Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  Captain Binney was trapped by the undercarriage and was borne away, shouting wildly for help. The crowds on the pavement shouted too, with horror and fury. Women screamed. But the car didn’t stop. Along Lombard Street it was chased by another car, but to no avail. Over London Bridge sped the car, up the Borough, swerving perilously into Tooley Street, with Captain Binney shouting, “Help! Help!” and appalled onlookers able to do nothing. As the car swerved around the corner into St. Thomas’s Street Captain Binney was flung forth from under the car and rolled against the curb. The car disappeared around another corner.

  The sickened people on the pavement ran to Captain Binney and he was carried across the street into Guy’s Hospital. But he had been terribly injured, and in spite of the speedy medical aid he received he died within a few hours.

  In all, he had been dragged along the roads for a mile and sixty-six yards.

  The city police were in charge of this case and immediately began searching for the car. It was soon found, abandoned in an unfrequented alley near the Elephant and Castle. It was a stolen car and provided some useful clues. The people in Birchin Street who had witnessed the smash-and-grab were able to furnish full descriptions of the two young men, especially the one who had actually smashed the shop window. The police began combing the Elephant and Castle area, and it was not long before the two young men had been identified and arrested.

  They were a twenty-four-year-old welder, of Rotherhithe, named Thomas Jenkins, and one Ronald Hedley, a laborer, aged twenty-six, of no fixed abode. Hedley was the driver of the car, Jenkins had been the man of action; the ax-wielding smasher-and-grabber. Both of them were well-known “Elephant Boys.”

  These Elephant Boys were a group of young toughs from the Elephant and Castle area who posed in the role of juvenile gangsters and who had already caused a good deal of trouble in the Elephant area—hence the name “Elephant Boys.” The attention of the police had become drawn to them some time before the Binney murder. Several of the Elephant Boys were already gracing reform institutions; others of their company—the senior members, as it were—had graduated from thence back to Elephant Land, there to become the lords and leaders of all the aspiring hoodlums in the locality.

  Now juvenile street gangs had once flourished all over working-class London, particularly in such salubrious neighborhoods as Hoxton, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, and the like. They had given the police and social reformers of the Victorian era many headaches. But as the worst slums of London were cleaned up and working-class conditions improved, the street gangs disappeared, or at the least became harmless play gangs rather than dangerous groups of young street marauders and budding criminals. The 1939 War, however, revived the street gangs. The London children, at the start of the war, were evacuated en masse to the country, but many of them returned to London as the months passed, especially those who came from the less responsible, slap-happy, neglectful homes. Parents with little sense of duty allowed their children to come back to bomb-rocked London: “Our Albert’s come ’ome. Couldn’t stand it in the country. Rather have him ’ere with us and take the risk.” I’ve heard several mothers saying it to me. What a London for the children to come “home” to! Often “home” had been blasted sky-high and the family lived in shelters, or Rest Centers. Anyway, whether home was standing or not, nights were invariably spent down the shelters, or on the platforms of the Underground, in a hugger-mugger of humanity. The schools were closed, so during the day the children ran wild in the streets. Lacking any authoritative supervision and coming from the “homes” they came from it should not surprise anybody that they were soon developing into young gangsters; for although school education had ceased, the cinema was still open to them and they learned a good deal there. Nobody bothered about these children, nobody checked them. Young Londoners are by nature daring and full of enterprise and individuality; characteristics that can be developed for good or bad. These children lived in a world shattered by bombs and rockets, the very background of their lives was violence, the newspapers were full of “heroic” war stories, tales of daring and desperation. Their only culture, if culture it could be called, derived from comics and films. The children got the rest of their specialist education from the streets themselves: firsthand education from the wide boys, the spivs, the boys on the Black, the young crooks who had been to the reformatories and who returned covered with glory to impart their cynical philosophy and squalid experiences to admiring and eager juniors.

