One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  She returned to the house, disturbed and drenched to the skin. The memory of Michael haunted Myra for the rest of her life: ‘Sometimes I can still see him in that murky water, reaching out for me.’46

  4

  Myra used to go to church. She liked dancing and swimming. She liked the normal way of life. She had many girlfriends. And she liked children.

  Maureen Hindley, evidence at ‘Moors trial’, 1966

  Myra Hindley’s first appearance in the press was in honour of her achievements. On 19 July 1957, the Gorton & Openshaw Reporter featured a column about Ryder Brow school sports day. Myra had covered herself with glory; on an afternoon of ‘keen competition’ she excelled: ‘Individual Championships . . . Senior Girls, Myra Hindley, 10 awards’.1 The overall winner in her year among the girls, Myra’s triumphs included coming first in high jump, second in javelin and third in the 220-yard run.

  Her last term at school occurred in a period of sweeping social change. The Suez Crisis of the previous year proved that although Britain’s days of Empire were at an end, the gloom of austerity was beginning to disperse, with rationing no longer in force and sales of consumer goods such as washing machines and televisions escalating. Wages and living standards were on the rise, and one of the first signs of significant change in people’s lives was how they shopped: in the major cities, housewives abandoned their daily queuing at individual stores and embraced the supermarket – which, in their infancy, were still nothing like the vast emporiums they are today. Convenience foods in cans and foil containers proliferated, while new products like fish fingers, tinned steak-and-kidney pies and pre-sliced white bread appeared on the shelves. The tea bag was launched in 1952, and a decade later Nescafé’s instant coffee became a contender for the nation’s favourite drink. Youngsters guzzled fizzy pop: Coca-Cola, Vimto and Tizer. Old essentials such as sugar lumps, candles and turnips were replaced by camera films, telephone rentals, dog food and nylon stockings, while high-street stores – WH Smith, Burton and Woolworths – flourished. ‘Deep in the national psyche,’ wrote journalist Christopher Booker, ‘was the knowledge that a very real watershed had been passed . . . the dam had burst.’2

  Nowhere was the upheaval more evident than in Myra’s age group; she was a teenager when the phrase first came into common use in Britain, when girls began to be freed from the drudgery of housework as appliances took over and National Service was abolished for boys in 1960. The popularity of coffee bars springing up in every town centred around jewel-bright jukeboxes where the latest single flipped into riotous life for sixpence a throw. Britain’s first Top Twelve Chart, cribbed from the American Billboard Chart, appeared on the pages of The New Musical Express in 1952, although for a while ballads sung by old-fashioned crooners held the top spots until Bill Haley and the Comets exploded into the chart in 1954 with ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. Almost overnight, rock ’n’ roll – black slang since the early 1920s for sex – became the soundtrack to British teenagers’ lives.

  In 1955, four million singles were sold in Britain; by 1963, that figure had risen to sixty-one million. In September 1956, when Myra was 14, the film Rock Around the Clock was released in British cinemas and, in Manchester, the press reported: ‘A thousand screaming, jiving, rhythm-crazy teenagers surged through the city . . . sweeping aside police cordons and stopping traffic.’3 Two months into the new year, the first episode of a youth-orientated music show aired on the BBC, with Pete Murray addressing the nation’s teen boys and girls: ‘Welcome aboard the Six-Five Special. We’ve got almost a hundred cats jumping here, some real cool characters to give us the gas, so just get with it and have a ball.’4 Over ten million viewers tuned in to the show, which set a trend; ITV launched their equivalent, Oh Boy!, a few months later, and in 1959 the most popular programme of its kind, Juke Box Jury, burst onto screens, with its celebrity panel declaring new singles a ‘Hit’ or a ‘Miss’.

  Although Myra’s voice joined those yelling along to Rock Around the Clock, her idol was Elvis Presley, who had his first number one single in Britain with ‘All Shook Up’ in the month she left school: July 1957. She saw his first film, Loving You, twice a night for a whole week when it was shown at Manchester’s Apollo, queued for every record he released, collected souvenirs and put together a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine clippings about the swivel-hipped singer.

