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

by Gordon Burn

  Out for a run one night in his green Morris Minor with another youth called Keith Sugden, he volunteered to walk to the nearest police station for help when they found they were out of petrol. Knowing that not only did he not have a licence, but that the tax disc on the front windscreen would be revealed, on closer inspection, to be nothing more than a Guinness label, all seemed to add to the fun. Sugden was certainly impressed by his friend’s gall: ‘He went to the station and the copper brought him back wi’ two gallons of petrol in car an’ dropped him off an’ he never blinked.

  ‘I think that was his kick.’ Cause when they’d gone he used to say, “Stupid bastards!” and have a right grin on his face. That’s how cool he were. I’d call it “self-disciplined”. He used to giggle. He thought it were great.’

  Long before Peter started ‘going mates’ with Eric Robinson and Laurie Ashton, Keith Sugden, an apprentice at Harrison’s printers in Bingley, had become the first real friend that he ever made. Unlike the crowd they both found themselves perfunctorily a part of, they were passive and quiet, positively reflective, given their surroundings, and Peter started to look almost comfortable in somebody else’s presence for the first time.

  ‘He were a loner, y’see. Pete would be in company but he’d never say anything, he’d still be totally on his own,’ Keith Sugden says. ‘He were always very remote. Always. And I can be the same, which is probably why we got on. I mean, he were company without being pushy, old Peter. If there was nowt to say neither of us used to say owt, and that were okay.

  ‘The others would be shouting and bawling and piss-arsing around, but not us. We could have a good laugh; Pete could have his odd moment. But he were never vulgar. I don’t think I ever heard him swear in all the time I knew him; “whores” and “scrubbers” is about the strongest he got. He were never loud.’

  Apart from pubs there weren’t many places for young people to go in Bingley, or even Bradford, in the early 1960s, even though London, if television and the newspapers were to be believed, was turning into the ‘swinging’ capital of the world. The C and D milk bar in Main Street – the Cat and Dog to regulars – boasted a juke-box and was open in the early evenings for hot and cold drinks; and there was the occasional ‘Hot Dog Hop’ at the Victoria Hall. But the Myrtle cinema had shut its doors for the last time, there wasn’t even a Chinese take-away to go to after closing-time, and a sign outside the Mecca Locarno in the centre of Bradford indicated how slowly the tide of ‘permissiveness’ was creeping north: ‘Because of the character of our particular entertainment, where men without previous introduction talk to any lady, a coloured gentleman must bring his own lady partner with him to any dance session,’ it began and ended: ‘Let us live together peacefully and let us be fair to all people and realise that nature has made us different.’

  Because Peter Sutcliffe and Keith Sugden were both ‘half men’, as those who considered themselves ‘big boozers’ in Bingley pointedly put it, they preferred to drive out into the surrounding countryside rather than sit about nursing drinks. Once or twice Peter’s Morris travelled in ‘convoy’ to Arnside with Dave Brearley’s spoke-wheeled MG roadster and Richard Varley’s old Standard with the white stripe across the top. But usually the two friends just drove to the coast on their own for the night, sometimes returning in the early hours after a scout around Blackpool; other times sleeping in the car – and once in a boat – on the promenade at Arnside, the resort of his childhood that kept drawing Peter like a magnet, until the gulls woke them up.

  As teenagers they were both strikingly good-looking. ‘Smashing. Dark black hair all swept back, an Elvis Presley type,’ is how Maureen, Peter’s twelve-year-old sister, saw Keith. And, with his olive skin off-set by the pastel-coloured suits he started wearing in his late-teens, Peter wasn’t without admirers himself. Both of them, though, were awkward around girls. ‘One’s scared and the other daren’t,’ was the sort of thing that made Keith’s ears burn when he heard it whispered behind their backs.

  ‘I found it difficult to pull birds; or, at least, put it this way, to do the initial chatting up. But, whereas I wasn’t willing to go forward an’ mek a fool of meself, Peter would. He’d leave it up to me, though, to lead conversation after he’d got ’em; once he’d got ’em he’d just stand there with that smile on his face, hardly saying a word.’

  When he was nineteen, Keith decided to kick over the traces and moved in with a girlfriend in Shipley who had her own flat. It turned out to be a short-lived rebellion, however: his mother came and dragged him home with her after just two weeks. But he made the most of it while it lasted and so did Peter who, basking in the reflected glory of his friend’s bold step, virtually became a lodger himself.

