by Robert Green
Morgan-Grenville, aware I had worked for Naval Intelligence during the war, offered the as yet unpublished book to me and asked, ‘Would you like to borrow this, and let me know what you think of it?’ Curiosity overriding my judgement, I accepted his dangerous invitation.
I was still bound by the Official Secrets Act. The smallest secret detail about my work during the conflict could have been used to discredit me or even prosecute me. When I called on Morgan-Grenville again a week later, I unwisely gave him some written comments. Fortunately, they went little further than suggesting ‘such things happen in war’. However, I had dropped my guard. This episode gave me an important wake-up call about my political naivety and vulnerability.
Morgan-Grenville died in 2009, aged 77. His most enduring legacy is the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth in mid-Wales, which I enjoyed visiting with Hilda soon after it opened in the 1970s. He also ran the British branch of the European ecological action group Ecoropa. In 1983 they coordinated the distribution of seven million anti-nuclear energy leaflets. Hilda hand-delivered hundreds. Dangerously for me, she then distributed another Ecoropa leaflet that accused Thatcher of fomenting the Falklands War, ordering the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano to scupper a peace plan, and alleging anti-submarine nuclear depth bombs had been deployed. After Hilda joined Ecoropa and started making donations in March 1982, Morgan-Grenville thanked her, and let her know she had supplied roses to his mother who held Murrell’s Nurseries in great esteem. This gave Hilda the confidence to contact him directly.
Morgan-Grenville was the first of several influential anti-nuclear lobbyists to encourage and help her with her critique of the Government’s White Paper on radioactive waste management policy. After he read her only copy of an early draft, which she unwisely posted to him because of photocopying difficulties, she wrote in her diary on 23 June 1983:
Letter from G M-G – deeply impressed by my paper, it is a ‘tour de force’. If I will send him 2 or 3 copies, he will send it to members of the government.
Morgan-Grenville also told her he would arrange for the paper to be vetted by Dr Ross Hesketh, a nuclear scientist working as Research Head Solid State Physics in the research laboratories of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). He was risking his job by helping Ecoropa and CND with their submissions to the Sizewell Inquiry.
A week later Hilda was alarmed to receive another letter from Morgan-Grenville asking her to ‘send back the document so that we can send it to Dr Hesketh’. He had wrongly assumed his secretary had returned it – because it had disappeared from his office.
Hilda decided she had no choice. She started retyping her paper, and sent it to him a few days later, keeping a carbon copy. Then she recorded in her diary that she went to Fron Goch:
Found door on to balcony wide open. There was a very small warbler fluttering in the window. At 5 pm tel rang: GM-G’s secretary has found my paper. ‘It must have blown off the desk’!! (13 very long pages stapled together??). Told her an up to date top copy was on the way, not to worry, it was better.
Six weeks earlier she had had a similar scare:
Was going to send my paper [to Morgan-Grenville] but can’t find it! Searched high and low. The large envelope that Harry [Bury] gave me when he returned the copy has both copies, the TCPA paper and Cmnd 8607, none of them to be seen. The box of carbon paper has also vanished from the typewriter…
She would have been shocked when she found them two days later, completely out of place in a dining room cupboard. Hilda was not absent-minded or disorganised, especially over something so important. Did she suspect an intruder had been in her home, removed her papers to photocopy them and check the used carbon sheets for other typing, and deliberately put them back in an unexpected place to intimidate her?
Further disturbing news followed from Morgan-Grenville. As Hesketh’s Times obituary in 2004 explained, ‘Hesketh suspected that plutonium from British civil nuclear-power reactors (Magnox reactors) was being supplied to the USA for use in nuclear weapons… Hesketh began publicising his suspicions, starting with a letter to The Times on 30 October 1981. This publicity greatly embarrassed the British Government. In 1983 Hesketh was sent on leave for a few months and then fired by the CEGB, a publicly owned body. But he continued to expose the diversion of plutonium produced in British civil reactors to military use and its export for the same purpose.’
