One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  Myra’s parents met in 1938. Eighteen-year-old, wilful Nellie began a fiery courtship with twenty-five-year-old Robert (Bob) Hindley, who was tall, dark-haired and sinewy. The Mayburys were Protestant, and though the teenage Nellie was indifferent to religion, she was scathing of the Catholic Church, a ubiquitous presence in Gorton. Bob was born and raised a Catholic: he had been educated by monks at the school in the shadow of St Francis’ Monastery on Gorton Lane. Religion was rarely a cause for argument during the early days of their courtship – that came when Myra was born – but Nellie and Bob had furious rows and equally passionate reconciliations. They married in 1940 and moved into the two-up, two-down house on Beasley Street that was packed to the creaking rafters with occupants: Gran’s husband had died, but her other children – James (Jim), Annie and Bert junior – had not yet left home.

  Bob Hindley wasn’t part of the household for long. A flair for sport at school led to enrolment in the Parachute Regiment; he took part in regimental boxing matches and won the championship. During the war, he worked as an aircraft fitter and left the damp streets of Gorton for the broiling heat of North Africa, Cyprus and Italy. ‘I must have been conceived during his period of leave from the army after a night on the booze,’ Myra reflected years later. ‘It would have been better if I wasn’t born at all.’4 On his next leave, Bob and Nellie had a fierce quarrel over the baby. He wanted Myra to be baptised, but Nellie was against it. They reached an uneasy compromise: Nellie agreed that Bob could have his wish provided Myra would not have to attend a Catholic school. Bob relented, and on 16 August 1942, Myra was duly baptised at St Francis’ Monastery. Her Uncle Bert’s girlfriend, a sensible young Catholic woman named Kath, was godmother. Myra’s father had already returned to his regiment.

  The Luftwaffe flew regular sorties over the streets of Gorton, targeting the foundry and damaging the schools adjacent to the monastery. The backyard of Gran’s house held an Anderson bomb shelter, but it was seldom used by Gran and her tenants, who felt safer in the communal shelter at the end of Beasley Street. Although Bob was at war, and Myra’s Aunt Annie and Uncle Jim had each left home after marrying, there were still five people living in Gran’s tiny house: Bert and his girlfriend Kath, Nellie, baby Myra and Gran herself. The family ran so often to the communal shelter that as soon as the air-raid sirens began to sound their ear-splitting wail, each person embarked on their individual task: Gran and Kath would dash straight out to join the neighbours flooding towards the shelter, while Nellie scooped Myra up from her cot, swaddled her in a blanket and handed her to Bert, who was a fast sprinter. In her autobiography, Myra records the story of how on one occasion Nellie leapt upstairs to retrieve her daughter and, in her panic to escape, flung the baby down to Uncle Bert, who was waiting to catch her at the foot of the stairs. He missed – and Myra flew through the air, landing safely in a thick pile of washing in a tub on the stairs. From then on, Nellie always clutched Myra in her arms as she hastily negotiated the stairs.

  Life at Beasley Street was cosily populated by women, apart from Bert, who had inherited his parents’ gentleness and easy-going nature. ‘Like most families at this time, we made the best of what we had,’ Myra recalled. ‘I was strongly influenced by my uncle Bert, who was a father figure. He was kindly and caring.’5 She couldn’t recall him ever losing his temper and one of her earliest memories was of being thrown deftly into the air by Bert under the washing hung up in the parlour while she screamed with delight. ‘I always went to [him] for help and advice. I respected him,’ she mused, ‘but somehow I seem to have inherited my dad’s strength of character.’6

  After VE Day, when Bob Hindley came home permanently, three-year-old Myra’s reaction to her father was cautious, even slightly fearful. He did his best to win her love and trust, but it rapidly degenerated into a formidable battle of wills: his, and those of his spirited daughter.

