abortions and therefore likely to result in heavier sentences.75 Pathologists’ reports generally noted if an instrument had been used with a degree of skill, which was interpreted to mean that the abortion could not have self-inflicted, and had to be have performed by an experienced professional abortionist.76 The payment of money to abortionists also reflected whether they were acting from compassionate motives or exploiting desperate women. In most of the cases in the Register of Deaths by Violence where the fee was recorded, it was £2 for women abortionists, and higher for men. In 1935 Winifred Gurnett refused to perform an abortion for less than thirty shillings as ‘it would not be worth her fare’.77 Both Georges de Fossard Comte de la Vatine and Esther Walsby charged £15 in 1942 and 1943, perhaps also due to higher demand during the war.78 Often the fee would be split with the person who provided the referral.79 In the 1942 case of Phyllis Newberry the ten-guinea fee was .

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130  Murder Capital split three ways: the chemist who provided the referral and the woman who provided the flat dividing £5 5s while the woman who did the actual syringing took the other £5 5s, though each was sentenced to the same two years of penal servitude.80 If the judge believed on the evidence put forward by the police that the accused was a professional abortionist, the sentence could be as much as six years (see Table 6). Table 6: Sentences for abortion-related manslaughter in London, 1933–53 Sentences Not guilty Bound over 6 months 9 months 12 Months 15 months 18 months 20 Months 2 years 3 years 4 years 5 years 6 years

Number 9 21 8 8 9 6 17 3 7 14 2 5 3

Source: TNA MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

Table 6 represents the recorded sentences of those charged with the variety of offences relating to manslaughter by criminal abortion, including conspiracy to commit abortion, in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence. The charge of conspiracy was most often levelled at those who had helped to make the arrangements or helped to pay for the abortion, and most often resulted in sentences of being bound over to keep the peace.Those with no previous convictions or police suspicions received sentences of generally eighteen months or less. The heavier sentences were for those who were considered to be professional abortionists. Those who received six-year sentences were Victor Graham in 1939, found with correspondence from sixty-five women, Beatrice Emma Cox in 1941 and Victor Ellinor, a forty-twoyear-old photographer in 1949.81 Those sentenced to five-year terms were Georges Fossard, Comte de la Vatine in 1941, Allan Openshaw, a forty-six-year-old watch repairer in 1945, Mrs Violet Springens in 1945, C.S.C MacCallum a sixty-one-year-old café proprietress in

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  131 1945, and fifty-nine-year-old trader Pius Louis Beausoleil. Though only twenty of sixty-six abortionists named in the Register were men, five of them received the heaviest sentences. While there was no doubt evidence to suggest that these men were professional abortionists, men were also more likely to be suspected of being strangers profiting from these women’s misfortunes and were thus sentenced to heavier sentences than women who were ‘friends of friends’. As the police files note in the case of Georges Fossard, Comte de la Vatine, ‘This was no ordinary case of abortion; the officers were up against unscrupulous and highly intelligent men.’82 The prejudice against male abortionists also surfaced in the case of John Robert Tate, found guilty in 1949 of manslaughter and abortion after injecting his wife Phyllis with carbolic solution. Sentenced to five years, he appealed and received a reduction to fifty-four days’ imprisonment. Although he had a prior criminal record, he had also reached the rank of captain during the war. Because he had not profited from the act, and had in fact lost his own wife, he could not be considered a typical professional abortionist and his long sentence was therefore unjust.83 By contrast, Comte de la Vatine, or Georges Fossard, represented the archetypal villainous professional abortionist, with his foreign name and shady past. In 1931 Vatine was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for unlawfully using an instrument, and while police suspected him of committing more abortions, they had no evidence. In the late 1930s he began to describe himself as a plastic surgeon, claiming to be a licensed doctor even though his only training was for nine months as a student at King’s College, which he left without passing any exams. Fossard had a surgery set up in his home in 1 Clareville Grove, Old Brompton Road, South Kensington, and had also been performing beauty treatments such as face-lifts in clients’ homes in Kensington and Knightsbridge. On 20 May 1942, his patient Helen Pickword from Liverpool was found dead in a Marble Arch hotel room littered with used bandages, medical supplies and a cigarette box with temperature readings written on the back of it. Bernard Spilsbury’s post-mortem found death was caused by sepsis from a perforated uterus. The father of the child, Edward Tickell, a married twenty-seven-year-old army captain, had arranged for the abortion and after Pickword’s death paid Vatine £15. At the fourday trial of Vatine and Tickell, the counsel for the defence, John Flowers, tried to convince the jury that the abortion had taken place in Liverpool prior to Pickword coming to London, but Spilsbury testified that the septic condition had originated only four or five days prior to death.84 The jury believed Spilsbury and the police, and Vatine was found guilty, though Tickell was acquitted. A note in the

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132  Murder Capital police file from the superintendant of D Division congratulated the investigating officers on a job well done: ‘This case was exceptionally well handled by DDI Clare and DI Freshey. When the death of the unfortunate woman was brought to their notice, they lost no time in obtaining the necessary evidence to secure the conviction of the notorious abortionist who was sentenced to five years penal servitude – a most satisfactory result.’85 The fact that Tickell was acquitted was angrily denounced in the files: ‘There is no doubt that he secured his acquittal by his meek behaviour on arraignment and the fact that he was dressed in the uniform of a captain of HM Army – a clever and successful ruse which can only be despised.’86 The dishonesty of hiding behind professional credentials – in Vatine’s case the false ones of being a doctor, and in Tickell’s case his real position as an army captain – were as despicable as the crime itself. That Tickell’s uniform was dismissed by the police as a disguise points the importance of reputation and integrity to the professions – Tickell’s alleged crime made him an imposter even when appearing in his own uniform. After his release from prison, Vatine once again created a new identity for himself, this time as an artist. In 1950 he reappeared in the courts as a defendant in a fraud case along with a former head of Oxford University’s agricultural research department. The newspaper article shows a photograph and a description of him as a ‘talented artist who has painted bishops and foreign princes’, who while in jail at Maidstone had painted a self-portrait of himself as Christ. He was again sentenced to five years.87

Uncounted deaths The Metropolitan Police’s Register of Deaths by Violence is not a complete record of women who died as a result of illegal abortions in London during this period. In 1933 the Streatham News reported an inquest by the Battersea coroner Edwin Smith into the death as a result of abortion of hairdresser Miss Irene Frances Barrett.88 Although she had named her abortionist in hospital before she died, the coroner said the name could not be given in court unless criminal charges were going to be laid. Accordingly the verdict was that her death was caused by persons unknown, and her death is not recorded in the Register of Deaths by Violence. The Metropolitan Register of Important and Interesting Cases from 1934 to 1940 also recorded the death of Dorothy Hesford in 1935 in Kilburn, and the deposition files of the Central Criminal Court reveal a 1935 case in Woolwich in which Ellen Praill died, neither of which were recorded in the Metropolitan

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  133 Police Register of Deaths by Violence.89 These omissions suggest that deaths resulting from abortion were only sporadically recorded during the 1930s, and cases which did not result in criminal charges were often left out. Cases of doctors suspected of having performed illegal abortions that led to the woman’s death were rarely recorded in the Register. The police files of the period attribute a dozen suspicious deaths of women to doctors, though in most cases the charges were not laid. For example, the death of Dorothy Glossop was not recorded in the Register, though the police believed it to have been due to an illegal operation performed by Dr Laura Sanders-Bliss.90 Dr Samuel Connor of Bloomsbury was denounced to the police by anonymous accusations in 1927, 1930, 1931, 1933, 1934 and 1935 and was suspected in over a dozen suspicious deaths of pregnant women. In each case the coroner’s jury returned an open verdict, charges were not laid and the deaths do not appear in the Police Register of Deaths by Violence.91

Doctors and deaths from abortion The Register includes six accused abortionists with some degree of medical knowledge, two surgeons and one doctor: resident surgical officer Dr Zelmanovits and house-surgeons Dr Watkin and Dr Gunewardene. Judging whether doctors performed abortions ‘in good faith’ and therefore within the bounds of the law relied on a complex set of circumstances: their perceived level of medical skill, whether they would profit unduly, whether the operation seemed medically necessary to save the life of the mother, whether they kept open records of the patient’s visits, fees and treatment, their professional reputation and other aspects of their practice. The evaluation of doctors’ motives also relied on their perceived compassion for and care of the patient. If it seemed a doctor was helping a worthy patient, as in the case of Dr Bourne’s fourteen-year-old rape victim, they were performing their duty to do their best by their patient. If they were profiting from a woman’s misfortune, they were the worst kind of professional abortionist. Their motives were also measured by the outcome; when women died, the doctor’s level of skill and motives immediately became suspect. In the 1944 case against Czech doctor Dr Alexander Zelmanovits and his friend Dr A.J. Watkin, the fact that they performed the abortion on Dorothy Muriel Davies in Dr Watkin’s flat rather than the hospital, and that she later died, put them under suspicion. When it emerged that Dr Zelmanovits had pleaded with

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134  Murder Capital Dr Watson to help him perform the operation on Davies because she was pregnant by him despite being engaged to his colleague they were both found guilty. Dr Zelmanovits as the instigator received a twelvemonth sentence while Dr Watkin was bound over.92 Dr Sumatapalage Gunewardene, who had emigrated from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the late 1930s, also performed an abortion on Grace MacLean in 1950 at the request of a friend.93 Maclean had travelled from Scotland to London looking for an abortion and was staying with her friend Nora McKissack, whose friend Mary Ann Staroszczuk had worked for Dr Gunewardene. She telephoned him to ask him to find an abortionist, and he provided the name of Mrs Hanson, a nurse on his panel. He drove the friends to Hanson’s house in Clapham then back to McKissack’s in Marylebone, where he attended Maclean until she was removed to the hospital and died.94 Both Hanson and Dr Gunewardene were convicted of manslaughter and conspiracy to commit abortion, and Dr Gunewardene was sentenced to three years, though he was released from his sentence early on the grounds of ill health.95 The investigations against Drs. Zelmanovits and Gunewardene suggest that foreign-born doctors were assessed, like English doctors, according to the professional parameters of qualification, skill and reputation. But the concerns expressed in police files about their sexual relationships with British women testified to the anxiety of ‘coloured’ doctors having intimate access to women’s bodies in the professional and the private realm. When accused, Drs Zelmanovits and Gunewardene tried to emphasize the common links of professional respectability but were ultimately judged to be lacking in the moral authority that Aleck Bourne had personified in 1938.

Conclusion The conflicting stories surrounding the death of Grace MacLean and other women in these cases suggest some of the difficulties of investigating a crime which took place in conditions of secrecy, where personal referrals extended across the city and in some cases across the United Kingdom and where evaluating criminal responsibility hinged on police interpretations of abortionists’ public reputations and motives. While Tania McIntosh’s study of abortion in Sheffield suggested that the majority of women seeking abortions in this period were married women with children who relied on their female community networks to procure one, examples from London confirm that husbands, lovers, male friends and male abortionists were also involved at each stage of procuring abortions, and that further

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  135 investigation of the roles of men in performing illegal abortions is needed.96 The Metropolitan Register of Deaths by Violence also illustrates an official reluctance to include the deaths of women from abortions in official statistics, as suggested by the cases found in other police files and the large number of abortions ruled to be self-inflicted in 1943–44. If after complex and far-ranging investigations police were able to identify and charge abortionists, most of the accused made a full confession to the police, presented themselves as compassionate helpers of women in distress, and threw themselves on the mercy of the court. Mercy for abortionists was usually not forthcoming, but for the women in the next chapter who stood accused of killing their children in moments of madness, the law provided a much greater shelter.

Notes 1 TNA, MEPO 20/3, 20/4. 2 Both Helen Pickword and Isabel Barker died in the Mount Royal Hotel, Marble Arch in D Division. 3 Robert Jackson, Coroner: The Biography of Sir Bentley Purchase (London: Harrap, 1963). 4 See for example, the chapter on ‘Pregnancy, Delivery and Abortion’ in Douglas Kerr, Forensic Medicine (London: Adam and Charles Black, 2nd edn, 1936). 5 TNA, MEPO 3/2227. 6 See Lesley Hoggart, Feminist Campaigns for Birth Control and Abortion Rights in Britain (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004); Stephen Brooke, ‘“A New World for Women”? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s’, American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 431–59; Angus McLaren, ‘Illegal Operations: Women, Doctors, and Abortion, 1886–1939’, Journal of Social History, 26 (1993), 797–816; and John Keown, Abortion, Doctors and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 7 Wellcome Library: Archives and Manuscripts. General Collections P/774, ‘Erasures from the Medical Register 1900–1934’. Details of the other erasures are found in the General Medical Council (GMC), Minutes of the British Medical Association for the years 1935 to 1960, as published in the British Medical Journal. 8 Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England, 1900–1967 (London: Croom Helm, 1988). 9 TNA, MEPO 3/844. 10 Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c.100), www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100.

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136  Murder Capital 11 The Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929. www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/Geo5/19-20/34/section/1. 12 Brookes, Abortion, p. 22. 13 See Barbara Brookes and Paul Roth, ‘Rex v. Bourne and the Medicalization of Abortion’, in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds.), Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 314–43; and Aleck Bourne, A Doctor’s Creed: Memoirs of a Gynaecologist (London: Gollancz, 1963). 14 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (London: HMSO, 1939, reprinted 1966), p.  13. Over the course of two years, the committee examined previous reports on abortion, data from the Registrar-General’s Statistical Review and the Joint Council of Midwifery, hospital records and Home Office criminal statistics, as well as the personal testimony of witnesses. 15 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, p. 45. See Patricia Knight, ‘Women and Abortion in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (Autumn 1977), 56–69; Diana Gittins, The Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure in Britain, 1900–1939 (NewYork: Hutchinson, 1982); Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: Perceptions of Fertility in England from the 16th to the 18th Centuries (London: Methuen, 1984); Barbara Brookes, ‘Women and Reproduction c.1860–1919’, in Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 149–74; Elizabeth Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995); Karl Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Sally Alexander, ‘The Mysteries and Secrets of Women’s Bodies: Sexual Knowledge in the First Half of the Century’, in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds.), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 161–76, Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and InfantWelfare Services in Early Twentieth-Century London (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996); Tania McIntosh, ‘“An Abortionist City”: Maternal Mortality, Abortion and Birth Control in Sheffield, 1920–1940’, Medical History, 44 (2000), 75–96; Catriona Beaumont, ‘Moral Dilemmas and Women’s Rights: The Attitude of the Mother’s Union and Catholic Women’s League to Divorce, Birth Control and Abortion in England 1928–1939’, Women’s History Review, 16:4 (2007), 463–85. 16 TNA, MEPO 20/1–10. 17 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, pp. 52–3. 18 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, p. 117. 19 Andrew Saint, Politics and the People of London: The London County Council, 1889–1965 (London: Continuum, 1989), p. 189.

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  137 20 See Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the InterDepartmental Committee, ‘Reservations’ to ch. 8, ‘Birth Control’, p. 127. 21 ‘Judge’s Warning on the Menace of the Unfit’, Daily Mirror (12 December 1935), p. 2. 22 TNA, MEPO 3/2242. 23 ‘Dead Girl: Doctor Questioned’, Daily Mirror (10 June 1943), p. 6. The jury returned an open verdict. 24 Douglas Browne and E.B. Tullet, Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Cases (London, George G. Harrap, 1952), p. 32. 25 ‘Obituary: Dr. William Bentley Purchase’, British Medical Journal (7 October 1971), 965. 26 Jackson, Coroner, p. 85. 27 ‘Waitress Reprimanded over Mystery Woman’s Visit to Cafe’, Islington and Holloway Press (2 January 1937), p. 2. 28 TNA, MEPO 3/1026. 29 See Keith Simpson, Forensic Medicine (London: Edward Arnold, 1947, 1951 edn). 30 Simpson, Forensic Medicine, pp. 168–9. 31 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, p. 163. 32 TNA, MEPO 2/4979. 33 TNA, MEPO 3/1033. 34 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 35 Jackson, Coroner, p. 91. 36 ‘Police Watch House: Married Woman and Illegal Operation’, Islington and Holloway Press (26 February 1938), p. 1. 37 TNA, MEPO 3/3225; and ‘Five Years Prison for Doctor: End of 20 Year Investigation’, Daily Telegraph and Morning Post (30 November 1944), p. 3. 38 TNA, MEPO 3/845. 39 TNA, MEPO 3/845. 40 ‘Surgeon to Go for Trial’, Daily Mirror (10 October 1935), p. 7. 41 ‘Married to Seal Lips, Say Police’, Daily Mirror (4 November 1939), p. 7. In a statement to police Dr Benjamin Ling said, ‘I am just going to keep quiet. I realise I am in a jam.’ See also ‘Doctor and Nurse on Abortion Charge’, London Times (4 November 1939), p. 3. 42 TNA, MEPO 3/2227. 43 A dying deposition is admissible in court because it is believed the dying victim has no reason to lie. See ‘Dying Declaration’, London Lancet: A Journal of British and Foreign Medical, Surgical, and Chemical Science, Criticism, Literature & News, 2 (1860), 169–70. 44 TNA, MEPO 3/844. 45 TNA, MEPO 3/844.

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138  Murder Capital 46 Six factory hands, one staff hand, two munitions workers and two machine operators. 47 Five domestic servants, two cooks, one laundry hand and one cleaner. 48 Three clerks, one bank clerk, one bookkeeper, one telephonist, one typist and one addressograph operator. 49 Three shop assistants, one shopkeeper, one window dresser, one stock-keeper and one chemist’s assistant. 50 One dancer, one artist’s model and one singer. 51 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4. 52 Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 34. 53 TNA, MEPO 3/844. 54 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, p. 107. 55 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, p. 88. 56 TNA, MEPO 3/844. 57 Geoffrey Field, ‘The Working Class Family in Wartime Britain’, International Labour and Working Class History, 38 (Autumn 1990), 3–28, 19. 58 S.M. Ferguson and H. Fitzgerald. Studies in the Social Services (London: HMSO, 1954), pp. 90–1; and Field, ‘The Working Class Family’, 1. 59 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 60 Ministry of Health and Home Office, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee, p. 34. 61 TNA, MEPO 3/1027. 62 TNA, MEPO 2/4979 and 2/845. 63 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. The names of the women are blacked out until 2027. 64 TNA, MEPO 3/844. 65 TNA, MEPO 3/1008. 66 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 67 ‘Sobbing Mother Faces Manslaughter Charge’, South London Advertiser (19 May 1950), p. 1. 68 ‘Woman Cleared on Manslaughter Count’, South London Advertiser (30 June 1950), p. 1. 69 TNA, MEPO 3/1027. 70 Rex v. Bourne [1938], in Brookes and Roth, ‘Rex v. Bourne and the Medicalization of Abortion’, p. 330. 71 TNA, MEPO 2/845. 72 TNA, MEPO 2/1033. 73 TNA, MEPO 2/1033. 74 TNA, MEPO 3/1033.

