Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century

by Peter Graham

  Nancy would later remember her friend as “a very pretty woman … physically attractive, gay and vivacious, caring, considerate and egotistical”. But, she added, “I thought her somewhat irresponsible for a woman of her position in the university.”

  The remark referred to Hilda’s sexual escapades. By the time she arrived in New Zealand, Hilda was unenamoured with the bloodless Henry and openly seeking sexual satisfaction, or at least pleasure, wherever she could find it. A younger woman who knew her at the time said she attracted men like bees to a honeypot. A distinguished New Zealand diplomat and writer who met her when he was a young man vividly remembered her siren-like presence. She was “a very sexy woman. I have never seen a woman so … steaming”.

  A psychiatrist, James Walshe, has given an amusing account of his first meeting with Henry and Hilda Hulme at a conversazione held by the headmaster of Christ’s College, a prestigious boys’ school in the city. Ngaio Marsh was the guest of honour. The celebrated writer of popular crime novels, Christchurch born and bred, was equally well known in her hometown as the producer of Shakespearean plays for Canterbury University College’s drama society. Walshe, a young master teaching English and history at the school, had been invited to the select gathering as one of Marsh’s former prodigies: he had played Claudius in her acclaimed wartime production of Hamlet.

  Walshe recalled that Marsh swept into the room with her usual panache, in the role of the Cantabrian grande dame. The Hulmes arrived later. There had obviously been an argument in the car and Henry Hulme, “a tall, thin and distinguished figure in … a well-cut suit”, said scarcely a word all evening. Hilda, on the other hand, “a comely woman used to getting her own way, forceful, fun-loving, style-conscious … [flashed] smiles at those who carried clout, cutting dead anyone who didn’t matter, ignoring academics’ wives”.

  Walshe was fascinated by Hilda’s body language, “sinuous, pelvic, live and unplugged. I couldn’t help thinking of a black panther in its cage, prowling, prowling, until the business of introductions was over and she could be prevailed upon to sit: there was no divan on which to stretch out en Odalisque”.

  Hilda was determined not to be upstaged by Ngaio Marsh. At some point Noël Coward’s name was mentioned. “I have met him. I do know him,” Marsh said in answer to an inquiry from Hilda.

  “Ah yes, he’s a dear isn’t he?” Hilda said knowledgeably.

  “No,” Marsh said firmly, “he’s a bit of a shit actually.”

  This exchange was greatly enjoyed by all present. It was game, set and match to Marsh, who rolled her eyes heavenward as the Hulmes made an early departure.

  After further acquaintance with the Hulmes, Walshe observed that “how Dr and Mrs Hulme had ever managed a cessation of hostilities long enough to get married was always an intriguing puzzle to the social worker in all of us”. He was not the only one to appreciate the rich irony of Hilda becoming a “founding sister” of the Christchurch Marriage Guidance Council.

  From time to time Hilda made vague attempts to be a good rector’s wife, but her ill-concealed contempt for her husband made this impos­sible. There was a faction of staff wives who admired her, but at least an equal number, mostly the more senior wives, could not abide her. Some of the younger women found her kind and helpful. Renee Stockwell’s husband was a post-graduate student. The couple lived near the Hulmes, and although Renee was a little in awe of what she saw as Hilda’s “controlled and austere character”, she appreciated her invitation to use the Hulmes’ telephone whenever she liked, and was grateful for Hilda’s attentiveness when her son contracted pneumonia.

  Helen Garrett, married to the professor of English, John Garrett, was very much in the other camp. To her, Hilda was “hard as nails” and less than truthful. She was even at fault for having brought a wringer-mop from England, complaining loudly that such a simple thing was unprocurable in “this God-forsaken country”.

  Juliet seems to have made no friends at St Margaret’s. One of her class­mates who was invited to play at her house was refused permission by her mother because of “goings-on” in the Hulme household. Rumours were obviously rife. Juliet sometimes played with the Sutherland twins, Diony and Jan, who were a year older. Jan Sutherland remembered her as tall and very lovely-looking, but strange in some undefinable way, “rather a lonely child”. Juliet’s mother seemed “not very warm—not to children”, and her father “aloof”, wanting nothing to do with children.