  It was a big house and a lot of girls lived there, but Peter stubbornly refused to be tempted even though they were considered an ‘easy touch’. His disinterest finally revealed itself as distaste one morning when one of the tenants threw herself across the kitchen table with no clothes on and, only half-jokingly, offered herself as ‘breakfast’. He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t have to; it was written all over his face.

  At the end of this brief interlude, Keith and Peter, who seemed especially relieved that the threat to their friendship had abated, drifted back into their old routine. Like millions of others touched by ‘Beatlemania’, Keith Sugden had bought a cheap guitar and taught himself the rudiments, and so had Patrick Slater, the mutual acquaintance through whom Keith and Peter Sutcliffe had first met. And after work every Friday Keith and Patrick would take their guitars and a small amplifier up to Cornwall Road to ‘rehearse’ for a couple of hours in the Sutcliffes’ kitchen. Peter didn’t play anything himself but he didn’t seem to want to; he was perfectly content to watch and listen to the ‘group’, although his father on odd occasions wouldn’t be able to resist getting his harmonica out and joining in.

  Although Peter always did his best to exclude them, the audience for these sessions sometimes included his sisters and their friends from a few doors away, Jacqueline, Colleen and Maureen, the Hawkes girls. At sixteen Doreen, their oldest sister, was too old to be running in and out of 57 Cornwall Road the way they always were, but Maureen Sutcliffe had an idea she would like to have been. Maureen had noticed Doreen Hawkes hanging around his motorbikes making him uncomfortable, and it had occurred to her that she might have her eye on their Peter. As it happened, though, it was Keith Sugden with whom Doreen finally took up.

  Keith and Peter were coming home late one night, tearing up the steepest part of Cornwall Road more recklessly than they should have been, when the car suddenly rammed the kerb. Keith was badly shaken but Peter, who had been behind the wheel, thought it was a great joke. ‘I thought he was going to bloody kill us, but he couldn’t stop laughing. He thought it were hilarious. “Bugger car” was all he could find to say.’

  It was next day, while they were changing the buckled wheels on the Morris, that Doreen Hawkes engaged them in conversation; and that night, the first of many, they went out as a threesome. Peter had just started working at the cemetery and he was quick to use the line, picked up from one of the older men, that was to be his stand-by on numerous future occasions. ‘I’ve a real job,’ was his reply when Doreen asked him what he did. ‘I’ve five thousand under me and not one of them complains.’ The little giggle that punctuated this remark was one that, repeated endlessly over the coming weeks and months, would begin to set Doreen’s teeth on edge. Peter’s only answer to anything, even the most innocent question, was that nervous, high-pitched, preoccupied laugh.

  Although he didn’t seem to mind in the slightest playing ‘gooseberry’ on their nights out at Dick Hudson’s, a pub high on the moor, Doreen wondered why he bothered to come, when all he did was ‘hear all, see all and say nowt’. Even when he gave her a lift up to Keith’s house, he’d sit in the car and not say a word. Keith, feeling that his loyalty was being tested, explained that it was just Pete’s way: ‘I think he gets summat from peop
le, does Peter. Something he needs. He’s no good at mekkin’ conversation himself, so he either sticks to a character that can or somebody that has a bit of personality in other ways. Something in him stops him being able to put his self forward, Dot. That’s why he clings.’

  But if Doreen came to a sort of grudging acceptance of Peter’s odd little ways, her mother and her oldest sister never did. Mrs Hawkes, who for a long time only knew him as the Sutcliffe lad who was always out messing with bikes, starting off thinking of Peter as ‘the nice, quiet, sensible type’. The more she saw of him, though, the more she was irritated by his giggle and unnerved by the power of his dark, penetrating gaze, the more uneasy she became. And no amount of reassurance on her daughter’s part could make the unease go away. It got to the stage where they started having rows about him coming to the house.