  Furthering her education was the last thing on her mind; she wanted to find employment and have money to spend: ‘I couldn’t wait to leave school and start work, which I did days after my 15th birthday. [They] were the happiest days of my life, except for those of my childhood when I didn’t have to go to school. I had a wide circle of friends with whom I went dancing, swimming and roller-skating and also spent a lot of time in local libraries, where I could browse and read in peace and quiet.’5 She was pleased when Lloyd-Jones gave her an excellent reference, and took a test to assess her suitability for a College of Further Education: ‘I was delighted when I passed because I wanted to learn secretarial skills. I didn’t want to end up in a dead-end job like most women seemed to.’6 She rejected a place at teacher training college in Didsbury and applied for a position as a junior clerk at an electrical engineering company, Lawrence Scott and Electrometers, on Louisa Street.

  She was offered the post but was a couple of weeks short of her 15th birthday – the firm’s required age limit for staff – so Auntie Kath found her a temporary position with a catalogue company in the city centre until then. The pay was good: £3 per week and tax-free. For a fortnight, Myra packed shoes and ran errands for the sales representatives, then on 26 July began work at Lawrence Scott, where the salary was less but the prospects considerably better. Her duties were limited to some light typing, running more errands and making tea. She enjoyed being part of a team and bantering with colleagues. When she mislaid her first week’s wage packet and told the other girls about it, they organised a whip-round to replace the money with a few bob extra thrown in to cheer her up. Their generosity was soon withdrawn when she came into work one day with a tearful story about losing her pay packet again. The girls weren’t fooled, and some of them turned against her, calling her ‘a hard cow’.7

  Other colleagues continued to be friendly. One of the girls, Margie, had a flat and invited her over for an evening. Hearing that Myra was thinking about changing her hair colour (she was fed up with being dishwater-brown), Margie immediately offered to bleach it. That same night Myra changed her image forever: when the peroxide was rinsed off and her hair blow-dried into a puff ball, the result was shockingly different. Myra stared at her reflection in the mirror, aghast. The awkward, lank-haired school-leaver had gone; in her place was Myra Hindley, slinky candyfloss blonde.

  Myra knew her appearance would cause a stir at home and at work. It did: her mother was incandescent with rage and struck her across the face, telling her she looked cheap. But to Myra’s relief she said nothing about dyeing it back again, and Bob contented himself with a few choice words about bottle blondes. The men at her workplace were more appreciative, and for the first time she had a glimpse of the power a sexually attractive woman could wield. She started going into the association room, where her colleagues – mainly the men – played table tennis and listened to the latest singles. When one lad offered to teach her how to play the game, Myra readily agreed and joined the company team, as they bussed about the city for table-tennis tournaments that usually ended in the pub. One of the older women advised Myra to be careful with her alcohol intake if she didn’t want to get herself a reputation.

  The workforce at Lawrence Scott made a point of socialising together after clocking off and funded their nights out with a weekly kitty. Myra’s first evening out with her colleagues was at Levenshulme Palais, where she wore a blue knitted dress, blue shoes and matching handbag. She managed to stay sober but spent the entire night jiving and smooching on the dance floor with a welder called Ray. His blond hair was gelled into a quiff and he drove a
fast motorbike when they went out on dates. They split up when Myra refused to sleep with him; she feared falling pregnant like her friend Dodo, whose boyfriend was a Teddy boy.

  She’d learned the rudimentary facts of life from gossip with other girls, knowing that there was no point raising the subject with her mother, who hadn’t even known when Myra began menstruating: ‘The smell of toasted bread reminds me of my first period. I was sitting in front of the fire eating toast when it happened, and I panicked and ran to Gran . . . We never talked about sex in our house and Mam didn’t warn me about periods. In fact, I never had any sex education at all. I don’t think anybody did in those days.’8 The impulsive element in her personality was limited to experimenting with her looks and skiving from work. She relished her wage packet and socialising with colleagues (whose netball team she had joined), but the actual business of working left her cold. On the rare occasions when she could be bothered to put in an appearance, she idled away the hours in the loos, puffing on Park Drives and keeping a casual lookout while some of the girls busied themselves with their sideline – buying and selling from catalogues.