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Suspicious deaths and abortions in London, 1933–53  139

75 TNA, MEPO 3/1008. 76 TNA, MEPO 2/4979. 77 TNA, CRIM 1/712. 78 Florence Taylor charged £2 for an abortion; TNA MEPO 3/844. James Bayles gave Mary Jones thirty shillings and she borrowed £3 from a friend to pay Frederick Wall; TNA, MEPO 3/844. Mrs Hawke charged £2 in 1938; TNA, MEPO 3/1033. 79 For instance, it was Isabel Barker’s friend Mrs Brandon’s refusal to share Esther Walsby’s fee that led to her being bound over as a conspirator to abortion. 80 TNA, MEPO 3/2227. 81 TNA, CRIM 1/1362 and 1/2000. 82 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. 83 TNA, CRIM 1/1985. 84 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. 85 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. 86 TNA, MEPO 3/2219. 87 ‘Ex-Oxford Chief is Gaoled for Eight Years’, Daily Mirror (1 December 1950), p. 1. 88 ‘Streatham Woman’s Tragic Death’, Streatham News (11 August 1933), p. 3. 89 TNA, MEPO 2/4979 and CRIM 1/712. 90 TNA, MEPO 3/1021. 91 TNA, MEPO 3/1023. He was eventually charged and convicted of using an instrument on sixteen women between February and April 1937. 92 Similarly, when the case came before the General Medical Council, Dr Zelmanovits was struck off, while Dr Watkin’s case was reserved for two years. ‘Disciplinary Enquiries’, British Medical Journal (9 December 1944), 144–5. The criminal file at The National Archives is closed. TNA, CRIM 1/1600. 93 TNA, CRIM 1/2138. 94 TNA, CRIM 1/2138. 95 ‘General Medical Council’, British Medical Journal (14 June 1952), 292. 96 McIntosh, ‘An Abortionist City’.

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5 Infanticide in London, 1933–53 Introduction Infanticide in London was from the eighteenth century associated with the disturbing images of infant bodies visible in the public spaces of the city. Merchant and philanthropist Thomas Coram wrote in 1736 about the ‘daily sight of infant corpses thrown on the dust heaps of London, and applications to the London Foundling Hospital he founded in 1741 were so numerous infants had to be turned away’.1 William Burke Ryan’s 1862 study of infanticide also described the infant bodies seen in London ditches, parks and garbage heaps.2 The urban character of English infanticide set it apart from countries such as Ireland, India and Russia, where it was seen as a rural problem.3 Newborn bodies found in London between 1933 and 1953 reveal a geography of urban infanticide which spread to encompass the natural spaces of parks, rivers and open lands, and public spaces such as railway carriages, streets and telephone boxes where bodies were sure to be found but unlikely to be traced. Cases of women charged with infanticide also map the geography of surveillance that kept certain groups of women under watch, such as servants, nurses and young women living at home. Unlike the increase in suspicious deaths committed by strangers or as a result of illegal abortions, the numbers of infanticides in London declined during the Second World War. Prosecuted infanticides reached a high of eight in 1943 and a low of three in 1944, and no infant bodies were reported in 1944 at all.4 The lower number of discovered infanticides and infant murders may testify to the effects of wartime family separation, a greater frequency of abortion or more successful hiding of the evidence. The cases of infanticide found in the Metropolitan Register of Deaths by Violence offer glimpses of the women who killed their infants and babies, and shift our understanding of infanticide as a crime primarily committed by single desperate women acting alone, to one also committed by women in relationships, and with help from others.

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Infanticide and the law The killing of infants was, from the earliest English laws, associated with illegitimacy. The first laws against newborn-child murder, or neonaticide, enacted in 1624 defined it as a crime of which only unmarried women could be accused, and decreed that concealment of birth was proof of murder.5 In the absence of a definitive physical test to prove an infant’s separate existence or live birth, defence was extremely difficult.6 Opposition to the law’s severity in the eighteenth century led to its effective abrogation.7 In an attempt to induce more juries to convict, Lord Ellenborough’s 1803 Offences Against the Person Act repealed the 1624 statute, and decreed that the trials of women charged with the murder of ‘any issue of their bodies ... shall proceed and be governed by such and the like rules of evidence and of presumption as are by law used and allowed to take place in respect to other trials for murder’.8 Debates over neonaticide and child murder in the nineteenth century reflected public fascination with the topic and the ‘remarkably consistent representation of child-murder as the special province of unmarried, desperate victims’.9 Conditions for unsupported mothers in England were certainly very difficult. The 1834 Poor Law Act ended the mother’s right to petition the father for child support and reduced her relief options to the workhouse, where she would be separated from her infant after a few weeks.10 Even under such duress, neonaticide was not a common response to illegitimacy. While neonaticides formed a high proportion of murders in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century, they were only a tiny fraction of the 30,000 to 40,000 illegitimate children born each year.11 By the early twentieth century, sympathy for mothers who killed their children had grown to the extent that, as Christine Krueger argues, ‘legal reforms, decisions by judges and juries, and later, police practice, all betrayed a desire to shield women from prosecution and punishment’.12A 1908 memo from the Home Office indicated that of 105 women who killed their own children between 1865 and 1908, only the four whose murders showed malice, callousness or predetermination were executed.13 The eighteen women imprisoned for killing children not their own were punished far more severely, including Margaret Walters, who was hanged in 1871 for the murder of her foster child John Cowan.14 Infanticide was legally redefined in England and Wales by the Infanticide Act of 1922, which stated that any woman killing her newly born child (clarified in 1938 to mean a child under twelve months) when she had failed to recover from the effects of giving birth and whose balance of mind was therefore

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142  Murder Capital disturbed, could be convicted of manslaughter, which was not a capital crime.15

Infanticide, 1933–53 Between 1933 and 1953, the number of suspicious infant deaths declined steadily from its highest number in 1939 with thirteen deaths, to two deaths in 1952 and three in 1953. The roots of this decline were found in the experience of the war years. The sharp rise in illegitimacy rates from 4.2% of live births in 1938 to 6.4% in 1943 and 9.3% in 1945 may have led to long-term changes in the social acceptability of unmarried mothers.16 Lower numbers of infanticides could also reflect the shift from live-in servants to part-time domestic work after 1945, which allowed greater personal freedom to servants.17 Infants may also have been adopted, as adoption became more regulated and the number of children adopted rose from 5,000 in 1936 to 21,000 in 1946.18 Women were also better able to support their infants on their own. The National Health Service and the National Assistance Acts in 1948 gave unmarried women free maternity care, a maternity grant, maternity benefits, unemployment benefits and access to housing, leading to a change in the prospects of an unmarried mother that had, according to social researchers Sheila Ferguson and Hilde Fitzgerald in 1954, ‘changed beyond recognition’.19 The suspicious deaths of infants were listed in four categories in the Metropolitan Register of Deaths by Violence. Out of 149 infanticides between 1933 and 1953, there were twenty-three cases of mothers killing themselves and their infants, which required no investigation. There were fifty-nine charges of infanticides, with additional details in police files, court depositions, forensic textbooks and newspapers which reveal elements of an older narrative of social anxiety over the killing of illegitimate infants, and the working-out of the new legal redefinition of infanticide as manslaughter. Of the 149 cases of infanticide, ninety-nine were neonaticides (murder of newborns), and fifty were murders of a child under one year. The third category included the sixty-three bodies of newborn babies found in the public spaces of the city who could not be traced back to their origin. The final category of infanticides was those defined as infant murder, where evidence existed of premeditation and deliberate planning. Four such cases occurred in the period (see Table 7). These four categories reveal how attitudes to female crime and poverty were changing in this era. Under the new Acts, women who killed their newly born infants were no longer guilty of murder and

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  143 were for the most part treated sympathetically. The few who served custodial sentences, as well as those charged with murder, expose the complexities of determining whether mothers who killed their infants were malicious murderers or victims themselves. Table 7: Infanticides and murders of children under one year of age in London, 1933–53 Year 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 Total

Newborn Murder/suicide of bodies mother and infant 4 0 4 3 1 1 2 1 + 1 attempt 7 0 3 0 6 3 1 1 3 1 2 1 3 7 0 1 3 1 4 0 4 1 4 1 2 0 3 0 2 0 1 0 4 0 63 23

Infanticide

Murdered by father or caregiver 2 0 1 0 2 0 2 0 3 0 1 1 4 0 5 0 3 0 3 0 0 0 3 0 3 1 5 1 6 1 2 0 3 + 2 neglect 0 3 0 0 0 2 0 4 0 59 4 Total 149

Source: Based on TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

The Infanticide Acts of 1922 and 1938 More than any other crime, infanticide demonstrates the importance of context to twentieth-century changes in legal and medical understandings of crime. The Infanticide Act of 1922 stated that any

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144  Murder Capital woman killing her newborn child (clarified in 1938 to mean a child under twelve months) when she had failed to recover from the effects of giving birth and whose balance of mind was therefore disturbed could be convicted of manslaughter, which was not a capital crime. In these cases the judge was permitted to sentence the accused from anything from life imprisonment to a fine or conditional discharge.20 The 1922 and 1938 Acts depended on proofs of diminished responsibility on the part of the mother, which were generally provided by sympathetic medical evidence. Even as forensic textbooks taught how to look for evidence of violence on an infant’s body, they expressed compassion for mothers, as in Douglas Kerr’s 1939 edition of Forensic medicine: ‘Considerable sympathy is shown to a woman in such circumstances – no doubt unmarried, seduced, abandoned, left to face the responsibilities alone, especially in the case of a young girl not knowing what is to take place, it is readily understood that she may become terrified and not be fully responsible for her actions.’21 Likewise pathologist Keith Simpson wrote in 1947 that infanticide was an offence dealt with ‘with great sympathy and understanding’.22 Yet public sympathy had its limits. A Private Member’s Bill put forward by MP Irene Ward in 1936 suggested that the age of the child in infanticide cases be extended to eight years, and that conditions of social deprivation be considered as well as physical strain. This was soundly rejected in a note in the Home Office files: ‘To provide a defence of this nature to one section of the community at a time when the death sentence still has to be imposed in many cases where murders are committed under equally or more distressing circumstances, would seem to be reducing the machinery for dealing with capital cases to absurdity.’23 Newspaper editorials commenting on the Infanticide Act warned that the Act should not be used to argue against capital punishment for women generally. A Daily Mail editorial by Gilbert Frankau on 24 March 1938 praised the 1938 Amendment but added, ‘It is to be hoped, however, that this sincere and common-sensible measure will not be used a lever by the sloppy sentimentalists and the pseudo-humanitarians who are always screaming for the abolition of capital punishment in general, and more particularly, for the abolition of the death penalty when a female commits murder.’24 Women found guilty of killing their infants prior to the Infanticide Acts had to endure the spectacle of the judge putting on his black cap and reading out the death sentence even if it were later commuted – painful scenes that Frankau and others were happy to see ended.25

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  145

Investigating infanticides Investigators of the deaths of infants in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s thus had to consider a complex constellation of factors: physical evidence that traced the body to the mother, medical evidence of a separate existence, and evidence either of premeditation or that the mother had acted while the balance of her mind was disturbed. The police and the courts had to work closely with medical examiners of both the child’s body and of the mother. All medical witnesses who appeared at trial, whether as personal physicians, as the doctors who first examined the child’s body, or as prison medical officers, were liable to be asked about the mental state of the accused. During the trial of Women’s Royal Naval Service Petty Officer Kathleen Cross, her physician Charles Hiley was asked whether her mind might have been unbalanced by the shock of giving birth, as was medical witness Donald Teare, though it was surely outside his area of expertise as a forensic pathologist. Teare responded, like Simpson and Kerr, with sympathy: ‘I know the circumstances of this case. I think it is a well recognized fact that the balance of a woman’s mind may be disturbed at such a time and in those circumstances.’26 The first step in an investigation of an infant death was the finding of the body. An inquest and a forensic examination would then determine whether the death was the result of a criminal act. For example, an inquest on a baby left abandoned at Northfield railway station in 1941 determined the child had died of pneumonia and therefore returned a verdict of natural causes.27 A medical examination of the child’s body would also suggest a sequence of events leading to the child’s death. When Joan Booker was first arrested on 29 January 1946 she denied harming her infant, and claimed her daughter had fallen on the floor at the moment of birth. After being confronted with the medical evidence, she later confessed that she had wrung the infant’s neck, put her in a bag and banged it on the floor, stabbed her, then took her out and wrung her neck again to make sure she made no sound.28 Forensic textbooks listed instructions for detecting suspicious infant deaths: how to determine if the child had been born full term and alive, and how to distinguish between natural death and death by violence. The evidence for criminal violence differed only in degree from that of adults: fractured skull, strangulation, suffocation.29 In the infanticide and neonaticide cases in London between 1933 and 1953, the most frequent cause of infant death was suffocation or strangulation, often with a ligature or clothing around the neck or in the mouth. Drowning and head injuries were also common. When instruments were used, such a knives or scissors, they were seen as

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146  Murder Capital evidence of criminal intent and the penalties for mothers were more severe, and more often resulted in custodial sentences (see Table 8). Table 8: Custodial sentences for infanticide in London, 1933–53 Year

Name

Age Occupation

1940 Lilly 22 Waitress Hinchley 1941 Gwendoline 26 Housewife Stimpson

1943 Nancy Fong 18 Munitions worker 1943 Andressia 33 Housekeeper Yorke 26 Housewife 1944 Eleanor Bunyan 1944 Dorothy 23 Not given Williams

1946 Joan Booker 26 Shop assistant 1946 Winnifred Clifford

42 Cook

1947 Violet Jenkins

19 Housewife

1949 Rose Hartnell

22 Housewife

Prison sentence 3 years youth detention 12 months imp.(manslaughter by neglect) 18 months

Crime No details Neglected her 8-week-old son Michael Stabbed infant

6 months

Possibly a second offence 12 months Killed child at 2 weeks old 2 years (man- Was cohabiting slaughter by with another man neglect) and neglected 5-month-old son Keith 9 months Stabbed child, had 6-year-old daughter 3 years Had previous reduced to 18 criminal record months on appeal 3 years Drowned 11-month-old illegitimate Norma, said child was ‘nuisance’ 2 years (man- Neglected her slaughter by 11-month-old neglect) son Clive and he starved to death

Source: Based on TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  147

Infanticidal women As in cases of women’s deaths from abortion, the details in police files of infanticides in this period challenge the traditional perception of the link between infanticide and illegitimacy. Of the women charged with infanticide whose occupations were given, thirty-four were listed in the Register of Deaths by Violence as housewives or ‘married’, only slightly fewer than the thirty-six single women charged with infanticide. Of the married women, one was nineteen, twenty-one were in their twenties, ten were in their thirties and two ages were not recorded. In at least two cases involving married women the child was illegitimate, including that of kitchen hand Louisa Magowan in 1946 whose husband was a POW in Burma.30 Of thirty-six single women charged with infanticide, six were in their teens, twenty-one were in their twenties, six were in their thirties and one was forty-two. Six single women were domestic servants (three of whom were in their thirties), four were shop hands, four were factory hands, three were cooks, three were nurses, two were barmaids and two were waitresses, two were canteen hands, two were clerks, two were listed as ‘single with no occupation’, one was an aircraft worker, one a conductress, one a ward maid, one a handbag maker, one in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), one a housekeeper and three occupations were not given. Continuing in these occupations with a young baby would have been very difficult, and there were few social and medical services available for single mothers who wanted to keep their babies.31 The biggest difference between these two groups of women is that in all the cases of single women the child was newly born, except for one, whereas only five married women killed a newborn.32 Two tentative explanations can be offered: that the births of married women were more often attended by others and they were more rarely alone with a newborn, and that the killing of older infants was a result of cumulative strain faced by married women burdened with other household responsibilities. The five women who were judged to be insane and unfit to plead were also all married: Alice Kimberlin in 1933, Marguerita McNicholl in 1936, Lily Hobbs in 1948, Winifred Irven in 1949 and Clara Euston in 1953. In the first two cases, declaring the women insane and unfit to plead allowed the women to escape the imposition of the death penalty in the years before the extension of the definition of ‘newly born’ in the 1922 Act to include children under one year. Only one mother was brought to trial for murdering an infant under one year between 1933 and 1938. In 1936 Hilda Queree, a domestic servant, jumped with her four-month-old son David from

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148  Murder Capital the Hammersmith Bridge.33 She was rescued but he drowned. Although she told the police that she acted out of depression and a sudden impulse, the police found a letter written to the baby’s father Frederick Blackmore: ‘Dear J, When you receive this, I shall be gone. I cant [sic] bear up anymore, so I’m taking the quickest way out. I’ve set my mind on Hammersmith Bridge and taking the baby with me to-night. You will I hope feel grateful.’34 This evidence of premeditation was enough for the jury to find her guilty of murder and she was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. An elaboration of malicious motives such as this, however, was very rare, and most women were given the benefit of the doubt. Because defining infanticide depended on establishing the mother’s state of mind, depositions from the mother were often recorded in police and criminal files. Such confessions are difficult for the historian to interpret, as it is not possible to know to what extent women were responding to questions in their statements to police, or telling their own stories.35 Many women seemed eager to confess and relieve themselves of the burden of secrecy. Kathleen Hughes’ statement to Divisional Detective Inspector John Henry of V Division begins, ‘I heard that enquiries were being made so I decided to clear the matter up and cause the least possible bother.’36 Likewise, when Eileen Cronin, a twenty-six-year-old aircraft worker, was arrested for perjury in 1945, she also confessed to killing her five-month-old daughter Margaret four years earlier and leaving her body in an attaché case in a railway station.37 A transcript of the 1940 police questioning of Mary Ann Bashford, a thirty-seven-year-old companion help on 54 Burnt Ash Road, Lee (R Division), records Bashford’s immediate confession.38 Inspector Wright said, ‘Shortly after you left the house this afternoon the dead body of a newly born child with string tied round its neck and wrapped in newspaper was found beneath the bed in your room.’ Miss Bashford hesitated and said, ‘Yes, I put it there. I had it yesterday ... It’s terrible. I couldn’t bear the disgrace to my mother, so when it came I cut it from me with scissors and tied string around its neck.’39 Though she was the second oldest woman found guilty of infanticide in this sample, she was also one of the most vulnerable. Her lover was married, and her elderly mother depended on her wages as a companion help, so she could neither keep nor pay to foster a child. A note from the prison governor and medical officer J.C.M. Matheson testified to her moral innocence and to her hard-working nature; ‘[She] had more or less continuous employment until the present time, chiefly in domestic work; the longest time she has been in one situation is 13 years. Her changes of work have always been to improve herself.’40 Bashford’s

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  149 limited autonomy defined her social respectability as well as her crime and its discovery in her room.

