Terry wonders what’s in the brown paper bag the tramp holds against his chest with his left hand.
‘But the thing that really alerted me was his manner … his gait. All tramps have a slow sort of slouch … a shuffle sort of thing. This geezer didn’t. He just strode in and then strode out … a bit like he was, you know, busy, or something.’
The tramp strode out and strode next door, to Enzio’s Rendez-Vous Café (Prop. Enzio Salandria).
Enzio is behind the counter at the far end of the café frying eggs and bacon for himself and his brother, Franco.
The tramp strides towards him.
It is now 6.40 a.m.
The tramp is Enzio’s first customer of the day. Enzio looks at the tramp apprehensively. There are plenty of them about here: mendicant hoboes, derelicts, winos, dossers, down-and-outs. Paddington and Bayswater are full of them. Enzio always dreads them coming to the café. They beg food, upset other customers, cause a disturbance … and smell. The tramp stops at the counter. Enzio tries to make him out behind the glasses, within the turned-up collar and beneath the hat, but with little success. He waits for the figure to speak.
The tramp smiles at Enzio and looks at the menu on the wall behind the counter.
‘I would like the egg, bacon and sausages … with some toast, marmalade and a cup of coffee … if you please.’
An educated voice indeed.
Enzio says nothing.
The tramp takes a wallet from inside the greatcoat, produces a crisp £1 note and hands it to Enzio.
‘Yes, sir,’ says Enzio. ‘Sit down … I will bring it to your table. And your change.’
The tramp says nothing, turns and walks back to the front of the café. He sits at a table that has been placed at right angles to the plate glass of the frontage.
The inside of the glass is thick with condensation and it is not possible to see out. The first thing the tramp does is wipe the window so that he can have a clear view of the street. He remains motionless, just staring out.
Enzio delivers the breakfast and change. The tramp thanks him by nodding. Enzio notices several things: the tramp is wearing a very expensive watch, he seems to be having trouble with a hearing aid that looks quite different from any aid Enzio has ever seen before and, despite the generally dirty appearance of the man, his shirt is spotlessly clean (thereby corroborating what Terry next door had said). Enzio wonders about the hearing aid. It looks more like an ear radio receiver he remembers from his army days.
The tramp begins to eat his breakfast.
The café is slowly filling up with other people.
At 7.30 a.m. the tramp has finished eating. Enzio clears away the cup and plates and the tramp asks for a further cup of coffee.
Enzio sees a brown paper carrier bag on the tramp’s lap that he has not noticed before. The tramp clutches it with one hand. An antenna-like wire projects from it.
When Enzio gets back to the counter Franco says to him that there is something very odd about this tramp.
7.45 a.m.
The tramp is now casually reading the newspaper: the Daily Telegraph.
A photograph of Harold Wilson dominates the front page. It measures seven inches by six inches and is positioned very nearly in the centre of the uppermost half of the page immediately below the masthead (there are smaller pictures of George Brown and Patrick Gordon Walker to the left). Wilson is standing in the doorway of 10 Downing Street with his left hand raised in a wave. The caption reads:
Mr. Wilson arriving at 10 Downing Street yesterday after his audience of [sic] the Queen. [Other pictures – Pp. 14 and 19.]
The Labour victory dominates the front page:
WILSON’S EARLY START
ON CABINET MAKING
MORE MINISTERS TODAY
The youngest
Premier since
Rosebery
The tramp continues reading the paper for nearly an hour, his reading interrupted only by long stares out on to Porchester Road.
It is now 8.55 a.m.
He continues staring across to Albert Terrace.
It is now overcast and raining steadily.
Dave Finney (19), a maintenance worker at Whiteley’s store, puts a coin in the jukebox and plays the first record of the day, the Kinks singing You Really Got Me.
Finney notices the tramp gazing intently out of the window, thinks he is looking for something or somebody. Enzio and Franco think the same thing. There’s an alertness he cannot disguise.
Now some conjecture.
The story as I see it.
A figure hurries up the path of No. 16 Albert Terrace, takes a key from his pocket and lets himself into the house. The door closes behind him.
The figure might be Tim.
The house is still.
A few moments later the light comes on in Tim’s room.
Is this what the tramp was waiting for? It could well be.
But enough conjecture.
Finney sees the tramp ‘whispering’ something into the paper bag before he, the tramp, gets up and walks quickly out of the café. Finney is intrigued by the figure and goes to the window. He wipes the condensation away and sees the tramp getting into a white Jaguar car that then speeds northwards up Porchester Road.
Finney turns to Enzio who is at the other end of the café and shouts, ‘He’s got a walkie-talkie in that bag!’ These are the last words Dave Finney ever utters.
Several seconds later there is a noise, like distant rumbling thunder. Distant but getting nearer. It increases in volume.
If you were standing out on the street you would now see the window-panes of Tim’s room stretch and bend outwards until they suddenly fragment into a million shards of glass which arc up and over Porchester Road. Pieces of curtain rise in the air, hover momentarily and then begin falling like lazy autumn leaves.
