He changed schools after the move, transferring to Carnwadric Primary on Capelrig Street, a two-mile bus journey from home. He attained good marks and made new friends; however, his mother began missing their Sunday meetings in 1948, when she began a relationship with Patrick Brady, an Irish ex-army man. Weeks drifted by in which she had no contact with her ten-year-old son, and when Patrick moved to Manchester for work, Peggy went with him, leaving Ian in the care of his foster family. Communication between them was by letter alone.
Ian attended the wedding of his foster brother Robert Sloan the following year. Afterwards, there was a family holiday in Perthshire, where the Sloans rented a cottage in Dunning and Ian stumbled across the memorial to Maggie Wall, the witch who had burned there three centuries earlier. Ian loved the cottage, with its low ceilings and oil lamps, and the stone bridge nearby across the river. He happily accompanied the family to the witch’s monument, on walks through the fields and on a day trip to the salt-eddied coast of St Andrew’s, and another to the harbour village of St Monans, where he scrambled over the bulbous stones of the ancient castle ruins.
Returning to Glasgow, Ian passed his exams and was admitted to Shawlands Academy in 1950. The pupils, who wore a navy-blue uniform with gold piping, were mostly from wealthy families; before the new estate in Pollock was built the school was deemed ‘posh’, but the local authorities insisted on adding a new wing to accommodate children from the estate. Ian invited new classmates to meet his old friends from Camden Street, taking pleasure in observing ‘how quickly they sloughed off middle-class values and enjoyed real life in the Gorbals’.20 His teachers regarded him as ‘withdrawn, quite a clever boy’, while a classmate saw ‘a boy who didn’t like company but nae dunderhead. He read all kinds of books about the Nazis and never stopped talking about them. Even when we were playing war games, he made a great point of being a “German” . . . When Ian used to shout, “Sieg Heil!” and give the Nazi salute, people would laugh.’21 He began collecting Nazi memorabilia, pestering other boys whose brothers were in the army to fetch him anything from Germany. He renounced God forever at the age of 12, when his beloved dog fell ill. His prayers that it wouldn’t die went unanswered and he declared himself a committed atheist.
On 16 May 1950, Ian’s mother married Patrick Brady at Manchester’s All Saints Registry Office. They lived in Ancoats, and Patrick worked as a meat porter in Smithfield Market. Peggy retained minimal contact with her son. He didn’t travel south to attend the wedding, holidaying instead with the Sloans at Troon, a large town on the south Ayrshire coast.
Returning to Glasgow, Ian committed his first break-in at the house of a naval man, although he claims he ‘did not take anything, but simply looked around’.22 It was in this period, Ian recalls, that ‘matters changed imperceptibly. Gangs formed round me . . . I took it as a natural process . . . That our activities became criminal was also accepted as natural. The more money we stole, the more fun we had. Only when we were caught did a minority drift away, mainly at the behest of their restrictive parents . . . replacements joined us and we continued to enjoy the fruits of our activities.’23 His ‘activities’ landed him in Juvenile Court in May 1951, accused of housebreaking and attempted theft, to the bemused shame of his foster parents. The courts were lenient and placed him on two years’ probation.
Ian’s appearance altered radically as he hit his teens: he grew tall and gangly, with a thick mop of dark brown hair, which he wore in a high quiff. He dressed sharply – one photograph shows him with a group of grinning lads on a seafront wearing a dark suit, black shirt and light tie. He found a girlfriend: Evelyn Grant, whom he met on the Shawlands bus. They shared a seat and he treated her to trips to the pictures, where he would immerse himself in the film.
On 16 July 1952, while still on probation, he appeared in Govan Juvenile Court on a housebreaking charge. His sentence was minimal – more probation – but according to journalist Fred Harrison, who interviewed Ian at length in Gartree Prison, he was growing increasingly disturbed; he claimed that while out cycling one day he felt inexplicably dizzy and saw a warm green radiation, like a thick mist, ahead of him, which he named the Face of Death.24 He professes to have made a pact with it, agreeing to commit ‘sacrifices’ in return for its unspecified favours.25 On a visit to Glencoe, where the horrifying clan massacre took place in 1692, he apparently experienced the same light-headedness and hallucination, and assumed that the Face of Death lived on nearby Rannoch Moor, a wilderness of black peat, lochs and abundant heather.26
Ian left school in 1953 at the age of 15. He worked as a butcher’s assistant for a while, then as an engine cleaner with British Rail, and as an apprentice plater before moving on to the Harland and Wolff shipyard as a tea boy. Shunting from job to job, none of which engaged his intellect, he became dissatisfied and frustrated, craving the accumulation of what he called ‘working capital’.27 His courtship of Evelyn came to an unruly end when he threatened her with a flick-knife after she went dancing with another youth.
