In the footsteps of Jack the Stripper
CATHI UNSWORTH puts the psycho into psychogeography on a tour of the mean streets and pop culture of Ladbroke Grove in the Fifties and Sixties.
It is 14 years since a book that should never have existed sent me on a long, strange trip back in time. David Seabrook’s Jack of Jumps, published by Granta in 2006, was a non-fiction account of the short lives and violent murders of eight women working in the dangerous illicit sex industry, whose brutalised bodies were left in a strange pattern, in and along the Thames west of Hammersmith, between 1959 and 1965. The search for their killer(s) raised the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan Police history and was never officially solved. Yet, despite its scale and the fact it happened within the living memory of many, this was a case few could recall.
I had only vaguely been aware of the Hammersmith Nude or Towpath murders before. The official investigation considered the final six victims – Hannah Tailford (31), Irene Lockwood (24), Helene Barthelemy (22), Mary Fleming (30), Frances Brown (21) and Bridget O’Hara (27), all murdered between 2 February 1964 and 11 January 1965 – were murdered by a serial killer. But Seabrook’s book and the first non-fiction account, crime reporter Brian McConnell’s Found Naked and Dead (1974), thought the 1959 murder of Elizabeth Figg (21) and the discovery of the remains of Gywnneth Rees (22) in November 1963 were also connected. Neither can explain why: McConnell died in July 2004, Seabrook in January 2009. All eight women were asphyxiated, probably with their own undergarments, and had possessions and clothing removed, leading Fleet Street to dub their attacker ‘Jack the Stripper’.
Then, most potently, there’s the geography of where they lived and died. Seabrook made me realise the centre of this story was not Hammersmith, but Ladbroke Grove, where I have lived since 1987. These women all took their final steps out of this world along streets I thought I knew well: I determined to go back in time to try and find them, let them say exactly what it was like to be a ‘good time girl’ in those bad old days. To do that, I made a sort of collage out of local history, popular culture and the voices of other residents of this time and place – and what a heady mix it proved.
Ladbroke Grove is now the home of multi-millionaire bankers, but in 1959 you could expect to find “more boys fresh from the nick, and national refugee minorities, and out-of-business whores, than anywhere else, I should expect, in London town,” according to resident Colin MacInnes in his classic Absolute Beginners, published that year.
Here was where the Windrush generation washed up with Peter Rachman, the Polish associate of Christine Keeler and the Kray twins, who was the only landlord prepared to accommodate black
The killer cocked a final snook at his pursuers before vanishing
people in his crumbling Victorian terraces around Powis Square. 1 It’s a part of London that puts the ‘psycho’ into psychogeography – acid bath killer John George Haigh, airman Neville Heath and former special constable John Christie had already been murdering their way through the locals. As a result of the housing situation, tensions between the incoming West Indians and the indigenous white population had been stoked into a full-blown riot the year before, with the help of Oswald Mosley’s British Unionist Party. As Absolute Beginners puts it: “You wouldn’t live in our Napoli if you could live anywhere else.”
But there were plenty of creative types who did – an angry young generation of writers, musicians and Pop artists.
The last witness to see Elizabeth Figg alive dropped her at a coffee stand outside Holland Park tube at 1.10am on the morning of 17
June 1959. Known as Betty, she was the sort of girl depicted in Arnold L Miller’s 1961 sexploitation flick West End Jungle, arriving in London, suitcase in hand, after being booted out of her broken home in Cheshire. Predatory pimps waited at train stations for such ‘mysteries’. Betty had not been in London long before she was ‘turned out’ by her boyfriend, Trinidadian boxer Fenton ‘Baby’ Ward, one of Rachman’s tenants.
Meanwhile, across the road in Lansdowne Studios, young engineer Joe Meek was working to produce his first LP, IHearA New World, which he described as “sounds for astral travel”. As well as inventing fantastic new recording techniques, Meek dabbled in Spiritualism – he would create his two biggest hits, ‘Telstar’ and ‘Johnny Remember Me’ following séances with his writing partner Geoff Goddard. Triangulating this corner, at number three Lansdowne Road, was the headquarters of the Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Association, founded by trance medium Winifred Moyes.
This inspired me to call my novel Bad Penny Blues, after the Humphrey Lyttelton hit engineered by Meek at Lansdowne, and to write the last moments of each of the murdered women as ‘transmissions’ – cries for help directed through the ether by Joe’s music and ‘heard’ via the dreams of my central character Stella Reade. Stella lives at 19 Arundel Gardens W11, next door to the flat Joe shared with his boyfriend, Lionel Howard. It was there, in January 1958, that Meek performed the séance when he was told Buddy Holly would die in a plane crash on 3 February. Joe did manage to get a message to his idol, bound for a UK tour that
month – but it wasn’t until a year later, on 3 Feburary 1959, that Buddy met his fate. Months later, Elizabeth Figg’s body was found just before dawn on the banks of the Thames in Duke’s Meadows, Chiswick. She had been strangled, the front of her dress ripped open. Her handbag and shoes were missing and her face washed clean.
Meek would know the heights of success with his Novello awardwinning ‘Telstar’ in 1963 and the depths of despair, addiction and blackmail over his then illegal homosexuality before he came to his own violent end, taking his landlady Violet Shelton with him, at his Holloway Road studios on 3 February 1967.
The corner of Lansdowne Road and Holland Park Avenue remains haunted. One reported sighting of final victim, Bridget O’Hara, was on the same spot, on the night of 12 January 1965. Her body was not discovered until 16 February, near an electricity substation on the Heron Trading Estate in Acton.