  One member of the household was lost that year when Duke was fatally run over. Myra was distraught. Gran immediately bought another collie and gave it the unimaginative name Lassie. Myra lavished the dog with attention but pined for Duke, who had been a loyal childhood companion.

  Myra began to grow increasingly dissatisfied with her life. Holidays were still uniformly domestic, but the whiff of foreign possibilities was there in newly popular French recipes and Italian fashions and the ubiquitous coffee bar with its air of European sophistication. Myra had overhauled the way she looked, but her lifestyle was unchanged. There was a brief escape with Margie to Butlins in Ayr (funded by second jobs in a jam factory for both girls), but then it was back to Gorton and the tacky glamour of local dance halls. ‘Myra liked jiving, it was the only kind of dancing she would do,’ Pat Jepson recalled.9 Myra and Pat attended Stan’s Dancing School off Knutsford Road, where classes on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday cost 1s 6d. They tried out the jive sessions at Chick Hibbert’s on Ashton Old Road, although the place was more dive than jive, and frequented the seedily glamorous Ashton Palais, where rockers often roared up on their motorbikes to start fights in the car park. On one occasion Myra and Pat travelled to a dance in Ashton-under-Lyne (five miles from Gorton), then missed the last bus home and had to stay at a friend’s house. Pat remembers: ‘I got a clout, but Myra’s mother batted her in the street and she wasn’t allowed out for a week.’10

  Sivori’s, the espresso cafe opposite the town hall on Hyde Road, was the place to be seen in. Allan Grafton recalls, ‘Everyone used to meet there. Myra was hanging around with a different football team then, the Mission Lads. We used to tease her about her hair. She was loud and brash, but still OK, though if you said too much, you’d more than likely see the back of her hand.’11 Myra and Pat dawdled by the jukebox, sipping hot Vimto and nibbling on Holland’s pies. They had their own uniform, favouring pencil skirts, cardigans that buttoned up at the back and ballet pumps. Myra disliked the full-skirted fashions; she preferred tight skirts and sweaters worn over cone-shaped bras and roll-on girdles – the Hitchcock Blonde look.

  She visited Ashton market with a group of friends, buying herself a complete outfit from one of the stalls. She was learning the age-old art of accentuating her good points – a strong face and slim legs – and camouflaging the bad – a beaked nose and broad bottom. She favoured scarlet lipstick and heavy, spit-slicked mascara worn with eyeliner as sooty as the bricks of Gorton Foundry.

  After the initial row over hair colour, Nellie agreed to bleach Myra’s roots and she returned the favour by curling her mother’s hair using fire-warmed tongs. Eventually, Myra decided to have her hair professionally coloured and styled. There was a salon on Taylor Street called Maison Laurette where she and Pat experimented with beauty treatments; Myra paid 10s 6d to have her hair bleached a dazzling white-blonde. The salon owner, Mrs Laurette Howells, showed her how to create the beehive look by putting rollers in her hair every night and protecting them with a headscarf until the following morning.

  ‘I thought I was fairly attractive to men,’ Myra reflected, ‘although some might argue, and I had a series of short-term relationships, but none that really satisfied me.’12 Her friend Pat Jepson recalls, ‘Myra never bothered much with boys. Of course she used to go out with them but not a lot. Myra looked very grown-up . . . I think she thought the boys around our way were too young for her.’13 Yet one neighbour complained to Nellie Hindley that Myra was always kissing lads outside her back door on Almond Street.

  The summer of 1958 brought a week’s holiday for Myra with Pat’s family in Blackpool, but she was still at odds with herself. Michael’s mother asked her if she’d considered what the Church might do for her and Myra began taking instruction in the Roman Catholic faith from tall, bespectacled Father Theodore at St Francis’ Monastery. Nellie swallowed her disapproval and joined the family to watch the Bishop of Salford anoint Myra. Auntie Kath was delighted, having always guided Myra’s interest in the Church, and presented her with an expensive prayer book. On the flyleaf was the dedication, ‘To Myra, from Auntie Kath and Uncle Bert. November 16th 1958. Souvenir of your first Holy Communion.’14

  Seven years later, the small ivory prayer book would yield a clue that cemented the Moors Murders case, establishing it as the most notorious exhibit ever presented in a murder trial. Its discovery condemned Myra as the benchmark of female evil in modern times.

