Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper

by Gordon Burn

  On his regular visits to the holiday caravan, Arthur, John Sutcliffes father, was seldom alone: Jack Hawkes, a man who worked with John in Bingley and was himself a frequent visitor to Arnside, had spotted him in the company of various ladyfriends and, back home, the word had slowly got around about Arthur Sutcliffes passion wagon. But eyebrows were also starting to be raised at the behaviour of his oldest son, who was seen to be a regular caller at the home of a single professional woman in Cottingley, and seemed increasingly to believe he was the small-town version of his famous namesake, Herbert Sutcliffe, the great Yorkshire and England opening batsman who had a reputation for dousing his flannels in eau de cologne before going out to play.

  Not content with having his name in the paper every other week in connection with the Musical Union or the operatics or the cricket, he was forever getting up at Cottingley Working Mens Club to perform one of the turns hed perfected in the Forces. He also contrived to have the most colourful front garden in Manor Road.

  Getting up one morning to find what he considered a superb display of tulips different colours in all four corners and a big centre-piece made up of diagonal black and white blooms half-flattened and half-stolen, helped nudge John Sutcliffe towards the decision to try and leave Cottingley and return to his side of the valley.

  5

  The teachers at St Joseph’s R.C. Infants and Juniors were the envy of their colleagues at other schools in Bingley: whenever they encountered them at the swimming baths or anywhere else in public, the Catholic children, it was noted, were always ‘immaculately behaved’, and Peter Sutcliffe was no exception.

  As a ten-year-old he looked very like the boy in the peaked cap featured in Bradford and Bingley Building Society newspaper advertisements under the headline ‘His future is in your hands’; but, apart from a quiet smile and a constant ‘yonderly’ look, there was nothing about him that made him stand out.

  Academically, too, he was undistinguished, routinely bringing home respectable but far from glowing reports. His father, though, who only ever seemed to see him with his nose stuck in a paper or a book, thought that he must do well at the 11-Plus and, when he didn’t, took it as a more or less personal affront. The day after the results came out, he went storming up to the school.

  How was it, he wanted to know of his son’s teacher, that he hadn’t passed to go to St Bede’s? Surely if anybody at the Sacred Heart was brainy enough to get through to the grammar school it was Peter? He was above average in everything except physical activities. He was always down at the children’s library with his sisters. He was extremely bright.

  The answer, when it finally came, frankly astounded him. ‘Oh,’ he was told, ‘you don’t want him to go to St Bede’s, Mr Sutcliffe. You’ve got four other children. You want him out at work when he’s fifteen.’ Try as he could to disabuse her of this notion, it was her final word.

  Cottingley Manor, the Roman Catholic Secondary Modern school, was a grimy, porticoed mansion surrounded by acres of playing fields at the town end of Manor Road. Which meant that, when he started there in September 1957, Peter Sutcliffe had less far to travel than many of the other pupils, who came down from the outlying villages and from as far away as Shipley and Saltaire. The inevitable territorial rivalries that resulted had always formed the basis of school gangs, and new boys always had to be careful not to find themselves caught between sides.

  Although two years his junior, Anne Sutcliffe had quickly overtaken her brother in stature and established herself as his ‘protector’ while he was at the Sacred Heart. This had put paid to most of the taunts about his timidity and his skinny legs but, from the age of ten, he had been pestering his mother for a pair of long trousers to hide them in and his pleas took on a special urgency with his imminent transfer to the ‘rougher’ Secondary Modern school.

  Long trousers, though, as his father kept telling him, didn’t grow on trees. If they bought him long trousers they’d have to cut at least four inches off the bottoms. He’d just have to put up with it until his legs grew long enough and then they’d buy him some grey flannels. And that was an end to it. He was to stop worrying his mother silly.

