Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (10 page)

In August 1945, Margery met a man named Daniel Hamilton Shields at one of her local pubs, the Lord Nelson in the King’s Road. At the time Shields was serving as a private in the 13th Holding Battalion based in Herne Bay. They were immediately attracted to each other. Margery told Shields about her unstable married life and that her husband had been in prison. As she was apparently penniless at the time he met her, Shields suggested that Margery should come and live with him in Herne Bay. He had a friend there called Ruth Wright who could offer her a room for a while at her home in Tankerton, near Whitstable. With little to keep her in London and no other options, Margery followed Shields to Herne Bay.
³²

Shields was on the permanent staff of the regiment and had a sleeping out pass. With Margery now settled in lodgings with Shields’ friend Ruth, a young widow, he spent the next two weeks – or the nights at least – with Margery, returning to camp every day. Ruth found Margery not very talkative, but she did glean that she was separated from her husband and had been working as a film extra. She felt that Shields and Margery were very much attracted to one another. She was also aware that Margery had no money and when they left, it was Shields who paid the bill.
³³

After a couple of weeks, Shields tired of the daily journey from Tankerton to Herne Bay, so he arranged more convenient lodgings for himself and Margery with a Mrs Hambrook in Herne Bay itself. They were to stay here from early October to December of 1945. Shields and Margery signed in as ‘Mr and Mrs Hamilton’, but after a few weeks, Mrs Hambrook discovered that they weren’t married and challenged Margery, living out of wedlock not being considered respectable at the time. Desperate not to be turned out of their lodgings, Margery explained that she had separated from her husband because of his drinking. He’d been pestering her to get back together again, but she had refused. She confided in Mrs Hambrook that when she had first met Daniel Shields, she had been destitute and that he had been extremely kind to her ever since. Margery may well have been overstating her financial peril to both Shields and Mrs Hambrook, as Mrs Wheat was sending her money via the Post Office at Herne Bay throughout this period. Mrs Hambrook allowed them both to stay. But, as ever in Margery’s life, this moment of security was not to last for long.

At the beginning of November 1945, Shields was posted to Folkestone pending discharge from the army, but Margery wanted to stay on in Herne Bay. He continued to believe that his relationship with Margery was ongoing and was surprised when he returned one weekend to find her with a pilot who had been working on the jet plane record attempt at Herne Bay. The relationship with Shields deteriorated into recriminations about Margery’s flirtations with other men. After a terrible row in Folkestone, Margery returned to London.

In the New Year of 1946, Margery bumped into Shields again in the Lord Nelson in Chelsea, where they had met the year before. Shields was anxious to have a suitcase returned to him that she had borrowed. Margery told him that she had lent it to her husband but would get it back from him. She also said that she had left some of her clothes at their lodgings in Herne Bay and wondered if he might collect them for her. Shields obligingly did so, collecting her belongings and even paying some money she owed to Mrs Hambrook. He met Margery at the Lord Nelson to give her her things. They then spent the night together in Notting Hill at the Connaught Hotel, Pembridge Square, booking in as ‘Mr and Mrs Shields’. This was yards away from the Pembridge Court Hotel where she was to die six months later.

Margery’s brother Gilbert was now twenty-nine and had recently been demobilized. Gilbert had joined the Territorial Army in 1939 and as a 2nd lieutenant had been sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force in April 1940. He survived the evacuation of Dunkirk and after two years of anti-invasion duties he had been sent to India. He later fought in the Burma campaign of 1944 as a platoon commander. He was then promoted to company commander and subsequently to intelligence officer at Divisional H.Q. after the capture of Mandalay.
³⁴
It was while he was in Burma that Gilbert decided that he would not be returning to take up his position in the family firm as a solicitor. His father now deceased, the future of the business had fallen to him. But Gilbert’s wartime experiences had led him to discover his true vocation as a teacher and in 1946 his old headmaster offered him a position at a prep school in Derbyshire. In contrast to his sister, Gilbert Wheat was very much his parents’ son, and even as a young man displayed a reserved and dignified character with a great sense of moral responsibility. Though very aware of his sister’s frailties and temperament he was both supportive and kind to her and began to supplement her income with an allowance of £4 a week whilst she looked for the steady job that continued to elude her.