  There is no doubt that the young, lovely-looking English school­-girl was a strange child. She was happiest in a world of her own imagination—a world where she was at all times the centre of attention, a dream land of lords and ladies, castles and caparisoned chargers, milk-white palfreys and damsels in distress. Nancy Sutherland noticed that Juliet was always a princess or some other form of superior being. Her little brother Jonty was sometimes forced to wait on her as a pageboy or groom but she resented him and played with him only when prevailed upon, never by her own choice.

  Hilda had hoped that in New Zealand her daughter might stay put in one school, make real friends, forget the past, and forsake her fantasy world, but the loneliness and isolation of her early years had made too deep an impression. The Hulmes were not a happy family.

  CHAPTER 8

  A New Residence

  Although by October 1948 Canterbury University College was at bursting point, acceptable accommodation had been found for the new rector in the clock tower building. The study, with its magnificent baronial fireplace and richly glazed oriel window, was the former meeting room of the professorial board but, splendid though it was, it was a little distant from the centre of power—the registrar’s office. The initiative to recruit a full-time rector had come from the board, which hoped to reestablish academic control over the affairs of the college. However, Sir Joseph Ward, the chairman, and Charles Clifford Kemp, the registrar, were used to running the show. They were not at all keen on being meddled with by some new appointee.

  Hulme tried valiantly to immerse himself in the life of the college. He mixed freely with students and staff and frequently dropped into the senior common room. But even those well-used to the eccen­tricities of academics found him a very odd fellow. For one thing, there was his way of lounging with his feet on the desk, or legs slung over the arm of his chair, when receiving visitors. He had his feet on the desk when Archie Stockwell, a lecturer in English, first met him. Stockwell was even more appalled when Hulme suddenly thrust a chocolate bar in his face. Perhaps informality carried to such extremes was a habit Hulme had acquired during his time in America, or perhaps he just hoped to appear approachable, unstuffy and forward-thinking. For many, it seemed not the way to behave and was intensely annoying. His support in January 1949 for a proposal that a new school of forestry should be located in Auckland rather than Christchurch added fuel to the fire: it was seen as a rank betrayal of his own college.

  In November 1949 Kemp resigned, and at a council meeting the relationship between the rector and the registrar was redefined. The rector was confirmed as chief executive officer of the college, while the registrar would act as secretary to the council and professorial board and, “under the general direction of the rector”, supervise and be responsible for the office staff and its work, the caretakers, cleaners and ground staff and their work, and the upkeep of buildings and grounds. The registrar’s wings had been clipped. It seemed to be a victory for Hulme, but there was a condition: as CEO the rector had to have the confidence of both council and professorial board. It was a stipulation that would return to haunt him.

  Hulme’s dealings with the new registrar, James Logie, were much easier than they had been with Charles Clifford Kemp, but by the council meeting the seeds of animosity planted in January had already started to sprout. A question was tabled: Was there any truth in the rumour that the rector, when visiting Wellington, had made statements concerning the council or individual members that were in any way disloyal to the council?

  It bec
ame clear that Henry Hulme had little aptitude for personnel management and was tactless, intellectually arrogant, and remarkably slow to learn that New Zealand was a small pond in which gossip travelled at the speed of a sonar pulse. At a meeting of the senate of the University of New Zealand, he may have spoken—as he often did—of certain members of the college council as “city buggers” or “Hereford Street mafia”, with a disdain those included found intoler­able when they heard about it. There was talk that he had been a complete dud in operational research at the Admiralty in London and been kicked upstairs to the Air Ministry, although there was no truth in this.

  Hulme’s relations with the professorial board were hardly anybetter. His idea of paying enhanced salaries to professors and senior lecturers who were singled out as particularly able or worthy, approved by the government in October 1949, proved contentious. Those who did not receive the bounty were outraged. Even those who gainedan additional two or three hundred pounds a year were unhappy with the rector for creating a most unpleasant hoo-ha.