In Bad Penny Blues, Stella and her friend Jenny Minton are part of the nascent Pop Art scene, inspired by the fact that Peter Blake, David Hockney and Derek Boshier lived in Ladbroke Grove while studying at the Royal College of Art. Ken Russell captures them in his 1962 Monitor film Pop Goes The Easel, in their bedsit ateliers and at basement jazz clubs. Most luminous among them is Pauline Boty, who in 1959 was actively campaigning against the post-War rebuild that threatened historic London with its smash-and-grab redevelopment attempts. The ‘Anti Ugly’ demos she led prevented the demolition of Piccadilly Circus, but failed to stop E Vincent Harris’s Town Hall from being built on Thornton Street, Kensington. Where this building now stands, the body of penultimate victim, Frances Brown, was found, buried in rubble behind a civil defence shelter, on 25 November 1964.
Sixteen months previously, Brown had been one of the few witnesses to testify in the defence of society osteopath Stephen Ward, at his trial for procuring and living off immoral earnings instigated by the Profumo scandal. The former Minister for War’s involvement with Ward’s muse and Rachman’s old flame Christine Keeler became the public’s introduction to ‘our Napoli’ and its Venn diagrams of vice.
Frances had much in common with the two victims who preceded her, Helene Barthelemy and Mary Fleming, all being slight, dark-haired Scotswomen who frequented the same hairdresser and pubs. At the Warwick Castle on Portobello Road, where Frances took her last drink, the landlord ran a sweepstake with his regulars on who would be next. It was a desperate attempt to laugh in the face of a killer who they believed had already put two of the pub’s habitués, Hannah Tailford and Irene Lockwood, into the Thames.
Hannah, found on the Thames foreshore at Upper Mall on 2 February 1964, was not unfamiliar with Stephen Ward’s milieu. She told stories of a party at a house in Eaton Square where, in the autumn of 1960, she was duped into providing a floorshow with a man in a gorilla suit for an audience in dinner suits and diamonds. More sinister still, she reportedly had a new beau who promised he would take her to live in Mortlake.3 For it was there, in the Borough Council Refuse Disposal Plant, that the remains of Gwyenneth Rees were discovered on 8 November 1963, buried in a shallow grave across the river from where Elizabeth Figg was found. Rees, who had been missing for three months, had no known connections to the others – her brief, brutal career in the sex industry had largely taken place in Whitechapel.
Irene Lockwood, found on the foreshore at Corney Reach on 8 April, knew Hannah and the circles she moved in. Before her death, she was working an afterhours scam with the caretaker of the Holland Park Tennis Club, Kenneth Archibald, luring punters into illegal late-night gambling. Police found mention of a ‘Kenny’ in her diary – then Archibald turned up at Notting Hill nick, claiming responsibility. He seemed to know the method of her murder and the time and place she had been dropped into the river. But with no evidence other than this confession, he was acquitted; he then told the waiting press he’d made the whole story up while depressed. Besides, there had been another murder while he was in custody – Helene Barthelemy, found in a cul-de-sac in Brentford on the morning of 24 April.
Helene’s body was covered in fine particles of paint – as were those of Mary Fleming and Bridget O’Hara – of the type used to respray cars. The Met threw considerable resources into trying to find the garage it came from. Twenty-four square miles of West London were broken into three sectors, each assigned to a detective sergeant with 12 officers. The paint was finally traced to the Heron Trading Estate, close to where Bridget’s body was placed – as if the killer was cocking a final snook at his pursuers before he vanished into thin air.
Pauline Boty never got to fulfil her potential either – she died aged 28 from a rare form of leukemia. You can still catch her on celluloid, briefly illuminating Alfie in 1966, and the ominously titled Edgar Wallace Mystery Strangler’s Web in 1965. While still at the RCA, Pauline had attended a lecture on the New Existentialism by the second of Ladbroke Grove’s literary Colins, Colin Wilson, who lived at 24 Chepstow Villas. This is the house immortalised in Wilson’s 1961 debut novel Adrift In Soho and was also the inspiration for Lynne Reid Banks’ 1960 The L-Shaped Room,
filmed by Bryan Forbes in 1962.
Bad Penny Blues was written as a gut reaction to Jack of Jumps,
not because I had any illusions about solving this mystery. During the course of my investigations, I thought I could maybe postulate a theory about what might have been, but the killer was not the most important person in this story for me – it was all about the victims. However, Seabrook’s sulphurous attitude towards these women and the world they inhabited is not the reason I say his book should not have existed – it’s because he was able to create it using the actual case files, which are supposed to be sealed to the public until 2050. He is no longer here to account for this. The mystery that continues to haunt is why he was allowed access to them. 5
NOTES AND SOURCES
1 Powis Square is the location of Turner’s house in the 1970 Ladbroke Grove classic Performance. Johnny Shannon, who played Harry Flowers, went on to portray a Rachman-style landlord in Julien Temple’s 1986 film adaptation of Absolute Beginners.
2 The Legendary Joe Meek, John Repsch (Woodford House, 1989).
3 Brian McConnell, Found Naked And Dead (New English Library, 1974).
4 Tony Moore, Policing Notting Hill: 50 Years of Turbulence (Waterside Press, 2013).
5 In Dead Fashion Girl (Strange Attractor Press, 2019) Fred Vermorel ascertains who gave Seabrook access to the verboten files. Stewart Home speculates why at www.stewarthomesociety.org/ seabrook.htm.
✑ CATHI UNSWORTH is the author of six pop-cultural noir novels. A regular contributor to FT, she has given many talks and walks for The Sohemian Society, The London Fortean Society, The Barbican Centre and The Bishopsgate Institute. She lives and works in Ladbroke Grove, London. For more go to www. cathiunsworth.co.uk