By Sunday evening, he was ensconced in his new chambers on Maynard Road. Graham’s bedroom was cell-like in its dimensions: 7 feet 6 inches by 7 feet. Situated at the back of the property, it overlooked the elongated strip of concrete and unkempt lawn that ended in a communal fence and trees, which screened the local hospital premises. Graham’s narrow single bed with its striped top blanket was pushed into the space under the window with its dark, floral curtains. The only other furnishings were a wardrobe that resembled a coffin, a small table and chair and a metal ashtray stand. In the ceiling over the bed lay the trap door to the attic. Once Graham had added his two suitcases, few items of clothing and books, there was barely room to move. The whole place was made smaller and more depressing by the garish wallpaper: a headache-inducing concoction of stripes and baroque shapes finished in a high sheen. But it was at least his own space, where he had nothing to fear from anyone else under the same roof and no one to check up on him.
His new circumstances and living arrangements brought him under the jurisdiction of Hertfordshire Probation and After-Care Service. Susan Vidal, a young, single senior probation officer, was put in charge of his welfare. As before, the question later arose regarding how much she had been told of her client’s past when Graham was assigned to her. An internal Home Office letter dated 1972 describes Miss Vidal as having ‘some background knowledge shared with Dr Udwin’, although she herself stated that she had been told nothing about Graham by Broadmoor and what knowledge she did have came from Robert Mynett, Graham’s previous probation officer.396 A second internal letter between Home Office staff declares that Dr Udwin did not ‘re-brief’ Miss Vidal because it was not standard practice to do so; it was expected that the original supervising officer would pass on all relevant information and case papers to the succeeding supervisor.397 Udwin himself felt Miss Vidal’s supervision of Graham was ‘entirely satisfactory’, given that he had not warned her to watch for signs of Graham’s ‘reverting to playing with poisons’ because ‘he did not believe there was any such risk’.398
Udwin’s ‘special concern’, which he communicated to the probation service, was that Graham might find it difficult to cope with ‘the stress of life outside’ Broadmoor and that this could cause ‘a retrograde reaction into irresponsible behaviour’.399 He therefore expected the probation officer to look out for signs that Graham was struggling to cope with his new situation and there were ‘no such signs’.400 From his own experience, Udwin thought the practice of probation officers visiting the home of discharged patients ‘varied according to the circumstances’, but that they would not generally visit if the patient was reporting regularly at the probation office.401 Udwin presumed the probation officer would also wish to guard against calling ‘undue attention’ to the fact of supervision by frequent home visits.402
Susan Vidal recorded her interactions with Graham in some detail. He visited her once a week on a regular basis, usually for half an hour but sometimes longer. Her initial impression was that:
compared with his contemporaries, he is a rather odd young man. He always looks very neat and precise and . . . will sometimes talk at great length about the somewhat macabre subjects which interest him. At times, however, he shows a surprising insight into his own personality and we have talked quite recently about his difficulty in making relationships with people on more than a superficial level, and his inability to experience joy. At other times, he has shown me that he can indeed feel very deeply about people and a few months ago he came to my office feeling extremely angry with Dr Udwin. Towards the end of this particular interview, he was able to tell me how very important Dr Udwin had been to him.403
This last observation is at odds with Graham’s sarcastic writings about Udwin in his letters home; almost certainly, in his conversations with Miss Vidal, he was keen to maintain the image that had secured him his freedom.
She tried to persuade him to register with a GP in Hemel Hempstead, but he was reluctant to do so, even when an unexpected bout of cystitis and indigestion laid him low. His reticence was due entirely to his fear that full details of his psychiatric history would be passed on to a surgery and that a doctor ‘might then question him about it’. Clearly, he was eager to distance himself from certain aspects of his past. Superficially at least, his efforts to escape the long shadow of Broadmoor implied that he wished to start afresh. But his clandestine behaviour within days of beginning his new job at Hadlands cast him in a stark light: his attempts to conceal what had gone before were not done in order to atone but instead to enable him to embark on the career he had always desired – that of poisoner extraordinaire.
