All Nerves

On​ 24 March 1953, the day on which, at 10.20 p.m., Queen Mary would breathe her last, a 43-year-old Jamaican jazz musician called Beresford Wallace Brown, who had arrived in England in 1950 and now worked in a dairy in Shepherd’s Bush, was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs tenant.

Rillington Place was a shabby Victorian cul-de-sac running parallel to the Hammersmith and City Line in Notting Hill. The street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a disused factory whose chimney loomed over the street. The landlord, a former heavyweight boxing champion called Charles Brown, also Jamaican, had given Brown permission to use the kitchen of the ground-floor flat recently vacated by Reginald and Ethel Christie, who had been tenants since 1938.

What happened when Beresford Brown started banging his nail into the wall is well-known to all true crime connoisseurs, who have watched the excellent 1971 film, read Ludovic Kennedy’s 1961 book on which it was based and endured the unremittingly miserable 2016 BBC three-parter Rillington Place. It’s a story that will not settle, because we will never know the full truth of what happened inside that house during its decade of murders between 1943 and 1953. Now, we can re-examine it through the probing eyes and incisive mind of Kate Summerscale, who has a penchant for the macabre in British domestic life and a gift for conjuring the feel and smell of a time and a place.

The wall sounded hollow behind Beresford Brown’s hammer. He stripped off a sheet of wallpaper and spotted a hole in the wooden panel behind it: an alcove. He shone a torch in, and saw the white torso of a woman, her head covered. He and a fellow tenant went to a kiosk to call the police. The police found two more bodies stashed away behind the first one. All three women in the alcove, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, were in their twenties. They had died between January and March. All of them had their heads covered with pieces of cloth and diapers between their legs.

Ethel Christie’s body was found under the floorboards (she’d died in December, aged 54), and after a bit of digging, the skeletons of two more women were found buried in the back garden. Those had been there for a decade. One of the sets of teeth had been crowned with silver alloy used in Central Europe, a clue to the woman’s identity. She turned out to be Ruth Fuerst, a Jewish refugee from Austria. The other woman was a Londoner, Muriel Eady, who had grown up in a children’s home after her mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918. A femur belonging to one of the women, dug up by the Christies’ dog, Judy, was being used to prop up a fence.

The story of the six bodies was of instant sensational interest to the prim but prurient 1950s newspaper-reading public. The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer had observed in his 1951 survey of British people that ‘though most English men and women cannot “let themselves go”, they love to think and read about people who do throw off inhibitions, either with sex or violence.’ The hunt was on to find Reginald Christie, now a suspect for serial murder. The public was on the lookout for a ‘middle-aged chap with drawn cheeks, horn-rimmed spectacles and glassy, staring eyes’. Sightings were reported in (among many other places) a Lyons tea shop near King’s Cross, an Italian café in Paddington and a compartment in a Bognor Regis to London train.

The alarming fact was that hundreds of neat, respectable-seeming middle-aged men in mackintoshes and horn-rimmed specs looked exactly like Reginald Christie. Eventually a bobby on the beat spotted the real Christie in a brown trilby near the Thames at Putney, and asked him to come with him to the station. From that moment, Christie helped the police with their inquiries (up to a point), identifying the skeletons and the bodies, explaining in a vague, half-forgetful, mad-sounding way how and when he’d killed them, claiming that he’d either been trying to help the women have abortions, or had been defending himself from attacks by them.

What made the story of particular, if shaming, fascination to an ambitious young Sunday Pictorial reporter called Harry Procter was that Procter himself had interviewed Christie three years earlier, when the bodies of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, Geraldine, who lived in the upstairs flat, had been found in the wash-house in the back garden of 10 Rillington Place. Procter was furious with himself that he’d failed to elicit the truth from Christie in 1949. Christie had told him that Beryl’s husband, Timothy Evans, had murdered both her and the baby after one of their many screaming rows. Evans himself had confessed to the murders in four differing versions. He withdrew his confessions before his trial, and pleaded not guilty, but he wasn’t believed, by judge or jury. His last words before he went to the noose were ‘Christie done it.’ Procter was now worried that Evans had been wrongly hanged.

Ludovic Kennedy’s book, a sensation when it was published in 1961, exposed what he saw as a scandalous miscarriage of justice. He set out to explain the mental states of the two protagonists. In his view, ‘the most important single thing to remember’ about Evans is that ‘he had the body of a man and the mind of a child.’ The reason he confessed to two murders he hadn’t committed was that he was ‘brainwashed’ by the police, who used the same psychological tricks to bewilder and confuse as ‘the Communists’ did to elicit confessions from terrified innocent people. Christie, for his part, had as a child been smothered with love by his mother and starved of it by his father, and had been mocked as ‘Reggie-No-Dick’ aged sixteen after he’d failed to perform in his first sexual encounter, so he was in effect taking revenge on the whole female sex each time he enticed women into his house on the pretext of helping them to abort their babies, and then gassed, strangled and raped them.