  Street gangs were soon flourishing everywhere. Toughest among them were the Elephant Boys and their rivals, the Brick Boys of Brixton. Jenkins and Hedley were two of the seniors the Elephant Boys particularly cared to emulate.

  But Jenkins and Hedley themselves cannot be explained as products of the war years. Jenkins was nineteen when the war broke out, Hedley twenty-one. No doubt the war encouraged their tendencies toward lawlessness and provided them with unusually favorable opportunities to become callous young criminals, but it cannot be said in extenuation of these two that they did not go to school because all the London schools were closed, or that their home life had been disrupted by the bombing. They both went to school, they both had “homes” of a sort. The truth is they were the products of the thirties. The decade of unemployment, chips on shoulders, and sloppy thinking. Religious conviction waned, the old values declined. Emphasis was on rationalism and intelligence. But most people are neither rational nor very intelligent. Hence all the muddle.

  I think it was Bernard Shaw who once remarked that it requires far more self-discipline to be a free-loving atheist than a God-​fearing conservative. Jenkins and Hedley were two of the very many who simply weren’t up to being self-disciplined atheists, and nobody had taught them to be God-fearing conservatives, because that would have been old-fashioned. So they followed their own inclinations and took to being good plain cavemen, in an up-to-date Chicago style. Thus they combined the old and the new.

  Dr. Simpson and I had our first glance of the captain’s killers in the dock of Mansion House Court, presided over by the Lord Mayor of London, an awe-inspiring “beak” if ever there was one, but who apparently made little impression on the two young thugs, who stared brashly around them and leered from time to time with an apparent sense of something they considered humor.

  So there they stood, side by side in the dock, rather undersized, with the pale, thin faces of young Londoners. Their hair was a trifle too long and their ties a trifle too gaudy. Their eyes were cynical, hard, and cold, and the expression in them both shrewd and stupid, the eyes of those who have learned to observe much but who comprehend singularly little of what they observe. Their minds moved within tight little boundaries, shut in by four ready-made fences labeled respectively, “I’m a Have-Not”; “Nobody’s Going to Exploit Me”; “Don’t Try to Pull That on Me”; and “Never Heard of It.”

  The Jenkinses and Hedleys of this world won’t accept anything they’ve never heard of, and as they’ve heard of little outside their slum alley and small-time criminals’ sphere they are necessarily very limited people. Their chief response to anything and everything is “Couldn’t Care Less.”

  Basically, the two young men in the dock had had their sensibilities stultified and shriveled by the great, great big chip each of them carried, one almost might say flaunted, on his shoulder.

  The corners of their mouths drooped in sullen lines of perpetual discontent and boredom. (For another basic factor in the lives of these wretched juveniles is that despite their constant attempts to seek out excitement they are always, always bored.) They smoldered with resentment and stared at us all as if we had committed an unspeakable crime against them, for which they could never forgive us. (Which no doubt they both firmly believed.) Although they were both very young they gave a spine-chilling impression that they were already habitually criminal and that all the help in the world would be too late. It certainly was likely, I thought, that they’d never had a decent chance from the start, but one reali
zed equally well that any helping hand held out to them would be promptly bitten. They were quite the most petrifyingly depressing couple I had ever set eyes on.

  In their Birchin Street bid to get rich quick they had stolen jewelry valued at £3,795, but nobody was really very worried about this. (Excepting, very probably, the jeweler from whom the things had been stolen!) They were charged with the murder of Captain Binney and the callous details of this murder, or more, properly, killing, were red-hot in everybody’s mind.

  One of the counsel representing them was a gentleman of whom it might be said that “he was a real character from Dickens.” (One of the unattractive ones.) The fact is of course that Dickens took his characters from life—except his heroines—and this counsel was an obvious descendant of a Dickens prototype, one of those legal portraits the author so loved to draw. He bore a peculiar and even alarming resemblance to a carrion crow, standing with his big, voracious head sunk between his humped shoulders and his beaky nose thrust forward. When he spoke he rasped and croaked. He was determined to get us all ruffled and uneasy, like scared little birds in a hedge. As soon as CKS got into the witness box to give evidence, for example, the carrion crow tried to ruffle him by attempting to get me turned out of court.