Chapter Twelve
STRANGE AND UNKNOWN THINGS
‘W
ELCOME TO BOVINGDON Village’ announces the laminated information board adjacent to Vicarage Lane bus stop. Erected and maintained as such things are by the local parish council, the board features five old photographs, a couple of reasonable sketches and a map explaining the area within sight. One photograph shows Rattle Cottages on the High Street decorated for the Queen’s Coronation in 1953; a sketch depicts the Bobsleigh Inn and explains that its name was bestowed in honour of the British gold medal won at the Innsbruck Winter Olympics in 1964 by the owner’s son, while the top three photographs on the board were taken ‘near where you stand today’.
Just visible in the distance is the crossroads and ‘main gateway’ to the village which, we are told by the board, ‘dates from the 1200s when the forest was cleared and arable farming began. Dwellings grew adjacent to the wide-spread farms, our 13th-century church is located next to one of the oldest, Bury Farm, in Church Street. You are standing on Hempstead Road, near the crossroads . . . ’ To the right of the junction lies Newhouse Road, and somewhat surprisingly, the history related by the board tells us that ‘Further up Newhouse Road, next to the former airfield, was Hadlands Laboratories, where in the 1970s, the “Teacup Poisoner” Graham Young, operated . . . ’
It’s an unusual choice of local history snippet to provide for visitors to such a picturesque and interesting spot, but his inclusion would no doubt have delighted Graham, had he known. Hadlands has long since gone, the company ceasing to trade in the 1990s, and in its place now stands a large housing estate and, behind that, a prison. Hadlands is remembered in the name of one of the new roads running through the new estate – and on the information board in relation to its notorious former employee.
The airfield that once stood next to the factory was constructed in 1941 through to 1942 as a training base for American airmen. Until then, Bovingdon had been almost exclusively agricultural, but overnight 2,000 US servicemen arrived in the village to fly out B-17 bombers across to war-ravaged Europe. The most celebrated of these was the Memphis Belle, whose last mission was the subject of a successful 1990 film of the same name. The village was home to many evacuee children from London, 16 of whom stayed at Newhouse Farm near the airfield. A German bomb fell directly on the farm, destroying much of it, but miraculously no one was hurt.
When the war ended, thousands of Americans returned home via Bovingdon, the base of their European Air Transport Service. Newhouse Farm was rebuilt by the War Damage Commission, but on the day in 1948 when work was completed, a local elderly man hanged himself from an apple tree in the grounds. The effect on the village was profound; people murmured about the place being cursed and no one went near the farm after that, not until 1960 when John Hadland bought the property. Together with his wife Daphne, he had been running a thriving photographic-equipment business from home and adapted the farm into a laboratory, adding prefabricated buildings for storage and production. The firm described itself as specialising in designing and manufacturing photographic instrumentation, particularly high-speed cameras for defence research. In 1966, it reached its zenith with the development of the world’s fastest camera, the Imacon, which could take 60 million pictures a second and secured them a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
Two years la
ter, the neighbouring airfield closed and the remaining personnel departed, buildings were destroyed and properties disposed of, mostly to former owners. Hadlands expanded further and by 1971 employed 76 people in its units at the end of Newhouse Road. The premises consisted of three blocks: administration in a Georgian-style building with a long, barn-like extension housing the canteen; a works area of some 9,000 square feet, which included the stores, and a maintenance area in a nearby barn. The works area occupied a large Banbury structure comprising five departments: camera production, processing, service, sales demonstration and general workshops, including stores. John Hadland remained at the helm as chairman, describing his function as ‘deciding policy’ and ‘opening up new markets abroad’.404 He was away for much of the summer working on the latter, leaving the man who had interviewed Graham, Geoffrey Foster, in charge. As managing director, Foster ran the company on a day-to-day basis and was regarded by Hadland as having ‘first-hand knowledge of all activities concerning staff and their welfare’.405 Of the 76 people employed by the company, 28 worked in administration and the canteen, five on maintenance and the rest in the general works area. Most staff worked from 9am until 5pm.
