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

by Gordon Burn

  ‘Laddish pranks’ were something that nobody was disqualified from taking part in on the grounds of age, and few people were better at thinking them up than Jack and Mick. Jack acquired a parcel of guts one time from his brother who worked in the slaughterhouse and sent them to one of their crowd who’d been waiting patiently to hear from an ‘old tart’ that he’d had a dalliance with on an organised day-out.

  On another occasion they’d enjoyed themselves at the expense of one of the pleasure-craft owners who’d steeled himself and stopped off at the Fisherman on his way down the canal. A group of them had engaged him in pleasant conversation and watched while he tried to work out a way of pocketing a wallet bulging with scraps of newspaper that Mick had planted by the leg of his chair. Once he’d left they’d followed at a discreet distance and roared at his discomfort when he finally sneaked a look, only to find the message ‘We’ve been watching you, you bastard’ scribbled inside.

  For more than a hundred years the mills and the other activities associated with the woollen trade had tended to obscure the fact that a significant number of Bingley people earned their living on the land. But as the industry had declined throughout the 1960s and weeds started to choke once thriving mill yards, so conversation in the pubs seemed to increasingly turn around ‘lamping’ and ferrets and other rural concerns.

  Even in the seventies, a pony tethered to the bar at the Fleece or to a fence in Cornwall Road could go virtually unremarked. And a surprising number of the old ways hung on. An old woman who was an immediate neighbour of the Sutcliffes, for instance, believed that even factory-farmed chickens should be buried in the garden for a few days to get them ‘ripe’, which was also the thinking behind hanging hares out in the open to let the maggots do their work. The washing-line outside the Hawkes’ house was often hung with rabbit-skins, and inside many a handbag and trouser pocket all over the estate was the inevitable ‘lucky’ rabbit’s paw.

  Mick Sutcliffe was the odd one out in his family in that he was the only one who was a countryman at heart – or a ‘yokel’ in the words of his father, who felt that a gamekeeper or a farmer’s lad is what Mick should really have been. ‘His pride and joy was to get up in a morning at half-past-four and take his dog out in the country and catch half a dozen rabbits while the dew was still on the grass. And it still is, actually. It’s his way. He puts more effort into doing a bit of rabbiting while it’s still dark than most working men put into an eight-hour day.’

  There was nothing John Sutcliffe liked better than a nice rabbit freshly gutted and skinned and cooked into a pie or a stew but, in common with the rest of his family, he couldn’t stand the ferrets whose smell seeped in through the back of the house, or the lurcher that was constantly getting under his feet: Mick was forever having stand-up rows with his father about him kicking the dog.

  Peter, too, was less than fond of it, but then he could claim to have good reason. Even as adults the two brothers slept in the same double bed which, whenever he could get away with it, they also shared with Mick’s dog: ‘If I went to bed an’ our lad hadn’t come in, if he were out down Bradford or summat, I’d get dog in, get him against wall side, right cuddled up there, then Pete’d arrive. “That dog isn’t in there, is it?” he’d say, an’ I’d say no; it’d be just laid right quiet there until he pulled back the clothes, when it’d start. I used to jump at our lad then. If they don’t like them, okay, but there’s no need to bloody hurt them.’

  On the nights when he was planning to get up in the early hours to go poaching Mick would flop into bed fully clothed, right down to his wellington-boots with a ferret writhing inside its draw-string bag on the floor beside him; by opening time he’d be dumping upwards of a dozen rabbits on the bar counter, ready cleaned but unskinned to prove that they were the genuine article and not, as had been known to happen, ‘moggies’. Poaching was one way he had devised of supplementing his income when he was working, and his dole money on the increasingly frequent occasions as the years went on when he wasn’t; and picking over the rubbish on the council tip was another.