Then on 29 November 1954, at the age of 16, Ian appeared before Glasgow Sheriff Court, charged once again with theft and housebreaking. The Sloans were overwhelmed and convinced that he would be sent to prison, but the Glasgow courts accepted the more unusual solution suggested by Ian’s probation officer, and his future was no longer their concern. The Scottish justice system had washed their hands of him and were – as Ian himself phrased it – ‘deporting’ him.28 In December 1954, he caught the train south to Manchester, where his mother was waiting anxiously at Victoria Station. He hadn’t seen her since he was ten, but she seemed determined to do her best for him now. He hadn’t yet met his stepfather either, but he had already taken his surname, shrugging off ‘Ian Sloan’ like an old coat – his third name change since birth. An awkward, long-limbed 16 year old, he left the railway station with his mother and stepped out onto Manchester’s bitterly cold streets as Ian Brady.
Peggy and Pat had recently moved from Ancoats to Moss Side; their home at 13A Denmark Street was sparsely furnished with bulky, old-fashioned pieces that made the rooms appear pokier than they already were, but everywhere was neat and clean. To Peggy’s relief, Ian got on well with his stepfather, who found him a job as an errand boy with Howarth’s Fruiterers at the market. The two shared a love of racing and sat listening to the radio commentaries together to find out if their modest bets had paid off. Otherwise Ian was insular, aware that his heavy Glaswegian accent sounded foreign in the city of flat vowels.
The Bradys moved often within the neighbourhood during the mid 1950s: from Denmark Street to Grammar Street (later Cannel Street) and then to 36 Cuttle Street, a particularly drab terrace near the Grey Mare Lane market. Mrs Alma Singleton, who lived at number 19, already knew Peggy and described Ian as ‘a boy too good to be true’.29 She remembered him as ‘a quiet lad. When I went in, he would look up and nod, and then he would blush. He always seemed to be embarrassed when he met anyone. Maybe he was a bit awkward with his mother’s friends because no one knew she had a grown-up son until he appeared.’30 Every lunchtime Peggy popped home from her job in an engineering works to prepare dinner, and in the afternoon Mrs Singleton stopped by to light the fire. Whenever she saw Ian, he was usually sprawled in a chair, wearing the checked shirts that he kept for work, and reading a book. ‘Anyone could tell Ian was Mrs Brady’s son,’ Mrs Singleton recalled. ‘When he was about the house, her eyes followed him everywhere. She thought the world of him.’31 He was kind and respectful towards Peggy and quiet about the place, but he appeared to have more money than he should, and never struck up conversations with the neighbours or the market workers, except to make disparaging comments about the black residents of Moss Side.
He missed Scotland deeply, and recalls that within months of arriving in Manchester he made the first of frequent trips to visit the Sloans. His younger foster sister Mary married a soldier in the Highland Light Infantry at Christmas 1955. Ian liked him and later accompanied the couple and the
ir two small children on holiday to Ayrshire.
But he had fallen foul of the law again, and on 9 November 1955 was convicted of stealing 44 lbs of lead seals from banana boxes. A driver at the market had asked him to stack the lead onto his lorry and had sold it to a scrap dealer, who contacted the police. The driver, when questioned, implicated Ian, who was called to Manchester Crown Court for sentencing. He pleaded guilty, anticipating a fine, and flipped a coin to decide how he would respond to the outcome: whether to go straight or become a career criminal. He was stunned to be sentenced to two years in borstal – and because all the borstals were full, he faced incarceration in Strangeways until a place became available.