Infanticides in urban space Domestic servants had been associated with infanticide since the nineteenth-century, as the group of women most often accused of the crime.41 Dr Edwin Lankester, coroner for Central Middlesex from 1862, argued that the geographical distribution of infanticide in London ‘reflected the social distribution of opportunities for concealment’, blaming inadequately supervised domestic servants in Paddington and Marylebone for the rise in neonaticides.42 While their lack of access to hiding places meant that domestic servants made up 80% of English women charged with neonaticide in the late Victorian era, the number of infant bodies found in the streets which were not traced suggests that neonaticides were perpetrated by other classes of women as well: those who had the time and knowledge to move freely in the city to dispose of their small bundles.43 A similar pattern of surveillance emerges in cases from 1933–53 in which women living under close scrutiny such as servants and nurses hid the infant body in their rooms. The map drawn by the Metropolitan Police Registry of Deaths by Violence of infanticides and neonaticides between 1933 and 1953 shows a shift away from the centre to the outer divisions: X (Willesden) Division with twelve, J Division (Bethnal Green) with twelve and V (Wandsworth) with thirteen. The division with the lowest number was C Division in Mayfair and Soho, where only one infant body was found, in a bomb site at the corner of Shepherd Street and Stanhope Row in 1948. Like the distribution of women’s deaths from illegal abortion in the outer districts, the geography of infanticides reflected the growing suburbanization of the capital. The bodies of the sixty-three newborn bodies found in the public spaces of London followed a different pattern, reflecting the geography of wasteground, rivers and alleyways. The divisions with the largest numbers of newborn bodies were T Division (Twickenham) with seven, J Division (Bethnal Green) with six and F Division (Kensington) with five. The only division with no reported newborn bodies in this period was X (Willesden), though it had the most charges of infanticide, suggesting either investigative inefficiency or the removal of evidence. Infant bodies were found by passers-by, often park keepers, those working on the river and in at least three cases, children playing. They were most often found in open spaces, in the rivers or in the parks. Of sixty-three infants, sixteen were found in rivers or canals, eight were found in

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150  Murder Capital parks, eight were found on open land, six in bushes or front gardens and six were found in war debris: three on bomb sites, two in bombdamaged houses and one in an air-raid shelter. The other bodies were found in the boundary areas between public and private. Eight were found near railways: four in carriages, two in station lavatories and two on railway embankments. Two were found in churches, two in telephone boxes, two in cinemas, one in a basement passageway in Fieldgate Mansions, Stepney (H Division), one in a static water tank in Leathermarket Street, Lyons Gate SE1 (M Division), and three on the street: on Nottingham Street in Marylebone (D Division), in a cul-de-sac off Holland Road, Kensington (F Division), and in a doorway on Campden Hill Road W11 (F Division). These places were public and anonymous enough that the infant would probably not be traced to the mother, but sufficiently sheltered from public view that she would not be observed dropping her package, often wrapped in brown paper, a coat or a suitcase. The first obstacle the police faced in cases of infanticide was how to categorize the crime. For example, the baby’s body found in the women’s cloakroom of Finsbury Park in 1940 was judged by pathologist Dr Temple Grey to have been born alive, but not to have had a separate existence from its mother.44 The baby was strangled with a piece of tape around its neck, which he judged could not have been done by the mother and could not have been done by accident. The scenario suggested that someone had assisted the birth and killed the infant. If the baby had been entirely born the crime would have been murder, but in this case was judged to be child destruction. Classifying the murders of infants was also vital to the recording of statistics for the Home Office, as a series of increasingly heated letters between the chief constable of Cumberland and Westmorland Constabulary, Penrith, and the director of statistics from the Home Office in 1946 revealed.45 The chief constable asked that an infant’s body found in a railway carriage be recorded in another district because the crime had most likely happened there. The director of statistics replied that the crime, like larceny of goods in transit on the railway, had to be recorded in the area in which it was found and he asked that the crime be recorded as ‘other’ rather than ‘undetected’, to which the chief constable retorted, If you adhere to your decision with regard to the recording of this crime I shall be grateful if you will inform me whether in your view it would be consistent to apply the same ruling in a case where the body of a man, obviously murdered, is found in a railway carriage some distance from the probable scene of the crime – the identity

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  151 of the culprit being unknown and there being little possibility of its becoming known: In short, is the mere finding of the body in the case of infanticide or murder sufficient to warrant the crime being recorded as ‘cleared up’?46

The director replied that in a case of infanticide the killer must by law be the mother, and therefore the crime of infanticide cannot technically be undetected, finally conceding in October that the crime be classified as murder, ‘undetected’. The fact that while six of the fifteen cases of infanticide in England in 1935 were tried in London, only two cases are recorded in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence, suggests that all police divisions sought to exclude infanticides and infant bodies as crimes likely to remain unsolved.47 The chief constable of Penrith was correct in his assertion that the culprit in the case of murdered infants was unlikely to be discovered. The killing of infants was the most difficult form of murder to investigate, as the infant had few ties to a world in which only one person may have known of its existence. Even material clues that led to a particular person or family could be misleading. In 1937 the police of H Division found the body of a newborn girl in the basement of 82 Fieldgate Mansions E1.48 The body was wrapped in a pillow slip and a bed tick, a sheet used by local Jewish families. The family whose laundry mark was found on the bundle were at first suspected as they had three unmarried daughters in their twenties and thirties, though they claimed to have thrown away the linen in a dustbin some months previously. Observing that the daughters ‘all appeared to be in the best of health’, the police decided some other local person was responsible and no further information is recorded. The police investigation was much more exhaustive in the case of a female infant body found on the foreshore of the Thames in Silk Factory Drain Dock, Wandsworth, in 1950, but had the same result.49 The child had been delivered, and the umbilical cord was torn. The child had been stabbed thirty times with blunt-edged scissors, and a ligature tied around the neck after death.50 Battersea coroner Mr Hervey Wyatt described it as a ‘frenzied attack’.51 The police traced and interviewed 217 local pregnant women, asking to be shown the infant or a death certificate. Despite this, the crime was not solved, perhaps because the mother had come from a different area or had successfully hidden her pregnancy. A survey of the women charged with infanticide exposes an institutional geography where private space and time was strictly regulated. Women in London who lived in highly regulated communities under the watch of employers and other servants were

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152  Murder Capital more likely to have their infanticides discovered. Women who worked as live-in servants or as hospital nurses had little free time or privacy and their low-waged positions demanded respectable reputations.52 Most servants and nurses charged with infanticide had made no preparations either for a child’s life or its death and the body was usually found hidden in their room: under the bed, in a chest of drawers, in a suitcase or in a cupboard. Domestic servants charged with infanticides were Hilda Queree in 1936, twenty-five-year-old Rose Wickens in 1936, thirty-four-year-old May Cable in 1937, Mary Ann Bashford in 1940 and nineteen-year-old Clara Maria Bezzola in 1953. In most of these cases the women tried to return to work right after the birth, but became ill and had their rooms searched.53 Rosa Hudnott, a ward maid at the Belgrade Hospital for Children who killed and hid her infant in a chest of drawers in 1945 could be included here as well.54 Nurses also lived in highly regulated spaces in hospital and three were recorded in the registry as charged with infanticide: Theresa McConnell, who in 1939 worked at the Grove Fever Hospital in Tooting; Hilda James, who worked at the Lambeth Hospital in 1945, and Elizabeth Smith, who worked at St Francis’ Hospital, Dulwich, in 1950.55 Kathleen Cross, a petty officer in the WRNS who killed her newborn in the WRNS Hostel, 3 Princes Gardens, South Kensington SW7 (B Division) and hid the child in her bag, was also discovered almost immediately.56 As in Lankester’s nineteenth-century Paddington, women under institutional control were more likely to be discovered and lacked the friends and family willing to help them conceal the act.

Infanticides and war The Register of Deaths by Violence also suggests some of the effects of the Second World War on infanticides. Jennie Margaret Dormer’s anxiety over the Munich Crisis led her to suffocate her ten-weekold daughter Barbara in the gas oven in 1938.57 The tense political atmosphere exacerbated her existing worries about the child’s crying, and agonizing over whether to evacuate London with the baby was one worry too many.58 She told the police, ‘I have been unwell for some time. The war business has worried me so.’59 The psychological effects of war may have also been a factor in the death of Sandra Pearl Northcote, an eight-month-old baby smothered by her adoptive father, a discharged soldier, when he was alone with her in 1946.60 He then killed himself. Soldiers were named as fathers in two wartime infanticide cases. The first was that of Rose Gordon, an Irish nurse

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  153 who had an affair with a patient wounded at Dunkirk, who had left by the time her pregnancy was discovered.61 When her pregnancy began to show, she was fired. She was staying with a friend and sharing a bed, and when the baby was born in May 1941 she covered his mouth so he would not cry, smothering him.62 In 1943 Nancy Fong also named a soldier as the father of her infant. The fact that she claimed he had offered to marry her and she had turned him down was a factor in her being sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for infanticide, since she could not claim to have been abandoned.63 The war also brought to light past neonaticides, as London houses damaged by bombs were torn down and small bodies discovered. In 1945 workmen in Brixton found the mummified body of a baby, clothed and wrapped in a good-quality shawl, in the ceiling of 37 Acre Lane. Though the post-mortem estimated the child had been dead for two years, the house had been vacant much longer.64 In 1946 workmen were demolishing 19 Barrington Road SW9 when a sack containing the skeleton of a baby fell out of a ceiling; the post-mortem was unable to give cause of death, sex or age.65 Neither investigation was pursued by the police.

Public sympathy Police files, criminal depositions and newspaper articles reveal public and private sympathy for women who had committed infanticide, based on their youth or desperation. The South London Advertiser’s account of the trial of Elizabeth Smith, an eighteen-year-old student nurse who tied a stocking around her newborn’s neck and hid the body in locked suitcase in the cupboard, emphasized her vulnerability, her youth and her good looks: ‘Supported in the dock by two prison officers, young, attractive Elizabeth Lavinia Smith ... pleaded guilty to infanticide.’66 The witnesses emphasized her respectability and that the act was contrary to her nature. Detective Inspector Wolf testified that she was a girl of good character, and that she had been alone at the birth and ‘must have suffered considerable pain. She was suffering from shock and in the opinion of the doctors the balance of her mind was affected when she destroyed the baby.’67 In a case investigated by police but not proceeded with, a seventeen-year-old waitress giving birth in a cinema rendered her child stillborn after she tore the umbilical cord.68 Police examined the medical evidence, as well as her social circumstances. The police concluded that since her employers were willing to have her back once the baby was born she had no motive to kill her infant and the charges were dropped.

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154  Murder Capital The dominant image of infanticides is of a woman acting alone, with no witnesses to check the actions of a mother whose balance of mind is disturbed. Yet in at least two cases of infanticide in this sample the woman was helped by a family member. A newborn found in Epping Forest in 1943 was traced through a coat to nineteen-yearold Rita Hickling. She and her mother Violet were found guilty, Rita of infanticide and Violet of concealment of birth, and were bound over for twelve months.69 In a 1946 case, Lucy Morfee gave birth to a child and later with her sister’s help buried him in the back garden. Both were found guilty of concealment and both were bound over. While family members were treated with sympathy, the involvement of others was interpreted as collusion and premeditation. Dorothy May Ball was a twenty-two-year-old housewife in Wimbledon who became pregnant by her lover in 1944. Nurse Betty Tyler attempted her abortion by syringing her over a period of six months and was unsuccessful. Tyler then advised Ball to give birth over a pail of water, and the child drowned. Though Tyler was not present at the birth, her fifteen-guinea fee and the fact that she charged Ball for proper burial and instead dumped the body in a men’s lavatory in a hotel in Wimbledon showed her in the most negative light.70 While Ball was found guilty of infanticide and sentenced to two days’ imprisonment, Tyler was found guilty of using an instrument to procure miscarriage and concealment of birth and sentenced to three years’ penal servitude and six months’ hard labour. Tyler was forty-six years old, had worked for the notorious abortionist Dr Powell of Tooting and was known to her clients as Miss Powell; she had been suspected by the police for some time. Ball’s description of her was damning: ‘Miss Powell never seemed to be worried about the child not coming away earlier. Her attitude all the way through was that it did not matter when it came, it would not be allowed to live.’71

Infanticide, child murder and cruelty While most women found guilty of infanticide were bound over or sentenced to a day or two in prison, twelve women between 1933 and 1953 were sentenced to substantial sentences, including Hilda Queree and Elsey Pavey who were sentenced to death. Older women with previous pregnancies or a criminal record were more likely to receive prison sentences, as were women who used an instrument, inflicted cruelty or let the child suffer. For example, when Nancy Fong’s baby was born, she called to her mother, ‘Mother, the baby’s come’, stabbed him nine times with scissors, then cleaned them and put them

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  155 away. 72 Since her actions showed calculation she was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, despite her youth. Women faced with evidence of their own cruelty often tried to give other explanations for wounds to the child’s body. Joan Booker claimed that she gave birth in the lavatory and the baby was injured as she tried to get her out of the pan.73 But the fact that she had hidden the body in the kitchen dresser, and already had a six-year-old daughter threw doubts on her claim. Pathologist Robert Donald Teare further undermined her case by testifying that that the baby’s skull had been fractured in three places and there were twenty incised wounds on the left side of the infant’s chest, and consequently Booker was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. Evidence of cruelty was also a factor in the sentences received by the three mothers accused of neglecting their infants to the extent that they died. While the dominant image of infanticidal mothers in this period is of women who were themselves victims, in some cases mothers and occasionally fathers were criminally motivated to kill their infants out of self-interest and disregard for the lives of newborns. Moira Maguire has argued that in twentieth-century Ireland many infanticidal mothers had malicious intentions, corroborated by the evidence of other examples of physical violence inflicted on infants, by the collusion of the friends and family who helped to conceal the crime, and by the general societal disregard for the ‘life and wellbeing of illegitimate, poor and vulnerable children’.74 In cases in the Register of Suspicious Deaths where malicious intentions were made obvious, the defendants would be charged with murder and not infanticide. Four people were charged with murder of persons under one year old, and sentenced to death in this period: Hilda Queree in 1936, a grandfather and two parents. In 1945 Arthur Clegg threw his daughter’s two-week-old infant Jill into the Thames.75 It was suggested at trial that he was also the father of the child. As Justice CroomJohnson sentenced him to death he said, ‘You possibly knew more in life about this baby girl than the jury know. You manifestly know about it in death more than anyone in the court.’76 Clegg showed no emotion as he was sentenced, but a newspaper reporter noted that his daughter broke down and wept.77 His was the only death sentence for the murder of an infant under one year old that was carried out. The other two people charged with murder of an infant under one year of age were Elsie Pavey and Victoriano Martinez, who murdered their newborn son in 1947.78 Elsie Pavey was a forty-two-year-old married woman who had left her husband and two sons in 1946 to live with Martinez, a refugee from Franco’s Spain. When they found she was pregnant, they

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156  Murder Capital decided to keep it a secret and get rid of the baby when it was born. On the afternoon of 26 September Pavey gave birth in a Brighton flat, alone except for a neighbour’s child who she was minding. She detached the umbilical cord, put the baby in a covered basin and left him to die. After eight hours they found he was still alive, and Martinez held the baby’s head in a bucket of water. Pavey wrapped the body up in ten newspapers and put the parcel in a cupboard until the following Sunday, when they travelled to London and left it in Hyde Park’s Framing Ground. Luckily for police investigators, Pavey had not removed the marks from the copies of the News of the World and the Evening Argus which showed they were Sussex editions. With the assistance of the chief constables of the Sussex districts, policemen took photostatic copies of the markings to all newsagents and within a few days an officer in Brighton reported that a newsagent had recognized the address. Police called at 49 Buckingham Road on 9 October 1947 and arrested Martinez, but not Pavey, who was visiting her mother in Devon. At first Martinez denied all knowledge of the baby, but then confessed, saying: ‘Me sorry. That not true. We did it. Take me with you. I tell the truth. I drown baby in bucket.’79 When Pavey was arrested later she also confessed easily, saying that ‘she wanted to get it off her mind’.80 The premeditation of the act and the cruelty of leaving the infant to suffer all day led to a conviction of murder and a death sentence. Pavey’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on 30 December 1947, and that of Martinez on 7 January 1948, one day before his scheduled execution. He was released in 1953 and deported back to Spain.81 Pavey was depicted as heartless and cold in police reports because she had planned the murder, and because she was already a mother who had abandoned her children.82 But her status as a mother also situated her as an object of compassion. An anonymous letter sent to the police protested the death sentence because of its effect on Pavey’s children: dear sirs, don’t you think that it is daft to sentence to death two people mrs. elsie pavey and victoriane [sic] martinez. the first who is the mother of two children you do not know what it will be like when they hear about the sentence so stop it and give them 10 & 20 years imprisonment. the death sentence is daft just for one baby, i am sure that they did not mean to drown it. signed x p.s. i do not want to put my real name.83

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  157 The fact that Pavey was a mother was used here to argue for a lighter sentence than Martinez’s, although he was the first to confess and admit remorse. The letter also shows the different emotional and moral weight given to infants and children: Pavey’s children were to be protected, but ‘just one baby’ was not a person to be considered.

Conclusion Infanticides in London suspicious death records reveal a transitional era in the occurrence of infanticides and in the laws governing them. Public sympathy for the fifty-nine women convicted of infanticide between 1933 and 1953 offered a tacit recognition of the difficulties of motherhood in this time. The women accused of infanticide were those under the strictest surveillance and most likely to be caught, while newborn bodies discovered across the city demonstrate that some women were able to conceal their crimes successfully. Police files and trial depositions suggest some of the social and psychological circumstances in which infanticide could occur, while the post-war decline in infanticides indicates some factors leading to its abatement. Nevertheless, the detached attitude to infants that Carolyn Conway noted in nineteenth-century trial reports was also present in the police records of 1933–53, which almost invariably refer to a newborn as ‘it’. In the case of the female baby found on the Thames foreshore in 1950, the police report noted, ‘As it was realized that there was little hope, on the evidence available, of finding the mother of the child, the assistance of the Press was sought with a view to giving the matter some publicity, although we were told that as the victim was a newly born child, its death had little news value.’84 Not until infanticides and neonaticides became much rarer, in the 1960s and 1970s, would their discovery become newsworthy again.85

Notes 1 Quoted in Jennifer Thorn, Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722–1859 (Newark: University of Delaware Press), p. 14. See also Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 2 William Burke Ryan, Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History (London: J. Churchill, 1862). 3 See Sharon Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and

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158  Murder Capital Criminology in Revolutionary Russia 1880–1930 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Fiona Brookman and Jane Nolan, ‘The Dark Figure of Infanticide in England and Wales: Complexities of Diagnosis’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 21 (2006): 869–89; Cliona Rattigan, ‘What Else Could I Do?’ Single Mothers and Infanticide in Ireland 1900–1950 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012); Kirsten Johnson Kramar, Unwilling Mothers, Unwanted Babies: Infanticide in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe, Single Mothers and their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Padma Anagol, ‘The Emergence of the Female Criminal in India: Infanticide and Survival under the Raj’, History Workshop Journal, 53 (2002), 73–93; and Lalitha Panigrahi, British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1972). 4 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 5 Mark Jackson, New-born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 6. 6 See J.R. Dickinson and J.A. Sharpe, ‘Infanticide in Early Modern England: The Court of Great Sessions at Chester, 1650–1800’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Laura Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in SeventeenthCentury England’, Past and Present, 156 (1997), 87–115; Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1984). 7 Jackson, New-born Child Murder, p. 87. 8 Act 43 Geo.3 c.53, commonly referred to as Lord Ellenborough’s Act, in Danby Pickering, The Statutes at Large from the Magna Charta, to the End of the Eleventh Parliament of Great Britain, Anno 1804 (Cambridge: J. Bentham, 1804). 9 Thorn, Writing British Infanticide, p. 17. See also Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10 See Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds.), Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Law, Literature, and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain, 1800–1930 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 11 Fewer than 200 murders of children under the age of seven were reported between 1860 and 1890: Tony Ward, ‘Legislating for Human Nature: Legal Responses to Infanticide, 1860–1938’, in Jackson, Infanticide, p. 280.

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  159 12 Christine L. Krueger, ‘Literary Defenses and Medical Prosecutions: Representing Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Victorian Studies, 40:2 (Winter 1997), 271–94, 271. See also Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Carolyn Conley, Certain Other Countries: Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England Ireland Scotland and Wales (Columbus: Ohio State Press, 2007). 13 TNA, HO 144/544/A54643. 14 See Ruth Homrighaus, ‘Wolves in Women’s Clothing: BabyFarming and the British Medical Journal, 1860–1872’, Journal of Family History, 26:3 (July 2001), 350–72; and Jim Hinks, ‘Demons in Human Shape? The Representation and Negotiation of Gender in Two Scottish “Baby-Farming” Trials’, paper given at the North American Conference in British Studies, Portland, OR, 10 November 2013. 15 ‘Child destruction’ in English law was covered by the Infant Life Preservation Act of 1929, dealing with the killing of a child after twenty-eight weeks’ gestation but before birth. See TNA, MEPO 2/5787, Police Order interpreting ‘Child Destruction’, 1922–29. 16 Katherine Holden, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England 1914–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 125. See also Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Kathleen Kiernan, Hilary Land, and Jane Lewis, Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Britain: From Footnote to Front Page (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998). 17 See Selina Todd, ‘Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain 1900–1950’, Past and Present, 203 (May 2009), 181–204. 18 Jenny Keating, A Child for Keeps:The History of Adoption in England, 1918–45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 117; and Maureen Waller, London 1945 (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2004), p. 399. 19 S.M. Ferguson and H. Fitzgerald, Studies in the Social Services (London, HMSO, 1954), p. 140. 20 See TNA, MEPO 2/5787, Police Orders interpreting ‘Child Destruction’, 1922–29. 21 Douglas Kerr, Forensic Medicine (London: A &C Black, 3rd edn, 1939), p. 158. 22 Keith Simpson, Forensic Medicine (London: Edward Arnold, 1947, 1951 edn), p. 149. 23 TNA, HO 45/25559, Letter dated 2 November 1943. See also the correspondence in TNA, HO 45/19230 and the directives from the Lord Chancellor’s Office, ‘Orders for Coroners’ Juries in Infanticide Cases’, TNA, LCO 2/586 and 2/3591.

