After a few months living at Bishop’s Cleeve, Fred decided they should move to another caravan site, at Sandhurst Lane, just north of Gloucester, where he was working as a labourer. Faced with the enormous problem of becoming a mother at sixteen, Rose showed remarkable self-reliance, refusing to ask her mother for help and insisting that Fred move the family to a proper house.
Rose found it increasingly difficult to cope with the children. Charmaine in particular was a wilful girl who did not take kindly to being told what to do by somebody only ten years her senior – and a girl who, in many ways, was less intelligent than herself. Because of the situation, Fred sent Anna Marie and Charmaine to live with foster parents in the town of Tewkesbury, although they were soon home again.
Rena reappeared the following month, demanding that the girls be returned to her. It was almost certainly at this time that Rena and Rose first met. Rena cared little now about her own relationship with Fred, and their troubled marriage was effectively over. Her only concern was that he did not harm the children, and she may have come to the conclusion that they were safer with Rose looking after them. Whatever she felt about Rose, and whatever happened when they met, she did not regain custody of her daughters.
Fred had found a house for Rose and the children to live in, and in June 1970 he led his ragamuffin family into the city of Gloucester – the place which would be their home for the next twenty-four years.
A small city, with a population of under a hundred thousand, Gloucester lies approximately one hundred miles west of London in the foothills of the Cotswolds. Much Marcle is fourteen miles to the north-west.
Gloucester was first established as a Roman fort, and later became a colonised Roman town known as Glevum. For centuries it was the lowest crossing-point on the River Severn, the gateway to Britain’s West Country and an important trading centre.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the land south-east of Gloucester’s ancient Roman walls had been left as pasture and orchard, sometimes burial ground. But the city boomed during the reign of Queen Victoria with the expansion of the railway, the building of a canal system and the enlargement of the docks. Between the mid-1700s and 1871, the population had increased sixfold and hundreds of brick houses had to be constructed to accommodate these new people.
A formal park, known simply as The Park, a bandstand and cricket ground were laid out on the site of a natural spa just outside the city walls. Streets of generously-proportioned houses were built around the perimeter. These middle-class developments included Midland Road and Cromwell Street, the two addresses where Fred and Rose were to live in their twenty-four years in the city. Both were built at about the same time, a few hundred yards apart, on side streets just off The Park. Midland Road had the slightly larger houses: semi-detached villas with walk-up steps at the front, and an attic room facing on to a light railway line raised on an embankment. The street took its name from the Midland Railway company which owned the track.
The residential area around The Park began to decline after the Great War. The spa in nearby Cheltenham was a more fashionable place to visit, and Gloucester increasingly faded in comparison with its sophisticated neighbour; a decline hastened after the Second World War by the exodus of people out of the city centre to modern housing estates in the suburbs. Gloucester changed further in the 1960s, when many of the ancient tumbledown buildings which had crowded the city for centuries were torn down to make way for a shopping centre, multi-storey car park and one-way system.
The handsome houses of Midland Road fell upon hard times. Front gardens became parking bays. Scrubby grass and nettles grew where the Midland Railway line had run, and the parallel Trier Way was widened, bringing more traffic, exhaust fumes and dirt. This was the faded street that Fred and Rose came to in 1970.
They lodged briefly at Number 10 before moving to 25, the second of Fred’s homes to bear that number. The property was then owned by a Polish immigrant named Frank Zygmunt, who had bought up several city-centre houses and converted them into low-rent flats.
Twenty-five Midland Road is a large semi-detached building clad in grey concrete, divided into three flats. There is a neglected front garden and a small flight of steps leading up to a black front door. Fred and Rose moved in to the ground floor, which had a small living room facing the road, a bathroom, kitchen and two bedrooms. A door in the central passageway led down to a cellar where the coal was kept for open fires. Light came into the passageway through a window of coloured glass.
With rent to pay on the flat, and Rose and the children to provide for, Fred soon resorted to petty crime. He went to work as a fitter for Cotswold Tyres in Albion Street, Cheltenham. It was a hard, dirty trade and he was frustrated by his poor pay. One day he told his boss that he was delivering an order of five new tyres – instead, he stole them.
He later left the tyre-fitters and went to work for Frank Zygmunt, carrying out odd jobs on the various houses that the entrepreneur owned in Gloucester. Fred was an industrious worker, almost to a fault, but he was also hopelessly light-fingered. When the tax disc expired on his car, he stole one from a pick-up truck belonging to his boss and forged the details. He was later stopped by traffic police and arrested.
In the early autumn Rose gave birth to her first child, a girl they named Heather Ann. She was born at the maternity unit of the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital on 17 October 1970, a pretty baby who soon had the distinctive dark hair of the West family, although her facial features were closer to those of her mother. Rose bottle-reared Heather, trying her best to care for her daughter under difficult conditions.
The simple fact of Rose’s tender age should have brought her under the scrutiny of social services at this time. The Register of At Risk Children, introduced in 1967, specified that ‘very young parents’ should be monitored. To this end, there was supposed to be communication between midwifery services and health visitors in Gloucester – Rose’s case should have been discussed by them, and follow-up checks should have been made on her well-being and on that of her children. Such checks would have revealed a worrying domestic situation; Rose, who was already known to Gloucester social services because she had been in care, was struggling to look after two young children and a baby. Gloucestershire County Council’s own report into the background of the West case admits that vital communication between departments occurred ‘less frequently [then] than [it does] now’.
Just as Fred was wondering how he could afford to support his growing family, Cotswold Tyres discovered that Fred’s ‘order’ for five tyres, worth a little over £50, had been bogus. He was arrested and charged with theft. Before the case was heard, Fred was called before Gloucester magistrates and pleaded guilty to four motoring offences, including stealing Frank Zygmunt’s tax disc. He blamed the offences on Rena, who he said had given him the forged disc. This time the full weight of the law came down on Fred: he was jailed for three months, and was also ordered to serve a six-month suspended sentence imposed in August 1969 for stealing fence panels from a building site. It came to a total of nine months behind bars.
A few weeks later, on New Year’s Eve 1970, Fred was taken from his cell to Cheltenham Magistrates Court to be tried for the theft of the car tyres. Once again, he pleaded guilty and blamed Rena. His defence counsel said he had been left with two small children to care for and had been short of money after being deserted by his wife, but now his ‘family affairs had pulled round’. The magistrates took a cynical view of this excuse. The prisoner before the bench was a seasoned petty criminal, a recidivist. He was sent back to gaol with an extra month to add on to his sentence.
It was a forlorn New Year for seventeen-year-old Rose. Snow had been falling across the county that week. It settled white and crisp out in the countryside, but turned to brown slush in the streets of Gloucester. The cold wet seeped into Rose’s shoes as she trudged back from Fred’s court hearing. Inside Midland Road, she stared sadly at an unmade fire grate. Horns honked out on the river; revellers
skidded past the window calling out: ‘Happy New Year!’ The Andy Stewart Hogmanay Show was on the television in a nearby house, but it was a joyless scene inside Number 25. Nappies and clothes were strewn about the flat, Heather would not stop crying and there was rent to pay.
In the bleak months following Fred’s imprisonment, Rose turned her frustrations on the children. She did not have the strength of personality to command the girls’ respect or love, so she attempted to ‘curb’ what she considered to be their inability to behave by beating them, soon contriving punishments as sadistic as those her father had used.
As the children lay in their beds at night, Charmaine tried to comfort her younger half-sister by whispering that their real mother would come back and rescue them, and everything would be all right. But their childhood had been so chaotic that Anna Marie could barely remember what Rena looked like, and despite the terror they both faced, Charmaine and Anna Marie were not particularly close anyway. ‘It was like there was a void between us,’ explained Anna Marie.