Kennedy exposed what he saw as the shocking bias of the judge in Christie’s favour during the Evans trial. ‘The pathetic belief in Christie’s integrity coloured almost everything that the judge said about him … Impartiality went by the board entirely.’ Because Christie was a former choirboy and boy scout from Halifax in Yorkshire who had fought in the First World War, where he was temporarily blinded by mustard gas, and had been a policeman during the Second World War, he was classified as an upright citizen, when in fact he had framed the innocent Evans. Kennedy also explained to his readers the kinds of thing that went on behind the scenes in the slums: ‘People who live on the edge of poverty, and in cramped and squalid surroundings, are more prone to aggressive behaviour than those who do not.’

Six decades later, Summerscale takes a different and more eccentric approach, and certainly doesn’t try to posh-splain the proclivities of the working classes. She tells the story from the points of view of two reporters: first, Harry Procter, a man who didn’t just report a story but ‘infiltrated it, embedded himself, then owned it, then manipulated its protagonists as puppeteer-in-chief’. (His favourite childhood book was Philip Gibbs’s Street of Adventure, in which it was written that ‘everything in life is but a peepshow’ and reporters were ‘the only real people in the world’.) Her second subject is the writer and criminologist Fryn Tennyson Jesse (great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson), who lived in a cottage in St John’s Wood with her husband, Tottie, who liked to sunbathe naked in the garden. Fryn covered the Evans and the Christie trials for the Notable British Trials series. I’m far more interested in those accused of the murders than in the reporters who covered them, so I found this a strange angle to enter from, but Summerscale has a dark eye for domestic detail; and the Fryn-Tottie set-up provides some useful comic relief.

After the six bodies were discovered in 1953, bringing the total number of murders at 10 Rillington Place to eight, Procter went straight to Halifax to investigate Christie’s past, and managed to persuade Christie’s brother Percy to sign a contract with the Sunday Pictorial: they would get the exclusive story after the trial in exchange for funding Christie’s defence. Most of all, Procter wanted Christie to confess to the murder of baby Geraldine, the murder for which Evans had been hanged (in those days, a person could only be tried for one murder at a time). In custody before his trial, Christie wrote detailed letters to Procter in very neat handwriting, admitting to and describing the murders of the women, and saying his intention had been ‘to avoid hurting them all’ while killing them. But he never confessed to the murder of Geraldine. He was tried for the murder of his wife and pleaded insanity, hoping to be sent to Broadmoor, the ‘hospital for criminal lunatics’, rather than hanged. His barrister set out the case for the defence: that the murders had been impulsive, chaotic and carelessly concealed, and that Christie was clearly ‘mad as a March hare’. It didn’t work. Christie was found guilty, pronounced sane and sentenced to death for Ethel’s murder.

At the trial, the attorney general, Sir Lionel Heald, reminded the jury that ‘there is not the slightest warrant for any suggestion, and no one ought to think for a moment there is any question, that Christie killed that child [Geraldine].’ He was intent on suppressing any suspicion that the state had overseen a gross miscarriage of justice when they’d hanged Evans. But Summerscale, who has trawled through the papers at the National Archives, finds that there is more to the story. A few days after Christie’s prosecution, Heald received a note from an experienced Fleet Street reporter saying there were rumours that Christie had told a prison guard that he had indeed killed Geraldine. Heald was clearly worried. ‘As attorney general,’ Summerscale writes,

he was responsible for the government’s legal affairs, and during the trial at the Old Bailey he had done his best to rule out any connection between Reg Christie and the Evans case. He knew that for Christie to admit to the child’s murder would be political dynamite, enabling his opponents in the Labour Party to renew their calls for a public inquiry into Evans’s conviction and to advance their case for the abolition of capital punishment.

Heald managed to hush up the story with the help of Sir Frank Newsam, the permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office. During a Commons debate on the bill to suspend the death penalty, Summerscale writes, ‘the government refused to confirm receipt of a report from a prison officer. The bill was defeated by 256 votes to 195. The death penalty remained in force.’

If Evans didn’t kill his wife and baby daughter, why did he confess to the murders? Ludovic Kennedy puts it down to stress, fear and manipulation by the police. In court, Evans put it like this: ‘Well, I thought that if I didn’t make a statement the police would take me downstairs and start knocking me about.’ In her gripping finale, Summerscale comes to her own conclusion. She surmises that Evans did tell Christie he ‘wanted rid’ of his wife, who was pregnant with their (unwanted) second child. They had been quarrelling violently. ‘Perhaps,’ Summerscale writes, ‘Christie offered to do her in for him, under cover of performing the abortion that she wanted. He was probably unable to resist the opportunity that had presented itself.’ Evans came home from work the next day and was shocked to find that Christie had actually gone through with the murder – just like in Strangers on a Train. The two men put Beryl’s body in an empty room, and Christie promised to dispose of it. Evans went away to Wales. Christie probably killed Geraldine two days later, because her crying threatened to give them away. He told Evans that Geraldine had been taken in by a kind childless couple in East Acton.