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160  Murder Capital 24 TNA, HO 45/9230. 25 TNA, HO 45/9230 and Catherine Damme, ‘Infanticide: The Worth of an Infant under Law’, Medical History, 22:1 (1978), 1–24, 14. 26 TNA, CRIM 1/2046. 27 ‘Baby Left Abandoned at Railway Station’, Paddington Mercury, Middlesex Independent and West London Star (18 January 1941), p. 1. 28 TNA, CRIM 1/2046. 29 Kerr, Forensic Medicine, p. 165. 30 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 31 See Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and Infant Welfare Services in Early Twentieth Century London (Amsterdam: Rodipi, 1996); and Katherine Lynch, ‘Infant Mortality, Child Neglect, and Child Abandonment in European History: A Comparative Analysis’, in Tommy Bengtsson and Osamu Saito (eds.), Population and Economy: From Hunger to Modern Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 32 Cliona Rattigan’s study of infanticide in Ireland in the same period also noted that in the vast majority of cases, the infants of unmarried women were killed within hours of being born. Rattigan, What Else Could I Do?, p. 1. 33 TNA, MEPO 3/827. 34 TNA, MEPO 3/827. 35 Rattigan, What Else Could I Do?, p. 187. 36 TNA, CRIM 1/841. 37 TNA, MEPO 20/4. I found no reference to this in the Register of Deaths by Violence for 1940 or 1941. 38 TNA, CRIM 1/1162. 39 TNA, CRIM 1/1162. 40 TNA, CRIM 1/1162. 41 See Krueger, ‘Literary Defenses and Medical Prosecutions’; and TNA, HO 45/8040, urging the registration of still-births to prevent undetected infanticides. 42 Ann R. Higginbotham, ‘“Sins of the Age”: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London’, in Kristine Garrigan (ed.), Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), pp. 257–88. 43 Conley, Certain Other Countries, p. 168. 44 ‘Baby’s Body in Cloakroom’, Stoke Newington and Hackney Observer (12 April 1940), p. 1. 45 TNA, HO 329/112. 46 TNA, HO 329/112. 47 TNA, HO 45/19230. 48 TNA, MEPO 3/828. 49 TNA, MEPO 2/8770. 50 ‘Baby in River Was Murdered’, South Western Star (19 May 1950), p. 1; and ‘Murdered Baby’, Evening News (19 June 1950), p. 1.

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Infanticide in London, 1933–53  161 51 TNA, MEPO 2/8770. 52 Kristen Kramar makes a similar observation about infanticide in Canada: ‘Since the loss of a servant girl’s reputation had catastrophic economic and social consequences’, they were more likely than other working-class women to commit neonaticide or conceal birth: Kramar, Unwilling Mothers, p. 26. 53 Cliona Rattigan’s study of infanticides in Ireland also noted that women tended to work until the birth and return directly afterward to avoid suspicion. Rattigan, What Else Could I Do?, p. 67. 54 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 55 TNA, MEPO 20/3, CRIM 1/1127. See also ‘Murder Charge against Woman of 21: Arrested at Lambeth Hospital’, Brixton Free Press and Lambeth Borough News (16 March, 1945), p. 1. 56 TNA, CRIM 1/2046. 57 TNA, CRIM 1/1042. 58 TNA, CRIM 1/1042. 59 TNA, CRIM 1/1042. 60 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 61 TNA, CRIM 1/1317. 62 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 63 TNA, CRIM 1/1499. 64 ‘Mummified Baby Found in Ceiling of Derelict House’, Brixton Free Press and Lambeth Borough News (5 October 1945), p. 1. 65 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 66 ‘Young Nurse Admits Killing her Baby’, South London Advertiser (27 October 1950), p. 1. 67 ‘Young Nurse Admits Killing her Baby’, p. 1. 68 TNA, MEPO 3/829. 69 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 70 TNA, MEPO 20/3 and CRIM 1/1629. The files also show that Ball’s mother and two sisters-in-law accompanied her to appointments with Tyler and came at various times during the confinement, pointing to the collusion of family members in some cases of infanticide. 71 TNA, CRIM 1/1629. 72 TNA, CRIM 1/1499. 73 TNA, CRIM 1765. 74 Moira J. Maguire, Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 202–3. 75 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 76 ‘Death Sentence on Brixton Man’, Brixton Free Press and Lambeth Borough News (15 February 1946), p. 11. 77 ‘Death Sentence on Brixton Man’, p. 11. 78 TNA, MEPO 3/2857. 79 TNA, MEPO 3/2857. 80 TNA, MEPO 3/2857.

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162  Murder Capital 81 TNA, HO 336/7. 82 TNA, MEPO 3/2857. 83 TNA, MEPO 3/2857. 84 TNA, MEPO 2/8770. 85 Julie Wheelwright, ‘“Nothing in between”: Modern Cases of Infanticide’, in Jackson, Infanticide.

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6 Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53 Introduction London emerged in the post-war world as a city of decimated neighbourhoods, rubble and bombed-out houses, and as the lair of petty criminals profiting from the continued scarcity of goods and rationing. Deserters still haunted the capital, and many families were struggling with post-war reunions and the lingering effects of separation.1 The rate of indictable crime rose from a wartime low of 91,200 in 1943 to a 1945 total of 128,954 crimes, of which only 25% were cleared up.2 Most of these were property crimes, including innovative large-scale organized thefts made profitable by continued post-war austerity.3 The Metropolitan Police’s Register of Deaths by Violence also showed a new pattern of violence: by 1953 the numbers of infanticides and women’s deaths from abortion had dropped under new social provisions for mothers and families, while deaths caused by firearms and service rifles increased. Diminished manpower and a shifting population led the Metropolitan Police to develop new investigative techniques, with increased training in specimen collection and the re-establishment of the Hendon Police Laboratory in Whitehall. The importance of forensics to murder investigations was made publicly apparent by the physical examination of 10 Rillington Place after the discovery of John Reginald Christie’s serial murders in 1953.4 The controversial hangings of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley also turned public scrutiny on to police murder investigations and raised serious doubts about the nature of British justice and the role of capital punishment in it.5 As had happened after the First World War, public anxieties reflected the fear that ex-servicemen, the public and even the state had become brutalized by the violence of war.6 Concern focused on the rise in crime among ‘problem veterans’, citizens who had been tempted by the black market and juvenile delinquents, all of whom feature heavily in post-war sensational crime reporting.

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164  Murder Capital

Post-war London Investigations into suspicious deaths in post-war London reflect the enormous difficulties of resuming civilian and family life in a bombscarred and impoverished capital. The mood in London at the end of the war oscillated between a sense of anticlimax and optimism. While victory had been won, the slowness of demobilization and the continuation of rationing and National Service led to widespread discontent.7 Individual expressions of dissatisfaction were voiced in a Mass Observation questionnaire about optimism for the future: ‘I feel it’s going to be the beginning of dreadful problems – it’ll be something for the fighting to stop but it’s going to be a terrible time.’8 As David Kynaston has argued, ‘within a year of V-E Day, there had set in ... a widespread sense of disenchantment’ across the nation.9 The rationing of bread for the first time between 1946 and 1948, combined with the severe weather conditions of winter of 1946–47 added to the sense of disaffection and feeling of crisis.10 The end of hostilities left a London whose pattern was rent by bombed-out streets, destroyed houses and now-empty air-raid shelters. Unsolved suspicious death cases expose the cracks in the literal and social fabric of the city through which the most vulnerable fell: infants, children and women. Fifty-seven-yearold Olive Nixon was hit on the head with a brick while walking along a path in November 1946, and her body dragged to a bombed garage on Park Village East NW1. Her murder remained unsolved until Adam Ogilvie confessed to it ten years later.11 Derelict houses and shelters offered privacy for the commission of crimes and hope for their belated discovery, particularly for the small bodies of infants. In 1947, the body of a newborn child was found in a disused Anderson shelter at 26 Rosemary Ave, Hounslow, where the house had been destroyed by bombs, and in 1948, one newborn body was found in a bomb site in Shepherd Street W1, and one on the windowsill of a bombed house in Islington.12 That same year, the body of thirtyone-year-old Edith Dorland was discovered with head injuries in a bomb site at Mint Street, Southwark, and the body of five-year-old Eileen Lockart was found by chance in a bomb site in Chiswell Street EC1 four days after she went missing from Wellington Way, Bow.13 All these cases remained unsolved. At the same time, the creation of a welfare state under the Labour government and the movement towards an optimistic urban planning offered the possibility of a reformed London.14 As the visions of post-war reconstruction were disseminated in the popular media at the end of the war, planners and policymakers created a ‘prescriptive notion of ordered civic life’ that would dominate social policy until the

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   165 late 1950s.15 As Frank Mort has noted, post-war planners generated their own moral visions for the city and the imposition of order on ‘the physical and social confusion’ of contemporary London.16 The benchmark of planning for post-war reconstruction was Sir William Beveridge’s plan for reforming social welfare in Britain, and for abolishing the ‘giant evils’ of squalour, ignorance, want, idleness and disease.17 Published in 1942 as Social insurance and allied services, the report became an unlikely bestseller, selling 257,000 copies at two shillings, and 373,000 copies of the abridged edition at three pence.18 London was the focus of post-war urban planning because of its central role in valiantly enduring wartime bombing raids, which came to symbolize English fortitude and national character.19 According to Labour MP Gilbert McAllister in his introduction to Homes, towns and countryside: a practical plan for Britain (1945), ‘The more the cities of Britain were bombed and blasted by the Luftwaffe, the more the people of this country were inspired by a vision of the new cities which they would build after the war.’20 The post-war rebuilding of London was invested with enormous symbolic importance. Urban planning and the growth in police forensic services were two strands in post-war attempts to reorder and, to an extent, reanimate London in a new rational and scientific order. Criminal investigation became part of the new language of urban expertise, with a new set of languages to decipher London’s urban space, rendered unintelligible by the physical damage of wartime bombing as well as the social strains of total war. The Metropolitan Police faced the enormous task of rebuilding the force and maintaining control of a changed city with less manpower. The renewed emphasis on forensic science and medicine in the Metropolitan Police under the stewardship of Commissioner Harold Scott was one of the main tools of post-war suspicious death investigations. The Hendon Police Laboratory developed increasingly specialized testing in chemical, physical and medical evidence, including ballistics, toxicology, blood analysis and radiography. The laboratory’s move to Whitehall under a new directorship in 1948–49 and the increased training of officers in specimen collection techniques helped to allay detectives’ pre-war doubts about its usefulness in suspicious death investigations.21 London itself had been transformed by the war, to become a much less rooted city than it had been in the 1930s. It suffered the highest casualties of any British city during the war, with 30,000 civilian dead and over 51,000 seriously injured.22 One and a half million Londoners were made homeless, and approximately 9 million square feet of office space was destroyed.23 Over 8 million people, or 40% of London’s population, had moved from their neighbourhood for some

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166  Murder Capital part of the war, and this move would in many cases prove permanent. As Patrick Abercrombie noted in his Greater London plan of 1944, ‘the war has made migration a familiar habit’.24 The war also exacerbated the existing population decline in the inner boroughs. Stepney’s population, for example, had been falling by 2% a year in the 1930s, and during the war it dropped by 40%, with few returning.25 In 1938 the population of inner London (the LCC area) was 4 million, falling to 3.2 million by 1961, while the population of the wider metropolitan region, including the green belt and the outer country ring, had risen to 10.6 million.26 The destruction of urban working-class communities and their relegation to new suburban housing estates would become a frequent symbol alienation in post-war working-class culture and politics.27 The population of London was also becoming less homogeneous than it had been in the 1930s. The largest immigrant group in the immediate post-war years was still the Irish-born, who in 1951 made up 3.3% of the county of London’s population.28 The second largest group were Poles, including civilian refugees, Polish soldiers who had fled to London on the fall of France in 1940, members of General Anders’ Polish Corps who had arrived in England in 1946 and 33,000 other Poles trapped by the Communist takeover of Poland in 1945. They settled in the areas of affordable housing in Clapham, Lewisham, Islington, Croydon, Willesden, Ealing and especially Earl’s Court Road, which became known as the ‘Polish Corridor’.29 Greek Cypriots, who had been arriving since the 1920s and settling mainly in Soho and Camden Town, numbered 8,000 in 1951.30 West Indians also began to arrive as soon as the war was over, with the first large group of 492 arriving on the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948. They settled in areas that were cheap, tolerant and close to transport and manufacturing jobs, such as Brixton, Notting Dale and Kensal New Town in North Kensington.31 The demographic and physical changes created a post-war London that was much more cosmopolitan and varied than it had been in the 1930s. Contemporary commentators and police reports reflect anxiety over the influx of ‘foreign immigrants’, as many ‘adapt themselves to English ways, but the steady refusal of some of them to help the police has made the work of looking after the districts where they have settled particularly difficult’.32 In one Metropolitan Police report on the conditions of ‘coloured people’ in London boroughs, Commissioner Scott described the West Indian as ‘truculent, lazy and indolent. His ethical conduct is deplorably low and he tends to gravitate towards Public Assistance, dishonesty and crime in preference to hard work,’ while admitting that the presence of ‘coloured people’ had

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   167 not increased crime in the Metropolitan area. In his 1954 memoir, Scott offered a more publicly palatable version of this sentiment, arguing that while most London criminals were still ‘home-grown’, ‘Cypriots, Maltese and coloured British subjects are responsible for a disproportionately large portion of the offences connected with gaming, living on the immoral earnings of prostitutes, and the sale of drugs and liquor.’33 He proposed that they be ‘sent home on conviction’, thereby improving ‘the areas where they are active’.34 The linking of non-white British subjects with crimes associated with licentiousness and immorality and with particular neighbourhoods intensified the pre-war associations of aliens with Soho and reflected the racial boundary separating the ‘real’ British subject and the alien in the face of common political citizenship. James Whitfield, Simon Holdaway and others have asserted that the post-war resistance of the Metropolitan Police Force to adapt to the changing demographics of London led to the conflicts between police and minority communities that continue into the present.35

Post-war suspicious deaths The after-effects of war continued to be felt in the numbers, the types and the motivations behind suspicious deaths in the capital until the early 1950s. Investigations exposed the legacies of wartime psychological damage, material privation and physical destruction of the landscape which offered unsupervised spaces for murderous crimes to be committed or hidden. All Metropolitan Police divisions showed a post-war spike in numbers of deaths by violence, especially in central B Division in Westminster (see Table 9). In all inner divisions, the rates of deaths by violence were highest in the first three years after the war, reflecting the intensified effects of the movement of peoples and the dislocations in the centre of the city. Several cases in the Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence also show the enduring psychological trauma of the war. For example, Mary Lockey, a fifty-nine-year-old housewife who had suffered mental illness since a bombing incident in 1943, strangled her eighty-sevenyear-old mother Mary Williams at home in Bolan Street SW11 in 1948.36 Material austerity was also a noted factor in several murdersuicides, including that of Florence Carpenter, a housewife who killed her twenty-one-year-old daughter Gladys and herself over rationing difficulties in 1946.37 Her husband told the inquest that she had hated queuing and was often worried she would not be able to get enough food for them for the coming day.38 Her note to her husband

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168  Murder Capital Table 9: Suspicious deaths in Metropolitan London Police divisions, 1945–53 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 Inner divisions A Westminster 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 C Mayfair and 4 3 2 3 0 0 0 3 0 Soho E Holborn 4 1 2 2 2 1 1 3 1 Semi-outer divisions B Chelsea 6 6 6 1 1 1 1 0 3 D Marylebone 1 3 4 5 4 5 2 2 3 F Kensington 1 3 2 4 9 3 4 2 6 G King’s Cross 4 2 0 3 0 0 0 2 0 H Stepney 4 0 2 2 3 3 0 4 4 L Lambeth 3 3 1 2 1 3 1 1 2 M Southwark 2 1 3 3 3 1 0 0 0 N Islington 4 7 5 2 1 2 2 3 3 Outer divisions J Bethnal Green 3 3 1 2 2 1 4 1 3 K West Ham 2 0 3 5 0 2 0 3 1 P Peckham 2 1 0 2 3 2 1 1 1 R Greenwich 1 2 5 0 4 0 0 3 2 S Hampstead 1 0 2 2 3 1 3 3 1 T Hammersmith 5 3 2 4 1 2 2 1 1 V Wandsworth 5 4 3 3 3 1 0 3 1 W Clapham 2 2 2 2 1 0 0 5 4 X Willesden 5 7 2 3 6 2 5 5 2 Y Holloway 1 0 2 4 2 1 1 1 1 Z Croydon 4 2 4 0 0 4 2 2 2 TA Thames 2 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 2 Totals

66

53

54

55

50

37

30

48

43

Source: Based on TNA, MEPO 20/4.

said, ‘I hope you will forgive me for what I am doing. I can stand the rationing no longer. I am taking Gladys with me as I think she will be better off. Bury us together.’39 St Pancras deputy coroner J.W. Hulme said to the jury, ‘We are all standing the rationing ... in the true British way by making the best of it’, while noting that mothers bore the burden the most and ‘here and there some crack under the strain’.40 A similar anxiety over scarcity in a pub on the Euston Road after the beer ran out led to a fight which left one man dead and the barman

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   169 accused of manslaughter.41 Post-war suspicious death investigations highlight the effects of psychological trauma, austerity and migration in a larger atmosphere of exhaustion and anxiety and the difficulties of readjusting to peacetime life. The police were also concerned with an exponential increase in post-war arrests for street solicitation in the West End, with a 100% increase between 1945 and 1946 in C Division, and an increase in B Division from an annual average of forty-five arrests to 586 in 1946.42 The perceived increase in prostitution was linked in the press and in police files to foreign organized criminal gangs and was seen as symptomatic of London’s post-war moral degradation.43 Several unsolved murders of prostitutes in the Register of Deaths by Violence were ascribed to foreigners, such as the shooting of Violet Green on the landing in her building on Rupert Street, Soho, in 1947 by a weapon ‘possibly an American Army type’ and Rachael Fennick, stabbed with a ‘Mediterranean’ knife in her Broadwick Street room in Soho in 1948.44 These police notes in the Register attempted to dismiss the unsolved crimes as perpetrated by a non-Briton, as had been done with the attribution of two unsolved murders in 1942 to American Airman Gordon Cummins.45 The assertion that unsolved gun murders could be ascribed to foreign guns was also part of a longer disavowal of guns as English weapons. As Clive Emsley argued, ‘even after the Firearms Act of 1920 restricted their availability and use, some English offenders continued to carry guns ... yet English commentators could still claim it was unusual and alien’, and represented the influence of American gangsters in the popular cinema.46 Two 1946 cases illustrate the difficulties of investigating suspicious deaths in post-war London. On the night of 9 November, two Londoners were shot dead in separate incidents, and the perpetrators were never found. Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Stuart Dolden was on demobilization leave from the RAF and was sitting with his fiancée Jacinta Bland in a car in Fairmead Bottom, a clearing on the edge of Epping Forest in Waltham Holy Cross (J Division), when a man masked by a muffler opened the car door, and according to the police file, ‘for no apparent reason’ fired four shots at Dolden, killing him.47 None of the other couples in the clearing saw him, and no clues were found. This crime was confusing and sinister, an apparently motiveless crime against a young ex-serviceman. The use of the firearm to kill quickly and the gunman’s escape pointed to new levels of social and physical disconnection in the capital, as well as an incalculable increase in service revolvers among the population. Nor were shootings confined to the backwoods of the city. The same

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170  Murder Capital night, Margaret Cook was shot by a bullet believed by police to be from a service revolver.48 She was talking to some men in a narrow passageway next to the door of the Blue Lagoon Club in Carnaby Street when a shot rang out and another man ran into the crowd and disappeared.49 He was described as a man in his mid-twenties, dark, with a dark Burberry-type raincoat and a pork-pie hat, a description popularized by depictions of professional gangster in post-war films.50 These shootings were reported by The Times on 11 November 1946, the second Armistice Day after the war, as ‘Two murders in the London area: man and woman shot’. The article also reported a third shooting at the Boathouse Hotel, Bush Road, Richmond, which narrowly missed a G. Dawson who was helping the barman clear up.51 These three shootings indicate the persistence of the multiple effects of the war on crime in the years which followed.