The decision enraged him. A later psychiatric report reflected: ‘He felt that this was a time of deep crisis in his life and that in some way a decision had been made. He felt increasingly cut off from other people in the emotional sense – he could no longer feel concern for them or feel warmly towards them. He retained affection for his foster family.’32 Ian admits that he found it increasingly hard ‘to accept the values of others. It seemed futile and pointless, their living, like trying to obtain something in a dream. I felt as if I was awake, and they were asleep . . . by the time I was seventeen or eighteen, everything started to become increasingly unreal. People seemed like puppets and marionettes. Their lives cotton wool, marshmallow, unreal . . . that was the beginning of the end for me.’33
In Strangeways, Ian made an effort to socialise with those inmates who he thought might prove useful to him later and struck up friendships with a small group of men from Leeds and Bradford. On 10 January 1956, he was transferred to Hatfield Borstal, a camp of wooden huts sunk into flat Yorkshire marshes. Borstals were run by the Prison Service, aiming to reform delinquent youths under the age of 23. Education was central, together with stringent routine and authoritarian discipline; one writer described them as ‘breeding grounds for bullies and psychopaths’.34 Hatfield Borstal, nine miles from Doncaster, opened in 1950 and was a former army training camp for boys of ‘better than average intelligence with a relatively light criminal record’.35
Ian’s mother and stepfather visited him there, unaware of his crystallising ambitions to become wealthy through crime. He was barred from National Service following a psychiatric examination and punished for running a betting syndicate and selling self-made alcohol to his fellow detainees. Eventually, he was ‘expelled’ for attacking a warder when drunk and transferred to a much harsher borstal housed within Hull Gaol, a squat Victorian former military prison two miles east of the city centre. During his two years there, the authorities discovered that Ian had a knack for figures and gave him some basic training in bookkeeping. He refined his plans to masterminding bank robberies and payroll snatches, and noted the names of two fellow inmates, Gil Deares and Dougie Woods, as prospective fellow thieves.36 ‘Gradually I began to adopt a more studious, professional attitude towards crime,’ he recalls, adding with characteristic grandiosity, ‘My instinctive form of relativism developed into a pragmatic philosophy. I began to choose my followers.’37
Released from Hull Borstal on 14 November 1957, he returned to his mother, who tried to convince the neighbours that he had merely fallen into bad company. ‘He still blushed every time you spoke to him,’ Mrs Singleton recalled. ‘Anything seemed to embarrass him. He didn’t want to be noticed, but you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. There were at least half a dozen lads of his age in the street, but he never spoke to any of them. He didn’t seem to have any friends and he never brought anyone to the house.’38 Her daughter, Carol, found him attractive, as did other girls in the neighbourhood; he was tall and dark, always smartly dressed, and wore his aloofness as plainly as the dark overcoat he favoured. No one ever saw him in the local pubs, but Carol Singleton spotted him staggering up Cuttle Street occasionally and her father met him clinging drunkenly onto a lamp post one night, unable to support himself.
Ian’s borstal report featured one positive aspect: ‘Application, Good at Figures’. But for several months he was unemployed.39 He found menial work eventually but was made redundant after a short time. In April 1958, through the intervention of his welfare officer, he was taken on as a labourer in Boddingtons Brewery, rolling out barrels and cleaning vats. Despite his clandestine ambitions, his only brush with the law after leaving borstal until he met Myra was when he was fined £1 for being drunk and disorderly. On 3 October, he lost his job as part of the brewery’s cutbacks but was given a reference as a ‘conscientious worker and good timekeeper’.40 He returned to fetching and carrying at the fruit market, contemptuous of the world around him and aching for change.
The Bradys moved on again, leaving Cuttle Street for 97 Grey Mare Lane, just around the corner, before finally settling in Longsight: 18 Westmoreland Street was a dingy terrace, ill-lit at night, with broken flagstones underfoot.41 Peggy tried to make the house more attractive, and Ian helped her decorate throughout, bit by bit, when they could afford it. Mrs Singleton visited them, bringing her baby daughter Lesley. When Peggy called Ian to see the baby, he mumbled that it was bonny and excused himself.
He had discovered Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on one of his frequent trips to Longsight Library. ‘That’s me, that’s what I’m all about,’ he declared 30 years later, telling police that everything he had ever done was in Crime and Punishment.42 The novel concerns Raskolnikov, a poor, failed student who commits a murder that is at once mercenary and a challenge of will but finds redemption in the love of a virtuous prostitute. Raskolnikov rationalises murder, suggesting that man has the ‘inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep . . . certain obstacles’, such as the conventions of accepted morality.43 Ian discarded Raskolnikov’s salvation and the novel’s ethical core, using it instead to justify his own dark thoughts.