In the New Year, Gilbert travelled down from Derbyshire and visited Margery in her flat at 59 Earls Court Square. He found that she had only recently been discharged from St Mary Abbot’s hospital and was recuperating from a miscarriage. Margery had previously told her mother that she was pregnant with Peter’s child. Fortunately, Peter and his new girlfriend, Tiddles, had been present when Margery started to miscarry and had succeeded in getting her to the hospital.

After the miscarriage, Margery recovered and moved to Bramham Gardens, her final address, where her mother visited several times. At around this time, Margery confided to Mrs Wheat that she had a new boyfriend, but never revealed his name. She said that he was a ‘nice quiet man who used to turn up for breakfast and bring her something to cook and he would sit with her in the evenings’.
³⁵
In all probability, this was Peter Tilley Bailey, who had known Margery for about two years, but had only known her well since the beginning of that year. In January, they had bumped into each other at the Lord Nelson shortly after he had been released from prison having served his sentence for driving a stolen car along Knightsbridge. By June, Tilley Bailey was spending two or three nights a week with Margery at her flat in Earls Court Square and then at Bramham Gardens. He held a key to Margery’s flat, where he was known by the landlady as ‘Peter Gardner’, but he was to offer a very fragile stability.
³⁶
Though the relationship was exclusive on Margery’s side, whether she was aware of it or not, Tilley Bailey continued to have relationships with other women.

Like many women in this period, Margery Gardner clutched at the sexual freedom that the war had offered, but then struggled with the harsh consequences – a hand-to-mouth existence with no security and little consistency in a period already fraught with hardship. Her last letters to her mother also suggest some sort of recurring gynaecological problem as well as an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and depression (‘my nerves have gone to hell’). One of her friends, Iris Humphrey, observed that in the seven or eight years she had known her, she felt that Margery had ‘changed’:

When I knew Margery some years ago she was a nice girl and I could not help noticing how she had changed in every way. She seemed to have become cheap and acted as if she would not have minded who she was with.
³⁷

Another close friend, Joyce Frost, offered a more compassionate understanding of her character:

[Margery] was a very straightforward sort of girl with no harm in her at all, and very quiet, who never made male acquaintanceships for money. She was content to spend the night with a man after a few drinks for company.
³⁸

And perhaps this was at the heart of her erratic emotional life. She wanted company or, as her mother had said, ‘a nice quiet man . . . to sit with her in the evenings’. Instead of which she crawled from pub to pub, night after night, living on hand-outs, cadging cigarettes and comfort from a series of feckless men.

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, Margery Gardner seems very much a woman formed and defined by the times in which she lived. But she was also a woman ahead of her time. Like Tennessee Williams’ Blanche Dubois,
³⁹
she is revealed, in various witness statements and her own letters, to be a highly creative woman in challenging circumstances, emotionally needy, trying to locate a haven for herself in a broken, half-familiar world where she resorted – of necessity – to some pretty desperate choices; dependent if not on the kindness, then on the indulgence of strangers.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thursday 20 June 1946

J
oyce Frost had been friends with Margery Gardner since the late 1930s, but had lost contact with her for a couple of years during the war. They had bumped into each other again at a Victory Celebration Party on the rain-sodden ‘V’ Day, 8 June, which had been organized by Peter Gardner in Kensington.
¹
A few days later, they had seen each other again at the Trevor Arms in Knightsbridge. From thereon they had picked up their friendship, meeting at the Nag’s Head in Kinnerton Street, a pub much frequented by guardsmen from the nearby Knightsbridge Barracks. When they met for drinks, Joyce noticed that Margery always drank beer, but she was almost always broke. Joyce was thirty-three, had been married, but was separated from her husband. She lived in a flat at 51 Ennismore Gardens near Hyde Park. A lodger, Desmond O’Dowd, shared the flat with her.
²