Post-war policing The Metropolitan Police faced enormous challenges after the war: an increased number of service revolvers in the city, a mobile population, criminal gangs operating in the West End, demobbed soldiers now returning home, the increase of traffic with end of petrol rationing, and the lowest number of police officers since the 1880s.52 In 1939, the Metropolitan Police Force had had 19,500 men. During the war recruiting stopped and 25,000 auxiliaries had been called up, but these numbers were reduced to 4,000 by the end of the war, and more than half of these left in 1945 after the labour order which compelled them to stay was revoked. Five hundred policemen had also been killed in London during the war, and the lack of adequate housing for policemen and the higher wages in the private sector limited recruiting.53 The appointment of Harold Scott as Police Commissioner in late 1944 signalled a change in how the Home Office wanted the force to be run. Whereas almost all previous appointees had been retired military officers of high rank, Scott was a professional civil servant who at the time was Permanent Secretary of Aircraft Production. Scott used various unorthodox tactics to make up for the lack of manpower in the police, including the greater use of informers and undercover operations to fight large-scale frauds and robberies. The Special Duty Squad, or Ghost Squad of the Metropolitan Police, established in 1945, was given the task of collecting and disseminating criminal intelligence within the force.54 Meanwhile the Metropolitan Police also expanded the Press Bureau, established in the Office of the Commissioner in 1919 and expanded in the 1930s; as Scott wrote,

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   171 ‘Publicity became, in fact, an indispensable part of our armoury.’55 The bureau acted as a liaison to the daily press, and also cooperated in the production of wireless programmes, films such as The blue lamp (1949) and later, television programmes such as Fabian of the Yard (1954–56) and Dixon of Dock Green (1955–76). In 1945, the post of public information officer was created to direct the Press Bureau’s activity, although he encountered resistance from within the force. In the wake of three London murders in July 1946, the public information officer described the intense pressure from journalists and requested permission to go himself to crime scenes and relay the details to all the newspapers at once, along with a leading detective from CID.56 The response from Crime Commander H. Young was a firm negative: ‘I don’t for a moment minimize the usefulness of the Press when acting in a public-spirited way, by publishing the news we ask them to do and so help us; but for police to supply the press with certain facts in a major investigation solely for their news value is something I cannot bring myself to agree to.’57 In response, the press officer expressed his frustration at the CID’s lack of cooperation with the press, which kept him from his fulfilling his ‘chief duty ... to keep the Press sweet’.58 He complained that even the newspaper men knew of his difficulties with the CID: ‘The Press tell me my appointment from the C.I.D. point of view is the most unpopular in Scotland Yard, and I shall make myself even more unpopular ... My present position, and that of the Press Bureau, is ludicrous.’59 A more successful method to deal with reduced manpower was the introduction of six Labrador retriever dogs introduced into the suburban divisions for detective work in 1945.60

Fears of post-war criminality Many of the public fears of a crime wave in postwar London reflected a crisis of masculinity that echoed the anxieties about returning damaged soldiers after the First World War.61 During wartime, representations of British masculinity had to maintain, as Sonya Rose has described, ‘an unstable and temperate mix, situated between hyper-masculine Nazis and effeminacy’.62 The end of hostilities brought a renewed fear of aggression and potential criminality in the demobilized solider, and a compensatory emphasis on domesticity and the normative family which involved a shift in gender identities.63 The late 1940s image of middle-class masculinity stressed the ‘stiff upper lip’: a man who restrained his emotions during times of crisis, but with an implied cost and fatigue.64 The wartime duty of self-denial

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172  Murder Capital carried on in the austerity and economic uncertainty of the post-war years, which made the ideal of home as a refuge as attractive as it was unobtainable.65 The returning soldier with a taste for violence, the deserter forced to live by criminal means, the foreigner involved in criminal gangs and the sharp-suited spiv selling black market goods in an alley were excluded from post-war home life and on the fringes of the an expanding criminal world. The end of the war also amplified fears that the general populace was growing increasingly criminalized. Whereas memoirs of former London criminals portrayed a prewar London underworld bound by kinship, territory and even a separate language based on eighteenth-century thieves’ cant and Cockney rhyming slang, the war diluted this criminal subculture.66 Deserters, petty racketeers and others swelled the criminal ranks.67 As a result, a new figure developed in popular imagination: the spiv, a runner or contact man who brokered criminal endeavours. Richard Hornsey defined the spiv as a dissenting figure who represented the bourgeoisie’s paranoia as much as a social reality.68 Spivs were also associated with former soldiers, in the exaggerated patterns and cuts of the demobilization suits, and with places like ‘Loot Alley’ in Cutler Street, Houndsditch, a blitzed cul-de-sac near Liverpool Street station, largely run by former soldiers where the ‘purloined goods of occupied Europe were being fenced at highly inflated prices’.69 Professional crime and of the readjustment of returning soldiers were themes that fascinated the British public and featured frequently in newspaper reporting and in police memoirs such as Robert Fabian’s 1950 autobiography Fabian of the Yard. The ‘spiv cycle’ of post-war crime films also depicted a London that was saturated with returning soldiers and deserters, against which a weakened police force could do little.70 In They made me a fugitive (1947), It always rains on Sunday (1947), Noose (1948), Night beat (1948) and The flamingo affair (1948), ex-servicemen come up against black marketeers who had done well in the war. These films contrasted the ‘satisfying masculine performance’ in wartime with the masculine dissatisfactions of the post-war world.71 In It always rains on Sunday, the life of East End housewife Rosie Sandigate is disrupted by the sudden appearance of her former lover Tommy Swann on the run from Dartmoor Prison.72 The two competing visual narratives of post-war London are represented in the visual contrast between the domestic space of Rosie’s life, with its floral chintzes and homely details, and the darkness of the disused Anderson shelter and ruined streets through which Tommy tries to make his escape. The two spaces are conflated when Tommy comes into the marital bed, the clean eiderdown contrasting with his bare chest, unshaven chin and dirty coat, while the metal bars

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   173 of the brass bed behind him suggest the prison cell from which he has come and to which he must return.

Post-war deserters The concern with men on the run, especially deserters, increased in late 1945 and 1946 as the frustrations with slow demobilization meant that more soldiers joined their ranks. On 22 January 1947, the government announced a scheme of voluntary surrender, promising that deserters would be dealt with fairly and an allowance paid to their families. The scheme met with a lacklustre response estimated at 842 surrenders out of 20,000 deserters.73 Most deserters faced with the choice of returning to their units, serving a period of detention and another period in the forces, or continuing their ‘illegal’ existences, chose the latter. Desertion was in itself a crime and was widely believed to inevitably lead to more crimes, since deserters had no ration books or identification papers. As the Deserter’s Amnesty Campaign wrote in a letter to The Times in March 1947, deserters were in danger of drifting ‘into becoming full-time criminals by pressure of circumstances’.74 While deserters may have had to resort to petty pilfering and forged coupons, only five post-war cases of violent deaths in the Metropolitan Police Register involved deserters. The first two cases involved deserters who had resorted to robbery and violence. In November 1945, black marketeer Ruben Martirosoff was shot and robbed by two Polish deserters, Marian Grondkowski and Henryck Malinowski.75 Martirosoff was found shot in his car in Chepstow Place, Kensington (T Division), and when the suspects were tracked down through fingerprints on the windshield, they had his watch.76 The two deserters had been brave soldiers. Grondkowski was thirty-three, and had fought in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War for three years. Taken prisoner there, he had escaped to France in 1939 and fought for the French Army until it surrendered, then with the Foreign Legion in North Africa. In 1943 he volunteered for the Free Polish Army and came to England, where he served for two years in the Special Sabotage Unit. Malinowski, only twenty-five, had fought in the defence of Warsaw in 1939, been captured by the Germans and escaped from a concentration camp, made his way to North Africa where he joined the Foreign Legion and had also come to England to volunteer in the Free Polish Armoured Division. Both men had deserted towards the end of the war when it was clear that their war aim: the liberation of Poland from foreign aggressors, was not going to be achieved.77 Each blamed the other for

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174  Murder Capital the shooting and both were hanged. The Martirosoff shooting showed the thin line between military heroism and criminal murder, hinting at the brutalizing effects of combat. Another post-war case involving deserters centred on a fight in a café at 140 New Cavendish Street W1 (C Division) on Christmas Day, 1946. Twenty-seven-year-old deserter Frederick Westbrook was being escorted out by several Jamaicans when he suddenly pulled out a revolver and fired several shots, one of which killed twenty-oneyear-old RAF Aircraftman Aloysius Abbott.78 Westbrook was traced through a black British prostitute Stella Mooney and her companion, who had been sitting with him in the café. When he was found two days later he led two police constables on a chase over the rooftops, shooting one in the eye in his attempt to escape.79 At trial his defence was that he shot into the café in the heat of passion, to frighten ‘a so-called gang of coloured men who were attacking him’.80 Westbrook tried to recast the Jamaican soldiers as criminals by appealing to racial stereotypes, despite the fact that at trial he asked that forty-four other offences of breaking and entering in the Walton, Weybridge and Woking districts be taken into account. He was sentenced to eleven years’ penal servitude for manslaughter and malicious shooting. The other violent crimes by deserters took place in 1948. On 23 January 1948, Alfred Lee shot and killed his wife’s lover John Addison, a soldier in the East Surrey Regiment. Lee had been a deserter since 1940 and worked as a painter and decorator. He had been decorating his wife’s kitchen when Addison came in and asked Lee’s wife to go to Brighton with him to meet his parents. In the subsequent quarrel Lee’s gun went off and Addison died. Lee pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to only three days in prison, although he had in his possession two rifles, two pistols and a six-chambered revolver.81 On 13 February 1948, Donald Thomas shot PC Nathaniel Edgar at Wades Hill, Southgate, when Edgar stopped him outside a house he was about to break into.82 When he was arrested he admitted to sixteen cases of housebreaking, and property from eight more were traced to him, including three clothing coupon books, one ration book and three identity cards. On 16 February 1948, John Leonard randomly punched bystander John Carr in the booking hall of Leicester Square station, killing him. The police assumed Leonard was drunk as there was no motive for the assault, and he served nine months’ hard labour for manslaughter.

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   175

Former servicemen Both deserters and returning soldiers were associated in the public mind with a rise in crime as they struggled to readjust to a changed post-war world. The surge in crime was blamed partly on the difficulty of reconciling the details of letters sent to soldiers in wartime with the realities of post-war Britain that awaited them; state censorship and self-imposed cheerfulness meant that few families had painted a truthful picture of destruction, shortages and the exhausted civilian population. The Metropolitan Police’s Register of Deaths by Violence suggests that these fears of serviceman violence were exaggerated, as soldiers or recently demobbed soldiers were named as perpetrators in only twelve of 436 post-war cases.83 Contemporary criminologists also argued against former servicemen being responsible for rising crime rates. In 1954 John Spencer found no compelling evidence for the post-war ‘veteran problem’, other than that presented in the press, though he did acknowledge the difficulty of readjustment to civilian life: ‘On demobilization the Serviceman is expected to abandon the aggressive and destructive impulses which are essential on the battlefield, and the whole attitude of scrounging and living on one’s wits requires a compete reorientation.’84 Dale Archer and Rosemary Gartner revisited the question in the 1980s and found that the war produced a similar lawlessness in women and older men to that in men of conscription age, which is reflected in the increase in suspicious adult deaths of all types in the post-war Register.85 The majority of the post-war murders or manslaughters committed by serving or demobbed servicemen were, in contrast to those of deserters, committed within the family. Two men shot their wives, and four shot their wives or girlfriends and then themselves, including a Canadian officer, a lieutenant colonel from the Polish Resettlement Corps, and an ex-wing commander.86 Two killed their wives’ lovers, one American soldier killed a waiter in a fight in a Windmill Street club, one strangled his adopted daughter, and former Royal Navy sailor William Clark killed his uncle Frederick Hinton. Clark had been serving on HMSS Trelissick which was bombed and sunk in 1941, and had been invalided out suffering from epileptic attacks.87 In 1944 he had claimed his uncle had drugged and molested him, a claim which he later said was due to hallucinations. In 1946 he killed his uncle with a flat-iron and was found guilty but insane. The exception to this pattern was the murder committed by Able Seaman John Mathieson. He was arrested for being drunk and disorderly outside a café on 21 July 1943 and was found to have the clothing coupon books of a Mrs Mona Vanderstay and her husband. Her body was discovered by

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176  Murder Capital choirboys the next day in St Luke’s Churchyard, Hillmarton Road N7 (N Division).88 St Luke’s, a Victorian Gothic church completed in 1860, had been damaged and the rubble piled up for repairs. The churchyard was on Mrs Vanderstay’s route home from the cinema which she had attended that night and the darkness and the rubble provided enough concealment for Mathieson to take her by surprise. Like the 1941 photograph of Richmond Way (see Figure 7), one police crime scene photograph of St Luke’s Churchyard focuses on bomb rubble, framed by the damaged church and the encroaching greenery (see Figure 8). As in other contemporary photographs of blitzed London, the photograph emphasizes the texture of the debris and the church ruins. Having featured in wartime propaganda, and now ubiquitous in every area of the capital, bomb sites took on a post-war afterlife in a London in which, as Kitty Hauser has argued, destruction provided an opportunity for seeing, telling, or imagining an otherwise hidden history.89 The ruined cityscape became an iconography of choice for post-war filmmakers and novelists, demonstrating, according to Leo Mellor, how ‘structures incomplete, broken, smashed or decayed could tell far more than they ever could while whole’.90 In this photograph, the looming wall of St Luke’s and the long grass growing around the rubble also implies that the literal

Figure 8: St Luke’s Churchyard N7, 1946 (TNA, CRIM 1/1799)

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   177 damage and neglect of the church reflects the moral degradation of the population as a result of war. Mathieson’s defence was that he was subject to blackouts since surviving a torpedo blast while at sea in 1943 and a motoring accident in Germany in 1945, but he was found guilty of murder and executed. The most dramatic case of a murder by a former serviceman was the murder of Margery Gardner by Neville Heath in Room 4, Pembridge Court Hotel, 34 Pembridge Gardens W11. Neville Heath was a figure whose crimes exemplified many of the anxieties of the post-war period: the instability of identity, the crisis of post-war masculinity and the crimes of demobbed soldiers. In 1939 Heath had joined the Royal Army Service Corps, was given a commission and sent to the Middle East, where he was cashiered for false pretences and writing a bad cheque. He escaped his guard in Durban, joined the South African Air Force and rose to the rank of captain.91 In 1945 he underwent his third court martial, this time for undisciplined behaviour and for wearing unauthorized decorations, after which he returned to England. In 1946 he appeared in Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court charged with wearing decorations to which he was not entitled.92 Heath was the ultimate cad: a dishonourable man pretending to be someone he was not. In 1946 Heath was living in London, subsisting on petty frauds and using hotels to indulge his sexual proclivities. On the night of 21 June, Mrs Margery Gardner signed into the Pembridge Court Hotel with Heath at 12 a.m. and was found dead in the room the following day. She had been bound, whipped and mutilated before suffocating. Heath was easily identified as he had signed in the hotel register under his own name and left his fingerprints in the room.93 Scotland Yard issued a warrant for his arrest, and in the ‘biggest hue and cry in modern times’, according to the Daily Mirror, circulated his description across Britain, though not his photograph.94 Heath escaped to Bournemouth, where he signed into the Tollard Royal Hotel in West Hill Road under the name Group Captain Rupert Brooke. While out walking he met a former WRNS, twenty-one-yearold Doreen Marshall. They had dinner together, after which Marshall was not seen for several days. After being questioned by the hotel manager, Heath went to the police station to clear the matter up, where he was recognized as Heath and arrested. In his room were belongings of Marshall’s, and her mutilated body was found on 9 July in the bushes at Branksome Dene Chine near the beach. At trial his defence lawyer J.D. Casswell attempted to claim partial insanity, describing him as ‘absolutely insane, mad as a hatter, a lunatic’.95 Heath was found guilty of the murder at the Old Bailey and was

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178  Murder Capital hanged in October 1946. The bodies of both Heath’s victims and the hotel room at Pembridge Court were investigated with forensic techniques, although not all the evidence was presented at trial. The thoroughness of the examination, despite the killer’s likely identity being known, was probably a test exercise in the gathering of forensic evidence, in which detectives and officers were being more rigorously trained. Such instruction was necessary: one of the palm prints found on the headboard of the bed in Room 4 of the Pembridge Court Hotel matched Police Sergeant Averill, an officer on the scene.96

Post-war forensics The greater anonymity of crimes in the capital, the increasing use of firearms and the reorganization of Scotland Yard’s forensic laboratory under Harold Scott led to an increasing reliance on forensics in postwar investigations of crimes. H.J. Walls, a scientist in the Scotland Yard Forensic Laboratory, attributed the rapid expansion of forensic science to scientific advances which led to greater specialization, increased laboratory access across the country and the education of police forces in the use of this new weapon.97 In 1945 the famous ‘murder bag’, or crime case, was introduced to serve as a ‘constant reminder’ to deal carefully with crime scene exhibits. It was a box 10” x 5½” x 2 ½”, containing test tubes, glass containers, tweezers, scissors, probes, magnifying glasses, steel measuring tapes, adhesive tapes, tie-on labels, stick-on labels and envelopes of various sizes. The boxes were labelled with instructions and procedures.98 By 1946 fifteen of these boxes were available to divisional detective inspectors, and thirty-six more were on order; their popularity was reflected in the annual skirmishes over who would pay for replacing the receptacles.99 These techniques of preserving physical evidence at a crime scene were slow to be learned. In 1946, the suicide of Blackpool butcher Charles Hyde was treated as a murder because of the many sets of bloody footprints at the scene and outside the locked back door, later discovered to have been caused by the many policemen who had come to look at the body.100

Fingerprints Before the war, the attitude of police to fingerprints was akin to that of the apocryphal criminal who protested fingerprint identification in its early days: ‘Let a man come forward like a man and say he

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   179 recognizes me. I’ve nothing to say against that, but this fingerprint business behind a fellow’s back, it’s mean and un-English, that’s what I say.’101 Fingerprints were mentioned in only two pre-war notations in the Register of Deaths by Violence and their associated police files. As mentioned earlier, in the 1937 case of Elsie McMahon, murdered in her flat on the Euston Road, police found fingerprints on a tin of salmon but no match. When Robert Dixon murdered a prostitute in a similar manner in Newcastle, detectives from D Division travelled there to interview him.102 They brought him to London to appear in an identification parade before they charged him on the fingerprint evidence.103 After 1939, the search for fingerprints was mentioned much more often in the Register and in the police files. In 1941 Harold Trevor, newly released from Parkhurst Prison, struck Mrs Greenhill on the head with a bottle during a robbery. His ‘finger impressions’ were found on the broken pieces of glass and his bloody prints on the desk.104 Fingerprints were also used to connect the murders of prostitutes Evelyn Oatley and Margaret Lowe to Aircraftman Gordon Cummins in 1942. A palm print on a safe was used to link young Samuel Dashwood and Theodore Silverosa to the murder of pawnbroker Leonard Moules.105 In the post-war years, fingerprints were used in evidence in the killing of Reuben Martirosoff in 1945, of Margery Gardner in 1946 and of eighteen-year-old prostitute Kathleen Lindsay killed by a client in 1946.106 Fingerprints were also used to catch the killer of Harry Michealson, who disturbed a robber on Christmas night in his Marylebone flat.107 Norris Megaw also left his prints when he killed the nightwatchman at the Savoy Theatre in Teddington in 1948. Fingerprints were found but not traced in the unsolved murders of pay clerk Alfred Mitchell in 1940, of Maurice Horner killed by a soldier in 1943, of prostitute Audrey Stewart in 1945, of John Brown killed by burglars in 1947, of prostitute Rachel Fennick in 1947 and of Daisy Wallis, owner of Adelphi Secretarial Agency stabbed in her office in 1948.108 Fingerprints were useful for linking people who knew each other only casually, or for identifying convicted criminals whose prints were already on file. They were therefore most useful for solving robberies that ended in manslaughter. The increasing use of fingerprints suggests that police and criminals were no longer narrow strata of professional men known to each other, but that crime investigation now had to focus more on anonymous relationships mediated by technology.

