A Deafening Silence (eBook)

Forgotten British Murders

Simon Farquhar (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
264 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-1-80399-643-1 (ISBN)

Infos

In a decade of researching and writing about crime, Simon Farquhar has met many of those professionally or personally affected by it. They all carry with them stories that the rest of the world has forgotten, but which to them remain unforgettable. In A Deafening Silence, five of these stories are told, in full, for the first time. Retracing these historic tragedies with a modern eye, talking to surviving witnesses and police officers, exploring Home Office files and even previously unseen evidence, each investigation reveals powerful truths about those who take away a human life and those bereaved by their actions, while shining a new light on how our society has changed - or still needs to change. Time is also taken to explore the untold stories of what happens after sentence is passed, after the press packs up and leaves, once the rest of the world has moved on. What becomes of the survivors, and what becomes of the criminals? What traces of these crimes still remain today? Exhaustively researched and sensitively written, these remarkable accounts are both harrowing and heartbreaking, presenting us with humanity at its cruellest, at its most vulnerable, at its most compassionate and at its most courageous.

SIMON FARQUHAR is a writer and broadcaster. His first book, true crime memoir A Dangerous Place (The History Press, 2016), was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-fiction. His plays include Rainbow Kiss, which played at the Royal Court Theatre in London and has since run in New York and Rome, Candy Floss Kisses and Elevenses with Twiggy for BBC Radio 4, Dream Me a Winter (Old Vic) and Wassail Play (Theatre Royal Dumfries). He has also written and presented documentaries including A Sympathetic Eye for BBC Radio 4, and writes regularly for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent. He has appeared on many true crime documentaries and podcasts.

Autor

Simon Farquhar is a writer and broadcaster. His plays include Candy Floss Kisses and Elevenses with Twiggy for BBC Radio 4, Rainbow Kiss (Royal Court), Dream Me a Winter (Old Vic) and Wassail Play (Theatre Royal Dumfries). His true crime memoir, A Dangerous Place: The Story of the Railway Murders, was published by The History Press in 2016 and shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction.

Textauszug

HIGH WINDOWS

James Furze Gratton (1909–1968)

For some, life begins with a narrow corridor and moves to a room with high windows. Choices are few. Brighter ways of life are beyond grasping. Existence is being sat in a grey room with windows too high to look from while a summer’s day blazes outside. It is unhappily apt that institutions which housed the mentally ill of yesterday were so often worlds of narrow corridors and high windows.

Springfield Hospital in Tooting, south-west London, was one such institution. Walking the site today of what was originally the Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, one meets the contrasting realities of the treatment of the mentally ill in the past and in the present. The imposing main building, sitting spider-like at the centre of the complex, is stern and Victorian, giving off a menacing sense of what once passed for mental healthcare in this country. Surrounding it are newer buildings, anonymous but less ominous, clinical rather than gothic.

While today’s patients are cared for in modern, enlightened, if underfunded facilities, the old hospital they sit within the gloomy shadow of is now being restored and regenerated into luxury apartments. The work is not yet complete, and for now, I can wander the ruins of wards of the past. These are ghostly, unhappy places. Shreds of paper trail from the walls of dispiritingly long corridors, off which, in one room, still stand the rusting metal frames of eight beds on each side of the room. This stark chamber would have once housed sixteen psychotically unwell people, each trying to cope with their own illnesses while surrounded by the confusions of fifteen others. Containment was the philosophy of psychiatric care in the past. Whereas today the ambition is to return patients to the outside world, for many years the intention was simply to keep them away from it.

Prior to the Asylum Act of 1808, which encouraged the opening of such an institution in every county, the mentally ill had wandered the streets or drudged in workhouses. ‘Private madhouses’ were only available to those with wealthy means, although some also accommodated a sprinkling of ‘pauper lunatics’, who were paid for by the parish but strictly segregated and given a lesser form of care.

Springfield was one of the hospitals built after the Act, in 1841. By the end of its first year, it was housing 385 patients. By the end of the decade, it was overcrowded, two new wings being added to accommodate a further 400. Most patients remained here for a vast amount of time. Many of them never left.

After the Lunacy Act of 1890, mentally ill adults were separated from the younger patients, although in the brutal language of the age, this was represented here by the construction of an ‘Annexe for Idiot Children’. The hospital continued to grow over the next half-century, housing nearly 2,000 patients at the start of the Second World War.

In 1948, grossly overcrowded and grossly understaffed, the hospital joined the NHS. In the years that followed, though patient numbers eased slightly as psychotropics developed, serious concern was starting to be expressed about mental healthcare and the rumours of the cruelty that surrounded it. In 1967, Barbara Robb’s Sans Everything: A Case to Answer exposed inadequacy and ill-treatment in such institutions.* Robb spent six weeks at Springfield and saw ‘a great many acts of calculated cruelty and enough corruption to sicken me completely’.1

A year later, on the afternoon of Saturday, 22 June 1968, Francis Read, a former porter at the hospital, was visiting a patient, Mrs Clemens, and took her for a drink at the King’s Head pub at Tooting Bec. They returned to the hospital, entering by the Glenburnie Lodge gate, at 1.55 p.m. They walked around the grounds and towards what remained of the hospital’s farmland, most of which had been sold off, only some poultry, vegetable patches and a piggery remaining. Read glanced across at the long, open Nissen hut which served as the machine shed. On the concrete floor lay a man’s body.