On Wednesday night, 19 June, Joyce was drinking in the Nag’s Head at about eight o’clock with her lodger. She caught sight of Margery in the back bar of the pub, just inside the door. Margery was with two men at the time whom she introduced to Joyce as ‘Ken’ and ‘Jimmy’.
³
The latter was undoubtedly Heath, fitting his description perfectly: ‘[Joyce] distinctly remember[ed] he had a caterpillar badge in the left lapel buttonhole of his jacket.’
⁴
As the group chatted, Heath told Joyce that he was attached to the South African Air Force and had his own plane. She commented on Heath’s caterpillar badge and he was only too delighted to tell her, ‘That’s for baling out.’
⁵
It seemed that Margery had been introduced to Heath a few weeks before. He had only recently made the Nag’s Head one of his locals as he had previously been stationed abroad.

That night, Margery left the pub at about 10 p.m., but not before sitting down with Joyce and her lodger again, with Heath standing near them. Margery excitedly told Joyce that ‘Jimmy is going to fly me to Brussels or Paris’. The two women arranged to meet for lunch the next day.

Thursday 20 June was the last day of Margery Gardner’s life.

Peter Tilley Bailey called round to see Margery for about ten minutes at about 11 a.m. in the morning, finding her still in bed.He had stayed over at Bramham Gardens on the previous Sunday evening, as well as another night that week. Margery told him that she had met somebody that she hadn’t seen for some time. She didn’t say who it was or when she was going to meet him – and she may well have been testing Peter, trying to provoke a reaction from him.
⁶
The status of the relationship between Margery and Tilley Bailey is hard to read. He retained his own flat in Coliseum Terrace in Regent’s Park, yet spent two or three nights of the week at Bramham Gardens. They were sufficiently close for him to leave his identity card with Margery,
⁷
but though she was in dire need of money, he doesn’t seem to have offered to help her out financially.

Just before lunch, Margery met Joyce and her lodger for a drink at the Packenham Pub on Knightsbridge Green. From there, they headed to the Lido Café which was opposite another of their locals, the Paxton’s Head. Joyce paid for Margery’s lunch, as she was broke again. After eating they went over the road to the Paxton’s Head for another drink. O’Dowd left, leaving the two women alone together. They each had a glass of beer and Joyce subbed Margery some cigarettes. Margery was dressed in the same clothes she had worn the night before – her pale grey two-piece suit, a greyish brown cape made of possum fur, ‘very dark nail varnish’ and an unusual pair of earrings made from flowery fabric. Margery complained of a stain on her right-hand skirt pocket and went to buy a bottle of ‘Thawpit’ from Barnes’ the chemist next door. She told Joyce that the shilling she had just spent on the cleaning fluid was her last, but it’d be worth it as she wanted to look her best that night.

‘Why do you want to look your best tonight? Are you meeting somebody particular?’ asked Joyce.

‘An old boyfriend. Haven’t seen him in a while.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘No.’

‘And this mystery man – is he on a promise?’

‘Absolutely.’

According to Peter Tilley Bailey, Margery had been faithful to him throughout their relationship, but perhaps she was beginning to realize that this was not reciprocated. Despite her fidelity, her relationship with Tilley Bailey had not resulted in any tangible support from him. If Margery was contemplating being wined, dined and romanced by her date that evening, it would be the first time she had done so since she had started her relationship with Tilley Bailey.

Margery and Joyce carried on from the Paxton’s Head to Cooper’s Stores on the Brompton Road where Joyce bought some food. They then walked on to Joyce’s flat in Ennismore Gardens. On the way to the flat, it started to rain. Margery took her headscarf from her handbag – an RAF scarf – and covered her head from the shower. When they got back to the flat, they continued chatting for about a quarter of an hour. Margery remembered that she was supposed to see her lady doctor (the Dr Kelly that she mentions in her letters to her mother), but she’d have to put it off until the next day. Whilst at the flat, Margery asked if Joyce would mind if she drew her picture? Joyce thought Margery a very good artist and readily agreed. While she was drawing, they continued their conversation.
⁸