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180  Murder Capital

Firearms The other change in investigative practice was the identification of firearms used in murders. From 1933 to 1939 the Register recorded sixteen suspicious deaths involving firearms (see Table 10). This increased to forty cases during the war. In the post-war years thirtyone cases involved firearms, with the highest numbers in 1946 and 1947, the years when demobilized soldiers were passing through the city. While the Metropolitan Police did not have a full-time ballistics expert until 1960, gun expert Robert Churchill performed forensic tests that linked bullets and cartridges to guns in his laboratory and testified for the prosecution in court.109 Table 10: Suspicious deaths involving firearms in London, 1945–53

September– December 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953

Fight Murder/ Unsolved Murder Robbery Total suicides of wife 0 2 0 0 0 2 3 0 2 0 0 0 1 0

2 2 2 0 3 2 0 0

2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0

3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 2 1 0 0 0 1 0

10 7 5 0 3 2 2 0

Source: Based on TNA, MEPO 20/3 and 20/4.

One of the most notable cases in which identification of the bullet and gun were crucial to the case was the murder of forty-one-yearold Elizabeth McLindon, a housekeeper shot on 8 June 1946 at 45 Chester Square SW1, the London home of the King of Greece.110 Chester Square is a small, exclusive residential square in Belgravia, off Elizabeth Street, one of three garden squares developed by the Grosvenor family in the 1840s.111 McLindon had worked there as a live-in housekeeper for three months. The case began when the police went looking for McLindon on 14 June 1946 to ask about accusations of bigamy against her fiancé Arthur Boyce. They found her body sitting up and slumped forward in a locked room in the flat, a spent .32 calibre cartridge case behind her. Boyce was also suspected of stealing

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   181 a .32 Browning automatic pistol from a fellow lodger John Rowland at 25 Dawes Road, Fulham SW6 a few weeks previously. So certain was Rowland that Boyce had stolen it (being the only one who knew he had it), he sent him a box and a postage label asking for it to be returned, which the police found among Boyce’s things. Rowland still had a used cartridge, which Robert Churchill matched to the bullet and cartridge case found in Chester Square. It also emerged during the investigation that McLindon had confided to friends that Boyce had threatened to shoot her numerous times, and that he had passed off bad cheques in the neighbourhood. On the last day McLindon was seen alive she was hurrying along the square, followed by an angry-looking Boyce.112 Boyce was found guilty on the circumstantial evidence and the case was reported in the Journal of Criminal Law because it had depended so heavily on ballistics evidence.113

Juveniles and young men The final post-war change evident in suspicious death investigations was the increase in cases involving juvenile offenders and juvenile victims. The war had brought children into the limelight as indicators of civilian morale, representatives of a post-war future and objects of social policies such as evacuation, in which more than 400,000 children were moved from London to less vulnerable areas. This voluntary scheme brought expert warnings from child psychologists such as John Bowlby on the potential psychological wartime dangers for children and highlighted the urban poverty in which many of the children lived.114 For those children who remained in or returned to London, the closure of schools, clubs and recreation grounds and the absence of older family members left many with no supervision, and older youths gained higher wages and the ability to live rent free in public shelters.115 According to child psychologist Cyril Burtt, the atmosphere of war also exerted a powerful influence on impressionable young minds, furnishing them with new violent words, ideas and images and exacerbating the desire for adventure and reckless daring which their new freedoms allowed them to pursue.116 The end of the war painted an even bleaker picture for London children and young people. The spectre of a generation of youth irreparably damaged by the war haunted post-war discussions about young people. Like demobbed soldiers, evacuated children had to return with a much broader knowledge to a strange home where much had changed. In 1945, evacuation officers examined each London address of the 56,000 children still evacuated. Only 37,000

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182  Murder Capital were deemed to have homes fit to return to.117 The rest had nowhere to go; their parents had died, disappeared, or were unwilling to have them back. Just as evacuation had shone a spotlight on the deprived condition of London children arriving in reception areas, so these visits highlighted the difficult circumstances of many children in the aftermath of war. The surveillance and discipline of young criminals also struggled in the face of shortages in the Probation Service, Approved Schools and Borstal institutions. The Children’s Act of 1948 attempted to remedy these problems, recognizing children’s citizenship rights and bringing responsibility for neglected and delinquent children, who had come before the same juvenile courts since 1933, to shared Children’s Committees and Children’s Officers in each local borough.118 The public concern over post-war youth crime condemned the perceived increase in the number of juveniles involved in violent crime.119 In 1947–48, 5,683 criminal cases were brought before Metropolitan juvenile courts or involved London juveniles in courts outside the county, an increase of 10% from the previous year and the highest rate since the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act. Charges involving boys rose from 4,037 to 4,397, and for girls from 426 to 510. The number of girls appearing before the courts as being in need of care or protection, which had shown a general tendency to decline since the wartime peak in 1943–44, rose sharply from 153 to 201.120 Various reasons were given for the spike in post-war juvenile crime, including a greater general willingness to report it. Criminologist F.H. McClintock argued that much of the 170% rise in convictions for crimes of violence among youths between 1950 and 1960 could be attributed to a greater readiness on the part of the public to report aggressive behaviour of young people.121 Others blamed the violence depicted in newspapers, comic books and films. A 1949 conference on juvenile delinquency held by the LCC debated the many causes of juvenile delinquency and set out a list of factors to be examined in each case, though this research was hampered by how little was known of the individual circumstances of juveniles appearing in court.122 One commonality identified at the conference was that of another family member involved in crime, suggesting a familial rather than a generational inclination towards crime. Two of the most famous post-war murder cases were committed by young men whose brothers were also lawbreakers. In 1945 twentyfive-year-old Thomas Jenkins was convicted with Ronald Hedley of running down Captain Robert Binney in a car on London Bridge when he tried to stop their escape after a smash and grab raid in the City.123 His younger brother, twenty-three-year-old Charles Jenkins, was one

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   183 of three thieves who fatally shot motorcyclist Alec de ­Antiquitis after an attempted hold-up on busy Charlotte Street, just north of Soho, in 1947. All three men were found guilty. Seventeen-year-old Terence Peter Rolt was sentenced to be detained during His Majesty’s pleasure because of his youth, but Jenkins and twenty-one-year-old Christopher James Geraghty were hanged in a double execution at London’s Pentonville Prison on 19 September 1947.124All three were former Borstal inmates discharged a few months before. Reports from the Borstal Association described Rolt as unreliable and with a violent temper, Jenkins as being hasty tempered, adventurous and suspicious of authority, and Geraghty as quick tempered with no moral sense. The last two offered ‘little hope for the future’, with Geraghty being described as ‘a potential gunman doing smash and grab raids’.125 The harsh verdicts against the three youths were in marked contrast to the leniency shown to Jenkins, Greenaway, Hare and Gray in the shooting of Gwendolyn Cox at the Alexandra Park tavern in 1940. While the youth of the 1940 defendants had been used to argue for compassion, Jenkins, Rolt and Geraghty were judged more harshly because of the violence they had shown as juveniles, as the evidence from Borstal reports suggests.126 These three were portrayed as inherently morally deficient, a condition that had been amplified by war and the glamorization of gangster films and crime culture. Crime also ran in the family in the 1952 case of Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley. In October 1952, Niven Scott Craig had been sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for armed robbery. On 2 November 1952, his sixteen-year-old brother Christopher Craig and nineteen-year-old Derek Bentley were caught by police attempting a robbery in Croydon. Craig was pursued over the rooftops, firing from a sawed-off shotgun and shouting ‘I am Craig. You’ve just given my brother twelve years. Come on you coppers, I’m only sixteen!’127 He wounded one policeman and shot and killed PC Sidney Miles. In a trial which attracted much publicity and criticism, Craig’s accomplice Derek Bentley was also found guilty of the murder for allegedly calling out, ‘Let him have it Chris’, despite his maintaining at first that he had meant ‘Let him have the gun’, then that he had not said the words at all.128 The trial and Bentley’s execution led to public outrage at the miscarriage of justice that the shooter lived and his accomplice was hanged. In 1998 the Court of Appeal granted a posthumous pardon.129 The actions of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, came in for the heaviest criticism, with Bentley’s lawyers and the counsel for the Crown agreeing that the judge was ‘blatantly prejudiced’ against the defendants, had misdirected the jury on points of law, had made prejudicial comments during his summing up and had wrongly

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184  Murder Capital commended the police officers.130 Goddard’s prejudices reflected the harshness of contemporary attitudes towards youth and the public perceptions of their increased hooliganism and general delinquency. The ending of the 1952 film Cosh boy, in which a young miscreant is violently thrashed with a belt by his new stepfather as the neighbours and police listen approvingly outside, epitomizes the hostility felt by the public towards the figure of the juvenile delinquent. Like the spiv and the ‘coloured’ Commonwealth migrant, the postwar juvenile delinquent was conspicuous and recognizable in urban space. Mid-1950s youth subcultures such as the Teddy Boys and Girls from Southwark who dressed as Edwardian dandies underlined youths’ visible difference and their refusal to adhere to dominant social mores.131 The Teddy Boys were associated in the press with a rise in violence and youth gangs, and the killing of eighteen-year-old John Beckley in a gang fight in 1953 added to the public perception of youth out of control. On the evening of 2 July, a group of young men who called themselves the Plough Boys attacked four youths on Clapham Common, including Fred Chandler and John Beckley. Outnumbered, Chandler and Beckley ran to the north side of the common, where they tried to get on a number 137 bus. Beckley was pulled off and chased up the street, where he collapsed with six stab wounds and later died in hospital. The problem lay in discovering which gang member had dealt the fatal blows, as no weapon was found, and none of the victims could identify Beckley’s attacker. One member of the gang, Michael John Davies, freely admitted participating in the fight when questioned by police, although he always denied stabbing Beckley. He was later identified by the one witness who came forward claiming to have seen the incident from the top of the 137 bus. Miss Mary Frayling told the police that she had seen a dark-haired youth attack Beckley, then put what appeared to be a green handled knife into his right breast pocket.132 She later identified him as Michael John Davies when he was sitting in a South London magistrate’s court with the other defendants. Frayling almost certainly exaggerated what she had seen, since the dusk light was uncertain, the bus was turning and the windows were small, and a formal identification parade was never held.133 But both Frayling and Davies, at least initially, enjoyed the attention and notoriety of the case, and their desire for publicity led to Davies’ conviction for murder after a jury deliberation of just two hours. Davies was later reprieved and served seven years, still denying his guilt in the murder. As these cases demonstrate, judges, juries, the press and the public colluded in a sensationalized image of juvenile crime in which youths were vilified.

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   185 Post-war investigation of suspicious deaths also underlined the vulnerability of young people. The murder of a fifteen-year-old girl, Pat Beard, from a slashed throat in Medwin Street, Brixton SW4 on 9 August 1950 and the acquittal of the main suspect suggests an age differential in post-war criminal justice. The accused was fiftythree-year-old Victor James Boyle, whose landlady’s daughter was Pat Beard’s best friend. Someone had complained to the police that Boyle had interfered with two little girls, and Boyle mistakenly believed that Beard was responsible.134 He had arranged to meet Pat that night in Medwin Street, and he later claimed that when he got there she had already been murdered.135 Although he confessed to several people on the night of the murder and tried to escape to Southport, he later denied these confessions and since no razor or blood was found in his room, he was acquitted.136 The first crime scene photograph captured the scene shortly after the murder, with the blood in the alleyway still fresh on the pavement (see Figure 9). As in other crime photos, the view is of a tightly framed empty scene, with the vacant space and the bloodstain suggesting the absent body. The desire of the photographer to include the street sign

Figure 9: Medwin Street SW4, 1950 (TNA, CRIM 1/2098)

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186  Murder Capital in the top left corner has let a sliver of human activity into the frame. A tobacconist’s shop with signs in the window suggests a busy high street, with the street life only steps away from where the murder had occurred, apparently unobserved. In this tight corner of the photograph stands a woman, like us a spectator to the scene, whose widened eyes convey horror, fascination and pity. As Dominique Kalifa has shown in the context of Paris, crime scene photographs anchored the crime to its street setting, while the presence of neighbours and locals at the scene helped to transform the crime into a site of collective memory. This photograph emphasizes the reflexive nature of crime scene photography, undermining the anonymity of the photographer and of the crime, both observed by the woman in the photograph. The crime scene photograph taken at some later date shows a very different view of Medwin Street (see Figure 10). In this scene it is daylight, and the bloodstain in the foreground shows signs of attempts to scrub it away. The vantage point of the photographer, looking north up Ferndale Road, emphasizes the everyday aspects of the street, the shops and signs of a busy main street, with children and a bicyclist in the distance, oblivious to the photographer. The eye travels up the street to the middle distance, away from the fading bloodstain and the memory of the crime. The contrast between the two photographs is between a Gothic night of horrors with no spatial context and the light of an ordinary day, in which the faded bloodstain is situated in the commonplace of the urban landscape. The 10 Rillington Place murders of 1953 are an appropriate final act for the post-war period. As Frank Mort has observed, the serial killings by John Christie in a working-class and racially mixed area of North Kensington accelerated debates about pathological masculinities, sexually wayward femininity and the cultural impact of increasing Caribbean and African migration on London’s socially deprived areas.137 Neil Pemberton and Ian Burney have also used 10 Rillington Place as an example of the shift from the ‘celebrity’ lone pathologist to a ‘forensics of things’, as pathologist Francis Camps led a multidisciplinary excavation of the scene and a prolonged and intensely public search for bio-evidence.138 Christie’s unmasking as a serial killer also revealed his hypocrisy as a key witness at the trial of Timothy Evans in 1950, hanged for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine, which was almost certainly committed by Christie. When Christie was accused in court by Evans’ defending counsel, Malcolm Morris, of being responsible for the death of Mrs Evans and Geraldine, he denied all knowledge of the deaths and sobbed hypocritically as the death sentence against Evans was read out.139 The

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   187

Figure 10: Ferndale Road SW4, 1950 (TNA, CRIM 1/2098)

Christie case also helped to create the field of ‘forensic linguistics’. In 1968, linguist Jan Svartvik found considerable stylistic discrepancies between the four statements that Timothy Evans allegedly made to police, raising serious doubts about their authorship.140 The Bentley case of 1953 provided another case study for forensic linguistics, as linguist Malcolm Coulthard demonstrated that Bentley’s words in his statement were those of the police. Coulthard’s evidence was an important factor in Bentley’s pardon.141 These miscarriages of justice

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188  Murder Capital threw doubt onto the system of British justice and raised questions about police investigative techniques and capital punishment which were felt keenly by the British public.142

Conclusion By 1945, crimes in London were being mapped by a series of punched cards which detailed the 3 million crimes committed in the capital each year. The cards were input into a Powers-Sama machine which counted, sorted and printed the incidence of twenty-three different categories of crime, which were mapped according to districts and divisions and compared to uniform and detective strength in those areas.143 In the late 1940s the Metropolitan Police also began to use roadblocks and motorcycles with two-way radios to stop suspects’ rapid escape through London, which had been a problem since the days of Victorian ‘rookeries’. These new technologies aimed to regulate the spatial dynamics of crime detection in London, much as the introduction of the traffic light in the 1930s sought to manage the efficient flow of vehicles and pedestrians.144 The increase in traffic and post-war tourism also put new strains on the Metropolitan Police, which was in 1950 still 4,000 men under strength. A new London was being created in the 1950s, one in which tourist spectacles coexisted with multiracial neighbourhoods, bombed spaces and a growing criminal underworld of home-grown ‘villains’ in a metropolitan gangland.145 For instance, the 1950 film Night and the city opens with shots of landmarks – the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben, then Piccadilly Circus – before showing a shot of the hero Harry Fabian running through dark, deserted streets and bombed wastelands, demonstrating the coexistence of ‘public, tourist, landmark London’ with the London of ‘graft, pay-offs, and the hierarchy of the underworld’.146 London spectacles such as the Britain Can Make It Exhibition in 1946, the London Olympics in 1948 and the Festival of Britain in 1951 sought to promote and export a vision of post-war ingenuity and prosperity while Londoners still struggled with austerity, lack of housing and the debris of war.147 But by 1953 these effects of the war were coming to an end. Identity cards were abolished under Churchill in 1952.148 Sweet and sugar rationing ended in 1953.149 On 23 February 1953, the government granted a one-time amnesty to wartime deserters as a special measure for the coronation year.150 The coronation of Elizabeth II itself made huge demands on the police service, with intensive planning and thirty-six hours of police overseeing the traffic and security arrangements for

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   189 the coronation.151 London in 1953 was on the cusp of a new era of flux and change, as it took on a new symbolic importance as a centre of post-war consumerism and affluence, as the hub of a new postcolonial global politics and a newly confident working-class identity.152 Post-war Britain turned to London to redraw the boundaries of a contemporary cultural polity in the context of imperial disintegration, postcolonial immigration and, later, globalization.153 London in 1953 was at a moment of optimism, looking forward to a bright future.