  In her autobiography, Myra recalls that her father found it difficult to adjust to civilian life; his wartime experiences were bottled up inside him, something he either couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate. Like his own father, he began working as a labourer at Gorton Foundry, which had withstood the Luftwaffe bombs to retain its dominance as ‘a thudding reverberant wilderness of brick and iron’ in Gorton Lane.7 Bob’s return had several repercussions, one of which was a new home for his family. Myra sobbed when her mother told her they were going to live in their own house but was slightly placated when she saw how close it was to Gran’s – literally round the corner, at 20 Eaton Street – and virtually identical, although with the twin benefits of electricity and a tiled fireplace. The similarities were odious: an army of cockroaches that scuttled under furniture and into cracks in the walls whenever a light flicked on, and rooms that were just as poky and mottled with damp. The back bedroom, which should have accommodated Myra, had a leaky ceiling and rotting floorboards. She slept in a single bed in her parents’ room, resenting the change and the person responsible for it: ‘I hated him for forcing us to move away from Gran’s . . . having to listen to him snoring and blowing off was a nightmare.’8

  Bob persevered in building a relationship with Myra. Both he and Nellie were proud of her looks; the resemblance to her father grew more marked as Myra entered her teens, but as a toddler the determined Hindley chin was offset by large grey eyes and a heavy mop of blonde curls. Nellie always ensured that Myra left the house in clothes that were clean, neat and as pretty as their meagre income allowed. If Nellie tried to put a hat on Myra, Bob objected, enjoying the compliments his daughter’s curls drew. He was careful to spend time alone with her, visiting nearby Belle Vue, the huge entertainment complex where crowds flocked to the pleasure gardens, roller coasters, Speedway stadium, greyhound racing, pubs, dancing and zoo. Curiously, Myra remembered those visits with less emotion than a trip father and daughter took into the city centre, where in Lewis’s department store she suddenly needed the toilet but was too frightened to go into the Ladies alone. Sympathetic to his daughter, Bob asked to see the manager and insisted that Myra be permitted to go into the Gents with him. He refused to listen to objections and eventually the manager gave in.

  Bob also took Myra to his relatives, who lived less than a mile away in Longsight. The little girl didn’t warm to her paternal grandmother, whom she addressed as Nana Hindley; Bob’s mother had dyed curls, wore garish make-up, liked to air her opinions and was a complete contrast to softly spoken, naturally pretty Gran. Her maternal aunts and uncles lived almost on the doorstep: Annie and her husband lived in Gorton’s Railway View, while Bert and Kath had married and lived a mile away in Clayton. Jim, to whom Myra was never close, lived in Dukinfield, four miles from Gorton.

  Despite the sleeping arrangements at Eaton Street, on 21 August 1946, Nellie gave birth to a second daughter. Myra’s sister Maureen had a shock of dark hair and petite, birdlike features. There was no jealousy on Myra’s part at the new addition to the family; she worshipped her sister and called her by Bob’s nickname for the baby: Moby. Sometimes she called her Mo Baby or just Mo, pet names that lasted into adulthood. Like Myra, Maureen was baptised into the Catholic faith at Bob’s insistence. Unlike her, she was not a baby who slept well and most nights were splintered with her sudden wails and lengthy bouts of crying. Nellie found it increasingly hard to cope. Weekday mornings were the worst; Myra helped occupy the baby while Bob dressed and Nellie prepared breakfast.

  Another mouth to feed stretched the warring parents’ resources to the limit and Bob started bare-knuckle fighting in the evenings to bring in extra money, even though he was disadvantaged by a war wound. Promoters sponsored the matches, which were held in local halls in ‘blood tubs’ – a moniker which suited the brutish nature of the fights, with their ill-matched contestants and dearth of fair rules. But after an accident at the foundry left him unable to walk without a pronounced limp, Bob retired from fighting and spent his days with other unemployed and elderly men in Gorton’s pubs. There were three pubs on adjacent corners of Gorton
Lane, in the shadow of his old workplace: the Bessemer, the Shakespeare and, Bob’s preferred bolthole, the Steelworks Tavern (the Steelie). His transformation from brawny, newly demobbed breadwinner to jobless semi-invalid got to him most when he drank – his behaviour after last orders was a running thread in Myra’s post-trial writings and conversation.

