Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (15 page)

Our gunners smashed their formation almost at a volley, scattered them like fluttering birds, sent cones of bursting shells over them, around them, straight at them. The Huns had the gaping six miles of estuary below them. They pelted bombs down. Many hit the water. Great columns of water surged up and the din was terrific.
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The German planes were driven away by Royal Naval Air Service pilots resulting in the loss of ten ‘Hun’ aircraft. German air raids continued throughout the month and 300,000 Londoners sought nightly shelter in tube stations, just as they would do a generation later.

Heath’s parents later claimed that their son had been born in an air raid and that this ill-starred beginning must in some way have contributed to his complex personality. As early as 1938, when Heath was sent to borstal, his father was citing the air raid as the reason for his son’s excitable and highly strung nature.
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Reg Spooner, thorough as ever, examined records of enemy action and found that no air raids were recorded in Ilford on 6 June itself. But there is no reason to doubt the Heaths’ testimony, as they are generally reliable and honest. It may be that Bessie Heath’s labour started on the evening before – the day of the raid over the southeastern counties. This is the first of the many confusions that occur throughout Heath’s life and story. Three doctors and two nurses attended the labour and Heath’s head was ‘badly damaged by instruments at [his] birth’,
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suggesting a forceps delivery. This would have been necessary if Mrs Heath was exhausted or if the baby was becoming distressed. Air raid or not, Heath’s birth was clearly traumatic.

After his trial, Heath’s parents were at pains to search their memories for incidents from their son’s childhood that might have affected his emotional or psychological development. Their well-intentioned attempts to uncover a forgotten clue or some inherent pattern that could justify his later actions might seem a little unscientific. Was there a genetic root to his aberrant behaviour? Bessie Heath revealed that her uncle, William Clevely, had been confined to a mental home for most of his life and had died, institutionalized, in 1938. ‘He was quite small when he set his bedclothes alight and bedroom on fire – and the shock was so great that his brain never grew on normal lines again,’ she stated.
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She observed that her son had ‘always been susceptible to shock’ and her husband concurred in a letter to Heath whilst in prison, reassuring his son that ‘any kind of shock has always been the thing to upset you most’.
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As well as reiterating the damaging psychological effects of being born into a world at war, they searched for concrete physical reasons to justify their son’s acts – a broken wrist or a fractured elbow in childhood, maybe? For surely, to commit such horrific acts, to cause such pain and suffering – there must
be
a reason? But perhaps these are the desperate questions that any parent in the Heaths’ circumstances would ask themselves. Where did we go wrong? Are we, as parents, in some way responsible?

Heath’s father, William, was born in 1890 into a respectable, hard-working, lower-middle-class family from Highbury, north London. William’s father had trained as a copperplate engraver of maps and charts, but then set up his own business, running an hotel.
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William himself worked as an assistant clerk with the civil service. Bessie Clevely was the daughter of a printer and had also been born in London, a little further north than William in Stoke Newington. In 1899, the Clevely family had moved some distance away to Ilford in Essex. This could be because the Clevelys had relatives there, as the whole Heath family, after the traumatic events of 1946, moved back to the area in the 1950s.

In April 1913, 23-year-old William Heath married Bessie Clevely at St Alban’s, Ilford – a classic pressed red-brick church – just around the corner from Bessie’s parents’ house at 35 Dudley Road. This was to be William and Bessie Heath’s first married home and where they would live with their extended family for the duration of the First World War. William Heath had been registered as a ‘warehouseman’ at the time of his marriage and as a ‘soft goods traveller’ at the time of Heath’s birth, but it’s very likely that he saw active service at some point during the war. The Military Service Act in January 1916 made conscription compulsory for single men between eighteen and forty-one. Married men like William were only exempt until May 1916. By the end of the war, 25 per cent of the total male population had joined the army, a total of 5 million men.