Notes 1 For more on post-1945 crime in England, see Clive Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Terence Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and F.H. McClintock and N. Howard Avison, Crime in England and Wales (London: Heinemann Educational, 1968). 2 Mark Roodhouse, ‘The “Ghost Squad”: Undercover Policing in London, 1945–49’, in Chris A. Williams (ed.), Police and Policing in the Twentieth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 141–61, 178. 3 William M. Meier, Property Crime in London, 1850 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4 Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, ‘Traces and Places: The Making of the Modern Crime Scene’, paper given at the Forensic Cultures in Interdisciplinary Perspective Conference, 11 June 2010; Neil Pemberton, ‘10 Rillington Place: Expertise and Homicide Investigation’, paper given at the University of Kent, 15 March 2011; and Ian Burney, ‘The House of Murder: The Christie Case and the Making of the Modern Crime Scene’, paper given for the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 14 March 2012. 5 See V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgment: Religion and the Death Penalty in England (New York: Continuum, 1993); and Andrew Hammel, Ending the Death Penalty: The European Experience in Global Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 6 See Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and the Fear of Brutalisation in Post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 75:3 (September 2003), 557–89. 7 Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 8 Mass Observation Archive, FR2228, Special Pre-Peace News Questionnaire, April 1945. 9 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2007),

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190  Murder Capital p. 109. See also Ina Zweiniger Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10 Ina Zweiniger Bargielowska, ‘Bread Rationing in Britain, July 1946–July 1948’, Twentieth-Century British History, 4 (1993), 57–85. 11 TNA, MEPO 20/4; ‘Regent’s Park Murder: Inquest Opened and Adjourned’, London Independent (15 November 1946), p. 3. 12 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 13 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 14 Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 15 Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, p. 2. 16 Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 93. 17 While the report came out of the meetings of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, the committee members made clear that the final report was very much Beveridge’s own vision. 18 Hansard Deb. HC, vol. 396, col. 780W (9 February 1944), available online at: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_ answers/1944/feb/09/beveridge-report-sales. Another set of unlikely bestsellers were the 1940s manifestos of urban planning, including J.H. Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie’s County of London Plan (London: Macmillan, 1943), Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan (London: HMSO, 1944); and the Corporation of London’s Court of Common Council’s Report of the Preliminary Draft Proposals for Post War Reconstruction in the City of London (London: B.T. Batsford, 1944). 19 See Amy Bell, London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London Blitz (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008). 20 Gilbert and Elizabeth Glen McAllister (eds.), Homes, Towns and Countryside: A Practical Plan for Britain (London: B.T. Batsford, 1945), p. xiii. 21 Norman Ambage and Michael Clark, ‘Unbuilt Bloomsbury: Medico-Legal Institutes and Forensic Science Laboratories in England between the Wars’, in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds.), Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 297–8. 22 Geoffrey Field, ‘Nights Underground in Darkest London: The Blitz, 1940–1941’, International Labour and Working-Class History, 62 (Autumn 2002), 11–49. 23 Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 342. 24 Forshaw and Abercrombie, Greater London Plan, p. v. 25 Porter, London: A Social History, p. 342.

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   191 26 Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 837. This was partly due to the high fertility of the south-west of England in the baby boom of 1945–49 and again in the 1960s. 27 See John H. Goldthorpe, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960); and H.E. Bracey, Neighbours (London: Routledge, 1964). 28 Inwood, History of London, p. 853. 29 Inwood, History of London, p. 853. See also Keith Sword, Norman Davies and Jan Ciechanowski, The Formation of the Polish Community in Great Britain, 1939–1950 (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1989); Wendy Webster, ‘Britain and the Refugees of Europe, 1939–1950’, in Louise Ryan and Wendy Webster (eds.), Gendering Migration: Masculinity, Femininity and Ethnicity in Postwar Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 35–51. 30 Inwood, History of London, p. 854. 31 Inwood, History of London, p. 854. For more on the politics of West Indian immigration in London, see Marcus Collins, ‘Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 40:3 (July 2001), 391–418; Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–64 (London: Routledge, 1998); Mary Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Narratives of Migration’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (Spring 1997), 86–108; D.W. Dean, ‘Conservative Governments and the Restriction of Commonwealth Immigration in the 1950s: The Problems of Constraint’, Historical Journal, 35:1 (March 1992), 171–94. 32 Anthony Martienssen, Crime and the Police (London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), p. 183. 33 Harold Scott, Scotland Yard (London: Andre Deutsch, 1954), p. 66. 34 Scott, Scotland Yard, p. 66. 35 James Whitfield, ‘The Historical Context: Policing and Black People in Post-War Britain’, in Mike Rowe (ed.), Policing beyond Macpherson: Issues in Policing, Race and Society (Abingdon: Willan, 2007), pp. 1–17; James Whitfield, Unhappy Dialogue: The Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in Post-War Britain (Abingdon: Willan, 2004); and Simon Holdaway, ‘Police Race Relations in England: A History of Policy’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 22:3 (August 1998), 329–49. 36 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/3018. 37 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 38 ‘Couldn’t Stand Queueing: Murder and Suicide Verdicts’, London Independent (5 April 1946), p. 3. 39 ‘Couldn’t Stand’, p. 3. 40 ‘Couldn’t Stand’, p. 3.

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192  Murder Capital 41 TNA MEPO 20/4; and ‘Euston Road Tragedy: Inquest Verdict of Manslaughter’, London Independent (9 August 1946), p. 3. 42 Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 174. 43 Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 178. 44 TNA, MEPO 20/4. He was acquitted. 45 TNA, MEPO 20/3. 46 Clive Emsley, Hard Men: The English and Violence since 1750 (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), p. 88. 47 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 48 TNA MEPO 20/4. 49 ‘Two Murders in the London Area Man and Woman Shot’, The Times (11 November 1946), p. 2. 50 Michael Boyce, The Lasting Influence of the War of Postwar British Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect. 51 The Times (11 November 1946), p. 2. 52 Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice, p. 59. 53 Scott, Scotland Yard, p. 55; and Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice, p. 60. 54 Roodhouse, ‘The “Ghost Squad”’; Meier, Property Crime in London, pp. 115–17; John Gosling, The Ghost Squad (London: W.H. Allen, 1959). 55 Scott, ScotlandYard, p. 90. See also Patricia L. Garside, ‘Representing the Metropolis: The Changing Relationship between London and the Press, 1870–1939’, London Journal, 16:2 (1991), 156–73. 56 TNA, MEPO 2/9352. The Press Officer is identified only as P.H.T. 57 TNA, MEPO 2/9352. 58 TNA, MEPO 2/9352. 59 TNA, MEPO 2/9352. 60 Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice, p. 60. See Neil Pemberton, On the Scent: Dogs, Detection and Forensic Cultures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.) 61 See Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Clive Emsley, ‘Violent Crime in England in 1919: Postwar Anxieties and Press Narratives’, Continuity and Change, 23:1 (2008), 173–95; and Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950’, Journal of British Studies, 44:2 (April 2005), 343–62. 62 Sonya Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes: Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain’, in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 177–95.

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   193 63 Stephen Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History 34:4 (Summer 2001), 773–95; and Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity (London: I.B.Tauris, 1998). 64 Michael W. Boyce, ‘British Masculinities: Duty, Confinement and Stiff Upper Lips’, in Boyce, The Lasting Influence of the War of Postwar British Film, pp. 47–75, 55. 65 Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40:2 (2005), 341–62. 66 See Jonathon Green, ‘Rhyming Slang’, Critical Quarterly 45:1–2 (July 2003), 220–6; John Worby, The Other Half: The Autobiography of a Spiv (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1937); Billy Hill, Boss of Britain’s Underworld (London: Naldrett Press, 1955); Charles Raven, Underworld Nights (London: Hulten Press, 1956); and Ruby Sparks, Burglar to the Nobility (London: Arthur Baker, 1961). 67 Heather Shore, ‘Criminality, Deviance and the Underworld’, in Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash (eds.), Histories of Crime: Britain 1600–2000 (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 120–40; Heather Shore, ‘“Undiscovered Country”: Towards a History of the Criminal Underworld’, Crimes and Misdemeanours, 1:1 (2007), 50–1; Dick Hobbs, ‘Professional and Organized Crime in Britain’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Robert Murphy, Smash and Grab: Gangster in the London Underworld 1920–60 (London: Faber, 1993). 68 Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect. 69 Allport, Demobbed, p. 169. 70 Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy, ‘Parole Overdue: Releasing the British Crime Film into the Critical Community’, in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds.), British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 1–15, 8. 71 Andrew Clay, ‘Men, Women and Money: Masculinity in Crisis in the British Professional Crime Film 1946–1965’, in Chibnall and Murphy, British Crime Cinema, pp. 51–65, 51. The theme of corrupted servicemen continued into the 1950s and 1960s as ‘an ideal vehicle to express film-makers’ sense of disappointment, loss and betrayal amidst increasing comfort and affluence’, Clay, ‘Men, Women and Money’, p. 53. 72 Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Space in the British Crime Film’, in Chibnall and Murphy, British Crime Cinema, pp. 139–59, 141. 73 ‘Offer to Deserters Response to Appeal for Surrender’, The Times (12 March 1947), p. 2. In the same period 420 deserters were apprehended. 74 Letter in The Times, 27 October 1947, in John C. Spencer, Crime in the Services (London: Routledge, 1954), p. 52. 75 TNA, MEPO 20/4.

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194  Murder Capital 76 TNA, MEPO 20/4 3/2316. 77 Keith Simpson, Forty Years of Murder (London: W.H. Allen, 1978). 78 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2737. 79 ‘Deserter Guilty of Manslaughter: “Extremely Brave Men” Commended’, The Times (13 February 1947), p. 2. 80 TNA, MEPO 3/2737. 81 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2995. 82 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2998. 83 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 84 Spencer, Crime in the Services, pp. 119, 83. 85 Dale Archer and Rosemary Gartner, Violence and Crime in a CrossNational Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 91. 86 TNA, MEPO 20/4; and ‘Struggle in a Dark Room: Soldier Accused of Murder’, London Independent (27 September 1946), p. 3. 87 TNA, MEPO 3/2725. 88 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2735; ‘Strangled Woman in Churchyard: Choirboys Discover Tragedy’, London Independent (26 July 1946), p. 3; and ‘Strangled Woman in Churchyard: Alleged Statement by Accused’, London Independent (6 September 1946), p. 5. 89 Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 246. 90 Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 3. 91 Simpson, Forty Years of Murder, pp. 124–5. J.D. Casswell, Only Five Were Hanged (London: Corgi, 1964), pp. 209–27. 92 Casswell, Only Five Were Hanged, p. 213. 93 TNA, MEPO 3/2664. 94 ‘Heath is Accused of Second Killing while Police Hunted him’, Daily Mirror (30 July 1946), p. 1. The police had been warned not to publish his photograph as it would be extremely prejudicial for a jury. 95 Casswell, Only Five Were Hanged , p. 210. 96 TNA, MEPO 3/2664. 97 H.J. Walls, Scotland Yard Scientist: My Thirty Years in Forensic Science (New York: Taplinger, 1973; first published as Expert Witness in London by John Long, 1972), pp. 194–6. Courses for British and colonial police officers on how to use forensic science were resumed at Hendon in 1946. TNA, MEPO 2/7555. 98 TNA, MEPO 3/2027. 99 TNA, MEPO 3/2027. 100 TNA, MEPO 2/2742. 101 Sir Basil Thomson, The Story of Scotland Yard (New York: Literary Guild, 1936), p. 219.

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   195 102 TNA, MEPO 3/1722. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to sixteen years of penal servitude. 103 TNA MEPO 20/4. 104 TNA, MEPO 3/2194. 105 TNA, MEPO 20/4. The case is also described in Keith Simpson, Forty Years of Murder, pp. 44–8; Molly Lefebure, Evidence for the Crown: Experiences of a Pathologist’s Secretary (London: W. Heinemann, 1955), pp. 54–6; and Robert Jackson, Coroner: The Biography of Sir Bentley Purchase (London, Harrap, 1963), p. 306. 106 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/2665. 107 TNA, MEPO 20/4 and 3/3036; and Jackson, Coroner, p. 291. Bentley Purchase had lived in the block of flats, Cumberland Mansions on the corner of corner of George Street and Seymour Place in Marylebone as a young man. 108 TNA, MEPO 20/4. 109 See Macdonald Hastings, The Other Mr. Churchill: A Lifetime of Shooting and Murder (London: George G. Harrap, 1963). 110 TNA, MEPO 3/2424. 111 Edward Walford, ‘The Western Suburbs: Belgravia’, Old and New London:Volume 5 (1878), pp. 1–14, available at www.british-history. ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45218. 112 These inquiries, led by John Ball, divisional detective inspector of B Division, were long and painstaking. Members of the Greek royal family could not be questioned directly and had to be approached through foreign offices. 113 The Assizes, ‘Rex v. Boyce’, Journal of Criminal Law, 11 (1947), pp. 152–6. 114 John Bowlby, ‘The Problem of the Young Child’, in John Rickman et al. (eds.), Children in War Time (London: New Education Fellowship, 1940); Cyril Burt, ‘Delinquency in Peace and War’, Health Education Journal (1943), 165–72, 170–1. See Susan Isaacs (ed.), The Cambridge Evacuation Survey (London: Methuen, 1941); Barnett House Study Group, London Children in War-time Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947). 115 Burt, ‘Delinquency in Peace and War’, 172. 116 Burt, ‘Delinquency in Peace and War’, 170–1. 117 See TNA, HLG 7/336; and LMA, LCC/EO/WAR/1/, Return of evacuees to London area and general records on child evacuation. 118 See Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 119 See Louise Jackson and Angela Bartie, ‘Youth Crime and Preventive Policing in Post-War Scotland, 1945–1971’, Twentieth-Century British History, 22:1 (2011), 79–102; Louise Jackson and Angela Bartie, “‘Children of the City”: Juvenile Justice, Property and Place in England and Scotland 1945–1960’, Economic History Review, 64:1 (2011), 88–113; and Abigail Wills, ‘Delinquency, Masculinity

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196  Murder Capital and Citizenship in England 1950–1970’, Past and Present, 187:1 (May 2005): 157–85. 120 LMA, CH/D/31/1, Report of the Children’s Committee of the LCC on Juvenile Delinquency Statistics, 1949. 121 T.H. McClintock, Crimes of Violence (London: Periodicals Service Co., 1963), pp. 241–7. 122 LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/01/161. 123 Although this crime occurred in the City of London and was investigated by its own police force, the Metropolitan Police assisted in the arrests. See TNA, MEPO 3/2284. 124 TNA, MEPO 20/4, 3/2985; and Scott, Scotland Yard, p. 75. 125 TNA, CRIM 1/1861. 126 Alyson Brown, ‘Crime, Criminal Mobility and Serial Offenders in Early Twentieth Century Britain’, Contemporary British History, 25:4 (2011), 551–68. 127 TNA, MEPO 2/9401/1. 128 Scott, Scotland Yard, p. 78; Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice, p. 47; and TNA, MEPO 2/9401/1. 129 ‘Craig’s Relief at Bentley Pardon’, BBC News, 30 July 1998, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/142351.stm, accessed 20 July 2012. 130 ‘The Bentley Appeal: One Last Week of Waiting’, BBC News, 24 July 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/138218.stm. 131 See Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture 1945–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Tony Jefferson, ‘Cultural Responses of the Teds’, in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals:Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2006), pp. 67–70; and Barry Goldson (ed.), Youth in Crisis?: ‘Gangs’, Territoriality and Violence (London: Routledge, 2011). 132 TNA, MEPO 2/9538. 133 TNA, MEPO 2/9538. TNA, MEPO 2/9538. 134 ‘Stoker on Brixton Murder Charge: Revenge Motive Alleged’, The Times (24 October 1950), p. 3. 135 ‘Boyle’s Landlady Breaks Down’, Advertiser (8 September 1950), p. 5. ‘Boyle Told me he Had Slashed a Girl’, South London Advertiser (22 September 1950), p. 1. 136 ‘Brixton Murder Charge Accused Man’s Evidence’, The Times (25 October 1950), p. 3; ‘Boyle “Not Guilty” Acquitted of Brixton Murder Charge’, The Times (26 October 1950), p. 7; ‘Pat Beard Inquest’, South London Advertiser (10 November 1950), p. 1. 137 Frank Mort, ‘Scandalous Events: Metropolitan Culture and Moral Change in Post-Second World War London’, Representations, 93:1 (Winter 2006), 106–37, 107–9. 138 Ian Burney, ‘The House of Murder: The Christie Case and the

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Suspicious deaths in post-war London, 1945–53   197 Making of the Modern Crime Scene’, lecture for the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 14 March 2012. 139 ‘Counsel Accuses Witness Giving Evidence in Murder Trial as Killer’, Daily Mirror (13 January 1950), p. 5; ‘Murder Trial Witness Sobs as Death Sentence is Passed’, Daily Mirror (14 January 1950), p. 7. 140 Jan Svartnik, The Evans Statements: A Case for Forensic Linguistics (Göteborg: University of Göteborg, 1968). 141 See R.M. Coulthard, ‘Whose Text is It? On the Linguistic Investigation of Authorship’, in S. Sarangi and R.M. Coulthard (eds.), Discourse and Social Life (London: Longman, 2001), pp. 270–87. 142 Claire Langhamer, ‘“The Live Dynamic Whole of Feeling and Behaviour”: Capital Punishment and the Politics of Emotion’, Journal of British Studies, 51:2 (April 2012), 416–41, 421. 143 Martienssen, Crime and the Police, p. 98. This system had been adopted from the late 1930s and was based in part on the system used by the Vancouver Police. See TNA, MEPO 2/4994 and 2/5619 and MEPO 2/7866. 144 TNA, MEPO 3/3109; Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, p. 2. 145 Shore, ‘Criminality, Deviance and the Underworld’, p. 125. See also the detective memoirs of Robert Fabian, London after Dark (London: Naldrett Press, 1954); and Edward Greeno, War on the Underworld (London: Digit, 1959). 146 Brunsdon, ‘Space in the British Crime Film’, p. 152. 147 Harriet Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012), p. 12; Becky Conekin, ‘“Here Is the Modern World Itself”: The Festival of Britain’s Representations of the Future’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp. 228–46; Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier (eds.), A Tonic to the Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976); and Council of Industrial Design, Design, ’46: Survey of British Industrial Design as Displayed at the ‘Britain Can Make It’ Exhibition (London: HMSO, 1946). 148 Morris, Crime and Criminal Justice, p. 39. 149 Meat was the last to come off the ration, in July 1954. Zweiniger Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, p. 229. 150 Spencer, Crime in the Services, p. 53. 151 As George Hathergill, deputy commander of Number 1 District (Western and South-Western London), recalled in his memoir A Detective’s Story (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972). 152 Peter J. Kalliney, ‘Cities of Affluence: Masculinity, Class, and The Angry Young Men’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47:1 (2001), 92–117; John Benson, Affluence and Authority: A Social History of 20th Century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2005).