  The carrion crow did this by complaining that I was taking up too much room in the bench reserved for lawyers and professional witnesses. He said that because I was taking up too much room his clerk was obliged to squeeze in a seat in a back bench where he couldn’t hear properly. The carrion crow wanted to know who I was and what business I had in the court.

  CKS replied I was his secretary and I always accompanied him into court in order to take shorthand notes of his evidence.

  The carrion crow responded I was still taking up too much room and he must insist I move to another seat.

  One of the representatives of the Director of Public Prosecutions rose in the bench behind me and said politely that there was plenty of room in his bench if I would care to move there.

  The carrion crow replied leeringly and sneeringly with nasty intimations that one could understand perfectly well the gentleman’s eagerness to have the young lady beside him, but she would still be taking up valuable room to which she was not entitled.

  The young lady went puce in the face with rage and embarrassment, and so did the gallant from the DPP’s office. Dr. Simpson had also assumed a very angry tint. However, dignity and restraint triumphed. After being moved for a few moments from seat to seat, each move being objected to by the carrion crow, I came to rest in a seat from which all his croaking and cawing could not dislodge me. His wretched clerk moved downstage to the place where I had originally been sitting and huddled there clutching a tatty little notebook and a stump pencil. The Lord Mayor surveyed the scene for a moment and then, bowing his head politely toward me, said, “And now, I trust, the young lady is comfortably installed?”

  The young lady, by this time the shade of a peony, murmured rather inaudibly that she was comfortably installed, thank you.

  This little pantomime gave great satisfaction to Jenkins and Hedley, indeed I think they thought such clever maneuvering would ensure an ultimate verdict of not guilty. The carrion crow looked pleased, too. But everybody else, apart from the carrion crow’s clerk, who looked scared, appeared furious and fed up; and this was unfortunate, for Jenkins and Hedley had infuriated everyone sufficiently already, without the assistance of the carrion crow.

  His objection to me, however, was but the first of a long series of objections, which he carried over from Mansion House to the Old Bailey, where he objected to evidence, statements, jurymen, witnesses, merely for the sake of objecting and causing trouble. Perhaps there was nothing else for him to do. The position of the defense in this case was very weak. The evidence against Jenkins and Hedley was of a nature that condemned them from the start.

  However, only one of them had been at the actual wheel of the car, knocking the captain down, running forward over him, then reversing over him and finally driving for over a mile with him caught underneath the vehicle. Jenkins, seated next to the driver, never at any time appeared to have protested violently against Hedley’s decision to make a getaway at all costs, but his plea that he had not been driving and was not therefore directly responsible for Captain Binney’s death could scarcely be refuted. The result of the trial was that Hedley was sentenced to death and was hanged, while Jenkins received eight years’ penal servitude.

  But this story, alas, doesn’t stop here. It had a sequel, every jot as brutal as the killing of Captain Binney.

  Early one afternoon in April 1947 three young men, their faces masked with scarves, drove into Charlotte Street, off the Tottenham Court Road, and staged a holdup in a jeweler’s shop. But the holdup, owing to the inexperience and impetuosity of the youngest member of the trio, was bungled. A member of the shop staff pressed a warning buzzer, a revolver was fired in panic by one of the bandits, and the next moment all three desperadoes were racing from the shop to their car. But at that very moment a large truck parked itself in front of their car. The three, panic-stricken now, began running wildly up the street, and it was then that a passing motorcyclist made an attempt to stop them. There was the report of a revolver again and the motorcyclist fell, dying, to the pavement. The three young men fled on. One of them jumped on to the running board of a passing taxi, but was turned off again as the driver already had a fare. This youth and another then ran into a nearby block of offices. The third disappeared down a side street.

