by Gordon Burn
The open flatness of the park is at one end of Cromwell Street and, until fairly recent years, ‘Tommy Rich’s’ was at the other.
The Sir Thomas Rich school opened towards the end of the last century and for seventy-five years occupied a large site between Cromwell Street and Eastgate Street, one of Gloucester’s busiest shopping streets. Unlike many of the muscular municipal buildings that were being erected nearby in the same decade – the library, the art gallery, the Guildhall, the City Museum – Tommy Rich’s was built in rich red brick rather than blank grey stone. Its Victorian bulk seemed connected to Gloucester Park, a hundred yards away, in much the same way that the great houses of the previous century were connected to their formal gardens. Except, interposed between the school’s grandness and the park’s greenness, were three narrow streets of terraced and semi-detached houses.
Sir Thomas Rich’s School was opened in 1889, and Cromwell, Wellington and Arthur Streets were all also built around that time. The villas of Brunswick Square would remain the most desirable places to live in the Gloucester Park area. There had been an attempt at the beginning of the century to set Gloucester up in competition with Cheltenham as a spa town and tourist centre, and Brunswick Square, apparently perfectly situated to benefit from ‘a perpetual current of fresh and wholesome air’ from the Severn, had been built as a speculative development next to the spa. The houses’ iron palisades and Grecian pilasters were seen as a mark of their owners’, and the area’s, conspicuous prosperity and respectability.
The houses in Cromwell Street and its close neighbours had little of any architectural merit to recommend them. Modest on any reckoning, they seemed further diminished by the municipal magnificence by which they were surrounded. The vast warehouse buildings in the docks were also close by and, again, in terms of scale, the houses in Cromwell Street and its near neighbours were dwarfed and made to seem insignificant. And not just dwarfed; also darkened. A darkness that contrasted with the strong light and big horizon of the park, which was always visible. This narrow aspect opening on to so much space. It felt like living in a canyon. But, for fifty years, the area between the school and the park was a well-to-do part of the city inhabited by business people and professionals.
Tommy Rich’s gave what the residents considered ‘tone’ to the area; Sir Thomas Rich’s School at one end of Cromwell Street; Fords’ garage, with its ramped approach and red, white and blue pumps, owned by the two Ford brothers, at the other.
Even after Cromwell Street had ceased to be neat, quiet and respectable, even after the very name had become synonymous with corruption and human cruelty almost beyond imagining; even then pockets of quiet respectability would persist at the school end of the street.
Years after Tommy Rich’s had been demolished and the playground turned into a pay-and-display car park for town-centre shoppers, you could still find fresh paintwork, scrubbed steps, laundered curtains, polished handles, shrubs protected against the weather by plastic bottles and supermarket carrier bags fitted over them at this end of Cromwell Street. Signs of self-respect and ingrained tradition; symbols of standards upheld against the scrappy lives and crude interferences and boom-boxes disturbing the peace; a defence against the loud obscenities rattling the windows in the middle of the night.
Mr and Mrs Miles have lived at 43 Cromwell Street for fifty years. Theirs is the house that abuts the perimeter wall of what used to be Tommy Rich’s (although the school is gone, the wall is still there). The windows at number 43 are filled with trailing plants hanging in baskets. Other plants, some swathed in cellophane, others standing in tin biscuit boxes, line the window ledges. Mr Miles, a retired civil servant, grows flowers in beds that run around two sides of his house. He is often to be found on his knees on the pavement, pruning and trimming, forking and sifting, tending his little bit of suburbia.
Mr Miles’s special talent is for growing roses – roses of vivid colours: bright crimsons and yellows set against the singing green he has painted the timber frame of his house and almost hallucinatory in this dingy backwater. Big-headed roses trained around thick cane poles.
The flowerbeds are a few inches high and two feet deep and sit right on the pavement. Invariably Mr Miles’s first task of the day is picking out the litter; taking away the cigarette packets and hamburger cartons, the lager cans and sweet wrappers that have been discarded there over the previous twelve hours. He does this not angrily, but routinely, before he moves on to anything to do with the care of the plants.