  ‘Blue jeans’ were one American import that hadn’t infiltrated as far as the West Riding in 1957. But Rock Around the Clock reached the Myrtle Cinema, Bingley, in August that year and the Bingley Guardian was moved to run an editorial the following week decrying the new breed of ‘delinquents’ the film had left in its wake: a gang of them ‘dressed in the silly “Teddy” clothing’ had disrupted a dance organised by Bingley Round Table at the Princess Hall, overturning and ripping up seats; ‘decent people’, it concluded, ‘must be protected from these morons who believe in nothing but their own right to do as they please in their own small-brained way.’

  They were sentiments which, within a very few weeks, Peter Sutcliffe would have cause to wholeheartedly endorse. As he’d suspected, he had remained friendless at Cottingley Manor Secondary Modern, and his isolation, together with his ‘weedy’ appearance and his obvious fear, had made him an irresistible target for the aspiring ‘hard cases’ and embryo ‘Teds’. At the beginning he’d tried to handle it in his usual way, by disappearing into the walls. But that hadn’t worked and he’d been forced to take more drastic action: he stopped going to school altogether.

  At the top of the Sutcliffes’ house at 79 Manor Road was a small loft or ‘underdrawing’ that was easily accessible from the landing at the head of the stairs, and Peter adopted this as his own private ‘burrow’. By standing on the bannister-top it was a simple matter to push open the wooden trap-door and hoist yourself in. And, without anybody ever suspecting anything, he did this every day for a fortnight.

  Every morning he’d shout ‘good-bye’ and bang the back door the way he always did when he went to school. But instead of disappearing down the hill, he’d wait until the coast was clear and then secrete himself in the underdrawing where he’d wait patiently all day until it was time to reverse the pretence.

  Lying alone in the dark he’d listen to the weather or the birds, or to the sounds of the house – his mother moving around cleaning, his father, home from the night-shift, snoring in the bedroom below. Mostly though, as he’d tell his parents later, he just slept, something for which he had an apparently boundless appetite.

  Whatever day of the week it was, whatever the time of year, Peter was always the last one down. ‘That little bugger’s got to learn to get his backside off the bed in the morning,’ John would endlessly complain to Kathleen, but he never did. ‘Bad timekeeping’ would lose him job after job when he was older, and his sleeping wasn’t confined to the beginning of the day: workmates would arrive, as arranged, to go out with him for the evening, only to find themselves exchanging small talk with his mother for an hour while Peter slept soundly upstairs. Sometimes he’d ‘pass out’ for five or ten minutes more or less in mid-conversation and prove, as his father was again always complaining, the devil to wake up.

  The first his parents knew of his absconding from Cottingley Manor was when a letter arrived from the headmaster asking why he hadn’t been at school for two weeks. Confronted with this, Peter’s immediate reaction, as when sensing any displeasure, was to dissolve into tears. But then he quickly owned up. The pressure the bigger lads were putting on him was too much, he said. They were at him and at him and wouldn’t leave him alone, but he knew it would get even worse if he complained. He’d taken it all until he couldn’t take it any longer and then had started hiding in the underdrawing instead. He hated that school, he said. He didn’t want to go there any more. But his father was quite firm: ‘It’s your school,’ he told him. ‘You’ve got to go.’

  A long meeting with Mr Battersby, the headmaster, got the whole thing satisfactorily sorted out – at least, as far as John Sutcliffe was concerned. Although he suspected that Peter might have been occasionally bullied in the three years that he had left at Cottingley Manor, he never truanted and he never came home complaining agai
n, which was the important thing: it marked the beginnings of ‘character’ that his wife’s ‘cossetting’ and overprotective attitude had always denied. Even so he couldn’t stop her regarding Peter as the little one who needed extra care and protection right into his early teens.

  Not long after this episode, Kathleen Sutcliffe, whose fifth child, Jane, was only two and a half, found herself pregnant once again. Another baby was another reason to add to the growing list for leaving Cottingley, and at the beginning of 1959 John Sutcliffe managed a quiet word with the churchwarden at St Wilfrid’s, Gilstead, who also happened to be Chairman of Bingley U.D.C. Sutcliffe was somebody who needed a bigger house because of a growing family; he supported his local church and wanted to be nearer to it, was the basis of their special pleading, and it paid off. In June, six months before Carl was born, they crossed the valley for the second and final time and moved into a four-bedroomed pebbledash at 57 Cornwall Road.