  After Buddy Holly, the whimsical English ‘folky’, Donovan, was one of Peter’s favourite singers and he used to love to sit in the Hawkes’s living-room listening to Keith strum the guitar to some of Donovan’s songs. The expression on Peter’s face used to be so admiring that the women in the Hawkes family, judging this to be the perfect spot to drive in the wedge, started to pull Keith’s leg when he turned up unaccompanied, asking him where his ‘boyfriend’ was tonight. It turned into such a running joke, it occurred to Keith that Peter, always so sensitive to atmosphere, so quick at weighing situations up, must know what was going on.

  But whether he did or not, he suddenly did something totally out of character for him. Although neither of them had ever seen him on his own with a girl, he turned up to collect Keith and Doreen at Doreen’s house one night with not one but two girls in tow whom he had picked up earlier at a pub in Keighley. Keith and Doreen recognised his companions at a glance for what they were – ‘scrubbers’. But Peter seized on the first opportunity that came up to spell it out: ‘They’re on the game, y’know,’ he grinned when the two women went to the toilet, which was enough for Doreen who, feeling that her own reputation was at stake, very coolly asked to be taken home.

  ‘His idea were for me to kip wi’ one, to be quite honest,’ Keith remembers. ‘He were supposed to go in bedroom at Cornwall Road with her mate an’ I were supposed to stop in living-room. But I weren’t right bothered an’ her mate weren’t right keen on him. She wanted to go home. Anyway, he took ’em back to Keighley and I went back round to Dot’s. What he were trying to do was split me an’ her, y’see. That were the thing.’

  Doreen only ever went into the Sutcliffes’ house with Keith once, and the visit helped terminate what was anyway becoming an impossible relationship with Peter. It was a Sunday afternoon and there was a pleasant atmosphere owing to the fact that Peter’s father, replete with half a dozen pints and his usually huge Sunday dinner, was in an especially expansive mood. Keith was playing guitar and John Sutcliffe was singing, but Doreen, still only sixteen at the time, became increasingly agitated until she knew that she had to leave. ‘He were eyeing me up and down and I felt so uncomfortable I had to get out,’ was the only explanation she could offer Keith later. She said she felt Mr Sutcliffe was undressing her with his eyes.

  Keith and Doreen became engaged soon afterwards and from then on they hardly ever saw Peter. They moved in with Doreen’s parents after their marriage in 1968 but, although they were only living six doors away and lived there for eight months, they didn’t see Peter once in all that time. It was as if, as they often remarked to each other, he’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

  *

  Peter’s mother used to like it when he went around with Keith, as she once confided to Doreen after she’d become Mrs Sugden: Peter was very easily led, she said; he was influenced by who-ever’s company he happened to be keeping, and Keith had always been so steady; Keith never ever brought any trouble home. Doreen took this to mean that Mrs Sutcliffe would have liked to have been able to say the same about Peter’s current friends.

  Keith Sugden knew Eric Robinson although there had been times when he could have wished this hadn’t been the case. In the two weeks that Keith was ‘sacking down’ at the flat in Shipley, for example, Eric had gone berserk and half demolished the basement kitchen with a sledgehammer when he was ‘stoated’, and he also almost got them both locked up. Keith had answered a frantic hammering at the door at 2.00 one morning to be confronted by Eric, who was in desperate need of a favour: he’d broken into the garage around the corner from where Keith was living, he explained, and had managed to drag the safe clear of the building, but now he needed a match to light the oxyacetylene set before he could proceed any further.

  The result of his labours was a cash-box full of Balkan Sobranie packets which, in turn, were shown to contain nothing but dozens of Durex sheaths. The safe ended up in the canal, which is where most of the incriminating evidence from Eric’s midnight sorties tended to come to rest: it was full of the bikes he’d stolen to ride back to Bingley from Saltaire on, after he had been to see his pal Laurie Ashton.

  It was a consequence of such petty – sometimes farcical – crimes that Eric was repeatedly being sent to prison, where Peter would write keeping him abreast of the goings-on in the small world which they’d mapped out for themselves and which they’d reinhabit as soon as Eric was returned to freedom.

  Eric, Peter and Laurie Ashton struck most of their contemporaries in Bingley as an odd threesome. When they weren’t sitting in the bashed-up Chevrolet of Laurie’s, running the electric windows up and down, they were parked by the juke-box in the King’s Head or the Ferrands ‘like three owd lads’, elbows on knees, staring at the floor. They tended not to hang around Bingley too much, however, which reduced the likelihood of them getting involved in the brawls that were an essential feature of the town’s social life.