Then the solid wooden window-frames move forward, but the solidity is illusory for they are instantly transformed into a myriad splinters, joining the triumphant arc of glass.
An engulfing ball of fire shoots forwards, rises, and dissolves, leaving in its wake an acrid pall of black smoke.
Another rumbling now. A rising rumbling that transmutes into the splitting crack of an explosion.
The outside wall of Tim’s room bows out, the stucco bursts and is propelled forward.
The balcony is now disengaged from the wall.
The brickwork is becoming unbonded as the force of the explosion rips through the mortar.
The balcony tilts forward and splits vertically in half before beginning its tumbling descent.
The roof lifts slowly, hesitantly, and seems to hover. The slates rise in unison and are then shot upwards.
A blanket of dust and debris covers Porchester Road.
Masonry now smashes through the plate glass of Enzio’s Rendez-Vous, propelling Dave Finney with it.
The story might now be continued through a montage of newspaper headlines:
BAYSWATER BLAST
MANY INJURED
* * *
MYSTERY EXPLOSION IN LONDON
* * *
PADDINGTON [sic] ROCKED
BY EXPLOSION
* * *
EXPLOSION IN PORCHESTER ROAD
Local residents say ‘It was just like the Blitz all over again’
The explosion made the inside pages of several of the national daily newspapers but thereafter it was left to the local West London papers and the Standard and News to pursue the story:
BAYSWATER EXPLOSION
One dead – twelve injured
* * *
PORCHESTER ROAD EXPLOSION
TWO DEAD – NINE INJURED
* * *
WEST LONDON BLAST
– THREE DEAD – MANY INJURED –
KENNETH THEODORE: I’d been with the old Paddington Weekly Advertiser for about six months when the story broke. My first newspaper job. Alfred Dare was the editor then. He’d been editing it for fifty years, perhaps more, an
d he called me in and put me on it because Cyril Reddington, the chief reporter, had had a heart attack.
I was round at Paddington Green when the copper on the case, Jim Munby, a chief inspector, announced the deaths … and here it is, as we reported it:
George Eric Purdom, aged 27, of 16 Albert Terrace, a café worker from Kent who had lived in Porchester Road for five years, Florence Edith Dodds, 84, a widow, also of 16 Albert Terrace, and David Terence Finney, aged 19, of Harrow Road.
There was a lot of pressure on Munby to find out what caused the explosion. He had his forensic lads going over the house day and night for a week and then they disappeared into the laboratory. While they were there the Telegraph ran a couple of paragraphs saying the police now believed it was a build-up of gas that had caused the explosion. Munby was furious. He was the investigating officer and he hadn’t made any announcements, one way or the other. I was quite pally with him by this time and he asked me to find out where the story came from (he knew I had a friend on the Telegraph). I got in touch with my friend there – we’d been to school together – and it turns out the story originated in an off-the-record Home Office briefing. Jim blanched when I told him. He was furious. Anyway he kept his own counsel and about two weeks later was taken off the case. He never quite got over it. You see, he was a copper of the old school. He regarded himself as a public servant and saw his job as discovering the truth and seeing that justice was done. Just a good copper, that’s all. Didn’t understand politics and couldn’t play the game like the smoothies at Scotland Yard.
Then the Gas Board who had been doing their own investigations stepped in and announced that there was no evidence to suggest it was a gas explosion. They effectively threw a gauntlet at Scotland Yard and said, put up or shut up.
So that put paid to the gas theory.
We were all waiting for the next development … and it wasn’t long in coming.
The reason Jim was taken off the case was that the forensic boffins had discovered, so Scotland Yard said, traces of gelignite in Albert Terrace. Special Branch stepped in and started their own investigations. I didn’t have any ‘in’ with those boys so I just turned up at press conferences like any other journalist.
The fact, of course, that it was Special Branch on the case now alerted us to some ‘political’ dimension to the story. Rumours went around, inspired no doubt by Special Branch, that some South African blacks had been staying in Albert Terrace and were storing explosives there which they were going to use to blow up the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square.
Don’t forget, it was only a few months earlier in 1964, in April, that Nelson Mandela had been convicted of sabotage in Pretoria. Blacks and bombs were hot news.
This theory had a fair bit of plausibility going for it until I blew it out of the water. I was always proud of that. I was just turned twenty! What I found out was that the landlords in Albert Terrace – the landlords and two landladies – effectively ran a colour bar. There were plenty of blacks all over Bayswater and Paddington but none had ever kipped down in the Terrace. We made that the front-page lead story. This little old local paper shouted ‘Not true!’
So, it was back to the drawing board for Special Branch! Christmas came and went and other stories elbowed out the blast in Bayswater. I got a job on the old Evening News and moved to Fleet Street. Then it was Churchill’s funeral and that was the end of it. Nobody followed the story up. It died a death.