Of the many English towns that are the backdrop to Heath’s story, Ilford seems to have changed the most – not only because of wartime bombing and 1960s urban planning – but because of post-war immigration. A large Asian community of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs now resides in the quiet and ordered streets around the Heaths’ first home in Dudley Road. Hindu temples have replaced Anglican churches, front gardens concreted over to accommodate people carriers. Only half an hour from London by train, it’s not the first time in its history that Ilford has undergone a dramatic cultural change. For over 1,200 years, Ilford had been a small village in Essex, part of the parish of Barking. But after the first rail link from Liverpool Street was constructed in the 1870s, the entire character of Ilford changed, and the town evolved with great speed into a dormitory suburb. With the advent of the railway, it was a comfortable commuting distance from central London and would house the clerks, assistant managers, teachers and shop workers – like the Clevelys and the Heaths – who served the booming city of London at the zenith of its imperial potency. Developers bought up large areas of land specifically for housing developments with the intention of attracting the new breed of owner-occupiers. Thousands of homes were built to suit the budgets of blue- and white-collar workers, from domestic staff to managing directors. In many cases even the deposit was the subject of a short-term loan provided by the builders. Shops, swimming pools, theatres, cinemas and libraries all followed as Ilford developed into a sedate and self-sufficient satellite of the metropolis. The expansion of the area was extraordinary; in 1881 Ilford had a population of 7,645 – by 1911, it had rocketed over tenfold to 78,188.
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By the 1920s, Ilford was established as a mature and fashionable suburb, but in 1922 the town was shaken by a story of sex and violence that took place on a politely ordered avenue and within an archetypal family that had come to define the comfortable but aspiring middle class that typified the area. This story – which was to wreck the lives of several local families – would anticipate the fate of the Heaths as well as touching their lives with an extraordinary, chilling coincidence.

Good-looking and sophisticated, Edith Thompson and her husband Percy were typical of the commuter families that had settled in Ilford. Edith was a professional woman who managed a hat shop in central London. Having married the dull and occasionally violent Percy Thompson, her head had been turned by a young man serving in the merchant navy, Frederick Bywaters, whom she had been introduced to by her younger sister, Avis. Looking for a room in the area when home from sea, Bywaters became the Thompsons’ lodger. Nine years Edith’s junior, he was handsome, virile and full of stories about his exotic travels abroad. Soon after he moved into the Thompsons’ house at 41 Kensington Gardens, Bywaters and Mrs Thompson began an affair. When he was away at sea, Edith fuelled the relationship with a series of letters, heavily influenced by the romantic fiction she voraciously consumed, but also chronicling the journey of their own sexual relationship in intimate detail. She poured out her love for Bywaters and her desperate desire to be rid of her husband. She even suggested that she had dosed Thompson’s food with poison and ground glass from an electric light bulb. This became the tabloid image of Edith Thompson – a ‘Messalina of the Suburbs’
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who used her age and experience first to seduce the naïve Bywaters and then to entice him to kill her husband. But this image proved to be a fantasy – a melodramatic attempt on Edith’s behalf to keep Bywaters excited by the relationship during his time away at sea, whilst she remained at home, submitting uncomfortably to her husband in the bedroom. When Bywaters returned to England, Percy Thompson became aware of his wife’s adultery and confronted the lovers, telling Bywaters to leave the house immediately. Bywaters did so, but insisted at the same time that Thompson should give his wife a divorce.
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On 3 October 1922, the Thompsons were returning home from the Criterion Theatre at Piccadilly Circus, having caught the 11.30 p.m. train from Liverpool Street, arriving at Ilford Station around midnight. Whilst they were walking along a part of Belgrave Road that was unlit by streetlamps, an assailant rushed past the couple and attacked Percy Thompson with a knife, pushing Edith aside. She cried out, ‘Oh, don’t, oh don’t!’ in ‘a most piteous manner’. Percy collapsed against the wall. The Thompsons were only 54 yards from home.

Bessie Heath’s older brother, Percy Clevely, was then living with his wife at 62 Mayfair Avenue, a few minutes’ walk from the Thompsons’ house. On the night of the murder, Percy had also been walking home from Ilford Station with a friend, Dora Pittard. Suddenly, Edith Thompson ‘seemed to come out of the darkness’, running towards them, hysterical and incoherent. She said that her husband had fallen down and was ill and that she desperately needed help. She wanted to know if they knew of a doctor? Percy Clevely and Dora took Mrs Thompson to a Dr Maudsley at 62 Courtland Avenue who said he would come and help. Mrs Thompson ran ahead and when Clevely and Dr Maudsley arrived, they found Percy Thompson propped up against a wall with his wife kneeling over him. Dr Maudsley struck a match and examined Thompson, but he was by then already dead. Percy Clevely asked Mrs Thompson what had happened and she said that she couldn’t say. Something had ‘brushed’ or ‘flew’ past them and then Percy had collapsed. When Dr Maudsley told Edith that her husband was dead, she asked, ‘Why did you not come sooner and save him?’