  She summarised Bob’s violence in an article she submitted to The Guardian in 1995: ‘[He] went off to the pub every night and being a taciturn, bad-tempered man, almost always got into a fight . . . and staggered home bruised and bleeding. I was often sent to the pub to retrieve his jacket which he’d taken off before fighting; it was the only “good” one he had. When my mother berated him for the state he was in, he began knocking her about and when I tried to prevent him, I was hit too.’9

  Her parents began to row again fiercely at home, and Gran was Myra’s ally when the fights became physical: ‘Gran was protective of me and we would both protect Mam by attacking him, even before I started school . . . I remember Gran bashing him with a rolled-up newspaper while I tried to pull his legs from under him.’10 She laughed as she recounted the story to her prison therapist, explaining how she ‘concentrated on the leg with the war wound, which was the weakest one’.11 Nellie was no cowering victim; as her daughters grew older, she would drink copiously in the Steelie’s lounge while Bob stayed in the vault with the men, and she was always as quick as her husband to launch into rows with a punch, but his build, strength and boxing skills made him a fearsome opponent.

  Myra created a hostile picture of her father in her re-written autobiography and later conversations, incorporating everything from ‘his oily, greasy hands . . . clutching a piece of bread’ to an incident when he struck her after finding her smearing shaving foam on her face and scraping it off with a kitchen knife.12 She maintained that she was singled out by her father for hidings, while her sister was never hit. In her autobiography, there is no mention of violence at her mother’s hands, but Myra told her ex-partner Tricia Cairns a different story; according to her, Myra was beaten so badly by her mother that her ears bled, but she spared her mother in print because Nellie stood by her at the trial and afterwards.

  While there is no reason to doubt Myra’s accounts of being hit by her parents, the slant she put on the stories appears to depend on what purpose was served by their telling. She quickly learned through her encounters with prison doctors that dwelling on a troubled childhood worked in her favour and might be viewed as a mitigating factor in her own psychological make-up. In her Guardian article, written as she was approaching another bid for parole, she mused, ‘With hindsight I can see that my sense of family values and relationships were seriously undermined by [my father’s] influence on me as a child . . . he was far from being a good role model.’13 She was silent both on the subject of her father’s sufferings – although that clearly doesn’t excuse his behaviour – and the feminine role models that cushioned her life: indulgent Gran, perhaps her mother Nellie, and certainly aunts Annie and Kath.

  The notion that this was the point at which Myra ‘accepted’ violence, with fatal consequences, is endorsed by Professor Malcolm MacCulloch (former medical director of Ashworth Hospital, previously Park Lane Hospital) in Duncan Staff’s book about the Moors Murders, The Lost Boy. In the absence of a fluent explanation behind the crimes from the protagonists themselves and ‘in keeping with our culture’s Freudian cast of mind’, Staff’s book is one of many which tries to stitch the fabric of the past into a satisfactory psychological pattern from which the murders then emerge. The credibility of such theories is somewhat undermined by the unfortunate commonness of Myra’s childhood experiences.

  Although there can be no justification for the mistreatment Myra witnessed and endured as she grew up, or the beatings that Nellie took from her husband, what occurred in the Hindley household was relatively routine in that era and environment; Myra was honest enough to admit as much in her Guardian article: ‘Friday and Saturday nights were known as “wife-beating” nights: the men worked hard all week and many spent the weekends drinking. Pub closing times were dreaded, because we all knew what would happen. Women ran out into the street, trying to escape from being beaten. All of the kids used to jump out of bed and rush outside to try to stop our fathers hurting our mothers, and we were often turned on too.’14

  Children were regularly clouted by their parents – and other adults – for the mildest of misdemeanours. Unlike Maureen, who didn’t challenge her parents until she was old enough to leave home, as Myra grew up she answered back when her parents rebuked her and was deliberately cheeky, despite knowing that a whack would follow. If Bob and Nellie sought to intimidate Myra by blows, they did not succeed: by the time she was a teenager, Myra was on the whole doing and saying exactly as she pleased. In her late teens, she began dealing with Bob’s attacks on her mother by meting out even harsher beatings on him. Her father was weakened then by his war wound and work injury; he would fight with his wife but never retaliated against Myra, except to hold up his arms to defend himself when she punched him and hit him about the body with his own stick. There are hints that her attacks came from something other than a need to protect her mother; by the time she was approaching her twenties, she was known in Gorton as a fighter, and Jim Burns, the uncle to whom Myra was never close, described her ‘temper and meanness as a child’ as having become ‘major faults’.15 Father and daughter were in many senses cut from the same cloth, as Myra confided in a trusted friend 40 years later: ‘If my father were alive, people would notice how much I resemble him in looks – at least I did when I was young, and I know I took after him in temperament in many respects too.’16