Having found one celebrated writer whose works he could interpret to make his own desires more palatable, he sought out others and soon encountered the novels of the Marquis de Sade, whose books brim with sexual cruelty and urge the reader to view murder not as a criminal offence but as a pleasure to be indulged. From de Sade he moved on to the philosophies of Nietzsche, telling himself that a killer was ‘attracted and stimulated by the excitement of challenging the norm, of stepping into forbidden territory like a solitary explorer, consciously thirsting to experience that which the majority have not and dare not’.44 A post-trial psychiatric report on Ian concludes: ‘He found an affinity for literature of a sadistic nature and had sympathy with fascist ideology and Nazi practices. He says he was exhilarated by their loss of feeling, as it appeared a liberation or freedom, but at the same time he was distressed.’45
In February 1959, one month after his 21st birthday, Ian replied to an advertisement for a stock clerk. Wearing the new suit his mother and stepfather had bought him, he caught the bus on Hyde Road to Millwards. He was offered the position following an interview with Tom Craig, who had his reservations over the young Scotsman with the borstal record but decided to give him a chance. Ian began work at Millwards on 16 February 1959, earning £9 a week. Staff found him neat, punctual and usually polite, apart from a dire lack of gamesmanship; lunchtime bridge sessions were dropped because he was so foul-tempered with his partner when they lost, and would sit glowering for the rest of the day if he had a bad hand at pontoon. Otherwise he was quiet, eating his egg-and-cheese sandwiches alone, reading Teach Yourself German or Mein Kampf.
Tom Craig regretted having employed him: ‘He was so bad-tempered about anything that upset him. If you ticked him off about something, he would fly into a rage. He had a shocking temper and his language was dreadful, but I used to pass it over just to keep the peace. He was reasonable at his job, but he would have been sacked long before if it hadn’t been that difficult to get staff . . . I can’t say I ever got to know him at all. In an office, the lads usually chat a bit about football or something like that, but Brady wasn’t interested in anything like that. Sometimes in the morning he might join
in a conversation about what was on TV the night before, but I noticed he only talked about the crime films or the Hitchcock Hour, things with a bit of horror or brutality in them. He often had a book with him – I don’t remember any of them, but they were always those paperbacks with a bit of filth in them. I think it was his first clerical job and he was just adequate and no more. He wasn’t the sort of fellow I liked to have around.’46
Although he was a keen reader, privately Ian returned again and again to Crime and Punishment, sharpening his beliefs and ambitions through the character of Raskolnikov. He failed to recognise the sorrow behind the would-be assassin’s lament: ‘What filthy things my heart is capable of . . .’47 Instead, he interpreted it as a switch to flick on the ‘black light’ of his darkest secret: a sexual attraction to children.48 But he couldn’t satisfy it alone.
7
She walked along with her nose in the air. She was ladylike but very stuck up with it, too. She had known me all her life, but she always passed without speaking. He looked as if he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. He always wore dark glasses and never walked by her side. He always walked behind her going along the street.
Mrs Lily Yates, former neighbour of Myra Hindley, interview, 1966
Ostensibly at least, Myra and Ian appeared to be a normal if unsociable couple. The staff at Millwards weren’t deceived by protestations that they were merely friends; Myra confided in one girl that they were having a relationship, and everyone else knew without being told. The two of them spent their lunch hour at their desks, talking quietly and eating sandwiches, or went out together for fish and chips. Although Ian was undemonstrative towards Myra in public – he never held her hand or put his arm around her – the impression they gave was of an unassailably intimate couple. Even years afterwards, when Myra was diligently constructing an image of herself as a gullible handmaiden to a master, she admitted that he was often loving and affectionate in private. Capable of genuine kindness towards her and habitually generous with money, he treated her to meals at Oriental restaurants and brought home impulsive gifts. He cooked more often than she did at Bannock Street, when they were alone after Gran had retired to bed, and if they had a disagreement he would apologise with another gift, which they referred to as ‘anniversary presents’.1 He called her Kiddo or the Germanic-sounding Hess, while she named him Neddie in homage to the Goon Show character played by Harry Secombe, which she learned to love as ardently as Ian.2
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