There was bad feeling between Rose and Charmaine, and Anna Marie felt that she suffered because of it. ‘Charmaine disliked her and was antagonistic. Rose would retaliate by taking it out on me,’ she says. Rose lost her temper with frightening violence. The children were in the kitchen washing up one day when Rose decided that Charmaine was taking too long. She snatched a cereal bowl from the child’s hand and smashed it over Anna Marie’s head.
A young family named Giles lived in the flat at the top of the house: Ronald Giles, his wife Shirley and their two daughters, Tracey and Janet. Shirley Giles often complained to her husband that Midland Road was eerily quiet. She said that it was ‘like a morgue’ – a prophetic description. Her daughter Tracey was nearly eight, the same age as Charmaine, and the two girls became best friends, playing together on the communal stairs. Tracey’s sister Janet also joined in the fun, but Anna Marie was quiet and ‘seemed like Charmaine’s shadow’. Tracey also played in the downstairs flat. She noticed that Rose always seemed to be telling Charmaine off and frequently accused her of being ‘guilty’. But no matter how cruelly she was treated, Charmaine refused to cry. ‘She felt like if she cried, she was giving in,’ remembers Anna Marie, who also concedes that Charmaine was a stronger character than her.
The Giles family were about to have breakfast one morning when Mrs Giles realised they had run out of milk. Tracey was sent down to the bottom flat to ask Rose if she could spare a cup. The little girl, excited with her errand, ran helter-skelter down the stairs, and, without knocking, barged into Rose’s kitchen. The scene that confronted Tracey brought her to a sudden halt. Charmaine was standing on a kitchen chair, her hands behind her back with the wrists crossed and tied together with a leather belt. Rose held a long wooden spoon in her right hand, which she had obviously been using to hit Charmaine. Anna Marie was standing by the door with a blank expression on her face. It seemed that such sadistic punishments were a regular occurrence. (Years later Anna Marie had a dim memory of seeing Charmaine tied to a bed.)
Tracey came back upstairs very distressed and told her mother what she had seen. When Shirley next saw Rose, she asked about what had happened, but Rose was neither embarrassed nor apologetic; she said she was punishing Charmaine to curb her naughty behaviour. ‘Rose would say that she couldn’t cope with Charmaine,’ says Shirley Giles. ‘She ruled Anna Marie and Charmaine with a steel rod, but Charmaine had a rebellious nature which she didn’t like.’ Mrs Giles discovered that Fred was in prison and that Rose was just looking after Anna Marie and Charmaine. She said she was having particular problems with the eldest girl and that her natural mother was coming to collect her. (Rena was having problems of her own at this time, for example being picked up by police in Bristol for soliciting.) Rose added that she ‘had had enough of Charmaine’; she was ‘at the end of her tether’ with the girl and could not wait to get rid of her.
At 6:50 P.M. on the evening of 28 March 1971, Rose took Charmaine to the casualty unit of the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. It was six days after the child’s eighth birthday, and she had an ugly puncture wound in her left ankle – hospital records show that Charmaine had sustained the injury at Midland Road. There had either been an accident or, in retrospect, Rose had gone too far in her attempt to correct the child.
One might have thought that such an odd and serious injury to a child, sustained at home, would have been brought to the attention of the local social services. But, at this time in Gloucester, health visitors had no official liaison whatsoever with the Accident and Emergency department of the local hospital, and consequently never knew what had happened to Charmaine.
After months without news from their daughter, Bill and Daisy Letts decided to visit Rose. They took their younger children Graham and Glenys along, and were all astounded by the squalid conditions in which they found Rose living. The floors of 25 Midland Road were bare boards and there was hardly a stick of furniture, yet the tiny flat was cluttered with children’s clothes, soiled nappies, toys and dirty plates. The fastidious Bill Letts was so appalled by what he saw that he did not want to sit down. ‘The place was a shambles. You wouldn’t want your dog to live in it,’ recalls Graham Letts.