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198  Murder Capital 153 Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

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Conclusion Instead of portraying a triumphal imperial metropolis or a battered but heroic city under fire, this book has examined the vernacular London, showing aspects of life as it was lived and as it was taken from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. Murder Capital has focused on suspicious deaths – murders in the family or murders by strangers, infanticides and women’s deaths from illegal abortions – as moments of crisis affected by the social fabric of the city and transformed by the damage and dislocation of the Second World War. The intimate details of suspicious deaths have evoked the fears and desires of the mostly working-class men, women and children who lived in London during this time of rapid and profound change. By setting the institutional ordering of the city against the hidden intimate spaces where crimes occurred, the book has uncovered a new popular history of the city, separate from the patterns of consumption that define other recent London histories. Each chapter has shown how integral urban space was to the investigation, classification and public perceptions of crime. Urban space helped to define crime, from the highest-level institutional ordering of Metropolitan Police divisions and coroners’ districts whose officers influenced the investigation and prosecution of crime, to the personal surroundings of female servants and nurses who lacked the privacy to conceal the body of an infant in their rooms. The physical landscape of London was also transformed in this era, as the destruction of Second World War bombing raids created derelict spaces in which domestic crimes could be hidden, as Rachel Dobkin’s body was in a burned-out chapel, and where old crimes could be discovered, like the skeletal remains of infants found in bombed-out houses in 1945 and 1946. Post-war police investigations of crime sought to increase forensic control over a more anonymous and varied urban space in the wake of unsolved murders and bodies discovered in bomb sites and abandoned shelters. Crime scene photography played an essential role in reinforcing and creating narratives of urban criminality. While the legacy of Alphonse Bertillon and Hans Gross emphasized police use of the camera as an objective recorder of the scene of the crime, police photographers also situated their photographs in the existing visual

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200  Murder Capital tropes of the barrenness of 1930s domestic poverty and the eerie ruins and ghostly rubble of 1940s bomb sites. Police photographs’ framing of violent crime in urban landscape and domestic settings reflected the influence of photographic genres, including documentary photography and wartime propaganda. The increased police use of crime scene photographs after the war also demonstrates the heightened importance of photography as visible forensic evidence presented to the judge and jury. The images represented in crime scene photographs became an increasingly vital narrative in the prosecution and reporting of crime, just as the cinematic depictions of policing in post-war films and television programmes became central to public perceptions of crime and its investigation. By 1974, publicity photographs of the Metropolitan Police could depict the archetypal London crime scene: an investigative team surrounds the body of a young woman in a bomb site, while a crime scene photographer takes pictures. These enduring narratives of urban crime, as the preceding chapters show, were a legacy of the Second World War.1 Murder Capital has also shown that the crime statistics generated by the Metropolitan Police did not correlate to the actual occurrence of crime, even according to the police’s own records. The Register of Suspicious Deaths by Violence includes the crimes which were forwarded to be counted by the Home Office, but other police files reveal omissions and reclassifications, suggesting a common divisional drive to keep crime figures low and solve rates high. Yet even in their partiality the case files and numbers of suspicious deaths evoke the changes in deadly violence in the capital, such as the shift from domestic murders in the 1930s to murders by strangers in the later war years. Police notes in the Register also suggest their attitudes and investigative strategies, such as the surge of maternal deaths from abortions defined as self-inflicted in 1943 and 1944, and the post-war increase in prostitutes killed by foreign weapons such as a ‘Mediterranean’ knife or an ‘American Army-type’ gun. Suspicious death files also show the war’s effects on policing, as the Metropolitan Police faced the post-war years with drastically reduced manpower and increased competition for recruits. As a result, the police increasingly turned to forensic pathologists, forensic science laboratories and the press to help with their investigations. The over-arching narrative revealed in these cases is of the vast and far-reaching effects of the Second World War on the physical and social geography of London. So much has been written about the destructive effects of war on London’s architecture, on the traditional urban working-class community, on the British Empire, on Britain’s global power, that British historiography of the war now reflects a

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Conclusion 201 sense of loss which overshadows the military victory. But as these investigations into suspicious deaths show, the dislocations of war also led to an opening-up of London’s communities and culture. The greater influx of new people and dissolution of traditional communities led to the possibility of greater anonymity in the city, like that found by Carolyn Steedman’s parents who sought to escape the censure of their Lancashire neighbours.2 While the post-war atomization of London increased anonymous and professional property crime, domestic homicides arising from parents’ desperation declined rapidly in the post-war years.3 In 1950, London, England and most countries in Europe experienced their lowest levels of homicide.4 Women’s deaths as a result of illegal abortions in London also decreased in the postwar years, virtually disappearing statistically after the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act and the increasing availability of the birth control pill for women.5 The social provisions of the post-war welfare state, rising wages and full employment were fundamental to these changes, but they also reflect a diminution of the strict community sanctions that drove so many to desperate acts. The decline in murders within the family also illustrates a broader shift in the emotional landscape of Britain. As Claire Langhamer and Hera Cook have shown, women and men coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s had increasingly positive attitudes to emotional and sexual intimacy.6 The waning of domestic murder reflects a profound change in the inner lives of Londoners, as they valued new intimacies in an atmosphere of post-war affluence and stability. Yet not everyone in London enjoyed the comforts of domesticity. The emergence of visible youth subcultures, such as the Teddy Boys, intensified anxieties about post-war youth. It was partly the attacks by gangs of Teddy Boys on West Indians that led to the Notting Hill riots of 30 August to 4 September 1958, in which most of the 400 arrests were of white teenagers from Notting Dale. Officers in the streets described crowds several thousand strong breaking into West Indian homes, shouting racist epithets and defying police attempts to disperse them.7 The riots were the first warning of the ruinous effects of racial tensions in post-war London and the linking of oppositional youth identities with racial prejudices.8 In the later 1950s and 1960s, relations between the Metropolitan Police and Caribbean and African immigrants also grew embittered. According to James Whitfield, the development of an ‘us vs. them’ embattled corporate identity was part of a larger post-war problem in which the Metropolitan Police’s priorities worked against the development of a closer relationship with all London residents.9 The troubled and prolonged investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s 1993 murder suggests an enduring unwillingness

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202  Murder Capital on the part of the Metropolitan Police to prosecute racially motivated crime with sufficient vigour and has inevitably led to accusations of racism within the force. Allegations in 2013 that the Metropolitan Police spied on the Lawrence family as they were pressing for a proper investigation into his killing seems to offer more evidence for Sir William McPherson’s assertion in the 1999 Lawrence inquiry that the Metropolitan Police were ‘institutionally racist’.10 The continuing fall-out of Lawrence’s murder after twenty years shows the power of unjust and untimely deaths and their investigations to expose the fault lines in the city, and the possibility of such tragedies to bring to light profoundly human stories of frailty and courage.11

Notes 1 TNA, INF 14/407/2. 2 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 3 See William M. Meier, Property Crime in London, 1850 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Anne-Marie Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain, 1600 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Julie Wheelwright, ‘“Nothing in Between”: Modern Cases of Infanticide’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2002); and M.N. Marks and R. Kumar, ‘Infanticide in England and Wales, 1982–1988’, Medicine, Science and the Law, 33 (1993), 329–39. 4 Manuel Eisner, ‘Longterm Historical Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, 30 (2003), 83–142, 88. 5 See Sally Sheldon, Beyond Control: Medical Power and Abortion Law (London: Pluto, 1997). 6 Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7 TNA, MEPO 2/9838. 8 See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); Claire E. Alexander, The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Rupa Huq, Beyond Subculture: Pop,Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World (Routledge, London, 2006); and Tony Jefferson and Stuart Hall (eds.), Resistance through Rituals (London: Routledge, 2006). 9 James Whitfield, ‘The Metropolitan Police: Alienation, Culture and Relations with London’s Caribbean Community 1950–1970’, in Chris Williams (ed.), Police and Policing in the Twentieth-Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 490.

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Conclusion 203 10 Rob Evans, ‘Stephen Lawrence: Met Chief “Failed to Tell” Mother about Police Spying’, Guardian (17 July 2013). Sir William Macpherson, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (London: Stationery Office, 1999). 11 See Eugene Mclaughlin and Karim Murji, ‘After the Stephen Lawrence Report’, Critical Social Policy, 19:3 (August 1999), 371– 85; Simon Cottle, The Racist Murder of Stephen Lawrence: Media Performance and Public Transformation (London: Greenwood Press, 2004); Nathan Hall, John Grieve and Stephen P. Savage (eds.), Policing and the Legacy of Lawrence (Cullompton: Willan, 2009).

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Index Abercrombie, Patrick 166 abortion 6, 50, 113–35, 201 fees for 122–3, 126, 129–31, 139n.78 legal restrictions on 29, 117–19, 133 motives for 113–14, 123–5 police investigations of 119–23 procedures for 120–1, 129 reported deaths from 16, 69, 70, 113, 118, 132–5, 163 self-inflicted 11, 118, 120, 125, 135 sentences for 122, 127–8, 130–1, 134, 154 see also infanticide air-raid shelters 61, 71, 102–3 Aish, William 78–9 Archer, Dale 175 Archer, John 10 Bailey, Victor 36 Balfour, Ruth 119 Barnes, Clara 32, 34 Barrett, Rose 122–4, 126 Barthes, Roland 14 Beard, Pat 185–6 Beaton, Cecil 97–8 Bellometti restaurant 40, 41 Bentley, Derek 19, 96, 163, 183–4, 187–8 Bertillon, Alphonse 13, 24n.59, 31, 199 Beveridge, William 165, 190n.17 Bingham, Adrian 16 Binney, Ralph 29

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Birkett Committee on Abortion 117–19, 121, 124–5 black market 5, 61, 69, 163, 172, 173 bombing raids 28, 63–5, 68–70, 79, 87 photographs of ruins after 97–9, 176–7, 200 Booker, Joan 145, 146, 155 Booth, Charles 3, 30 Booth, William 3 Bourne, Aleck 117, 127–9, 133, 134 Bowlby, John 181 Boyce, Arthur 180–1 Boyle, Victor James 185–6 Brandt, Bill 31 Brash, James Couper 75 Bravo, Charles 2 Brewer, Gladys Lavinia 91 Brookes, Barbara 116 Brown, Alyson 29 Burney, Ian 5, 49, 186 Burtt, Cyril 181 Caine, Hall 29 Camps, Francis 186 Carleton, Billie 28 Chang, Brilliant 28 child neglect 50, 141, 144, 155 see also infanticide Children’s Act (1948) 182 Christie, John Reginald 4, 163, 186–7 Church, Maple 101–2 Churchill, Winston 87, 188

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232 Index Clover, Matilda 2 Collins, Wilkie 2 Colombo, Massimino 29 Conan Doyle, Arthur 2 Conley, Carolyn 77 Conway, Carolyn 157 Cook, Hera 201 Coram, Thomas 140 Coroners Amendment Act (1926) 15, 114, 119 Cotton, Jeanette 47–8 Couthard, Malcolm 187 Cox, Gwendolyn 29 Craig, Christopher 6, 183 Cream, Thomas Neill 2 Crippen, Hawley Harvey 2, 49, 75, 84n.78 Crisp, Quentin 103 Cummins, Gordon (‘Blackout Ripper’) 94, 101, 103, 169, 179 Cypriot immigrants 38, 41, 166, 167 Daley, Harry 15, 39, 44, 64, 90 Daston, Lorraine J. 14 Davies, Andrew 92 Davies, Dorothy Muriel 133 Davies, Michael John 19, 96, 184 D’Cruze, Shani 73, 74 Deeley, Iris Miriam 91–2 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) 28 De Gaulle, Charles 88, 107n.15 deserters 77, 88–93, 163, 173–4 amnesty program for 173, 188 see also servicemen Dickens, Charles 2 Dixon, Robert 47, 179 Dobkin, Rachel 75, 199 domestic servants 142, 147, 152, 161n.52 domestic violence see familial murders Donovan, Charlotte 78–9

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drugs, illegal 28, 29, 167 Elias, Norbert 9–10 Emmerichs, Mary Beth 10 Empire Windrush (ship) 166 Emsley, Clive 12, 169 evacuations, during World War II 4, 18, 60–3, 65 Evans, Timothy 19, 163, 186–7 Fabian, Robert 171, 172 familial murders 4, 35–6, 46, 69, 70, 167–8 after domestic quarrels 42–3, 50, 77–8 during London bombings 60–1, 65–8, 73–9 Fantham, Elsie Louise 127–8 Ferguson, Sheila 142 Field, Geoffrey 62 fingerprints 13, 44, 47–8, 115, 178–9 Finn, Jonathan 14 firearms 19, 94, 163, 169–70, 180–1, 200 Fitzgerald, Hilde 142 Fogelman, Bernard 115, 116 forensic science 75–6, 163, 178–81, 200 development of 4–5, 48–9, 165 and infanticide 144, 145 and linguistic analysis 187 training in 178 Fossard, Georges (Comte de la Vatine) 126, 127, 130–2 Foundling Hospital 140 Frayling, Mary 184 Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 17, 26n.80 Galison, Peter 14 Galton, Francis 13 gangs see juvenile crime; organized crime

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Index 233 Gartner, Rosemary 175 gender norms 29, 97, 171, 177 Geraghty, Christopher James 183 Germans, British internment of 87 Glaister, John, Jr 75 Glossop, Dorothy 123, 133 Goddard, Lord 183–4 Gosling, John 103 Graham, Victor 126, 127, 130 Grierson, John 31 Grondkowski, Marian 173–4 Gross, Hans 13, 199 Gunewardene, Sumatapalage 133, 134 Gurnett, Winifred 129 Hamblin, George 31–3 Harvey, George Frank 32–4 Hatch, Alec 11 Hauser, Kitty 176 Havard, J.D.J. 10 Heath, Neville 177–8 Hendon Police Laboratory 19, 48, 163, 165 Henry, Leroy 100 Hiley, Charles 145 Hobbs, Dick 11, 43 Holdaway, Simon 167 homosexuality 5, 39, 89, 104, 175 Hornsey, Richard 172 Houlbrook, Matt 5, 27, 39, 43 Hulme, J. W. 105–6 Hulten, Karl Gustav 92 Hussain, Nessar 42–3 immigrants 28–9, 37–9, 41–6, 51 in post-war London 101, 166–9, 173, 184, 201 during World War II 59, 87–8, 107n.7 India 39, 42, 140 infanticide 4, 35, 69, 70, 140–57, 164

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classification of 70, 142–3, 150–1 investigations of 145–6, 150–1 legislation on 11, 16, 117, 141–4 motives for 144, 147, 148, 152–5 from neglect 141, 144, 155 numbers of cases of 140, 147, 149–50, 158n.11, 163 sentences for 141, 144, 146, 153–6 suicide with 142, 143, 147–8, 152 during World War II 140, 142, 152–3 see also abortion insanity defence 42, 43 for infanticide 144, 147, 153, 154 after World War II 175, 177 during World War II 62, 63, 66–7, 90 Ireland 166 infanticide in 140, 160n.32, 161n.53 Italian immigrants 29, 39, 88 Jackson, Louise 11, 43 Jackson, Robert 100 James, Arthur Lloyd 67 Jenkins, Felix 96, 109n.59 Jenkins, Thomas 182–3 Jews 28, 29, 87, 88 Jones, Gareth Stedman 20n.10 Jones, Mary 116, 124, 139n.78 Joyce, Simon 5 juvenile crime 96, 181–8, 201 Kalifa, Dominique 14, 186 Kassel, Max 39 Kerr, Douglas 144 Kohn, Marek 28 Koopman, Charles 91 Kramar, Kristen 161n.52

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234 Index Krueger, Christine 141 Kynaston, David 164 Laite, Julia 5, 11, 43 Langhamer, Claire 201 Lankester, Edwin 149, 152 Lawrence, Stephen 201–2 Lee, Laurie 37 Lefebure, Molly 105 Levine, Joshua 65 linguistics, ‘forensic’ 187 McAllister, Gilbert 165 McIntosh, Tania 134 McKinstry, Joseph 99 McLindon, Elizabeth 180–1 McMahon, Elsie 47, 48, 179 McPherson, William 202 Maguire, Moira J. 155 Malinowski, Henryck 173–4 Manton, Irene 76 marriage brokers 38, 39 Martin, Josephine 46–7 masculinity 29, 97, 171, 177 Mathieson, John 175–7 Mayhew, Henry 3, 30 Meier, William M. 5, 15, 61, 90 Mellor, Leo 99, 176 ‘mercy killings’ 60–1, 65–8 Messina brothers 44–6 Metcalfe, James 46–7 Miller, James 66 Mnookin, Jennifer 14 Morris, Robert 10 Mort, Frank 43, 186 National Council of Women 28 Neal, Hilda 59 Newberry, Phyllis 115–16, 123, 129–30 newborn babies see infanticide Offences Against the Person Act 117, 141

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Ogborn, Miles 5 opium 28 organized crime 51, 92, 163, 167, 172, 173 films about 169, 170, 172, 182, 188 and prostitution 38, 44–6, 103 territorial battles of 28–9 Orwell, George 92 Pankowski, Boleslav 41 Parker, Tony 30 Patmore, Kathleen 77–8 Pavey, Elsey 154–7 Pemberton, Neil 5, 49, 186 Phillips, Lawrence 5 photography 2, 12–14, 30, 40–2, 185–7, 199–200 Barthes on 14 and documentary films 31 of London ruins 97–9, 176–7, 200 ‘Pimlico murder’ 42–3 Police and Firemen (War Service) Act (1939) 72, 83n.61 Polish immigrants 41, 166, 173 Poor Law System 31–3, 71, 141 prostitutes 28, 43–8, 103 and immigrants 38, 44–6 local knowledge about 44–5, 48 suspicious deaths among 45–8, 169, 177–9, 200 wartime murders of 94–5, 101–5 Purchase, Bentley 100, 101 on abortion cases 15, 114–15, 120, 129 Queree, Hilda 147–8, 152, 154, 155 racial tensions 17, 134 after World War II 166–7, 174, 184, 201–2 during World War II 99–101

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Index 235 rape 61, 94, 117, 133 Rattigan, Cliona 160n.32, 161n.53 Reaume, Geoffrey 17 refugees, wartime 59, 87–8, 107n.7 see also immigrants Reynolds, Quentin 60 Rodway, Ida 66–7 Rolt, Terence Peter 183 Roodhouse, Mark 5 Rose, Gertrude 105–6 Rose, Sonya 171 Ruxton, Buck 75 Ryan, William Burke 140 Sainsbury, Peter 36 Sanders-Bliss, Laura 123, 133 Scott, Harold 15, 61, 71, 165–7, 170–1, 178 serial murders 19, 46–7 of John Christie 4, 163, 186–7 of Gordon Cummins 94, 101, 103, 169, 179 of Neville Heath 177–8 servants, domestic 142, 147, 152, 161n.52 servicemen 28, 88–9, 93–5, 163, 172 ‘mercy killings’ by 67–8 racial tensions among 99–101 after World War II 163, 171–2, 175–8 see also deserters Shore, Heather 3, 28–9 Shpayer-Makov, Haia 15 Simpson, Keith 61, 75–6, 94–5 on abortion 121 on infanticide 144 Slater, Eliot 65 Slater, Stefan 11, 43, 44 Smith, Edwin 132 Smithies, Edward 61 Special Duty Squad (or Ghost Squad) 170

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Spencer, John 175 Spender, Humphrey 31 Spilsbury, Bernard 35, 46, 48–9 and abortion cases 114, 120, 121, 131 ‘spivs’ 172, 184 Steedman, Carolyn 201 suicide 1, 4, 88, 90, 178 infanticide with 142, 143, 147–8, 152 during London bombings 65, 67 motives for 35–7, 76, 167–8 murders with 35–7, 62–3, 78–9 Svartvik, Jan 187 Swann, Carmen 36–7 Tagg, John 13 Taylor, Florence 6, 128, 139n.78 Taylor, Howard 10, 11, 95 Teare, Donald 145, 155 Teddy Boys 184, 201 Tickell, Edward 131, 132 Torrie, Julia 110n.70 Trenchard, Lord 4, 9, 12, 34 Tyler, Betty 154 urban planning 3, 164–5, 190n.18 V-1 rockets 62, 64, 68 V-2 rockets 64, 68, 122 Vatine, Comte de la (Georges Fossard) 126, 127, 130–2 Voluntary Women’s Patrols 28 Walkowitz, Judith 5, 39 Wall, Frederick 116, 124, 127, 139n.78 Walls, H.J. 178 Ward, Irene 144 Ward, Philip 94 Watkin, A.J. 133–4 Watson, Basil 67 Watson, Lionel 73–5 Webb, Beatrice 3

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236 Index Wensley, Frederick 11 West Indian immigrants 101, 166, 191n.31, 201 Westminster Institution, Fulham Road 31–3 White, Jerry 30 Whitfield, James 167, 201 Wiener, Martin 38 Witchard, Anne 5 Woodside, Moya 65 World War I 28–9, 163, 171 World War II crime during 60–1, 65, 68–70 D-Day invasion during 69, 88–9, 125

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evacuations during 4, 18, 60–3, 65 infanticide during 140, 142, 152–3 racial tensions during 99–101 Wright, Lily 62–3 Yetter, Leigh 5 Young, H. 171 Zelmanovits, Alexander 133–4, 139n.92 Zemenides, Angelo 38, 41

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