by Andy McSmith
In the midst of this outcry, Leeds Crown Court heard a very different case involving a violent death. Two sisters, Annette and Charlene Maw, aged twenty-one and eighteen, admitted stabbing their drunken, abusive father, who had repeatedly beaten his wife and daughters. After one beating, Charlene picked up a bread knife, which she passed to her older sister, who sank it into their father’s neck. They pleaded guilty to manslaughter and, on 17 November 1980, were sentenced to three years in prison. The case roused an already angry feminist movement. In December, as it went to appeal in the high court in London, where Charlene’s sentence was reduced to six months, a hundred women demonstrated outside the court. ‘We are horrified by this decision. It means there is no justice at all for women in the courts of this country. Only this week a man convicted of raping a seven-year-old girl was given a suspended sentence,’11 one of them told journalists.
Margaret Thatcher was not a feminist. On the rare occasions that she mentioned feminists, it was to ridicule them. Speaking to the Conservative Women’s Conference, she said: ‘We don’t seek to advance women’s rights by insisting that you, Madam Chairman, be addressed as Madam Chairperson, Madam Chair, or, worse still, just plain “Chair”. With feminists like that, who needs male chauvinists?’12 And yet, there is an intriguing story in one of the first biographies of Thatcher, by Hugo Young, which suggests that her reaction to Jacqueline Hill’s murder was not so different from that of the sisters. Reputedly she announced, in that imperious way of hers, that she was going to Yorkshire to take over the investigation in person, because ‘nobody but her, she thought, really cared about the fate of these wretched women’.13 Home Secretary William Whitelaw had to talk her out of this madness. This story is not repeated either in Thatcher’s memoirs, or Whitelaw’s, or in Hugo Young’s diary, and might seem to be one of the many myths that have grown up around Mrs Thatcher, were it not that unpublished documents in the Home Office archives prove that she did personally intervene in the ‘Ripper’ enquiry, and to good effect.
A week after the Hill murder, on 25 November, Mrs Thatcher summoned Whitelaw, Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, and Head of the Home Office Sir Brian Cubbon to tell them that ‘the local police had so far failed totally in their enquiries into a series of murders that constituted the most appalling kind of violence against women’ and that ‘it was now a matter of public confidence’.14 Whitelaw had evidently been forewarned, and had his answer ready. The previous day, he had summoned Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir James Crane to the Home Office, and that same day, Regional Inspector Lawrence Byford was dispatched to Leeds. Byford must have been familiar with the scene of the Jacqueline Hill murder because his son Mark, a future deputy director-general of the BBC, was a recent graduate of Leeds University. On 26 November, he informed the Home Office that Oldfield was off the case and that a team from outside, headed by Leslie Emment, the deputy chief constable of the Thames Valley police, had been called in. Emment’s team, which included Stuart Kind, director of the Home Office Central Research Establishment at Aldermaston, took no time at all to conclude that the messages from Wearside could be treated as ‘an elaborate hoax’.15
Three days after Mrs Thatcher’s intervention, and nine days after the discovery of Jacqueline Hill’s body, the pointless hunt for a man with a Wearside accent could be called off, at last. Soon afterwards, Stuart Kind gave the police written advice that they should look for a man living in or near Bradford.16 On 2 January 1981, two police officers in a patrol car in Sheffield’s red-light district spotted a couple in a parked car that had false number plates. They arrested the man, who identified himself as Peter Sutcliffe, from the Heaton area of Bradford, and who confessed that he was the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, kitted up for his fourteenth kill.