  Meanwhile, Hilda Hulme had found her new avocation. A member of the college council most definitely not a “city bugger”was Alwyn Warren, the dean of Christchurch. New Zealand-born, Warren had been educated in England, at Marlborough College and Magdalen College, Oxford. A physically commanding presence, he had won a Miltary Cross in the Italian campaign while serving as chaplain to the New Zealand Divisional Cavalry. In February 1948 Warren and his wife Doreen had helped found the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Marriage Guidance Council. An off­-shoot of an altruistic movement started in Britain, the council was supported by the government and the principal churches: among its local leading lights were the magistrate Rex Abernethy, Maurice Bevan-Brown, a psychiatrist, and Francis Bennett, a well-known doctor. Its aim was to curtail marital breakdown and divorce.

  Hilda must have impressed this muscular Christian as the right type to become a marriage counsellor. Like the other volunteersshe was sent to training courses in Wellington, conducted by the Depart­ment of Justice, on topics such as “Sexuality”. The statedgoal of the Marriage Guidance Council was “to encourage and assist individuals in their striving to relate happily and fully to one another, particularly within the social institution of marriage”. Counsellors would “facilitate the endeavours of couples to understand, respectand love one another”. It was an odd mission for a woman who seemed to lack empathy, and who placed little stock on marital fidelity. Despite her obvious lack of suitability, Hilda rose to become vice-chair of the Christchurch branch.

  Towards the end of 1949, the Hulmes’ short-term lease on their house in Cashmere expired and the family moved to Rapaki Road

  in the Port Hills. It was a less convenient location: in Hackthorne Road Juliet had been able to get herself home from school and the tram had stopped virtually at their gate. But this was only a small incon­venience. In the New Year Hilda planned to send her twelve-year-old daughter to Queenswood, a private girls’ boarding school in the North Island.

  Travelling to Queenswood was no small endeavour. Juliet would have to take an overnight ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington and then travel for a good six hours by train. It was unlikely she would have any other Christchurch girls as travelling companions. Most of the girls at Queenswood were the daughters of prosperous Hawke’s Bay sheep farmers. Few parents in Canterbury would contemplate sending young children so far to preparatory school.

  In 1949 Erica Hoby, Queenswood’s longtime proprietor and head­mistress, had retired and sold the school to the Anthroposophical Society, whose members wanted to establish a school run along the lines advocated by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The prime movers and financial backers, Edna Burbury and Ruth Nelson, had visited Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which operated according to Steiner’s ideas, and been inspired by what they had seen.

  Steiner believed there was a spiritual world that was compre­hensible to pure thought, but accessible only to the highest faculties of mental knowledge. These faculties of knowledge, he believed, were latent in all humans. Enhanced consciousness, enhanced spiritual perception—dreamlike, independent of the senses—could be taught. Access to the spiritual world could be gained by those trained in the “knowledge produced by the higher self in man”. To all but a few this seemed at best eccentricity and at worst outright lunacy, but fortunately for Queenswood the wool-rich farmers continued to send their daughters there.

  Perhaps Hilda was interested in anthroposophism and Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on education. She was the type of person attracted to modish ideas that would set her apart from the common herd. Perhaps she believed the Rudolf Steiner method might be of benefit to her troublesome daughter. Many years later she made only a cryptic and brief mention of this sorry new turn in her daughter’s life: “She attended a private school, Queenswood School in Hastings. … She was happy at first but became very unhappy later at this school and we brought her home.”

  A few days before Christmas 1950, while Christchurch was celebrat­ing the centenary of the arrival of the first four ships of the Canterbury Association in 1850, the Hulmes had a party at Ilam. It was both a house-warming and a belated birthday for Juliet, who was back from Queenswood for the long summer holidays. Henry and Hilda had rounded up the children of friends and university staff as playmates for the occasion.