  *

  Like the rest of Ferncliffe Estate ranged above it, Cornwall Road had been built on the hillside which it was now helping to obliterate in the years immediately preceding the war. Made up of uniform rows of brick-and-stucco boxes, it fell away steeply at both ends so that, whatever way it was approached on foot, it was impossible to arrive without feeling out of breath. Turn left out of the Sutcliffes’ new home and you were soon surrounded by the woods and meadows bordering the canal. Turn right and you were descending into the smoke issuing from, and blurring the outlines of, the tall mill chimneys in the centre of the town.

  As an estate-dweller, John Sutcliffe found himself part of a small minority in the church choir, as in most of the other organisations to which he belonged. And, as if to prevent further incursions, St Wilfrid’s and the equally solid, equally coal-black Gilstead Wesleyan Chapel stood like twin guardians at the brow of the hill where Ferncliffe Estate ended and the old Gilstead village began. Posters hanging in Gilstead Post Office offered the visitor further clues as to what kind of community this was. ‘“Lovely Things” will be the subject of an address given to the members of the Gilstead Methodist Ladies’ Pleasant Hour by Mrs C. Walker of Keighley on Thursday,’ said the elegant cray-onned script; ‘Eldwick Ladies Choir will give a concert in aid of the British Heart Foundation at the Eldwick Memorial Hall on Friday, artists to include Doreen and Ronald Lee (vocal duo) and Gerald McCauley (tenor).’

  But back down on Cornwall Road and Queensway and the Oval the signs were just as easy to read: threadbare curtains and botched windows, rusting cars jacked up on bricks, ribby dogs scavenging in the gutters, and pasty-faced, mongrel children waiting for their parents to get home.

  Ferncliffe Estate was not entirely populated by the ‘rough’ working-class, however; there were many hard-working, ‘respectable’ families and John Sutcliffe instinctively placed himself at this end of the spectrum. ‘Our kids were different to the majority of them who lived round our way. They were always properly clothed and well-fed. Peter went to school in his grey blazer and grey flannels right up to the last day. They never had to have free school-dinners or anything,’ was to be his proud boast in later years. ‘They had love and care at home. They weren’t brought up rough-and-ready. They had so much protection.’

  The back garden at 57 Cornwall Road had been ruined by motorbikes belonging to the previous tenants. ‘I’d be better off digging for oil than trying to grow owt in that lot,’ was one of John Sutcliffe’s favourite jokes. So he concentrated on the front instead, growing vegetables in the borders, planting conifers in each corner, and making a putting-green on the lawn. On summer evenings he’d often be out there on his own with a putter, somewhat to the embarrassment of his older children, playing ‘clock-golf’. But then, two and a half years after returning to Gilstead, John Sutcliffe suffered a sudden fall from grace.

  Jack Hawkes, a neighbour of the Sutcliffes at number 71, had always been unimpressed by the debonair face that ‘his nibs’, as he always called him, showed to the world. The two of them had once worked nights together at a mill in the old part of Bingley, and Jack Hawkes wasn’t alone in noticing that, during fine weather, John Sutcliffe never brought anything to work to eat: he’d disappear down a fire escape in the early hours to help himself to tomatoes, lettuce and whatever else was growing in the allotments that ran between the railway line and the canal.

  So it came as less of a surprise to Jack Hawkes than to many when he woke up on Christmas Day 1961 to learn that John Sutcliffe had been arrested in the middle of the night and charged with burglary at a house further along the street.

  ‘39-year-old weaver, John William Sutcliffe, admitted stealing foodstuffs valued at 19s 7½d and was conditionally discharged for twelve months on payment of costs,’ the Bingley Guardian began its account of the magistrates’ hearing, two weeks later.