  There was so much confusion in Charlotte Street that none of the spectators of the crime noticed the two youths vanish into the offices, and as the taxi driver hadn’t witnessed the shooting he didn’t realize he had just had a murderer ask him for a lift. He placidly continued on his way with his fare.

  Therefore the three young bandits and killers made a getaway.

  Within an hour or two the newspapers were splashed with huge headlines describing the murder of the motorcyclist, Alec de Antiquis. The story of his killing shocked the nation and threw London’s usually hard-boiled underworld into a state of agitation, too, for gunmen are not approved of by the British underworld, any more than they are approved of by Whitehall or by suburbia; although the underworld disapproves for different reasons. A gunman not only brings down dire trouble on to his own head, but he stirs up the police and public to a degree that gets everybody uncomfortable all the way around. There is a public clamoring for the police to be armed, judges call for stiffer sentences, people declare that flogging should be brought back; in short, everyone toughens up. Besides, there are definite professional standards among crooks. Skilled criminals take a dim view of gangster rough stuff. Any clod can run around shouting, “Stick ’em up.” Professional criminals have scornful things to say about hoodlums. Gunmen are beyond the pale, and the Antiquis shooting was therefore considered an outrage in all strata of society.

  The detective put in charge of this case by Scotland Yard was the debonair but dangerous Robert Fabian, by this time a chief inspector of reputed flair.

  The Antiquis case followed only shortly upon a similarly outrageous shooting in Winchmore Hill, when a young gunman named Thomas fired at and killed a detective-constable. Thomas, found guilty of murder, had not been hanged, as capital punishment had been experimentally suspended. Public opinion, divided on the great problem of the death sentence, now hardened. Hanging was reintroduced and the nation awaited not only the arrest of the Antiquis killers but also their execution.

  But the killers weren’t all that easy to catch.

  Although several people had seen Antiquis shot, descriptions of the youths concerned were unreliable and vague. All three of them had been effectively masked, all three of them had been moving quickly, and the raid on the jeweler’s, the shooting, the shouting, the general confusion and horror, had made it difficult for spectators to register any clear impressions of the bandits. Clues consisted of a discarded and unfired revolver, without fingerprints, ho
wever, and the bandits’ car, which was a stolen one as is usual in such cases, but which afforded little information. A .45 bullet was found embedded in the woodwork of the jeweler’s shop, and Sir Bernard Spilsbury removed a .320 bullet from Antiquis’s body at the postmortem. Chief Inspector Fabian had but little to go on, therefore, when he started his investigations.

  A check was begun on all young men recently released from reformatories. Detectives began combing London’s underworld. Mr. Fabian rounded up and interviewed everybody who had been near or in Charlotte Street at the time of the crime, among these the taxi driver. As a result of his interview with this driver, Mr. Fabian and his men were soon exploring the offices into which the taxi driver had seen the two young men run.

  An office boy had also seen two men, in a hurry, going up in the office lift about the time of the shooting, and had later noticed one of them lounging against a windowsill in an empty room while the other leaned idly against a banister. The lad was able to describe both of them fully to Mr. Fabian.

  A truck driver had also noticed them go into the building, although he had not realized that they were involved in the shooting. Presently he had also seen them coming out of the offices. He remarked that one of them had been wearing a raincoat when he hurried into the building but was without it when he came out.

  A raincoat. Just a dirty, shabby, cheap raincoat.

  Mr. Fabian began combing the office premises for this raincoat. At length it was found in a lumber room, tucked underneath a counter. It was a stained, crumpled garment; in its pockets were a cap, a pair of gloves, and a piece of white cloth such as the bandits were said to have masked their faces with.

  The police routine procedure of taking a garment to pieces was followed, and stitched under the lining of the armpit Chief Inspector Fabian found a manufacturer’s stock ticket. This was painstakingly traced and led to a factory in Leeds, and from thence the trail led to South East London. In a shop in Bermondsey the raincoat was traced to a purchaser, a youth who was already known by Mr. Fabian to be a relative of a certain Charles Henry Jenkins.