by Stephen Wade
He was born in middle-class Wimbledon in 1917 and he went to a good school where he excelled at sport. He was always an impressive rugby player and athlete, but he was not academically bright, and when he left school he took a job as office-boy at Pawson and Leaf, a firm in the City of London. But that was tedious for him and the lure of the uniform and fast cars was too much for him; he managed to get a short-term commission in the RAF, after a spell with the Artists’ Rifles. He was just seventeen when he went to Cranwell for training, and it is on record that one officer said of him that ‘This man has the makings of a first-class pilot and should prove himself an officer with outstanding abilities.’
There was no doubt that Heath could fly a plane: he always had the knack of being able to fly any kind of craft. But his criminal mind showed itself at this early stage when he began to spend far more money than he earned and he decided to embezzle the Mess funds when he was Sports Officer in Duxford, Cambridgeshire. When the officers of No. 73 Fighter Squadron gathered for discussion of the subject, Heath was missing. He had written a dud cheque and his squadron leader rang him up to ask about it, but he went on the run, stealing a car belonging to an RAF sergeant, which he left abandoned on Waterloo Road, London. Of course, he was dismissed from the Service, though found not guilty of desertion.
After other crimes, he went on the run again, and a detective cornered him and he was arrested. At the Old Bailey he was sentenced to a spell in Borstal for counterfeiting a banker’s draft. There he was, a man who thought he was an officer and a gentleman, at a Borstal for ‘Boys’. It was the ultimate humiliation for him. After some time in Wormwood Scrubs, he was sent to Hollesley Bay, at Woodbridge in Suffolk, and there, with 400 other boys, he returned to his life of charm and play-acting. The boys were allowed to wander out into the village and with servicemen. He would mix with officers and their wives, being able to talk about his ‘RAF career’ framed by lies and stories. But he managed to join the Army Air Cadet Force and told tall tales about flying Lysanders and about almost being killed on daring raids. He made it to second lieutenant in the cadets and then, in an era when checks on career histories were very slack, he managed to get himself attached to the Army Air Force Cooperation Unit in March 1940 and was posted to the Middle East.
He was, of course, very popular in the mess in Palestine, and even as a ‘one pipper’ lieutenant he had the charm and wit to ingratiate himself with his senior officers. There was a general there who wanted to sell his car as he had no use for it when on active service, so naturally, Heath agreed to buy it, but it was simply to re-sell it and make money. He thought he would make a lot of money, because he paid for the car with another dud cheque. Heath was sure that it would take a long time for him to be found out, but he was wrong, and the general came looking for him, in a rage. At his second court martial he led his own defence and things could have been worse: he was merely cashiered.
Going home to England was out of the question, so Heath hopped on a boat and went to Durban. The lure of the uniform was still strong in him; he would have considered being a hotel commissionaire if need be, just to wear the uniform. But his air force days were not over, and with the assumed name of James Robert Cadogan Armstrong, he joined the South African Air Force. They were impressed with both his flying skills and his prowess on the rugby pitch and he was sent to Transport Command. It was here that his dreams of grandeur and affection for living as an impostor began to flower, and he took another name, Bruce Lockhart. That was the name of the famous traveller and spy, and one of the real Bruce Lockhart’s friends told Heath he was a liar. The episode tells us all we need to know about the man: he said he was using the name to deceive the enemy because he was actually in the British Secret Service. He told the man he was really Captain Selway of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
He was utterly joyful to hear that he was being posted to England, and soon he was in Oxfordshire, and he could resume his life of fraud. Here he became ‘Jimmy Armstrong’, a persona he made into what can only be described as a ‘war celebrity’. But he was found out. He returned to South Africa, married and had a son, and then of course, he was back in court again, in Durban. For the third time, Heath was dismissed from His Majesty’s forces, given a military escort to the docks and put on a ship for Britain. A man who knew him in Durban said Heath was ‘The cocktail party type seen wherever it was fashionable to be seen.’ But back home, his sinister side came out and he was in his own personal mythology, ‘Jimmy the Ripper’.
It is almost certain that his first murder took place in South Africa in 1943. He had been divorced and had had a lot to drink, and Heath drove off for a ride in the country with a young woman. He came back alone. The story he gave was that the car had burst into flames and he had tried to put it out, but that he had jumped from the car, then ran after it to try to save the girl, but that she had been burned beyond recognition. There was an investigation, but the Devil’s luck was with his protégée, and Heath was never charged.
The number of his victims in wartime London and elsewhere will never be known: some were raped, others robbed, many were ripped off with bad cheques and tall stories, but deep in his personality, Neville Heath was also a sadistic killer. He was more dangerous to women than arsenic-laced foundation cream. Heath met Margery Gardner in May 1946, when he had been living under a succession of assumed names, roaming and roving the country looking for casual (and very violent) sex, but also for a lifestyle of pretence, fantasy and dangerous delusion. This love of hotels and hot sex was to lead to his first known murder: Margery Gardner liked unusual sex as well, and at the Pembridge Court Hotel, London, the woman’s screams from the bedroom were heard by the hotel detective. There was nothing illegal found out and no prosecutions, but Heath, after proposing to another woman, returned to that hotel with Margery later, and this time he left her dead; she was found by a cleaner lying naked, on her back, with her ankles tied together and with several scourge marks on her body. Heath had used a whip with a diamond pattern and this was seen on her flesh.