Most, but not all, of the women Sutcliffe attacked were prostitutes, giving rise to a myth that he was on a maniacal mission to clean the streets of these women, though the evidence suggests that he simply enjoyed killing women and selected prostitutes because they were easily available. A generation later, when young prostitutes were being picked off by a serial killer in Ipswich, relatives of the dead women went on television to talk about their sense of loss, but public attitudes in 1981 did not allow anyone to speak for the prostitutes killed by Peter Sutcliffe. The public was not even told that one victim, Wilma McCann, had a seven-year-old daughter, Sonia, and a son, Richard, aged five, who wondered why their mother had not come home and ventured out across the fields at 5.30 a.m. in search of her, passing close by her mutilated body. Sonia never recovered from that night, and committed suicide.17 Richard wrote a vivid, bestselling autobiography,18 though he was moved to remark that ‘the way these women were being portrayed did nothing for my self-esteem’.19 There was a general separation of victims into the innocent, such as Jacqueline Hill, and those who, some believed, deserved what they got, like Wilma McCann. During Sutcliffe’s trial, Attorney General Michael Havers described Sutcliffe’s victims to the jury: ‘Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of this case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women.’
These remarks invoked a furious reaction from feminists outside the courtroom, who handed out a statement saying: ‘This distinction between prostitutes and “respectable” and “innocent” victims has been made all along by the police and the media – the murder of prostitute women seems irrelevant and unimportant. This attitude towards prostitutes, much the same as the Ripper’s, allowed him to carry on murdering women for five years.’20 Pat Barker’s novel, Blow Your House Down, published in 1984 and loosely based on the Ripper murders, was a reaction to this mindset; it focused on the humanity of the victims and treated the murderer as an incidental character in their story. It was such a bleak read, however, that it was never likely to break into the popular market.
If the Sutcliffe murders can be said to have had any positive social impact, apart from the improvements that they inspired in police methods, it was through the attention they drew to the terrain on which they were perpetrated: those desolate bits of waste ground inside decaying cities, which seemed to have reverted to pre-civilization, where women desperate for money offered their bodies for sale. It also caused people to question if women on the receiving end of male violence were properly treated by the police. The Thames Valley police, perhaps unwisely, allowed a BBC crew to do a fly-on-the-wall documentary series, broadcast in January 1982, which included film of male officers interrogating a woman with learning difficulties who complained that she had been raped. One of the police officers told her that her story was ‘the biggest bollocks I have ever heard’.21 In the next day’s Daily Mail, the columnist Lynda Lee-Potter described the reaction she heard from one young woman who had been watching: ‘Did you watch that programme? God, I’d never go to the police after that.’22
This coincided with a scandal that erupted in Scotland when the Daily Record published information about a case that had been thrown out by the courts. In 1980, a twenty-nine-year-old woman walking home from a pub after quarrelling with her boyfriend was dragged off a Glasgow street into a derelict hut by three teenagers, who raped her and slashed her with a razor, noughts and crosses style. She needed 168 stitches. The police had forensic evidence against the three, a confession and a statement from an eye-witness that placed them at the scene, but when the case came to court, in June 1981, the defence lawyers gave notice that they were going to claim that the woman consented to sex. She appeared to be too distressed to give evidence, so the court ordered a psychiatric report. Three months later, just as the BBC documentary had focused attention on rape, the Daily Record revealed that the case had been dropped. By inflicting sufficient injuries on the woman to reduce her to suicidal despair without actually killing her, the men had ensured they would never be prosecuted. Or, as the Labour MP Jo Richardson put it: ‘What has happened in Scotland gives licence to rapists to rape and then cut up their victims knowing they will get off scot-free.’23 Sir Nicholas Fairbair
n, the Scottish attorney general, was quoted in newspapers as having rubbished the story, saying ‘this unfortunate woman’s mental stability was irrelevant’, but he said something very different when he faced an angry House of Commons. He then claimed that the case had been dropped for the sake of the woman’s health, an argument weakened somewhat by a public statement issued by the woman herself, saying that she had been prepared to give evidence, that she first learnt that the case had been dropped by reading it in the newspaper and that she was considering a private prosecution. Sir Nicholas also floundered as he tried to explain why, even if the rape charge was to be dropped, they had not gone ahead and prosecuted the men for the razor attack. He pleaded: ‘The question of the victim’s consent is critical to the proof of the crime. I can see no way in which, out of fairness to those who are accused, one could conduct the trial in her absence.’24 Fairbairn was a devoted Thatcherite, and Margaret Thatcher had stood by him the previous month when the Daily Star revealed that a Commons secretary had attempted suicide outside his flat when he ended their affair, but after this performance he resigned rather than be sacked.
In the same week, there was another case that caused as big an outcry as the Glasgow rape. Hitch-hiking was then such a popular means of travel that a kind of subculture had grown around it. There was a manual, first published in 1979, by the travel writer Simon Calder that offered advice on the best sites to hitch a lift out of 200 towns and cities, ‘with hitching ratings for every junction, plus techniques and gimmicks, the art of signwriting, legal problems, what to wear, hazards and how to avoid them and route planning’.25 Predating that, there was a similar guide to Europe, which inspired Douglas Adams to write the radio series, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, which was made into a TV series in 1981. While the young loved to hitch, others thought it disgraceful that they should be entitled to travel without paying. One seventeen-year-old girl who had been at a party at the US air force base at Lakenheath hitched a ride home from a businessman who spotted her by the roadside, and was raped. At Ipswich Crown Court, Judge Bertrand Richards let the attacker off with a £2,000 fine, because ‘I am not saying that a girl hitching home late at night should not be protected by the law, but she was guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence.’26 Less than three weeks later, a seventeen-year-old American who lived on the Lakenheath air base tried to hitch home, and was also raped.
The judge’s remarks in this case were contradicted by Lord Hailsham, the lord chancellor, and Lord Lane, the lord chief justice. However, in December 1982 Cambridge Crown Court heard the case of a woman who had been taken down into a basement, where she pleaded in vain to her assailant not to rape her. Judge David Wild was not impressed. Pleading not to be raped might be a woman’s way of saying ‘stop it, I like it’, he told the jury. If she had genuinely resisted, she would have bruises to show for it. He continued:
Women who say no do not always mean no. It is not just a question of saying no, it is a question of how she says it, how she shows and makes it clear. If she does not want it, she has only to keep her legs shut and she would not get it without force.
After the accused had been acquitted, it transpired that he had already served a long prison sentence for rape.27
Four years later, there was a rape case so clear cut that not even a judge as obtuse as David Wild could imagine that the victim had asked for it. In March 1986, three burglars broke into a vicarage in Ealing, west London, and came upon the vicar, his daughter and her boyfriend. They coshed the two men, leaving them with fractured skulls, and one burglar took the young woman upstairs to subject her to a revolting attack, that lasted a full hour, with another burglar looking on.
The first controversy this case threw up was over privacy. It was illegal to name the victim in rape trials or pre-hearings, but the law did not extend this protection in a case where the rapists were still at large. Within a week, different newspapers had told their readers that this victim was a vicar’s daughter, that she was twenty-one years old, that the attack had happened at a vicarage in Ealing, close to the home of Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, and that the vicar, whose name was Michael Saward, had described the victim as ‘a jewel in my crown’.28 The Sun also published her photograph, partly blacked out. The Labour MP Robin Corbett demanded that the Sun be prosecuted, but the attorney general’s reply was that, since no one had been charged with rape, no law had been broken – though the law was changed in 1987 as a result of the case. That was too late for the Ealing rape victim. Anyone who knew the family, including the entire congregation at Rev. Saward’s church, knew that she was the vicar’s daughter, Jill Saward. Fortified by her religion, she came through the ordeal well. When she was aged thirty-nine and the mother of three boys, she made a BBC programme in which she said:
Ealing Vicarage Rape Victim – that’s been my tag for the past eighteen years, because at the age of twenty-one as a virgin I was raped, buggered and indecently assaulted whilst my father and boyfriend were beaten up by burglars who came to our home. I make no complaint about this tag as it has enabled me to challenge politicians and work for change.29
There was a second part to the story that was almost as shocking as the crime itself. The three burglars went before a judge in February 1987. Martin McCall, Jill Saward’s attacker, was sentenced to five years for rape and five years for aggravated burglary. Another man was sentenced to three years for rape and five years for burglary. The next day, the judge dealt with a third defendant, Robert Horscroft, who had instigated the raid on the vicarage and was implicated in the violent attack on the vicar and his daughter’s boyfriend, but had been repelled by the rape and had tried to persuade McCall to leave Jill Saward alone. His sentence was fourteen years. As he left the court, he shouted: ‘What about the fucking rape, you prick?’,30 which, though crudely put, was pretty close to the reaction outside when news of the sentences reached the public. People simply could not comprehend how a judge could think that burglary was more serious than rape. It was made no more comprehensible by the judge’s remark that the effect of the assault on Jill Saward was ‘not so great’, as if her resilience mitigated McCall’s crime.