  The birthday girl was, as usual, self-contained and self-absorbed, wanting little to do with other children. Hilda, though, was in spanking form. She stood on the upstairs verandah throwing down sweets and small gifts to the children gathered on the lawn below. The adults, drinks in hand, looked up at her, laughing appreciatively. She was in her element—the focus of attention, the gracious hostess admired by all. How well the big house and its delightful grounds became her. In later years, she may have looked back on this moment as her finest. She seemed to be juggling sure-handedly the components of her life: mother, rector’s wife, enchanting hostess, and sexually alluring woman.

  The Hulmes had only recently moved to Ilam. The house and its surrounding fifty-three acres had been bought by the government from the estate of Edgar Stead, a passionate plantsman and ornitholo­gist, and vested in Canterbury University College as part of the site for the university’s future relocation. At the same time as it acquired the Ilam block, the university purchased land on the other side of Ilam Road and with it another fine old house, Oakover. In February 1951, the government also expropriated Avondale, a large, elegant relic of the 1880s, and its surrounding lands under the Public Works Act, making one hundred and twenty-six acres in all available to the university.

  Once the big house at Ilam had been earmarked as the rector’s residence, Dr Hulme was urged to occupy it as soon as possible. It would be a symbolic hoisting of the flag, a demonstration that the move to Ilam was really going to happen. Henry and Hilda needed little persuasion. The place would not be ideal for Juliet’s health—the house was on the flat and with the upper waters of the Avon flowing through the grounds it would be damp and foggy in winter—but with Juliet away at school in Hawke’s Bay, Ilam, surrounded by fields and pad­docks, would be a wonderful place for Jonty to live. Hilda was delighted. It was a very suitable place for her to entertain and hold court.

  *

  The Hulmes’ new residence came with a colourful history. The original home on the site had been built in the early days by John Charles Watts Russell, late of the 17th Lancers, and his Irish wife Elizabeth, and been a centre of the social life of Canterbury’s self-styled aristocracy. Later it had been bought by Leonard Harper, an Eton-educated barrister and solicitor, member of the House of Representatives and notable explorer—the first white man to journey from the east coast of the South Island across the Southern Alps. There had been an almighty scandal when, in July 1891, Harper had absconded, leaving £200,000 of his clients’ funds unaccounted for. After being briefly occupied by Patrick Campbell, the son of a colonel in the Madras Army of the East India Company, the property had been sold to a mysterious
woman who went by the title Countess de Fresnado. In August 1910 it had burned to the ground.

  The house occupied by the Hulmes was designed by J.S. Guthrie, the leading Christchurch architect of the day, and completed in 1914. Large, handsome and slate-roofed, it was one of the showplaces of Christchurch. The lower storey was red brick and the upper stucco. A porte-cochère, the dominant feature of the front of the house, was supported by four elegant columns. The hall and other ground-floor reception rooms were panelled with burnished native timbers.

  The house’s previous owner, Edgar Stead, had established an out­stand­ing woodland garden. On a trip to Britain in 1925, he had collected and shipped out hundreds of rhododendrons from English and Scottish gardens, including the latest hybrids, his main sources being Lionel de Rothschild’s garden Exbury in Hampshire, and the Earl of Stair’s collection at Castle Kennedy in Wigtonshire, Scotland. He had experimented with hybridisation himself and produced Ilam Cornubia, Ilam Alarm, Ilam Canary, Ilam Violet, and others. His favourite hybrid, IMS, was named for his wife, Irene Mary Stead. Through what became a firm friendship with Lord Rothschild, Stead had been appointed a judge of the rhododendron exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show and acquired an international reputation as a grower.

  During the thirty-five years Stead had lived at Ilam, the gardens had always been opened to the public in late spring, with an admission charge donated to the Christchurch Horticultural Society. From time to time there were also garden parties to raise funds for the Red Cross; these were attended by anybody who was anybody in Canterbury, and sometimes honoured with the presence of the governor general. In a modest way Canterbury University College maintained the tradition, employing a full-time gardener and opening the gardens to the public each spring. Because there was a shortage of space in the college library, Henry Hulme also encouraged students to use the garden as a place to study for end-of-year exams; he would wander around offering them glasses of lemonade.