  ‘When I used to pray in front of the pietà, I used to touch the hand of Our Lord, which hung from Our Lady’s sorrow-racked embrace, and although slightly scared because the church was only dimly lighted by candle-glow, and empty, which awed me a little, I used to quickly kiss His hand before leaving the church,’ Myra recalled in a prison letter.15 Her immersion in Roman Catholicism gave her a temporary sense of calm and she was touched when the Higgins family asked her to be godmother to Michael’s nephew, Anthony John. But her devotion to the Church soon waned. Within a few weeks, she had stopped attending Mass, and when she encountered Father Theodore in the street hung her head in embarrassment and mumbled excuses.

  Pat Jepson was engaged and saving for her wedding. Myra described herself then as ‘emotionally immature, relatively unsophisticated and sexually inexperienced – I was still a virgin and intended to be so until I got married’.16 The boys she dated tried to rectify that, but Myra was prudish to the point of not allowing even her family to see her undressed and shrieked when her sister walked in on her at bath-time. ‘Don’t be daft,’ Maureen responded, typically down to earth. ‘It’s only your sister.’17 But Myra didn’t want anyone seeing her in the tin bath that was brought into the kitchen on Saturday nights. She found a steady boyfriend, however, in Ronnie Sinclair, one year her senior, from nearby Dalkeith Street. They met when she was 12 and he tugged the ribbons from her hair at the ‘Bug Hut’ cinema. He was working as a tea-blender at the Co-op when Myra agreed to go out with him in late 1958. In preparation for marriage – whether to Ronnie or someone else – she took over all the housework from Gran, as practice for running her own home, and paid a neighbour two shillings a week for ‘bottom drawer’ items from a catalogue. She also paid two shillings every week into a Christmas club.

  In spring 1959, Myra was made redundant due to financial difficulties at Lawrence Scott. She was unemployed for just one week; in March 1959, she began work as a junior typist at Clydesdale’s Furniture Shop in Gorton. The wages were poor, but Nana Hindley came to the rescue by securing weekend jobs for Myra, Margie and a few other ex-Lawrence Scott girls in the catering department at Belle Vue. Allan Grafton and his friends visited the huge entertainment complex every weekend: ‘On Saturday nights, everyone would go to the Speedway and then into Belle Vue amusement park. At 10.30 p.m., the crowds converged on the Lake Hotel boating lake, where there was a fantastic weekly firework display. Apart from paying a sm
all fee to go to the Speedway, everything was free.’18 Myra served customers from food trolleys, but she hated the stink of fish and chips on her clothing and was glad when she and her friend Irene were offered work in the German-styled ‘bierkeller’ instead. The head barmaid advised them to dress up, keep smiling and serve short measures without getting caught. Myra and Irene were happy to go along with it, especially when they were given free packets of cigarettes as a bribe.

  Ronnie presented her with an engagement ring on her 18th birthday, which Myra duly displayed to her family and friends, careful to point out the three tiny diamond chips set in it, while hoping they wouldn’t find out it was second-hand. Bob offered to pay for the wedding with his compensation money from the foundry. Nellie was less enthusiastic; she wanted Myra to enjoy life while she was still young and didn’t like the idea of her settling down with the first boy who proposed. Her mother’s misgivings roused Myra’s own. She looked at Nellie, trapped in a ‘boring domestic role’ of the ‘downtrodden wife. I wanted my mother to stand up for herself, but she was weak and allowed Dad to bully her. I hated that.’19 Myra began silently criticising Ronnie as a result, put off by the grease under his fingernails – ‘like Dad’s’ – and secretly condemning him as ‘boring and mundane. He cared a lot about me, which mattered, but he didn’t like dancing and we spent most of our time at stock car races, which was his hobby.’20

  Pat Jepson was the first of her friends to marry. Others followed, and Myra abhorred how their lives seemed to shrink: ