by Robert Green
Less than two months later, Margaret Thatcher swept into power as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. I was working in the Ministry of Defence just across the street as a newly promoted Commander. Thatcher coined the phrase ‘one of us’ to describe those she favoured and trusted. As resentment and resistance grew to her ‘conviction politics’, anyone who disagreed with her and stood up to her learned that she regarded them as ‘the enemy within’. She and some close Cabinet colleagues would narrowly escape death in October 1984 when the Irish Republican Army blew up their Brighton hotel during the Conservative Party annual conference. It was an era when legitimate opposition was considered at best subversive and, at worst, treasonable.
In my position as Personal Staff Officer to the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy), I was a fly on the wall as my Admiral facilitated the internal debate on replacing Britain’s four Polaris nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines with a scaled-down version of the massively expensive, over-capable US successor system, Trident. By then, Hilda had convinced me that radioactive waste was the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry, and Three Mile Island had endorsed her view that nuclear power was unacceptably hazardous. However, the new Prime Minister, an enthusiast for all things nuclear, was determined to introduce an ambitious programme of new nuclear power plants. Worse than this, she forced the British nuclear industry to accept a US pressurised water reactor design similar to the one at Three Mile Island.
Hilda was horrified. The apathetic response to her nuclear waste concerns from most of her CPRE colleagues drove her to challenge the false economics and unaccountability of the nuclear industry. Drawing upon her business and financial skills, she set about writing a paper, What Price Nuclear Power?. With my naval staff training, I was able to help her with the structure.
She was still revising the draft in 1981 when the Government’s Department of the Environment published a White Paper explaining its plans for managing radioactive waste. This was needed to deflect opposition to Thatcher’s programme for ten pressurised water reactors, of which the prototype would be Sizewell B on the Suffolk coast. Hilda was so incensed by the White Paper’s complacency and faulty science that she decided to write a critique.
Around that time, the Thatcher Government, desperate to find savings, announced a major defence review. With cuts to the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates projected, I took the plunge and applied for redundancy.
Notification that my application had been successful came one week into the Falklands War. In April 1982, Britain suddenly went to war with an erstwhile friend, Argentina, over its disputed claim to the Falkland Islands. Argentinian forces invaded and quickly overpowered its token Royal Marine garrison contingent. The Royal Navy’s role proved to be pivotal. By then I was working in the command bunker at Northwood in northwest London as Staff Officer (Intelligence) to the Commander-in-Chief Fleet, in charge of a 40-strong team providing round-the-clock intelligence support to the Fleet. The war was directed from Northwood by my boss, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse. At one point the outcome was in the balance: our ships were being sunk, and some friends and colleagues killed. When I expected to be planning my imminent retirement, I had never worked so hard in my life. After the Falklands capital Port Stanley had been retaken, I was allowed to go on terminal leave in September.
I was 38 years old, with no qualifications except my rank and experience. Tired of weekend commuting to high-pressure naval appointments in London, I decided to try my luck and find local work, which would allow me to be home every night with my wife Liz in a newly converted barn in a Dorset village. We had no children, so I could afford to indulge myself. I trained as a roof thatcher, enduring many painful jokes with stunned former colleagues. Hilda was delighted with my new career. For eight idyllic years, I loved working with my hands in the open air on what was essentially restoration of often fine old houses, with a bird’s eye view of some of the most picturesque parts of southwest England.
As part of her research for her new paper, in October 1982 Hilda visited Don Arnott, a brilliant retired radio-chemist living about half an hour’s drive into Wales from Ravenscroft:
A lovely Regency country house, rather run-down. Two upper teenage girls were outside, they took me in and yelled for ‘Pa’. It was rough and dingy. Pa emerged in due course, doubled-up (polio I learnt afterwards) with a terrific hand grip. We had coffee. He had a streaming cold. We went at it hammer and tongs for 1¾ hours. Of course I learnt any amount of useful things. His knowledge is enormous… We didn’t cover anything like all the points I had listed… Sizewell will take all his time.
A consortium of trade unions covering firefighters and health workers chose Arnott as an expert witness at the Sizewell B Inquiry; the Three Mile Island accident had forced the Thatcher Government to hold the first public inquiry into a new nuclear power plant. However, shortly after his last meeting with Hilda and before he was due to testify in April 1983, he suffered a mysterious heart attack and dropped out of the Inquiry. He and Hilda met once more, when he gave a talk in Shrewsbury on 8 February 1984. By then, she was heading for Sizewell.
Hilda had sent her draft paper to national CPRE Director Robin Grove-White. Realising this was the only critique he had seen of the Government’s waste-management policy, he told her it was so good she should register as one of very few individual objectors at the Inquiry. Her application to testify received final approval on 9 February 1984.
Margaret Thatcher, her political career salvaged by the military, began her second term as Prime Minister in May 1983. She was now determined to tame her domestic ‘enemies within’: the trade unions led by the coalminers, and anti-nuclear campaigners and their left-wing political supporters.
Tensions mounted between the military, police and women peace campaigners at Greenham Common airbase in Berkshire. The first women had started camping outside the base some three years earlier after the plan was announced to deploy 96 US nuclear-tipped Cruise missiles there. Supposedly secret exercises were disrupted when the mobile launch vehicles emerged from the base at night. In December 1982 over 30,000 women ‘embraced the base’, generating worldwide publicity. A year later 40,000 came. Non-violent direct action proved increasingly effective. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) thrived on this, with huge demonstrations in London opposing both Trident – Thatcher’s replacement for Polaris – and Cruise.
Thrilled by the achievements of the Greenham women, Hilda sent them donations, and attended a packed meeting in Shrewsbury when Lynne Jones, a hospital doctor, spoke on 11 January 1983. Hilda recorded in her diary:
[She] was very good indeed. Very clear and precise about the effects of the bomb. Greenham woman. Dedicated.
In April, 70,000 protesters formed a human chain between the nuclear weapon factories at Burghfield and Aldermaston in Berkshire. Later that year I was startled to find Hilda’s name in a full-page advertisement in The Times sponsoring the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign. As with Greenham, she did not talk to me about her opposition to nuclear weapons. She was careful to confine our discussions to nuclear energy, because she knew I had recently led the team providing top-secret intelligence support to the Polaris nuclear submarine deployed on patrol.
Ten years earlier, I had been a 25-year-old Lieutenant serving in the British aircraft carrier HMS Eagle as back-seat aircrew in its Buccaneer nuclear strike jet squadron. ‘Observer’ is the Fleet Air Arm’s traditional term for bombardier-navigator, whose role is to navigate the aircraft and help the pilot operate its weapons system. As well as practising to attack Soviet warships with conventional weapons, my pilot and I were a ‘nuclear crew’. Our task was to be ready to deliver a WE177 ten-kiloton tactical free-fall nuclear bomb to detonate above a military airfield on the outskirts of Leningrad – which is now St Petersburg’s airport.
Thirty years later, in 1999, I landed there to speak at a conference reviewing nuclear policy and security on the eve of the 21st century. In a television inter
view, I apologised to the citizens of St Petersburg for having been part of a nuclear mission that would have caused appallingly indiscriminate casualties and long-term poisonous effects from radioactive fallout, and virtually destroyed their beautiful ancient capital as collateral damage. By then I had accepted Hilda’s view that nuclear weapons would not save me, or the Russians.
Back in 1972, following a decision by the British Government that it could no longer afford strike carriers, I switched to anti-submarine helicopters. The following year, I was appointed Senior Observer of a squadron of Sea King helicopters aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. Our task was to use radar, variable-depth sonar and other electronic sensors, plus a variety of weapons, to detect and destroy enemy submarines threatening our ships. Among our armoury was a nuclear depth-bomb, an anti-submarine variant of the WE177 design. This was because our lightweight anti-submarine homing torpedoes could not go fast or deep enough to catch the latest Soviet nuclear-powered submarines. My opposition to nuclear weapons was first stirred by the disturbing discovery that, if I ever had to drop one, it would have been a suicide mission: unlike strike jets, a helicopter was too slow to escape the explosion.
It was not until after Hilda’s death that I discovered she was a member of the Shropshire Peace Alliance, which campaigned against all things nuclear. She also joined European Nuclear Disarmament (END), which differed from the much larger and more radical CND in giving equal blame to NATO and the Soviet Union for ‘fomenting the most dangerous decade in human history’. Its manifesto called not just for a nuclear-free Europe, but for dismantling the two blocs through ‘détente from below’.
Nevertheless, Hilda was an active CND supporter. At the age of 76, she described in her diary on 1 May 1982 joining a local demonstration picketing councillors outside the Shire Hall:
Several nice small children with non-nuclear circles attached to their fronts. At long last the councillors began to trickle down for lunch. Meanwhile we had been roped off and photographed by the press. Gradually the demo found its voice, and with every 1-2 councillors who appeared, set up the chant: ‘Make Shropshire Nuclear Free’ with a heavy rhythmic beat which was effective. Some councillors had CND badges which drew loud cheers. Others grinned sheepishly. One said ‘we should be over-run by the Russians’ which drew a huge NO!
Eighteen months later she was among over 250,000 marchers in London. The Secretary of State for Defence, Michael Heseltine, responded by setting up a propaganda unit in the Ministry of Defence called DS19, to counter the arguments of the nuclear disarmers. The unit had direct links with MI5, which was let off the leash. According to whistleblowing agent Cathy Massiter, its F Branch, dealing with ‘domestic subversion’, was massively expanded to extend surveillance to anti-nuclear protesters. Phone-tapping and close collaboration with Special Branch police became widespread, with no accountability.
In this febrile atmosphere, opposition to Government policy had become subversion. Any fearless, eloquent, independent critic was now seen as a threat to the State. This included a 78-year-old former rose-growing environmentalist who loved her country so much she was not prepared to let it be irrevocably ruined and poisoned by the nuclear industry – and whose nephew knew too much about the Falklands War, had left the Royal Navy and dropped out of the ‘Establishment’ to become a roof thatcher.
CHAPTER 2
THE FIRST WEEK
‘They’ve rubbed her out.’ Above all else, I remember my involuntary conviction when the Shrewsbury police phoned at about 2pm on Saturday 24 March 1984.
At about 7am, an hour or so after sunrise that day, Police Constable Edmond Lane parks his patrol car outside the entrance to Ravenscroft, a large slate-roofed Victorian house at 52 Sutton Road, Shrewsbury. He knows this is the home of a Miss Hilda Murrell whose car was found abandoned, stuck on a muddy verge, in a local country lane three days ago.
He walks slowly into the wide, grey shingle driveway towards the side of the house facing the road. Seeing a door slightly open, he knocks and calls out twice. He goes round to the front porch, and rings a doorbell: again no response. He does not go inside the house, leaves the side door as he found it, and resumes his mobile patrol.
An hour later, PC Lane is back at Ravenscroft: the door is still open. Once again he knocks and calls out, without response. This time he enters through the kitchen where the curtains are closed and a light is on. He climbs the stairs to the landing, and sees a broken baluster. He finds another narrow flight of steps to the attic, and starts a systematic search of each room, finding no one.
Back in the kitchen, Lane notes the scrubbed table strewn with documents and two handbags. Oddly, wet white bedsheets lie in a heap on the scullery floor.
By now it is 8.30am. As he leaves, he sees a key on the inside of the door. He locks it and takes the key to Frances Murrell, the widow of a cousin of Hilda, across the road.
PC Lane then visits the town’s general and psychiatric hospitals to check if they have admitted Hilda Murrell. He radios the police communications room to suggest a dog handler be used to start a search of the area of her abandoned car.
At about 9am, neighbour Brian George arrives to tend his vegetable plot in Hilda’s large garden. He notices the curtains and shutters are partly closed in the downstairs rooms.
David Williams arrives to start his weekly job of helping to keep the garden tidy. Seeing the up-and-over garage door half-open with no white Renault 5 inside, he calls to George. They try the side door, locked only 30 minutes earlier by PC Lane. Nearby they find the conservatory door unlocked; surprisingly, so too is an inner door. Tentatively, they enter the house.