Many years ago, when the Mileses first came to Cromwell Street, there had been allotments all along the backs of the houses, on the spit of land separating Cromwell Street from the then very desirable St Michael’s Square. The strip of paved road running down the side of the Mileses’ house is an access road for Gloucester Art College. But they remember it when it used to be ‘Muddy Alley’, the rough track leading into the allotments. And it is possible that Mr Miles’s show of roses is an attempt by him to preserve a piece of that old landscape, a last trace of what used to be there before it was levelled and paved over.
Mr and Mrs Miles have a friend who used to take in washing seventy years ago for the people who then lived in their house at 43 Cromwell Street. There are two attic bedrooms where the maids used to sleep. Their friend has told them you used to hear the maids running along the corridor, their feet clattering on the brown-and-yellow-pattern mosaic tiles. They think their employer could have been a doctor. Anyway it was the professional classes.
Sir Thomas Rich was the founder of the Blue Coat School in Gloucester. The boys wore blue hats and blue jackets and the tradition passed down through the generations. Three hundred years later, boys in blue coats were still dragging their feet past Mrs Miles’s front-room window on their way to school. The ten-to-nine morning bell rang punctually in the lives of everybody in the area. In 1964, Tommy Rich’s moved to a northern suburb of Gloucester, although it would be a further ten years before the school buildings were finally taken down.
Throughout the sixties and seventies, Mr and Mrs Miles watched their friends and neighbours – the McCalls, the Jameses, the Taylors – gradually move out. When they went, they tended not to take very much with them. The better pieces went for sale in Mott’s Salerooms in Wellington Street around the corner. The rest – old sofas and tables, curtains and clothes, pictures and ornaments, china and cutlery – was left behind for the new people to use or not use, to keep or to throw away. The old belongings were shabby and shameful, unworthy of the new life that was to begin. People left behind in the old houses a prodigious amount of what they considered junk.
Friends and family and workmates and colleagues and sisters and brothers moved out. Friends and monsters and beasts and thugs and vandals and child-molesters and weirdos and alkies and addicts and scroungers and thieves and liars and cheats and hooligans and drop-outs and no-hopers filled the empty spaces. It started to feel that way anyway to the marooned older residents. ‘Ne’er-do-wells’ as Mr and Mrs Miles cautiously refer to the new neighbours. People with sitting-up or lying-down mattresses in the small cement front gardens. People who are in the courts every week.
A hitman hired to murder two Gloucester lovers at Barrow Wake beauty spot in November 1991 lived at 1 Cromwell Street, formerly the Commercial School. The pair were trussed up, and pushed over a cliff in a burning car.
One night a drunk put his fist through the window panel of Mr and Mrs Miles’s front door, a first in more than forty years of living there. This would be around the time of what they regarded as the riot. School House – the headmaster’s house at Tommy Rich’s – in recent years has become Winnie Mandela House, a hostel for homeless young people with bright Rastafarian colours painted on the front of it. And Winnie Mandela House acquired as overspill accommodation the small house next door to Mr and Mrs Miles. On the night of the riot they used the stakes from Mr Miles’s roses to batter down the hostel door.
There was a time when most of their neighbours fr
om aroundabout would join the Mileses standing on Park Road for the march past and the solemn ceremonial at the war memorial on Remembrance Sunday. No more. Such an archaic act of public remembering can have no appeal for the shifting population of a place whose main reason for being has become its capacity for overlooking; for wiping out and forgetting.
*
For five years from 1927, Eddie Fry, destined to be known as ‘The Pocket Hercules’ and ‘Gloucester’s Midget Strongman’, walked along Cromwell Street on his way to the back playground entrance of Sir Thomas Rich’s. He was aged eleven to sixteen then and would return to Cromwell Street to live a few years later when he married Doris Green, the girl at number 25.