They approached to within 10yds, close enough to see that the man was lying on his back with one arm across his chest and that there was ‘blood all round his head and face’.2 They hurried back to the main building and, after Mrs Clemens had been returned to her ward, Read took Mr Vickers, the head porter, and Alexander Whitelock, the senior assistant chief male nurse, back to the shed. Vickers picked up the man’s hand and let it fall. Whitelock said, ‘The man’s face had been battered and was unrecognisable’, but from papers in the pocket he established that he was James Furze Gratton, ‘a patient of long standing from Oak ward’.3

The police arrived at 2.55 p.m. and Whitelock identified the body to DS Bolton, who waited with it until the arrival of Dr John Treherne, who pronounced life extinct. The man had received several blows to the head with a sharp instrument. Although he had died in the position in which he was lying, bloodstains on the roof suggested that he had been standing when first struck.4

The post-mortem was conducted that evening by Professor R.D. Teare at Battersea Mortuary. The deceased was ‘a well-nourished and muscular elderly man’, 5ft 8½in tall and weighing about 12 stone, who had been subjected to a truly dreadful attack.5 The cause of death was laceration of the brain due to multiple fractures of the skull.

The following day, DS William Hughes was interviewing staff and patients in the quiet room of Dahlia ward when, at 2.30 p.m., a male nurse brought a 16-year-old patient to him after remembering the boy had returned to the ward dirty and wet the previous afternoon. Thin and underdeveloped, Raymond Edward Marks had been a patient at Springfield for six months.

Hughes told him that yesterday a man had been ‘very badly injured in the grounds of the hospital’ and he was there ‘to find out who knew him, who saw him yesterday and what everyone was doing yesterday’, adding, ‘You are not afraid of me at all, are you?’6 The boy said that he wasn’t, and said that after breakfast and being given his pills, at 9 a.m. he and two other boys went into Tooting Bec to look around Woolworths and the market. They then walked back to the hospital and played a game with some postage stamps.

Raymond said that he had been back at the hospital since Friday. ‘They let me go home last Monday but I had to come back on Friday.’ Hughes told him that he was going to write everything down, but after giving his full name, age and date of birth, after one line of his statement the boy let out a loud sigh. Hughes asked what the matter was, to which he replied, ‘I am thinking.’ He then added, ‘I am in trouble, aren’t I?’

Hughes said, ‘Have you done something the nurses said you shouldn’t do?’

Raymond replied, ‘Yes, I’ve been down to the piggery, haven’t I?’ Then he said, ‘I did that bloke in.’

After cautioning him, Hughes asked him to describe the man, which he did, and said, ‘I got a bar and hit him on the head three or four times.’ Asked why, he said, ‘I thought he was going to kill me or rape me.’

Hughes asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘You know what I mean. I’ve had it done to me before, they’re all the same in here.’

Raymond had never seen the man before but could tell by his clothing that he was a patient. He said that after they had told each other how long they had been there, he had turned to leave and the man had grabbed him from behind. ‘I thought he was going to rape me. I struggled loose and fell on the floor. I saw this bar and picked it up and hit him.’ He then ran, throwing the bar away as he fled.

When Hughes asked him whether he was telling the truth, he replied, ‘Yes, I know it’s better to tell you than have it on my mind.’

Raymond then led Hughes to a side ward where, hanging over a radiator opposite the centre bed, were the trousers that he had worn the previous day, still damp because ‘the grass down by the piggery was soaking wet’. DS Lacey took charge of him while Hughes notified senior officers. When Lacey introduced himself, Raymond said, ‘I’ve already said I did it.’7

Lacey asked him about the position of the body. Raymond responding by getting on to his bed and demonstrating. Lacey asked what he did to him.

‘I hit him.’

‘Once?’ asked Lacey.

‘No, I hit him and then I hit him again.’

To test the truth of these statements, Lacey asked, ‘What happened to the property you took from the man you hit?’

He said, ‘I didn’t take anything from him at all, honestly.’

Lacey then lifted up the mattress to see whether anything was hidden under it. As he did, Raymond shouted, ‘You won’t find the bar there, it’s not there.’

When the senior officers arrived and were introduced to Raymond, he said, ‘I got in first. I was in a bad mood. The doctor wouldn’t let me go home, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.’8

The detectives asked him to take them back to the murder scene. He said, ‘Yes, I’ll help all I can.’

They left Dahlia ward and walked down to the Nissen hut, where Raymond pointed to the blood on the floor and said, ‘That’s where I did him. He grabbed me from behind and I...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.11.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie
• Schlagworte: barry evans • british crime • British murders • crime witnesses • forgotten murders • forgotten stories • Investigations • Investigators • janet stevens • Police • police files • red riding hood murder • sean mayes • True Crime
• ISBN-10: 1-80399-643-9 / 1803996439
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80399-643-1 / 9781803996431