Time to Be in Earnest (33 page)

I took the 7:30 a.m. bus from Gloucester Green, Oxford, expecting that the M40 would be very busy and the journey take far more than the usual hour. However, the road was clear and I got home in fine style. I made a fuss of Polly-Hodge and fed her, and then took the bus to Marble Arch, walked down Park Lane and joined the Countryside March as it entered Hyde Park. Park Lane was closed, and it was strange to have the road almost entirely to myself. I walked through the barriers to join the marchers and immediately found myself hailed by Margaret Clayton, who was my last Assistant Secretary when I worked at the Home Office. She had retired early and was now working part-time for six days a week and obviously happy. She moved quickly on to join her friends before the march ended on the road just north of the Albert Memorial.

A large barrier slung across the path with the word “Finish” on it was a slight anticlimax, but I could understand why the organizers had decided against speeches. The marchers are united in their support of the countryside and those who live and work in it, but I doubt whether large landowners and small tenant farmers have a great deal in common, or that all the marchers care greatly about fox-hunting. I wouldn’t wish to hunt myself; this is mainly because, even if I were young, strong and able to ride, it wouldn’t seem to me an activity worth risking my neck for. But I am sure the fox suffers less from the hounds’ jaws at the end of a hunt than by shooting or the horror of poisoning, and it seems irrational to ban hunting while permitting fishing or tolerating the conditions under which our eggs are produced.

It was a wonderfully diverse group of people: a tall corduroy-suited elderly man who looked like the stage stereotype of an irascible colonel striding along alone, groups of the young chatting or singing as they
walked, middle-aged ladies who were obviously stalwart upholders of the WI, and agricultural workers who marched with a kind of rugged determination in support of their livelihoods. No one dropped litter.

My walk home along the Bayswater Road was made interesting by the pictures on the park railings. They are an odd mixture. Some of the watercolours, particularly of flowers, have an attractive spontaneity and freshness and in all I saw three pictures which I would have been reasonably happy to see on my walls. But most are awful, although the non-representational art didn’t seem worse than some examples I’ve seen in prestigious galleries. I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I liked the little autobiographies and critical notes and extracts from magazines which are pinned up by some of the paintings. Obviously those painters are managing to make a living, and good luck to them. I would much rather buy a picture from these railings than a reproduction. I did in fact find a very agreeable scene of Dover Cliffs some years ago which I still enjoy.

St. David’s Day always reminds me of my first day at the Home Office. I was being taken on the usual short induction tour of departments and had arrived in the Home Secretary’s private office. James Callaghan was Home Secretary at the time and the outer office was piled high with daffodils sent to him by his constituents. The office was busy and it was hard to reconcile this controlled activity with the overwhelming smell of spring flowers. Thus, incongruously, I began the last stage of my working life as a bureaucrat.

I learned early to cope with parliamentary questions, those regular minor irritants which fell on to the desk in the form of lurid yellow folders. I had to provide background notes about the MP and his preoccupations and the possible reason for the question, provide an answer and then follow up with pages of notes for supplementaries. This was the most difficult part of the exercise. The object was to ensure that the Secretary of State or Minister was never left without a readily accessible answer to any supplementary question that the Member might choose to ask. Apart from the Forensic Science Service and Forensic Pathologists, I was also given responsibility for police vehicles. When I protested I couldn’t even drive, my Assistant Secretary said that made me eminently suitable for the task.

By chance my first PQ was from an MP who asked for details of every make of vehicle held by all the police forces in England and Wales. The draft reply I put up said this information would be of no possible public
use. My Assistant Secretary gently pointed out that there was a form of words to provide for questions where the cost of obtaining the information would be disproportionate to its use, but that I hadn’t hit on it.

I received no period of formal training but occasional miscellaneous advice, the most important being never to use a green ballpoint, since green was the prerogative of Sir Philip Allen, the head of the office.

Despite some initial stress, I enjoyed my time at the Home Office. It is a department where ministers’ reputations are more easily lost than gained. The department is inured to receiving a critical press, being seen as draconian, illiberal and dilatory, but I left with a respect for the integrity and intelligence of the senior officers with whom I worked.

It was while I was in the Police Department that I wrote my first work of nonfiction, in cooperation with the Assistant Secretary, Tom Critchley.
The Maul and the Pear Tree
(published in 1971) deals with a series of notorious and brutal murders in Wapping in 1811, referred to usually as the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. The first victims were twenty-four-year-old Timothy Marr, a linen draper on the Highway, his wife Celia, their three-and-a-half-month-old baby son Timothy, and their apprentice boy, James Gowen. It was a Saturday, 7th December 1811, and the shop remained open until eight. A little before midnight, Timothy Marr called to his servant girl, Margaret Jewell, gave her a pound and sent her out to pay the baker’s bill and to buy some oysters. She found the baker’s shop closed, went to another place to try to buy the oysters but again was unsuccessful. After about twenty minutes she returned home to find the door shut tightly against her and the shop in darkness. Thinking that the family might have gone to bed, she pulled the bell, the jangling seeming unnaturally loud in the quiet street. And listening, she heard a sound that gave her the comforting assurance that Marr or his wife would soon be opening the door. There was a soft tread of footsteps on the stairs. But no one came. The footsteps ceased and again there was silence.