Eddie’s father was the Son of ‘Fry and Son’, bakers, of 41 Southgate Street. The shop was just a short stroll away from Tommy Rich’s and the family lived over the premises. Eddie had attended the British School in Wellington Street until he was eleven, and then his father paid for him to become a Richian – it was like a calling card in the city; there was an association, the ‘Old Richians’ – in an attempt to knock some of the rough edges off him.
When the plan wasn’t succeeding, at the age of fourteen Eddie was made to work in the bakehouse from six in the morning until eight and then have his breakfast and change into the blue cap and blazer to go to school. After school he had to do his homework and then go back in the bakehouse and clean and grease bread tins before the nightshift came in.
He left school at the end of the term following his sixteenth birthday in 1932 and worked full time in the bakery until a persistent skin complaint of the dermatitis type saved him. He was advised to give up the bakery trade, but his father, as it happens, was just about to tell him to get out of the house and the shop; out of his life. Eddie bought a small tent and a motorbike and went and lived in Cranham Woods. Later he moved to a wooden shack on the banks of the Gloucester and Sharpness canal at Hardwick near Gloucester, a little way from the Pilot Inn.
It was around this time that he became very friendly with a young lady called Doris Green. The year was 1938. Her parents had retired three years earlier from the sweet shop they used to run in Lydney, in the Forest of Dean, to live in Cromwell Street in the centre of Gloucester. Number 25 was one half of a house, which, because of the way the pitch of the roof was recessed, looked like a box from the front. The box effect was emphasized by the fact that the doors to numbers 23 and 25 didn’t open from the street, as the front doors to all the other houses did, but were around the side.
In the case of number 25, this meant going down the alley-like path separating the house from the next-door mission hall. The boundary of the church land was marked by a high wooden fence, although the hall itself was little more than a shanty building, roughly constructed of wood and corrugated sheeting. As a result, you could hear the singing inside number 25 on those days when there were services. The sound used to come through quite well and it always made for a restful atmosphere which made Mrs Green and the members of her family feel blessed. There was very little other noise to compete with it in those days. The street was quiet and calm. Mr Green, Doris’s father, looked after the key to the mission hall and acted as a kind of warden.
25 Cromwell Street was rented from the King agency for seven shillings and sixpence a week. Freddie King – Alderman King – owned a number of properties in the area, and had his rents collected for him by a Mr Cyril every Friday. Every Friday at ten or ten thirty at the latest. He was punctual. Mrs Green would be on the King books for thirty-six years, from 1935 all the way through to 1971. And for many, many years the rent on 25 Cromwell Street never went up from the original seven and six.
Doris’s father was a church man, and Eddie knew without him ever having to say anything that he disapproved of the way he lived. He may have been an Old Richian, but the fact was he was living in a wooden shack on the canal bank and driving their daughter around in an Austin 7 Fabric Saloon for which he had given five pounds. But the aspect of Eddie that almost certainly set the loudest alarm bells ringing was the fact that, two or three years earlier, at the age of eighteen, he had joined the boxing club at the India House public house in upper Barton Street.
Eddie was eight stone and five foot nothing, but he trained with most of the old boys: Harry Hewlet, Tosh Wells, Billy Wagner, Harry Smith, Doug Watkins. He also had a round or two with Hal Bagwell and several other well-known boxers, not forgetting Johnny Thornton. But he couldn’t seem to put his heart into boxing as he didn’t like punishing people, but he enjoyed the keeping fit. So he concentrated on developing his body. He took up body-building.
He did at least one hour’s training in his bedroom every night and still went to India House boxing club two nights a week. After about a year he had developed a very strong and fit, well-musculated body. He was still short, but he had developed his upper body to impressive proportions. In 1937, the year before he started seeing Doris Green, Eddie gave his first public show as a strongman in the skittle alley running alongside the bar in India House. A report with pictures was published in the Citizen newspaper and it wasn’t long before he was in demand to give shows at clubs, pubs, mission halls and the city hospitals. He gave his first theatre show at the Theatre Deluxe in Northgate Street in Gloucester. A man called Wyndam Lewis played him on stage with ‘The Entry of the Gladiators’ on the great Wurlitzer organ and continued with a waltz while Eddie held the springs, ten strands of spring whose combined tension weight was more than six hundred pounds, expanded at arm’s length. This brought a big round of applause. His other feats included having somebody strike a sledge-hammer on to the three-hundredweight anvil he was supporting on his chest and inviting six heavy men to jump on his stomach. It was a talent show and he took second place.
If, as he suspected, he had always been ‘too rough and ready’ for his father, a future High Sheriff and Deputy Mayor of Gloucester, Eddie was definitely stronger meat than Mr and Mrs Green had been hoping for as a son-in-law. Sensing that their daughter was showing signs of wanting to spend the rest of her life with a boy who was going to grow old with a bed of nails stored away in his wardrobe, who would be photographed lying on it on his eightieth birthday, bare chested and with a woman in sharp heels standing on his stomach, they made it clear that he was no longer welcome at 25 Cromwell Street.
But Doris Green married Eddie Fry anyway. The wedding took place in February 1939, and their son Brian was born five months later. By then Doris and Eddie had found a flat in Cromwell Street numerically right next door to her parents. Numbers 25 and 27, though, had the mission hall standing in between them.
When Doris came out of hospital, she took the baby and went to stay with her parents. Mr and Mrs Green wouldn’t let Eddie see his son and, whenever he tried, told him the same thing: that he wasn’t wanted there.
Things continued in this fashion for more than a year, with Doris living on one side of the mission hall with her baby and her mother and father, and Eddie living on the other side on his own.
Eddie was working at the Gloucester Aircraft Company as a fitter in the wing shop when he was enlisted in October 1940. He was sent to Blackpool to do his basic training with the RAF and billeted in a house opposite the Central Pier. His wife was allowed to join him there and it was at Mrs Adshead’s in Blackpool that they enjoyed their last period of intimacy together. Doris went back to living with her mother and father in Cromwell Street when they returned to Gloucester. Eddie sold up everything at number 27 and two weeks later was posted to Exeter. The letters he wrote to Doris from there all went unanswered.
By the time the war was over, Doris Fry had had another son with another man and it became clear to Eddie that her parents had won. They had achieved what they wanted and the relationship was over. Eddie left Gloucester then for several years with the idea of following wherever his body-building talents led him.
It is worth following Eddie Fry for a while on his travels, because they reveal some striking coincidences of interest between
him and the next long-term resident of 25 Cromwell Street, Fred West, despite an age difference of twenty-five years.
For example, their life-long attachment to caravans and mobile accommodation and what Eddie Fry calls ‘living vans’: vans and other commercial vehicles converted to domestic use. Also of course for use as ‘love wagons’.
In the forties, Eddie took a high-sided Luton Motor Van, previously used for moving furniture, and converted it into a mobile living room. He put in a window high up so nobody could look in. He had a bed in there and a little table and it was all done out for electronics. He put board on the walls and covered it in wallpaper. Thirty years later, Fred West would carry out the same kind of conversion on a former Group 4 Ford transit van, welding the security chutes up, cutting in windows, boarding up the inside with chipboard, and adding a chipboard table for the children to play on. He customized all the vans he owned in this way.
Both Eddie Fry and Fred West were keen motorbike riders as young men, and they would both link the key events of their lives to the bikes or cars they were driving at the time. For more than twenty years Eddie drove a Bentley around town. He thought it was the appropriate transport for ‘the most well-known man in Gloucester’, which is what he considered himself to be at that time. The Bentley had once been the property of the children’s writer, Enid Blyton, and it was put through many resprays during the years that Eddie had it: black, Rolls-Royce ‘regal red’, glittering gold, back to black for the last couple of years in Eddie’s possession. He saw the golden floor in the reception area of a shop and walked out of there and had the car sprayed ‘colonial gold’. With the light on it, it would appear to have specks all through it. ‘Look at all the people I got mixed up with,’ he would say. ‘All the big high people. Two out of three people I meet know me.’