Heath killed again: he murdered Doreen Marshall, whose body was found in bushes at Bournemouth, naked except for one shoe. Her throat had been cut and she had been beaten; one nipple had been bitten off and there were severe cuts on her body, from the vagina upwards. Some object, possibly a branch, had been pushed up her anus. He was caught and charged, and in court an insanity pleas was given, but this was to no avail and Neville Heath was sentenced to hang.
The fantasist and turned killer, and the man who had entertained thousands with his tales of wartime heroics and persuaded the world that he was a professional sportsman as well as a bomber pilot, was in Pentonville prison in October 1946, when the cell door opened and the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, made sure that Heath was quickly pinioned, taken to the noose and hanged. He was hanging more than the pathetic and evil man in that cell – he was killing Major Jimmy Armstrong, Captain Rupert Brooke, Prisoner number 1059 – and Jimmy the Ripper.
CHAPTER 9
Mutiny in North Yorkshire
I n the years following the end of the Great War in 1918, many prisons were closed, and in 1922 HMP Northallerton in North Yorkshire ceased operations, though the buildings were left standing by. In the old tradition in Britain of utilising existing establishments when new necessities arise, when war came along in 1939 the place was in use again, this time as a training depot for the military police. The cells provided accommodation for the trainees, and from a mere store it was transforming into a busy military location.
In the early days of the Second World War the military police comprised all kinds of personnel, from the Auxiliary territorials (women) in the service to the elite such as the 150 Provost Company, whose men took part in the ‘Phoney War’ with the British Expeditionary Force in 1939 in France; in that action, there were numerous thefts of stores and equipment and a Special Investigation Branch was formed. But for most officers in the military police at the time, routine duties were such things as
the enforcement of order and discipline, instructor work, record office clerical work or security duties. But there were different kinds of military police: the Red Caps are of the Provost Wing; the Traffic Control Wing work by particular areas; then the Vulnerable Points Wing guarded important sites and installations. Clearly, the latter group were the Northallerton deployment.
For a few years at the outbreak of war, then, these men had special training for those duties; though destined to become the Royal Military Police in 1946, in those first years they had an important but routine set of duties on their agenda.
In 1943, it was needed as a prison once again and became a military detention centre. There was to be a radical transformation in the next few years, as the prison changed from a place where soldiers would be trained for such things as the prevention of sabotage at important sites to a military detention centre. By 1946, Northallerton became national news, though not for good reasons. It was the location of a mutiny. To tell the full story of what became known as ‘The Glass-House Mutiny’ it is necessary to place the events in the context of that year.
In the House of Commons, on 26 March 1946, Mr Lawson, Secretary of State, responded to Tom Driberg with regard to an enquiry into conditions at Stakehill Detention Centre near Bolton. This was the report in The Times:
[Lawson] said that he had recently received the final report of the Court of Inquiry into conditions at Stakehill Detention Barracks. The general conclusion was that the allegations which had been made in the public press and in letters to the Rev. Urien Evans, or to members of Parliament, were either unfounded or grossly exaggerated. The Court of Inquiry, which included among the members a KC and a psychiatrist, examined every aspect of the problem in great detail. Every effort was made to call as witnesses all those who had made allegations about the treatment of prisoners at Stakehill, and also all soldiers under sentence who had any complaint to make. They examined in all 195 witnesses including 47 members or ex-members of staff …
It was all very thorough, but his conclusion – that ‘there is no need to make any further enquiry into conditions at Stakehill’ – is very much at odds with personal testimony from some sources, and this evidence enables us to take a less than sanguine view of the kind of prison conditions which were to affect Northallerton severely.
If we set beside Lawson’s words this extract from a memoir, I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels, by Albert Meltzer, we are led to re-think these matters. Meltzer was an anarchist who had already done a stretch in Brixton before he was sent north to Stakehill:
Stakehill had hit the news because a prisoner had been found dead. The Church of England chaplain is usually in such circumstances a minor administration official but in this particular case an enthusiastic young parson objected to the guards declining to take their hats off when escorting prisoners in church. He protested but to no avail. Then one day he was down in the detention cells and heard cries. He rushed in to find that two warders had just hit a man who was lying on the floor. One of them was saying to the other, ‘Kick him staff, he’s still breathing.’ When the horrified padre asked what had happened, the other staff sergeant said, with an equal heavy attempt at jocularity, ‘Don’t mind him, Sir, he’s always lying on the floor, crying.’
Meltzer wrote that he found the place ‘seething with mutiny’. He saw that something was deeply wrong, and he noted that many of those being abused were ‘a credit to the nation’. He pointed out that the cruelty was often extreme: ‘Yet for some minor infraction of absurdly imposed regulations or breach of discipline … we were kept in cages. It was Brixton gaol all over again but more so.’
At the same time, Aldershot military prison experienced severe problems: this was on 23 and 24 February and that was to spread to other gaols, including Northallerton. What happened at Aldershot was that a detainee managed to smash his way out of his cell and release others in the hall where he was kept; they overpowered the NCO and gathered more men as they went on the rampage. The Commandant addressed them with a loudspeaker and used threats of severe reprisals but this had no effect. Troops surrounded the block where the men were, and the mutineers took to the roof. There were around forty men involved and their rage of destruction lasted well into the next day.
Some of the men involved there were recently arrived from Northallerton, as it was reported at the time: ‘There seems no doubt that the disturbances were a development from a frustrated attempt by six soldiers under sentence recently transferred from Northallerton, and were not a generally concerted act of mutiny.’
In fact, Northallerton was to see the same thing, just a week later. On 1 March rioters there forced their way into one of the prison stores and set fire to it. Some of the men climbed onto the roof and began throwing bricks. The local fire brigade arrived and put out the fire. The rioting took place in a hall holding seventy men, but exactly how many were involved is a matter of conjecture. They were long-sentence prisoners and things were in a condition of extreme danger: armed soldiers from Catterick camp were called in and a cordon was placed around the block. There had been two earlier incidents and the first was the one in which the men sent to Aldershot were involved: in the first riot there was considerable damage done to buildings. Sixteen men had escaped after morning church parade on that occasion. A week later another sixteen men broke down the gate through which the earlier escape had been attempted. The use of a hosepipe put paid to the latter trouble.
In the main mutiny, what happened was that the outbreak was confined to the one barrack; officers and managers acted quickly and efficiently; the rioters could not get near the armoury. Of course, there were some serious repercussions. An officer was hit by flying slate. But there were no escapes. The War Office official announcement said:
The trouble appears to have been started by nine prisoners transferred from overseas on February 26. The mutiny was confined to some of the men in one block only. Men under custody in the other block and in Nissen huts were not involved. Fifty troops from Catterick have arrived to reinforce the barracks staff, but the situation is now under control except that about nine men were still on the roof at 5 p.m.
The leading lights in the insurrection were from the British Army of the Rhine. The main source seems to be a unit which had served in Italy and the disaffection that began there was carried with them back to England. The Secretary of State made a speech in which he hedged around the whole area of what underlying grievances might have been. The main one was that sentences for quite minor offences were very long, as Meltzer had claimed in his memoir. The Secretary bluffed and spoke vaguely, saying, ‘… it is clear that some of the soldiers under sentence, some of whom have criminal records, were in a mood to take full advantage of the opportunity to join in this act of mass indiscipline.’
In Northallerton, the papers created a narrative of high drama and dramatic incidents. The Daily Mail photographer managed to take a flight over the prison and to take a shot showing all the events: he labelled the picture to show the hose being used against a man on the roof; he showed the positions of all the fire brigade installation, and made sure that his readers would be reassured by seeing the armed guards placed around the gaol. The same paper later printed a shot of the destruction, with the caption: ‘Two pictures from a Daily Mail cameraman who visited Northallerton (North Yorkshire) military prison during yesterday’s riots, when long-sentence prisoners seized the main block of the gaol, smashed everything they could, and set fire to the Army stores.’
The Mail main headline said it all: ‘National Glasshouse Plot Suspected’. It was a case of hype on a grand scale; unfortunately, in the years since then, there have been exaggerations and distortions. One account states that ‘two regiments’ were needed to quell the riot.
The end of the mutiny was described in the Daily Express on 2 March, in these words from Reginald Butler ‘inside Northallerton prison’:
Seven long-term prisoners, bedraggled and shivering – they had been drenched by hose-water for hour
s – climbed down from the rafters of this military prison at 7.45 tonight after a rooftop siege which lasted eight and a half hours. So ended an all-day riot involving nearly 300 soldiers – less than a week after the disturbance at Aldershot, Glasshouse No. 1.
Butler went on to say that ‘most of Northallerton’s century-old prison was wrecked’ – which is clearly grossly inaccurate.
Naturally, there was a trial of the mutineers. The evidence suggested in their defence was that their commanding officers in Europe had indicated that the men would only receive a short sentence, and that was very wrong. The men had originally gone AWOL after serving well in the theatre of war; their sense of injustice is not difficult to imagine. On 27 April, it was reported that eleven of the soldiers were charged with mutiny and faced court-martials at Catterick camp. The men were from the Pioneer Corps, the Royal Scots, the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, the General Service Corps, the Seaforth Highlanders, and (most ironically) from the Loyal Regiment. The men were named and shamed in the national press.
CHAPTER 10
Ruth Ellis: Crime of Passion
T he reading public know a lot about Ruth Ellis, the blonde killer of her lover; the desirable West End hostess who went through failed relationships; we even know, thanks to the television series, Most Haunted, that her spirit is reckoned to haunt at least two locations. The fact that she was the last woman hanged in Britain is also something lodging in the general consciousness. There have also been several media portrayals and, most famously, the film on her life and crime in which she was played with great power and impact by Miranda Richardson. But the very last piece of documentation on her could not be more horrendous and disenchanting.