About ten years later I was reading Commander Melvin’s memoirs. He’d been one of the top brass in the Metropolitan Police in the sixties. He mentioned the explosion and said that the gelignite had been stored in Albert Terrace by some extremist supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the ‘Ban-the-Bombers’, who had planned to blow up a number of top secret government fallout shelters. I believed him up to this point but when he went on to say that the police knew who was responsible but did not have sufficient evidence to bring a successful prosecution I thought to myself, pull the other one, squire! If you believe that, you’d believe anything! Not enough evidence! Not enough bloody evidence! They’d just sit back in the face of explosives and do nothing! Can you believe that? And written by one of the Yard’s top bananas! Huh!
It’s a mystery all right … a real mystery. And Melvin saying that was just part of the cover-up. We never got to the bottom of it. Just another Bayswater mystery.
BERNARD PROTHEROE: My boss, Jim [Munby] was very bitter about being taken off the case. His attitude to the force changed after that. He just wanted to serve his time and leave … and he did. He took early retirement and moved out to the coast, to Frinton, with Edna his wife. I often used to visit them there. We used to sit out on the veranda drinking and talking about old times.
The odd thing was that after Special Branch took over the case from us they never ever contacted us to ask us anything. It was like we were a bunch of swedes who didn’t know hay from bullshit. We sent the files over as a matter of routine but that was it.
I made routine inquiries into George Eric Purdom. Established who he was and what he did and so on. Just the basic stuff. At that stage we had no reason to go any further. He wasn’t a known associate of criminals, didn’t have a police record or anything like that. Didn’t appear to be the sort of person who stored explosives under his bed. I spoke to a couple of people in the house who told me odds and sods. I think I even went to see some girlfriend of his out down in Kent somewhere. She was a hairdresser. Recently got married. Didn’t want to say much.
And then we had the rug pulled from under us.
Now, it’s funny that you should mention the tramp. Jim was convinced that there was some connection between him and the explosion. Just a hunch, that’s all. But how do you investigate something like that? You don’t, by and large. You rely on a tip-off. You rely on some informant coming forward … but no one ever did. The café owner, the chap who had the newspaper shop, and a couple of others supplied good descriptions. We knew exactly what his movements were. But where do you go with it? Where does it lead you? It intrigued us. It intrigued Jim. And it led nowhere. I don’t think it even made the papers. I floated it informally with one of the journalists from, I think, the Kensington Post and he laughed.
We’re talking history now, aren’t we? It’s nearly thirty years ago, a third of a century ago.
NICK ESDAILLE: There was a big explosion all right, but who was blown up? Who was in the room when the gelignite (or whatever it was) went up, eh? The pathologist at the inquest said he couldn’t positively identify the human remains as Timmy’s or anyone else’s for that matter, and I think it was the coroner who took evidence and said it must be him, Timmy. Couldn’t be anyone else. But that was based entirely on circumstantial evidence.
The whisper that went round Soho was that it wasn’t Timmy who went up but Charlie. Charlie was always staying over in Porchester Road in Tim’s room and it could equally well have been him. Now if it was Charlie I can just see Tim being smart enough to figure out that it was him, Timmy, who was supposed to have gone up in pieces … and then, accordingly, making himself scarce. Perhaps Tim disappeared to South America, to India, to Australia? Perhaps he’s living in Aberdeen? Who knows? Perhaps he’s still here in London? You tell me.
Nobody’s ever seen Timmy since then, but then again nobody’s seen Charlie since then either. He disappeared at exactly the same time. You tell me what’s going on. Who’s dead and who’s disappeared? If Timmy were alive now how old would he be? Mid-fifties? Getting on for sixty or thereabouts? I wonder if I’d recognise him?
What about the photographs?
The photographs? The stills from the films? The girls? And were they indeed from the Labour Party?
These questions are academic. It doesn’t matter whether the girls were or were not connected with the Labour Party. The intention is what matters. They were to be presented as being connected with the Labour Party. That was the important thing. Whoever was behind this had a clear intenti
on – fuck over the Labour Party at all costs. These are the people who make Peter Wright look like a bleating liberal.
Wright admitted that he and these other MI5 officers tried to fuck over Harold Wilson and destabilise the Labour Party. He admitted it. It’s a fact.
If you are going to do something about this don’t go around blaming MI5 or the other intelligence-security agencies … you know, like they blame the CIA for everything in the States. That’s a trap that’s set for you, one you’re supposed to fall into. By concentrating on MI5 or the CIA you’re taking the searchlight off the real culprits.
These agencies are dogs that do their masters’ bidding.
Why weren’t the photographs used?
That’s a rather naive question! Just because they weren’t splashed all over the front page of the News of the World don’t assume they weren’t used. Do we know what went on behind all of the locked doors of the Establishment in the 1960s? Are we privy to every dirty trick of the last thirty years? Do we know about every bit of midnight leverage and dead-of-night blackmail that’s come to pass since then? Of course they were used, but how and when and where we can only guess. The big thing about the recent past in Britain, the post-war period, is that our history is shifting all the while. We’ve got an unpredictable past. New stuff is emerging all the time and changing our understanding and perception. The more that comes out the less we seem to know.
Coming back to what you were saying a moment ago … who are they? The real culprits?
London Blues Page 28