Percy Thompson had died of stab wounds and both his wife and Bywaters were arrested and charged with murder. Percy Clevely was called as a prosecution witness to the Old Bailey on 6 December 1922.
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He was cross-examined by Travers Humphreys who had appeared for the Crown in the trials of Oscar Wilde, Dr. Crippen and George Joseph Smith, the ‘Brides in the Bath’ killer.

Despite a lack of convincing evidence that Edith Thompson had in any way instigated the murder, both she and Bywaters were executed in January 1923 – with Mrs Thompson dragged, drugged and unconscious, to the gallows, causing mass protestations of her innocence and a strong lobby against the death penalty. This controversial case, essentially a miscarriage of justice, was to continue to fuel the debate for the abolition of the death penalty throughout the rest of the century. Such was the public fascination with the case, that later, when the contents of the Thompsons’ home were put up for auction, the hedge in the front garden was completely stripped of its leaves by people wanting a souvenir.
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Edith Thompson’s beautifully decorated, double-fronted Edwardian house – her pride and joy – was minutes away from the more modest Clevely family home in Dudley Road. But for the young Heaths and their little son, Neville, it must have seemed extraordinary that a murder could have taken place in the streets of Ilford – on their own doorstep. Bessie’s brother Percy was in the papers – and not just in the
Ilford Recorder
and the
East Ham Echo
, but in the national press, too. This sort of scandal just didn’t involve ordinary people like William and Bessie Heath. But wouldn’t it be a fascinating tale to tell their grandchildren by the fireside one day – the time when Uncle Percy was a witness in the most sensational trial of the age?

After Edith Thompson’s execution, there was much local sympathy for her family who continued to live in the area. In the wake of such traumatic events, how did they find the resolve to face the world with such quiet dignity?

A generation later, William and Bessie Heath were to find out for themselves.

In about 1918 the Heaths had some studio photographs taken of their young son. Dressed in white, with long, golden curls, he looks girlish, as was the fashion of the day. His eyes are bright and lively and we know them to be a dazzling blue. In one photograph, he leans against his mother’s head, his left arm resting on her shoulder, his baby teeth just visible as he and Bessie smile into the camera. His mother is an attractive woman, not yet thirty, with even features and dark hair. There’s trust and love in the photograph. A proud and contented mother, an adored and beautiful child.

Possibly motivated by William’s work as a manufacturer’s agent in the textile industry, the young family left Ilford in the spring of 1920 and moved across London to Merton in south-west London. At the same time, Bessie had announced that she was pregnant again. The Heaths set up home in a corner property in a street of smart Edwardian houses at 1 Bathurst Avenue where, on 5 September, Bessie gave birth to another son, Carol William Clevely Heath – a younger brother and companion for little Neville. But tragedy was soon to cloud their lives.

Tubercular meningitis, popularly known as consumption, was an epidemic in the early twentieth century with no known cure. Feared by the entire population, it was known to be infectious and deadly. Children under four were most vulnerable as their immune systems were not sufficiently developed to fight the ravages of the disease which affected the lungs and resulted in lethargy, fever, weight loss and coughing – sometimes, distressingly, bringing up blood. Tragically for his family, Carol Heath soon began to exhibit symptoms. The disease was hugely contagious and both Bessie and William would have been vulnerable to it, but the family member at the highest risk of infection would have been Neville, who was six at the time. Many adults who developed the illness would be treated in sanatoria, effectively removed from society in order to prevent the spread of their disease, but Carol, being still a child, was cared for at home. Both parents would have been aware that his prognosis would be very bleak; in this period, the vast majority of individuals who contracted the disease did not survive. At the beginning of February 1923, Carol’s condition deteriorated and he fell into a coma. He never recovered and died at home on 24 February 1923, his mother at his bedside. He was just two.