  Within minutes of the gates being closed at the ‘waste management site’ at Dowley Gap, on the canal bank opposite the Fisherman, the skips were alive with people ‘rooting’, but few of them had Mick Sutcliffe’s nose. Gold bracelets, cigarette lighters, solid sliver picture-frames ‘wi’ dogs’ heads an’ all that all the way round’ were some of the ‘finds’ that he reckoned brought his accumulated earnings from this source up to something like £2,000. Strictly speaking, of course, he was breaking the law, and John Sutcliffe received a great deal of sympathy from his friends in the Musical Union and at the cricket club for the antisocial behaviour of his son. Combing the tip, however, was one of the least illegal activities in which Mick was involved.

  He had been arrested for the first time when he was thirteen for breaking into a youth club and stealing boxes of crisps and ‘pop’, and had been in trouble with the police more or less constantly ever since. He had convictions for robbery, assault, actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm, and by his mid-twenties would have spent four consecutive Christmases in Armley jail. It should have been five, however, as he is the first to admit:

  ‘The way I worked it most of the time is, I’d spot something handy that was worth a bit of summat and just put me boot or a rock through shop window at night on the way home. I didn’t tek it back wi’ me to Cornwall Road, though. I had a little storage place an’ lads who wanted gear used to come an’ collect it there. I had buyers all over an’ there was never any come-back off of any of them.

  ‘This particular Christmas Eve, though, I were with another three an’ it were about ten o’clock at night when we kicked window through an’ just climbed in. I ended up wi’ a pile of boxes up past me chin – shirts, jumpers, pants, boots – an’ they must’ve thought I’d just been shopping because nobody took any notice of me as I were walking home.

  ‘“Here,” I said, an’ I gave me father a jumper, for Christmas, like, an’ our Peter an’ me mother an’ the lasses, an’ I kept one mesen. But two of these other silly cunts that were wi’ me, they walk straight into King’s Head wi’ all their clobber an’ start flog-gin’ it in there. Naturally it’s only half an hour afore they get done. It’s two days before they oppen their mouth on me though, so it’s Boxing Day an’ I’m wearing one of the jumpers, which they fail to notice, when they pull us in. Me lawyer put it down to high spirits of the season an’ we got away with a fine.’

  Occasionally John Sutcliffe would express his half-hearted disapproval of the way various members of his family were conducting their lives, but his own occasional, aberrant lapses meant that he had forfeited the right to criticise anybody, at least in Mick’s eyes. ‘He turns round to me an’ says, “You’re goin’ crackers, you; you’re getting worse as you go on.” An’ two weeks later he gets fuckin’ caught nickin’ a load of silver hissen coming down Sherriff Lane, coming home from some cricket do in early hours of the mornin’. I can remember me mother shoutin’ and bawlin’ an’ playin’ hell. He’d even tekken a kettle for some stupid reason. He were pissed up.’

  In the same way that he’d stood up to the priest at Cottingley Manor Secondary Modern, whom he accused of trying to ‘indoctrinate’ him, Mick stood up to his father, who had a tendency to throw his weight about in the house when he was drunk, in a way that Peter couldn’t. But this only partly explained the grudging admiration, almost bordering on envy, that those who knew both brothers detected in Peter. Certainly they could hardly have offered a greater contrast in styles: Mick ebullient, profligate, loose-limbed, staggering home broke; Peter taciturn, temperate, inhibited, perched nervously on the edge of his chair.

  His inability to relax, even when sitting in front of the television, was something that had come to seem so much a part of Peter’s nature that it had long ago ceased to be commented on at home. Nobody could ever remember seeing him just lounging around: he always sat up erect with both feet firmly on the gro
und, swivelling his eyes to left or right whenever anybody spoke to him, rather than turning his head.

  Just how tense Peter was was always particularly apparent to Mick on the rare occasions when he joined him in the Fisherman for a drink. ‘I allus knew he were a bit tensed up. He’d come in an’ sit with his hands on his knees, right sort of stiff so’s you’d feel like saying, “For fuck’s sake, relax!” On the other hand, after he’d had a few beers he used to go to opposite extreme.

  ‘He didn’t sup much because he couldn’t handle pop. He only used to sup a few light bottles. But if I got him on pints, that were it. He’d get right over-excited more than owt, laughing and talking and telling jokes. And once he started laughing you might as well forget it then, because it’d be a ten-minute job. It were one of them laughs where it screeches out; he’d shout out like a right shrill shriek an’ the whole pub’d look round. He’d just let it go when he were popped. He didn’t bother then.’

  In the company of his brother Peter enjoyed a sort of delayed adolescence, travelling up to North Yorkshire on poaching trips in an old van packed to overflowing with town tearaways and guns from Mick’s ‘armoury’ (although it was clear to anybody that Peter didn’t know a curlew from a pheasant). Drinking also became less hazardous in the pubs around Bingley for Peter and his pals Eric and Laurie, given Mick Sutcliffe’s growing reputation. But Peter would also try and impress his brother with his own ‘credentials’.

  Mick got the story about the bag of rings collected from bodies in the graveyard, although he was never shown any hard evidence; and he was given a late-night tour of the town mortuary where Peter walked fearlessly up to a body in a shroud, his footsteps echoing off the cold stone, while Mick prepared to run.

  It was riding pillion behind him on one of his motorbikes, though, that made Mick realise that Peter had a daredevil side: ‘It’s okay if you go on a motorway or summat, but it were ridiculous the speeds he used to go up and down these roads. I’ve seen him come round on to Cornwall Road at ninety after he’s tekken us out for a spin round, then ride bike into the house an’ up stairs.’

  *

  When Mick was about seventeen, Peter decided to introduce him to Bradford and to the city-centre pubs that he’d spent the past two or three years discovering for himself. After a couple of drinks he’d demonstrate how to go about chatting up a girl. ‘If you play your cards right tonight you could have me,’ was his usual tack, and Mick usually wasn’t the only one who remained unimpressed: ‘It didn’t exactly come to him as if he had a born ability to do it.’ Occasionally, though, he’d get far enough to arrange a date and come home a few nights later raving to Mick about what a good time he’d missed.

  Mick, in fact, had had sex for the first time when he was sixteen, which he was confident put him several years ahead of his brother; and he’d gone with his first prostitute when he was seventeen, several years before Peter was to drive him through the red-light district of Bradford with the triumphant air of someone revealing a secret world.

  The overcrowding and their mother’s perpetual presence should have made the conduct of a private life difficult, if not impossible, at Cornwall Road but, to Keith Sugden, Laurie Ashton and other visitors, the opposite seemed to be the case. ‘Come up any time you like, lad, and bring a girlfriend,’ was an invitation that, coming from John Sutcliffe, caught Laurie slightly off-guard; but Keith had already taken advantage of the prevailing permissive atmosphere to consummate a relationship with one of Maureen Sutcliffe’s older friends.

  When Maureen became pregnant herself at sixteen, however, her mother reacted in what she couldn’t help thinking was a wholly unreasonable way; she couldn’t have been unaware, after all, that for some time Maureen had been sleeping with the baby’s father: ‘In lots of ways she were an exceptional person, me mother. She were right patient and a right good mum. But you couldn’t sit down and talk to her – at least you couldn’t about anything that mattered.

  ‘She could feed us and clothe us and look after us materially, but she just didn’t seem to have enough discipline to cope. She just couldn’t handle us six kids. She worked too hard and she’d too much to do at home. She had it all to do herself and she had no control. She’d do owt for a quiet life.’

  Much to everybody’s surprise, Maureen’s father didn’t blow up when he found out that she was having a baby. In fact, he was surprisingly ‘modern’ about it all: she didn’t have to get married, he assured her, unless she really wanted to; and when she said she really did, he did all he could to smooth the way.

  John Sutcliffe had never sat down and discussed the facts of life with any of his children, but then his father never had with him. A joke that he used to sometimes like to tell summed up his whole approach: ‘This little feller comes home and his dad says to ’im; “Now then, son, do you know anything about the facts of life?” And little lad turns round to his old man and says, “Yes, Dad, what do you want to know?”’

  ‘Sex education’, in other words, was another newfangled idea that ‘those do-gooders’ who believed that corporal punishment in schools was unnecessary and out of date had made their minds up to promote. ‘I mean,’ he’d say, ‘it comes to everyone in their life. As you develop you find these things out. You hear all about it in the school playground and you sort the wheat from the chaff as you go along. It’s the way that it’s been done for hundreds of years. Then suddenly these people in the higher echelons of education are saying, “Well, if the parents aren’t doing it, we must do it in the schools.” So fair enough, they’re being taught by people who are supposed to be able to explain it in proper terms.’

  In the case of his own children, however, the ‘proper terms’ were not primarily addressed to the mechanics of sex but to the ethics of it and came circumscribed by the attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church: Peter and his brothers and sisters were taught by the teachers at Cottingley Manor Secondary Modern that sex should take place within marriage and in order to produce children, full stop. There could be no room for ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. How the Sutcliffe girls resolved this dilemma was to declare themselves ‘lapsed’ as soon as they had left school. Only as adults would they begin to recognise the truth of the saying that ‘Learning in childhood is like engraving a stone.’

  Mrs Sutcliffe certainly had difficulty curbing the energies of Anne, her oldest daughter, who, at seventeen, had grown tall and voluptuous-looking and enjoyed a reputation among Keith Sugden and others of Peter’s friends for being ‘lively as a lop’. Sugden was round at Cornwall Road at about 7.00 one evening when Anne was shut up in her bedroom with a youth from up the street: ‘Her mother was screamin’ and shoutin’ at her to oppen door, but she wouldn’t an’ in the end Peter just turned to me an’ said, “Oh c’mon, let’s go.” He left soup he’d been heatin’ up in pan.’

  Mick, of course, in this as in all things, was a law unto himself. ‘It were a bit awkward. You could never get the house on your own or anything, because me mother never went out apart from shopping and mebbe on her birthday when me father’d tek her down for a drink. But I thought “Bugger ’em”, like. I’d just get a chair an’ lock it under handle so they couldn’t come in while I were bullin’, an’ dive straight into bed.’ On at least one occasion, though, these precautions proved inadequate because Carl, Mick’s six-year-old brother, was already in the room, concealed on the top of the big old wardrobe with a pal. Things had progressed too far for the boys to reveal themselves when they realised, as a result of Mick staggering over to the window to be sick, that his partner was the sister of Carl’s friend.

  It wasn’t unheard of for Peter to be with a girl: Mick or Maureen would occasionally come across him in the kitchen or the coal-house ‘snogging’ with somebody off the estate. He always seemed more dutiful than driven in his courting, however, and never had a ‘steady’ girlfriend.

  One night, a few months before his twenty-first birthday, though, Peter came home in a particularly exuberant mood. He’d met a ‘rig
ht buer’, he enthused to Mick in their bedroom, and went on to describe his elaborate method of picking her up: he’d spilled half a pint down her skirt deliberately and then insisted on taking her home on his motorbike to change. She’d then gone back into Bradford with him to the Royal Standard and had promised to see him again at the end of the week …

  The word ‘buer’, though, which he’d never heard before, is what Mick’s mind stuck on, and how unnatural it sounded falling from his brother’s lips. He was like a sponge, always picking expressions up from other people, was Mick’s last thought, as he grabbed his share of the bed-clothes, turned over and went to sleep.

  9

  It had always been a matter of pride to Eric and Laurie and their regular crowd at the Royal Standard that they were considered out-of-step with the times. But by 1967, in their greased quiffs and ‘beetle-crushers’ and Edwardian-style, velvet-trimmed coats, they were starting to look like the relics of an age that a growing number of drinkers in the pubs around Bradford knew only by reputation.

  It was in retaliation to the ‘psychedelic’ fashions and the increasingly ‘progressive’ music that was so offensive to their ears, therefore, that ‘the gravediggers’ decided to organise rock’n’roll revival evenings of their own. The landlord of the New Miller’s Dam made a room available and they booked in only those local groups with a solid, Gene Vincent–Little Richard–Jerry Lee Lewis-based repertoire.