Rose was upset. Daisy well knew that the only way in which Rose expressed unhappiness was by crying, and it was clear that she had been doing just that. ‘Her eyes was red and you could see she’d been crying. Dad said that he’d like to know what was going on.’ But Rose, whom they noticed was also thin and unkempt, did not explain her unhappiness – other than to tell her sister Glenys that she did not like Charmaine because the child wet the bed. Rose said she smacked Charmaine when she did this. ‘Rosemary couldn’t cope with it,’ says Graham. ‘It hit her all of a sudden and she got run down.’
The family were surprised to find another little baby crawling about in the dirt, for Rose had never told her parents that she had given birth to Heather. Now they met their new granddaughter for the first time. Daisy made two more visits to Midland Road, and on one occasion was surprised to discover that Rose had gone out leaving Charmaine completely on her own in the house.
Fred and Rose were writing each other passionate letters which, in retrospect, speak volumes about both their own obsessive relationship and the callousness they showed towards Charmaine. The following letter was received at Leyhill open prison, Wootton-under-Edge, in the south of the county, on 4 May 1971. Rose had drawn a heart at the top and written the words ‘From now until forever’ and ‘That ring that means so much’ in the right-hand corner. The body of the letter (with its original errors of grammar and spelling) reads as follows:
To My Darling,
What was you on about at the beginning of your letter. I just can’t make it out for trying. Hey love thats great, three more visits, it’ll take up half the time I’ve got to wait for you. Blinking base people get’s on my nerves. Darling, about Char. I think she likes to be handled rough. But darling, why do I have to be the one to do it. I would keep her for her own sake, if it wasn’t for the rest of the children. You can see Char coming out in Anna now. And I hate it.
Love, I don’t think God wan’ted me to go to that dance. Because I didn’t go after all. Darling, I think from now on I’m going to let God guide me. It always ends up that way anyway (As you may know) Ha! Ha! Oh! Love! about our son. I’ll see the doctor about the pill. And then we’ll be safe to decide about it when you come home.
Well, Love, keep happy, Longing for the 18th.
Your ever worshipping wife,
Rose
This letter is fascinating for many reasons. Rose agrees with Fred that she has to be ‘rough’ with Charmaine, but is tired of taking all the responsibility for the children. She is clearly only interested in seeing Fred again, the man she ‘worships’. She writes of a ‘ring that means so much’ and of being his ‘wife’ even though Fred was still married to Rena at this time. As to their ‘son’, it appears that Rose was pregnant and had assumed the baby would be a boy. T
he letter reads as if she is considering terminating her pregnancy, and as there is no record of a baby having been born to her in 1971, it seems this is what she did.
On 7 May Rose took the children to visit Fred at Leyhill Prison. He was delighted to see her. When they met, he presented his beloved with a painting he had made in his cell, showing Rose, naked, kneeling down and silhouetted before a burning sunset.
Fred wrote to Rose from Leyhill on 14 May. He refers in the note to a model Gypsy caravan he made for her out of plywood. The model was cleverly designed so that it opened up to make a jewellery box; a wooden heart suspended from the front by a chain was inscribed ‘To Rose Love Fred’. He also mentions a table, which was presumably built in the prison workshop. Across the top of the note he scrawled: ‘Our family of Love’; underneath this Fred wrote, in an illiterate hand which mimicked his countrified way of speech:
To My Darling Wife Rose.
Darling be at home Tuesday for your table Will be cuming so be at home all day untill thy cum it will be in the morning if thy do cum then cum see me but don’t cum to thy cum Darling.
Darling you for got to write agen. Darling your caravan is at the prison gate for you I have put your assisted visits form for the 18th or 19th and for the 15th of June. Will, it wont be long be for the 24 now Darling so get the pill if you want it or will be a mum for or son to son Darlin. I love you darling for ever my love. Your has you say from now until for ever. Darling. Will, Darling, untill I see you. All my love I sind to you.
Your Ever Worshipping Husband
Fred.
Fred then decorated the letter with the words ‘for Heather’, ‘ANNA’, ‘CHAR’, ‘For Rose’ and a number of crosses representing kisses. Then he wrote:
Fred & Rose Page 11