  She privately admitted that if Ian Brady suffered as a result of his fractured upbringing, she could not validly claim the same: ‘I didn’t have any traumas in my childhood as he may have done. I didn’t have a grudge against the world or society. I had no excuse for my actions.’17

  3

  Progress and conduct: satisfactory.

  Personality: not very sociable.

  Attendance: consistently unsatisfactory.

  Myra Hindley’s school report,

  Ryder Brow Secondary Modern, 1954

  ‘Any good in me comes from my gran,’ Myra wrote to her idealised father figure, David Astor, three years before her death. ‘She was a wise, gentle, polite and kindly lady who had not had an easy life and worked her fingers to the bone to make ends meet. She loved me dearly and I loved her more than anyone in the world.’1 After years of accommodating her children and their spouses, Gran felt as if she rattled like a pea in a bucket alone in the house on Beasley Street. She suggested to Nellie that four-year-old Myra move in to keep her company, perhaps hoping it would help diffuse the tension between Nellie and Bob. He was opposed to the idea, Myra recalled: ‘I wanted to go back to Gran’s but Dad wouldn’t let me . . . eventually he said I could but had to come home for meals.’2 She doesn’t explain why her father was against the move; it may well have been that he feared his daughter would become spoiled by living with her overindulgent grandmother. Myra had three disparate examples of adult behaviour guiding her through her childhood: her strict father, her extremely lenient grandmother and her inconsistent mother, who would let Myra do as she liked one minute, then wallop her for relatively little the next.

  Myra’s permanent departure from home to Gran’s house is often perceived as an unnecessary upheaval of Dickensian cruelty, instilling her with ‘a lurking sense of rejection’ and the fact that ‘there had never been any question of Moby being the one to go’ made her banishment seem complete.3 In reality, there was no discussion about which child should be sent to live with Gran for the simple reason that the request for Myra came from Gran herself; Maureen was then a very young baby who needed her mother. The two houses were so close that Myra could skip between them in a matter of minutes, and she certainly wasn’t the only child in Gorton to live with a grandparent: it was a practical arrangement in the overcr
owded terraces where working mothers had to rely on family members to mind the kids. And Myra was pleased with the move. Living with Gran meant respite from her bickering, irritable parents. She continued to eat at home because her father insisted upon it but was soon telling her mother that Gran was a better cook, and received a slap for her cheekiness. She was ‘forced to eat meals, especially fish, which I hated. I would eat it and be sick rather than get a good hiding.’4 When she was older and refused to eat what was on her plate, Nellie resorted to serving a side dish of chips at every meal, determined that Myra would leave home with some food in her tummy.

  A year later, Myra and Gran moved to 22 Beasley Street. Their new home was scarcely an improvement on the last. As before, the front door opened straight into the front room or ‘parlour’, where there was a stove and an open staircase, and the second of the two ground-floor rooms was a gloomy space with a lean-to scullery where cold water wheezed from a single tap into a Belfast sink. Upstairs, the wintry back bedroom overlooked the toilet shed in the yard and faced the back window of the Hindley house on Eaton Street. The room was too cold to be functional; Gran slept downstairs next to the stove, while Myra had the front bedroom, sleeping on a tick mattress on a lumpy bed. The furnishings were few: a wardrobe, a chair, a rickety marble-topped chest of drawers and a handmade rag-rug to brighten the floorboards. Gran followed the usual custom of piling old coats on the bed at night for warmth, together with bricks she’d heat in the stove and wrap in newspapers before pushing them under the blankets.