The clanging of the bell and the girl kicking the door aroused the interest of a night watchman and then the neighbour, John Murray. He told the watchman to continue pulling hard at the bell and he would go into his back yard and see if he could rouse the family from the back of the house. The back door was open and he made his way inside by a light from a candle burning on the landing of the first floor.

In the shop he found the first body, the apprentice boy James Gowen, with the bones of his face shattered by blow after blow. With a groan,
Murray stumbled towards the door and found his path blocked by the body of Mrs. Marr, blood still draining from her battered head. Murray opened the front door and screamed his news incoherently, “Murder! Murder!” and the small crowd, swollen by the arrival of neighbours, pressed into the shop. The air was loud with groans and cries. They found the body of the child still in its cradle, the side of its mouth laid open with a blow, the left side of the face battered and the throat slit so that the head was almost severed from the body. And behind the counter, lying face downwards, was the body of Timothy Marr.

But that wasn’t the end of horror. Twelve days later, and in the next parish, a blameless middle-aged publican, Mr. Williamson of the King’s Arms in New Gavel Lane, Shadwell, his wife and their maidservant were murdered with equal brutality.

The crimes provoked nationwide panic. The government offered an unprecedented reward for the conviction of the murderers, while there was a vigorous and persistent demand for the reform of the police. The Prime Minister himself speculated on the crimes in the House of Commons while Sheridan made a characteristically witty and trenchant attack on the incompetence of the investigation. De Quincey was powerfully interested in the murders and years later they inspired his essay on “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

Both Tom and I were fascinated by the setting as we were by the investigation of the crime. In 1811 the Port of London was the greatest port in the world. Every year 13,000 vessels from all parts of the world dropped anchor. The great vessels of the East India Company, bulky and formidable as men-of-war, bearing cargoes of tea, drugs, muslin, calicoes, spices and indigo, colliers from Newcastle, whalers from Greenland, coastal vessels, packets, brigs, lighters, barges, ferries and dinghies. The parishioners of Wapping lived their lives against a constant accompaniment of river sounds. It was from the bustling trade of the river that nearly all the inhabitants, rich and poor, drew their life: stevedores, watermen, suppliers of rope and tackle, ships’ bakers, marine store dealers, instrument makers, boat builders, laundresses who lived by taking in the sailors’ washing, carpenters to repair the ships, rat catchers and the keepers of cheap houses where the seamen lodged.

What was fascinating to me was the investigation. It was extraordinarily incompetent. The various authorities—the river police, the night watchmen, the magistrates of Shadwell and those of Wapping—were more concerned to guard their own reputations and functions than to
cooperate effectively. The end of the case was as macabre as the beginning. A young seaman, John Williams, was arrested for the crime but was found dead in prison, apparently by his own hand. His decaying corpse was paraded through the streets of East London to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. This was an act of public vengeance unique in the history of English criminal law.

The case came to Tom Critchley’s attention when he was writing his history of the police in England and Wales, but when he mentioned it to me I remembered that I had read an account in the
Newgate Calendar
and had been very far from convinced of the guilt of John Williams. Accordingly, we sent for as many papers as we could find and started our investigations, arriving at a conclusion which cannot now possibly be proved but which seems far more logical and credible than Williams’s guilt. His conviction was certainly expedient. There was a tacit agreement among the authorities that the Ratcliffe Highway affair should be allowed to fade from the public mind. Whether Williams was an accomplice, whether he died by his own hand or was murdered by those who wanted to ensure their own safety, it seems likely that the body which was buried with ignominy at the crossroads of St. George’s Turnpike was the body of an eighth victim.

The Committee of Management of the Whitbread Literary Awards met at
12
o’clock in Chiswell Street. I was full of a sensible resolution to take the Tube from Notting Hill Gate to the Barbican rather than get embroiled in traffic, but then decided against it and took a cab. I was glad I did when the cabbie drove into the park between tossing daffodils and bright patches of purple crocuses. On the Mall fortress the matted creeper, like a brown tufted rug, was falling from the wall in great swathes.

After the working lunch I travelled from the Barbican to Westminster and arrived in the House of Lords at about 3:30 for the debate on the report stage of the Teaching and Higher Education Bill. We won a victory on Amendment 50, moved by Emily Blatch, to restore grants, and again on the Amendment providing that English students at Scottish
universities shall not be required to pay for the fourth year. At present only Scottish students and those from overseas are exempt. Tessa Blackstone argued that the first year at Scottish universities is the equivalent of the final year of upper school in the rest of the UK, and that it is reasonable, therefore, for students other than those educated in Scotland to enter at the second year and complete their degree in three years. But it is unjust and, indeed, ridiculous that a student at Edinburgh University who lives in Belfast will pay £4,000 for his course and one from Dublin will pay £3,000, one from Manchester will pay for the extra year but the one from Munich gets it free. Both Lords’ Amendments will, of course, be lost in the Commons, but at least the Lower House will have to debate it again.