In all these cases it was the women’s movement and politicians from the Left – Women Against Rape, the Glasgow Rape Crisis Centre, the Labour MPs Jo Richardson, Jack Ashley and Robin Corbett – who led the charge for more severe penalties for rape and better protection for the victims. After the hitch-hiker case, Jack Ashley campaigned for the attorney general to have the right to appeal against sentences that were too light, something for which there was then no precedent in British law. That reform was passed in 1987, in the wake of the Ealing case. And it was left to Clare Short, on the left wing of the Labour Party, to raise the tattered banner of the anti-pornography crusaders in Parliament. One Friday morning in January 1986, a half-empty House of Commons was discussing a private member’s bill to curb obscene publications, which did not have a chance of becoming law, when Short was provoked by a flippant comment from a male MP to say, on impulse, that she might introduce a bill ‘to outlaw showing pictures of partially naked or naked women in mass circulation newspapers’.31 At first, there was little reaction, except that her remarks were picked up by the wire service and published in local newspapers, and she was surprised to receive letters from women around the country, urging her on.32 Thus encouraged, she introduced her Indecent Displays (Newspapers) Bill to the Commons, on a Friday in March 1986, and by and large divided the Commons on party lines, with the Conservatives rallying to the defence of soft pornography while Labour MPs, including Tony Blair, voted for censorship. There were exceptions. When Robert Adley accused Short of wanting to take away ‘one of the few pleasures left to us today’,33 a fellow Tory, Tony Marlow, rebuked him for being flippant.
Outside the Commons, the Sun of course came boldly out in favour of its version of press freedom. Its campaign was fronted by Samantha Fox, famous for having posed for Page 3 days after her sixteenth birthday, thus bec
oming the nation’s youngest professional topless model.34 ‘Save Our Sizzlers’ (SOS) was the slogan of this campaign. Short was denounced time and again as ‘killjoy Clare’, ‘crazy Clare’, and the ‘crackpot MP’. Undeterred, she brought her bill back to the Commons in March 1988 and picked up support from 165 MPs, including three of the more impressive women on the Conservative side: Emma Nicholson, Gillian Shephard and Ann Widdecombe. In November 1989, she led a squad of thirty women in a raid on WH Smith to sweep the offending publications off the top shelf. The following year, the News of the World took revenge by running a story across two pages, accusing her of having once been involved with a man who was later shot and killed in what appears to have been a gangland assassination.35
After so much activity and so much publicity, it would be pleasing to record that attitudes to sexually related violence had been transformed by the end of the 1980s. They had changed certainly, but not in every courtroom. In February 1989, a woman named Sara Thornton was charged with murdering her alcoholic husband, a former police officer. The police had been called to her home several times after reports that he had assaulted her; a neighbour testified that he ‘beat her black and blue’; yet she was sentenced to life imprisonment. The case would become one of the major feminist causes of the 1990s, until in 1996 the charge was reduced to manslaughter.36 It was linked to the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, also sentenced to life imprisonment in 1989 for killing her husband, at whose hands she had suffered ten years of rape and abuse. After he threatened to burn her with a hot iron, she threw petrol over his duvet while he was sleeping and set it alight. He died ten days later. Her case was taken up by the pressure group Southall Black Sisters and, after a retrial in 1992, the charge was reduced to manslaughter and she was released. Her appeal set the precedent that women who kill as a result of severe domestic violence should not be treated as cold-blooded murderers.