  He was on his way home from a Christmas Eve party which lasted until 4.30 a.m. on Christmas Day. Some young people in another room were having a party which was just about breaking up. On hearing a light switch in the kitchen they went to investigate, just in time to see Sutcliffe, whom they recognised, making a dash for the door. Some youths chased him down the road, caught him and sent for the police. As he ran, Sutcliffe left a trail of packets of raisins, sweets etc behind him, which he had stuffed into his pockets.

  He was genuinely sorry for the theft because the complainants were distant relatives of his and hitherto he had had a perfectly clean record.

  Christmas Day was John Sutcliffe’s one big day of the year, when he liked to ‘impose’ himself on the kitchen and, characteristically, although it was after 8.00 a.m. when he was finally let out of the police cells, he carried on as if nothing untoward had occurred. But that year a pall inevitably hung over the proceedings.

  When, on 27 December, Mr John Taylor, a retired school-caretaker living alone at 28 Cornwall Road, gassed himself and his pet cat, it set the seal on a memorably miserable Christmas.

  6

  Unlike his father, who was mostly either out or asleep but un-ignorable, Peter was nearly always in and yet nowhere to be found.

  He’d left school in the summer of 1961, aged fifteen, and gone straight into the engineering works of Fairbank and Brearley in Church Street, Bingley, as an apprentice fitter. But, even as a seventeen-year-old, he was conspicuously shy: to most of the people who knew him then and found him perfectly pleasant, he seemed to be looking at the world from a distance, as if it was just so many images, flickering on a screen.

  He tended to be so quiet at home that none of his family was ever sure whether he was in or out. He could enter a room or leave it without it registering with anybody that he’d been or was gone. It was possible to walk into a room in which Peter was sitting and not even notice that he was there. ‘I’ve walked into the house many a time and he’s been just sat quiet in the kitchen without me realising for ages,’ his sister, Maureen, says. ‘Not reading or anything; just sort of sat there staring at space. Pete were one of these who could sit for hours on his own without getting restless, like some blokes can’t; they’ve got to be either watching television or talking to somebody or going out for drinks with their mates. Pete were quite happy in his own company. He didn’t get bored.’

  The hours he spent shut away in the toilet – he’d sit there all afternoon if nobody disturbed him – became something of a family joke. And his monopoly of the bathroom was tolerated as merely another idiosyncracy until his sisters started to grow up. Then the charge that he spent more time in the bathroom than all the women in the house put together, which meant five, including his grandmother and his mother, was one that was incessantly heard. There was a pellet-hole in the bathroom door, and sometimes Carl would secretly watch his big brother snipping millimetre after millimetre off his curiously electric black hair. He could stand rooted for half an hour or more in front of the mirror, lost to the world.

  So ‘meticulous’ was a description that, half-compliment, half-criticism, attached itself to him as an adolescent, and another
one was ‘deep’. Apart from the hours when he was out working, he seemed to spend the whole of his mid-teens alone in the room that he slept in at nights with his two brothers, with the rest of the household kept at bay on the other side of a firmly locked door.

  On the evidence of the ledger which he kept doggedly throughout these years, in which each week’s Top Twenty hits were recorded in a neat, almost prim hand, he had all the makings of the sort of clerk the Wool Exchanges in Bradford had once been full of, but which was now a fast dying breed.

  It very quickly became clear that the industrial environment certainly didn’t suit him, although lack of prospects and unpunctuality, rather than temperamental unsuitability, were always the reasons offered for his frequent changes of job. He left Fairbank and Brearley after less than a year, complaining that, far from being taught anything, he was being ‘exploited’, and for a short time worked alongside his father in the mill. It took him just a few months to discover that his future didn’t lie in weaving, and Fibre Products, a firm on the small industrial estate just outside Bingley, was his next stop.

  There the masks that the employees had to wear as protection against the dust from the rags and asbestos that they spent all day chopping and grinding kept communication to a minimum; but even so Peter Sutcliffe would be remembered as ‘a queer bugger’ with the look of ‘a frightened animal’. In this case, however, it is possible he decided that silence was the safest option.