Morgan-Grenville wrote to Hilda:
Dr Hesketh confirmed my worst fears about the goings-on inside the CEGB and likened it to the Orwellian stoats and rabbits. He, personally, has been threatened in many subtle ways and has been the subject of many pressures to prevent him blowing the whistle. He has also had a written confession put in front of him to sign. Really the only difference between the treatment of dissidents in this country and, for instance, in Czechoslovakia is quantitative and not qualitative. But, I fear that the people of this country will awake to the reality too late. For every Hesketh, there are 1,000 non-Heskeths who just fall in line and soon learn the arts of professional apathy.
Soon after that, Hesketh wrote to Hilda commenting on her paper:
Yours is a powerful indictment of the state of affairs we are now in… but when you speak of ‘somebody at the top who could put a stop to it’ you reveal the great difficulty: no one wishes to put a stop to it, at the top. There’s the rub!
The episodes with the missing papers provide circumstantial evidence that, nine months before she was murdered, both Hilda and Morgan-Grenville were under surveillance and harassment as she gained support for her critique from anti-nuclear organisations and prominent scientists. Her correspondence with Hesketh would have especially alarmed the nuclear industry security and State security authorities. Also, back in March 1983 she had written to Dr Patricia Lindop after reading a controversial article by her on the catastrophic consequences, including genetic health effects, for Europe if the high-level radioactive waste tanks at Sellafield were attacked in a nuclear war. Early in 1984, Morgan-Grenville alerted Hilda to the work of Dr Rosalie Bertell, an American nun and expert on radiation-caused illnesses and genetic deformities, who later testified for Ecoropa at the Sizewell Inquiry. Hilda sent donations towards her travel cost to give evidence at Sizewell, and to help publish her book No Immediate Danger, which became a bestseller when it appeared in 1985.
In addition, on 30 July 1983 Hilda wrote in her diary (my explanatory additions in brackets) that Morgan-Grenville was proposing she should send copies of her paper to some major figures:
I should come out in the open and write covering letters saying who I am and about the nursery etc. They really don’t like it when the respectable oppose them and they tend to answer, whereas they just ignore the wildcats. He suggested John Baker CEGB, Sir Peter Hirsch AEA [UK Atomic Energy Authority], Sir Kelvin Spencer [former Chief Scientist to the Ministry of Fuel and Power in the 1950s] and the Minister of Energy. I asked him please to deal with Sir Dennis [Denys] Wilkinson [Chair of the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee] … I shall write to Sir Kelvin Spencer first…
Throughout this period, Hilda and I were conferring closely. When I visited her in October 1982 to tell her I had taken up roof thatching, she briefed me about Don Arnott, the retired nuclear scientist who was advising her. On 12 October 1982 her diary records:
I read the thatching book and R read the Arnott papers. Then I read my paper. R urged the inclusion of several bits from Gowing [who wrote a definitive history of the early years of the British nuclear industry] and Arnott. To bed eventually, unwashed, after a very good day of talk such as I could hardly have with anyone else.
On 2 July 1983, Hilda wrote that when I phoned her, she told me ‘about the paper, GM-G and Hesketh’.
Six weeks later, she had just decided, following encouragement from CPRE Director Robin Grove-White, to submit her paper to the Sizewell Inquiry. Her diary records us discussing an incident that would have rung more alarm bells for anyone inte
rcepting the call:
Tel R. There is a Winfrith worker living 100 yards away – he had a talk with him in the pub one night and mentioned that I was working on the subject but not that I had written anything. R would like to show it to him. R’s idea I think was that he might produce points. I said not till I have thought about it. I want it to spring on them from nowhere without any prewarning. Danger of photocopying. Promised to let him know developments.