Or perhaps Evans did know that Christie had killed his baby. Believing he was complicit in causing his wife’s death, and knowing the net was closing in on him, Evans gave himself up to the police. He was in such a state of despair at what he had set in motion that he felt he had nothing to live for. He knew that Christie would never be a credible suspect in murders for which he had no motive. ‘If this, or something like it, was how the murders unfolded,’ Summerscale writes, ‘Tim Evans’s conflicting statements make more sense.’

Summerscale​ is a socially curious writer, adept at setting her macabre true stories firmly inside the domestic surroundings in which they unfolded. I’ll never forget the little household items – cups of hot Bovril, pieces of coal, saucers of milk – that fly across suburban living rooms in her non-fiction poltergeist book, The Haunting of Alma Fielding (2020). In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, her 2008 bestseller about the murder of a three-year-old boy whose body was found under an outdoor privy, she conjured up the secretive atmosphere of a Victorian Wiltshire household. In The Peepshow, again, she singles out details that heighten the atmosphere. There was the QPR badge found inside Christie’s pocket when he was arrested; the tobacco tin in which he collected clumps of women’s pubic hair (unforgettably revolting) and – almost as macabre – the cheerful television programmes he went to watch with his neighbour Rosie Swan over Christmas 1952, just after he’d put Ethel under the floorboards: Andy Pandy, Flower Pot Men and a festive variety show with Norman Wisdom, Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Petula Clark. Reggie was ‘all nerves’, Swan later recalled.

Summerscale pauses for a moment, just after Beresford Brown’s discovery of the dead bodies, to describe the multicultural make-up of 10 Rillington Place – the only house in the street that housed Black tenants at the time. After the bodies were found, the tenants were asked to move out so the police could turn the house upside down. This was a cruel eviction for the West Indians. That week’s accommodation notices in the Kensington Post excluded ‘Black and Irish’. A property in Willesden specified ‘British only’, one in Earl’s Court ‘English Only’. A few days later, the landlord, Charles Brown, received a note through the door of number 10: ‘Quit England and our boarding houses, you dirty stinking Black niggers we don’t want you here doing all your filthy breeding. Leave our white women alone or there will be trouble.’ Clearly, they did get out: the photograph of Rillington Place’s street party for the queen’s coronation, which took place two months after the bodies were discovered, contains not a single Black person in the mass of jolly parents, children, jelly, bunting and Union flags.

At his trial, the manifestly racist Christie would cite the nuisance of the ‘Blacks’ upstairs as one of the things that drove Ethel to end her life. ‘These coloured people used to kick and dance and make noise continually until we just could not sit in the front room in evenings or weekends,’ he claimed. ‘I wish we could get out of here,’ Ethel had written to her sister Lily before Christmas. ‘It’s awful with these “people” here.’ Christie claimed she’d been trying to gas herself, and he’d merely helped her to finish the job.

In the manner of Hallie Rubenhold, whose book The Five (2019), about the victims of Jack the Ripper, focused on the women’s stories, Summerscale has worked hard to find out as much as she can about the lives of each of Christie’s victims. Muriel Eady, who at the age of twelve had been sent to Acton to help her late mother’s invalid sister-in-law run a lodging house for policemen, met Christie while working at Ultra Electronics in 1944. She disappeared on 7 October that year. When the Christies’ dog dug up her skull in the back garden, Christie took it round the corner and disposed of it through the smashed window of a bombed house. Ruth Fuerst, born in Austria in 1922, had fled to Britain with the help of a Quaker organisation in 1939. When the war broke out, she was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien before being sent to lodge with a Congregationalist minister in Lancashire, where she was miserable. She managed to return to London and got a job in a Mayfair hotel, where she became pregnant by a Cypriot waiter and gave up her baby, who was taken into care. She met Christie at a snack bar off Ladbroke Grove. He claimed she’d asked to have sex with him and that he gassed her with a glass jar and rubber pipe.

The stories of Christie’s final three victims – who must have been easy to kill once his wife was out of the way – evoke the tough world of prostitution in 1950s London, where there were ten thousand prostitutes and a quarter of a million ‘transactions’ a week. Kathleen Maloney, a prostitute who had given up her five children into care, first met Christie at the Fountains Abbey pub in Praed Street. A few weeks later, she left the Westminster Arms with him and was never seen again. The police described all the women in the alcove at 10 Rillington Place as ‘of prostitute type’ – ‘to explain and to diminish their deaths’, Summerscale writes. One pathologist, Keith Simpson, said that women like these were ‘better out of this world’.

Having finished the book, and being unable to think about much else, I went to try to find the spot where 10 Rillington Place used to stand. It’s in a quiet corner of Notting Hill, a few minutes north of Grenfell Tower. What used to be Rillington Place is now Bartle Road, except that the former two-sided street has become a one-sided street, so the houses are in a completely different place. The spot where 10 Rillington Place used to be is thought to be where numbers 26 to 29 St Andrew’s Square stand now, beneath the peaceful rumbling of trains. Halfway along Bartle Road, there’s a small, unmarked memorial garden.