In the kitchen, Williams sees the two handbags and documents on the table. George first notices the wet sheets in the scullery, then Hilda’s upper denture plate on the wooden draining board of the sink. He knows she would never go out without wearing it.
With mounting concern, George calls out to Hilda as they climb the stairs. The broken baluster is in three pieces: one is on the landing carpet, the other two on an ottoman in the bathroom. They knock and enter Hilda’s curtain-dimmed bedroom. The bedclothes are pulled right back, and drawers are open in a dressing table. Curtains are closed across the window facing the drive. Unusually, the window overlooking the back garden is wide open, its curtains only partly drawn back. They check the other two bedrooms: curtains are closed, which is also unusual. A picture with its glass broken lies in the doorway of the smaller back bedroom. On checking downstairs, Hilda is not in the sitting room, dining room, toilet or cellar. In the front porch, they note a pile of Guardian newspapers and mail on the tiled floor. The chain and bolts are in place across the locked double doors.
Back in the kitchen, George decides to phone Betty Latter, Hilda’s cleaning lady. The telephone is on a small chest of drawers beside a wooden box seat built below a narrow window facing Sutton Road. Concerned that the receiver is partly off its cradle, he picks it up: there is no dialling tone. His eyes follow the thick grey plastic-covered cord from the phone to the junction box: the box cap is loose and unscrewed. Lifting it, he sees that three of the four wires inside are partially disconnected and the spade terminals are intact – so the cord has not been wrenched out.
Meanwhile, two hundred miles south in Dorset, Liz and I stayed in bed until around 9 o’clock before enjoying a leisurely breakfast.
At 9.20am Police Constable Robert Eades, a rural beat officer, is returning to Hunkington Lane, about three miles east of Shrewsbury as the crow flies. He is re-investigating a small white Renault 5 hatchback, seemingly abandoned and stuck on the soft grass verge, hard against a low hedge on a bank. He first inspected it before sunset on Wednesday 21 March with PC Paul Davies, when they established it has not been reported stolen, and is owned by a 78-year-old unmarried woman called Hilda Murrell living at 52 Sutton Road.
Eades enlists the help of the local gamekeeper, whose cottage is about a mile away. He is out, but his wife offers to help search with two gundogs
. They start in hazel thickets flanking Hunkington Lane, about half a mile from Hilda’s car.
Back in Shrewsbury, Brian George walks home to phone Betty Latter. She last saw Hilda when she cleaned Ravenscroft the previous Monday, and agrees to meet him there.
George phones Fron Goch, Hilda’s weekend retreat. The phone is out of order. He dials 999.
George, his wife Betty, Williams and Mrs Latter then search Ravenscroft together. It takes half an hour before a woman police constable arrives. She makes a call on her radio. PC Lane joins his colleague and neighbours in the drive after making no progress at the hospitals. They all re-enter the house where PC Lane is shown the disconnected telephone, and is told that Hilda would never leave her home untidy or unlocked.
When Detective Superintendent Needham arrives a few minutes later, he asks to use the Georges’ phone to contact his superior officer and meet him out at Hunkington.
Across the road, Frances Murrell watches with growing disquiet. She phones Carolyn Hartley-Davies, a daughter of Hilda’s cousin Leslie Murrell and a frequent visitor to Ravenscroft, who lives ten miles away. Carolyn phones her father.
Liz and I went on our weekend shopping trip to Yeovil. None of Hilda’s neighbours would have known how to contact me. I barely knew Carolyn, her father or Frances Murrell.
Shortly before 10am, PC Eades gives up searching the thickets. He remembers Hilda’s interest in birdwatching. The gamekeeper’s wife recalls seeing a pair of barn owls hunting along a hedge next to Moat Copse – a plantation of mature poplar trees over 500 yards across a waterlogged field of heavy red Shropshire clay sown with winter wheat. The quickest and easiest way to the copse is around the back via lanes and a cart track through Somerwood Farm.