Graham began working at Hadlands on 10 May 1971. As assistant storekeeper, he earned £19 gross per week. The staff in stores were responsible for maintaining stock needed in manufacturing, for storing finished goods and for sending and receiving goods. The layout of their works area was simple: a long corridor ran irregularly right through the laboratory works building and off this were various sections, such as the production room and the machine room, each neatly partitioned. The stores themselves were divided into two sections, the smaller of which was called the Work in Progress store (WIP), where those materials which were needed immediately were kept and where other workers visited to obtain an issue. Adjacent to the WIP store was the main store, entered by a half-gate that resembled a stable door. At the far end of the main store, a door led into the small packing bay. This was where Graham worked most of the time; his job entailed packing goods for dispatch and unpacking raw materials as they arrived.
Supervising Graham was store manager Robert Edward Egle, who also completed most of the paperwork. Born in Norfolk in April 1912 – two days before the sinking of the RMS Titanic – Bob had little memory of his father, who died during the Battle of the Somme in 1917 and was himself part of the British Expeditionary Force and Allied troops evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940. He and his wife Dorothy had been married for 37 years and lived in a beautiful cottage named Orchard Glen in Whelpley Hill, less than two miles from Bovingdon. Bob had worked at Hadlands since July 1969 and was looking forward to his retirement, when he and Dorothy intended to sell their home to live near their married daughter in the small Norfolk village of Gillingham. As Graham got to know Bob, he would regularly press him for stories of his war service, eager to hear especially about Dunkirk.
Also working in the stores was 56-year-old Fred Biggs, head of the WIP department. Fred’s wife Annie, to whom he had been married over 30 years, also worked at Hadlands in the clerical section; they had both joined the company in May 1970. The couple had two sons and two daughters, all married, and lived approximately five miles from Bovingdon in Chipperfield, Kings Langley, where they had run the newsagent’s and general store together during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fred was a local councillor for five years, representing Chipperfield. He and his wife worked two full days and three mornings at Hadlands.
Both Fred and Bob took a fatherly interest in their new young colleague. Equally friendly, but slightly younger and working in the stores during Graham’s first few weeks, was Ron Hewitt. Aged 41, he was employed mainly as a delivery driver, but when there were neither deliveries nor collections for him to undertake, he helped out in the packing bay, getting equipment ready for dispatch. He preferred driving and had begun looking for a suitable full-time post elsewhere, but until July he often worked with Graham in the stores. Unlike the two older men, Ron was able to discuss his first impressions of their youngest colleague with detectives in the months to come. He remembered Graham as ‘perfectly pleasant, if a bit baffling’.406 He and his fellow storemen were curious about Graham’s daily poring over of medical textbooks, and one of them raised the question of why, if the subject absorbed him so much, he hadn’t chosen to become a doctor or something similar. ‘His reply to that question was that he was just interested in reading this type of book and did not want to take up the profession,’ Ron recalled. ‘If we were talking at work about anything medical, Graham would always refer to it in the proper medical terms.’407
Graham’s interest in all things medical drew the attention of his other colleagues, including Martin Hancock, then 18, who was employed as a technical assistant at the laboratory prior to leaving in September that year to study at Dacorum College. ‘My job involved bench work in the development department but I had to visit the stores department regularly in order to carry out this work, which mainly involved calibration,’ he explained.