At a subsequent pub meeting with the worker from the secretive reactor research centre near the Dorset village of Winfrith, the man understandably got cold feet and nothing more came of my proposal. Only eight months earlier I had left the Navy and dropped out of the ‘Establishment’ as a thatcher. Now, convinced and empowered by Hilda’s research, I had tried to incite a nuclear industry worker to whistleblow. Also, Hilda, Morgan-Grenville and I were often naively indiscreet on the telephone. Only on reading Hilda’s diary did the chilling realisation dawn on me that around this time she was leafleting her neighbourhood with Morgan-Grenville’s allegations about possible nuclear weapon deployment during the Falklands War. I must have already been under surveillance, suspected of being his possible source.
After meeting Morgan-Grenville again, I decided to make a pilgrimage to where Hilda’s body was found. I parked on the concrete pad used as the police field HQ, and gazed across winter wheat to Moat Copse. The leafless branches of its ranks of mature poplar trees that witnessed Hilda’s tortured death were now softened by sprouting catkins. Farmer John Marsh knew it as Funeral Field because so many horses had died trying to plough the waterlogged red Shropshire clay. Since then, it has been converted into a water storage lake.
As I absorbed the scene, incredulity seeped in about the police theory. From where the car had crashed to the copse was over 400 yards in a straight line, let alone following the hedge. The muddy field was wide open to view from surprisingly frequent traffic, and was overlooked by Marsh’s farmhouse and workers in adjoining fields.
Unable to have a funeral, the family held Hilda’s thanksgiving service on 18 April, almost a month after her murder. Hundreds of mourners packed into the maze of curving pews inside the unique Georgian circular nave of St Chad’s Church in the mediaeval heart of Shrewsbury. Instead of Hilda’s coffin, we placed a small wreath of roses in front of the altar.
The principal eulogy was delivered by the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Leslie Lloyd Rees. His participation reflected her distinguished place in the wider community rather than her support for the Church of England. Hilda was deeply spiritual, but without the need of organised religion.
The Bishop captured the mood well: ‘We all feel caught up in it, and diminished by it; and yet in a strange way we are brought close to one another in our revulsion and sorrow. In the darkness of the circumstance, however, there is something which penetrates and transforms it – and that is the thanksgiving which we are offering together for Hilda herself.’
He concluded: ‘Yes, a remarkable person; a pilgrim on the way, a constant seeker after truth, responding to the hints of ultimate reality as she perceived them; a person of the spirit, and as her obituary notice said, a fierce but fundamentally gentle warrior. It seems to me highly significant that, although Hilda would not have claimed to be an orthodox Christian, we are thanking God for her in a Christian church and within the most holy week of the Christian year, a week dominated for us by a Cross on a green hill outside a city wall…’
Emotionally drained, we left St Chad’s Church to discover, via the Shropshire Star, that two young men had been prosecuted for stealing the vehicle licence tax disc from Hilda’s car on the afternoon it crashed. Charles Bevan, aged 21, and 18-year-old Christopher Watton admitted stealing the disc, worth £42, at about 4.30pm on 21 March – nearly two hours before the police first inspected the car. When the youths heard about the murder they panicked and burned the disc.
We were astonished that the police had not told us about the theft or the court case, especially as one of Cole’s deputies attended the thanksgiving service. He could also have warned us about the shocking revelations they were about to make the next day, after we returned home. As the victim’s next of kin, living hundreds of miles away, I expected to be kept informed of all significant developments. This never happened. It meant I had to rely on reports from Joan Tate, who became the hub of a growing network of local contacts. Why were the police excluding Hilda’s family?
At a press briefing on 19 April, Cole announced that Hilda had been sexually assaulted. Apparently the ‘sex attack’ had happened at her home before she was abducted. He described it vaguely and disquietingly as ‘sexual activity’, not rape. Family and friends were left to fret about the exact extent of this added violation of Hilda.
Why had this particular moment been chosen to release the sexual angle? Cole must have known about it within days of Acland’s autopsy. Was it because they wanted to put the murder back on the front pages, which it did, and deflect attention away from mounting murmurs that the real motive was political?
The question of when the police discovered the sexual angle would receive a disturbing twist nine months later. In January 1985, journalist and author Judith Cook and Member of Parliament Tam Dalyell revealed they had met a professional counsellor from Shrewsbury who was occasionally called on to assist investigations into sex crimes. He was troubled because, he claimed, two Shrewsbury police officers had visited his home at 6.30pm on the Friday night before Hilda’s body was discovered. (This was soon after Marsh reported police ‘on a murder hunt’ on his farm, and just before PC Davies visited Ravenscroft.)
The officers asked if he could think of anyone who might have a sexual hang-up about elderly ladies. Did he know a man who would be turned on by going into a woman’s bedroom and interfering with her clothing? Someone who might be violent? When Hilda’s murder was reported, he was shocked to discover some of the details matched the scenario outlined by the two detectives. Before anyone officially knew there had been a murder, were the police already aware of it, including the sexual component?
In addition to the sex attack sensation, on 19 April the Shropshire Star reported that DCS Cole was appealing for information about two cars ‘which may be connected’ with the case. A red Ford Escort had been spotted in Sutton Road at about 10.30 on the morning of the abduction. Cole did not add that a similar car was seen several times around Hunkington while Hilda was missing.
At about 2.30pm on Thursday 22 March, tractor driver Bryan Salter is spreading fertiliser on the field next to Hilda’s car. He thinks nothing of a red Escort driving by – until he sees it again, and then a third time in a period of an hour and a half. It is always travelling in the same direction, as if the driver is patrolling the area.
The Escort was not the only suspicious car Salter saw in Hunkington Lane that day.
At about 3.45pm, shortly after Ian Scott has checked the Moat Copse poplars for felling, Salter again watches curiously as a large, dark saloon car drives slowly along the lane. It stops and reverses onto the verge opposite a double gateway into a field next to Funeral Field. A man in a suit gets out, crosses the lane, and walks through the gateway. He follows the far side of the hedge between the two fields, where the police later find the large kitchen knife, Totes rain hat, broken spectacles and house boots. The mystery man returns along the hedge to the car about 20 minutes later and drives off.
After Hilda’s body was found on the Saturday, farmer John Marsh made a point of watching out for vehicles. On the Sunday afternoon, he noticed a two-door red Escort saloon drive past his farm. Half an hour later the same car passed again travelling in the same direction – so it would have driven past the police post on the concrete pad twice.
Later I learned that, after the young men had stolen the tax disc from Hilda’s car on the Wednesday, they had to brake sharply when a red Ford Escort Mk II with a CB aerial on its boot suddenly pulled out in front of them. It had been parked in a gateway some three hundred yards further along Hunk
ington Lane. Driven by a man in his late twenties, it sped away ahead of them before they lost sight of it. The next afternoon a yellow van was seen parked in the vicinity – about two hours after Salter had watched the mysterious man in a suit walk to the copse and back. The van, with two men in it, was close to the spot where Hilda’s driving licence and AA membership card were subsequently found. Police enquiries about these suspicious vehicles came to nothing. Also, they made no attempt to update me about all these developments.
Through her anti-nuclear work, Hilda had become close to Harry Bury, a retired doctor, and his wife Gladys, a former social worker. They shared a passion for the countryside and revulsion of all things nuclear. Hilda lent them her latest research papers, and discussed her Sizewell draft with Harry. One month before her murder she told them she thought both her phones were tapped. Harry was not surprised as he was sure their phone was also being monitored.
Six weeks after the murder, Harry went out campaigning for local council elections, and shut but did not lock the front door. Gladys was resting when she was disturbed by noises downstairs. On investigating, she was confronted by a man and a woman, both smartly dressed, standing in her hallway.
When Gladys challenged them with her usual feistiness, they claimed to be plain clothes police officers wanting to talk to her about Hilda. Ignoring her demands for identification, they hurriedly left. Gladys immediately phoned Shrewsbury police station to ask if anyone had been sent to question her: they had not. She was confident she had rumbled two security agents who, assuming the house was unoccupied, wanted to search for papers which Hilda might have left for safekeeping – because they had not been found in Ravenscroft?