  Peter in particular liked to escape to Bradford or Halifax or Keighley, to one of the pubs or coffee-bars that had been added to their circuit of regular haunts. He wasn’t a big drinker: three or four bottles of ‘light’ would do him, compared to Eric and Laurie’s eight or nine pints, but he didn’t need much to get him going: he’d get intoxicated on the atmosphere generated by the other two and seemed happy enough to enjoy himself vicariously through them.

  Laurie, for instance, knew every song in the rock’n’roll canon after years of dedicated listening and sometimes, if he was drunk enough, would get up on the stage at The Bridge or Green Gates Working Men’s Club in Bradford and give them his Gene Vincent or his Eddie Cochran. ‘By God you’ve missed your way. You’re better than Gene Vincent. Why don’t you make a go of it?’ Peter would enthuse afterwards, his already high-pitched voice rising higher with the excitement. And the same at the Rysh-worth club at Crossflatts, just outside Bingley: Peter always stayed out of the limelight himself, but he loved to see Laurie and Eric get up in their crepes and drapes and do some ‘boppin’.

  The only area in which he allowed himself any sort of self-expression was his appearance, which was not only eye-catching but ‘immaculate’. Off-white and black suits were his favourites, worn with drainpipe trousers and Cuban-heel boots, although for a few months, Peter, Eric and a married friend of Eric’s affected a uniform which consisted of matching black trilbies with white bands, and black shirts with white ‘slim Jim’ ties, all from Greenwood’s ‘the men’s outfitters’ in Main Street in Bingley.

  But whatever he wore, Peter still couldn’t disguise his shyness. He came to Eric once with a story about being discovered in a friend’s garage with a girl off the estate; and he told Laurie that he’d taken a fifth-form girl from the grammar school to Arnside for the weekend. And, while it was true that Laurie had seen him chatting to one of the pupils who used the cemetery as a shortcut, it was the first time he had ever seen Peter in conversation with any girl, and he turned crimson when he knew he’d been spotted.

  It was in fact very easy to make Peter blush. ‘Nuddy’ books were always doing the rounds of the men at the graveyard but Peter never seemed sure what the appropriate reaction sh
ould be. He was even more thrown by the pictures that one of the older diggers carried in his wallet of his wife in a number of provocative poses in their bedroom.

  Even out drinking with Eric and Laurie, usually in less-than-salubrious spots, he would try and observe the proprieties. He grew very uncomfortable if they started telling what he considered dirty jokes within earshot of a woman; and any woman daring to ‘come on strong’, as he saw it, threw him into terrible confusions. ‘Those two mates of yours are bloody useless,’ a girlfriend of Laurie’s reported back to him after a night out in the car with Eric and Peter. ‘I stripped off last night an’ neither of them would climb in back wi’ me.’ The most embarrassed Laurie ever saw him, though, was when a girl accused Peter, who was below her working in a grave at the time, of staring up her ‘clouts’: it seemed to Laurie that he would have liked to have buried himself in the hole.

  Behind the wheel of a car or on the back of a bike were the only times Peter seemed even vaguely unselfconscious. He enjoyed the journeys to and from the ‘Tomato Dip’ in Skipton, the Gardeners’ Arms in Keighley and the half a dozen other places where they were regulars, better than the ‘socialising’ that he merely endured in between. He was at his happiest ‘doing a ton’ on the Golden Mile outside Skipton on the racing-style Norton Dominator 600 that he ran for a while, with Eric hanging on behind and tears streaming off the back of both their heads.

  With Eric, he took to siphoning petrol out of cars in and around Bingley and stealing wheels, which started to fill the coal shed at Cornwall Road. The two of them were apprehended tampering with the doors of a Bentley which was parked outside the White Horse one night but got off with a warning from the police and a piece of advice from Peter’s father, who told them to be more careful in future.

  Often in the course of an evening in one of the pubs, while Eric and Laurie were casting an eye over the ‘talent’ and daring one another to make the first move, Peter would slip away for an hour, scouting, as he explained to them later, for new places to go. This is how they became, first, regulars, and then virtually permanent fixtures at the Royal Standard, a handsome Edwardian pub on Manningham Lane in the cosmopolitan, northern part of Bradford.