I knew Graham Young very well during the time that I was employed. We had many long conversations either in the store, where he worked or in the department where I worked. Almost on every occasion the conversations were about medicine and pharmacy. The only time that it wasn’t was when he had just finished reading the book The Third Reich. I was astounded by his knowledge of medicines and pharmacy. I think he said that he had been studying it for fourteen years. He knew all the Latin names for drugs and medicines. He would always refer to things by their proper name.408
He found Graham ‘completely emotionless, except for his rather dry sense of humour’.409
When Hertfordshire constabulary came to investigate Graham’s employment at Hadlands, detectives were struck by the warm, close-knit community that existed within the firm, who placed ‘considerable importance on the welfare of their employees and the premises are well equipped and appointed with this in mind’.410 One example was the facilities offered in the cheerful canteen, where the main midday meal was cooked and served by two kindly ladies, Mrs Pested and Mrs Lawson; all beverages were supplied free of charge to members of staff, who were also encouraged to help themselves to fruit. During lunchtimes and tea breaks, Graham usually sat with Ron Hewitt and Bob Egle, both of whom had a sweet tooth and would offer round toffees from a tin kept in a bench drawer in the stores. Graham collected the morning and afternoon tea on a tray from May, as charlady Mrs Mary Bartlett was known to everyone. Her trolley was loaded with bottles of hot water for coffees and a large teapot; she added milk and sugar before Graham took round the drinks to his colleagues sitting in the store on the packing bench. Secretary Diana Smart later worked in the stores and she occasionally noticed him ‘stirring the cups’ as he brought the tray back, after which he would gather the teaspoons used in the stores and put them in ‘his’ drawer.411
In time, Diana got to know Graham better than most at the company, but the men who worked with him saw nothing out of the ordinary in his behaviour. They had no reason to be vigilant, as another employee, Anthony Oldham, explains: ‘When Graham arrived, it was understood that he had come from some rehabilitation as a result of a mental breakdown. He didn’t strike one as exceptional. He was very dark, somewhat glum, very articulate, clearly very intelligent and obviously conveyed through one means or another knowledge of chemistry.’ When Oldham asked him what he had done in the past, Graham replied, ‘Well, actually, I’m a failed chemistry student.’412 He and other colleagues took him at his word.
Diana Smart was more curious about Graham. Forty years old, she and her husband Norman had worked at Hadlands for six years and lived on nearby Chesham Road in the village. Until mid-October 1971, she worked mostly on the laboratory side of the main Banbury building, but she also filled in for anyone who was off sick in the stores, main office, on the switchboard, in accounts or the Imacon section. She worked often in the stores, where she found Graham unlike anyone else she had ever met and sensed there was more to h
im than met the eye, although she could never have imagined quite what that entailed. She found everything about him slightly odd, including his appearance: short, with a little beer belly and forever rolling his own excessively thin cigarettes, which caused her to notice his hands: ‘The tiniest hands, with the tiniest fingers . . . cold and blank-white and his longest finger was shorter than [my] smallest.’413 If he held a pen, his knuckles shone unnaturally white and when he smoked, as he often did, he held the cigarette not in the normal way, between the first and second fingers, but hooked inside his nicotine-stained thumb and stubby forefinger. Otherwise, he always seemed to keep one hand in his pocket, regardless of the task he was doing. Each day he brought a toothbrush and toothpaste to work in a little paper bag and would nip to the bathroom several times a day to clean his teeth. He never told anyone when he was going to the loo either, unlike everyone else. He was clean and neat, and never said a word which could be misconstrued; he had beautiful manners and was unfailingly polite, calling her ‘Diana’ when everybody else referred to her as ‘Di’. He asked about her health, but never made any enquiries into her home life, and had an excellent memory, which came in useful at work.
Diana, like all the Hadlands staff who came into regular contact with Graham, recalled his obsessive interest in medical matters and a period when he would bring a whole heap of textbooks on the subject to work. Remembering that he had told another colleague he was a failed chemistry student, she asked which university he had attended and was surprised when he replied that he hadn’t actually gone to university but had studied medicine since first discovering a predilection for it around the age of 12. When Diana mentioned that she was taking a first-aid course through St John’s Ambulance Brigade, he promptly brought her a copy of Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Forensic Medicine and another of Whitla’s A Dictionary of Treatment, both of which were far too technical to be of use to her. She recalled how he could even pick up a tin of toilet cleaner and list its components without referring to a label. Sometimes his use of long words would exasperate her, and for much of the time he seemed ‘completely unfeeling’.414 She tried to draw him out on more personal matters but her questions would be met with the vaguest of responses, such as when she asked him where he had worked before Hadlands and he said airily, ‘Oh, I was at Slough,’ before walking off.415 She did find out that he lived alone in a single room and took all his washing to the local laundrette, then ironed everything himself in his lodgings. She felt a pang of sympathy then that made her warm to him.
A Passion for Poison Page 17
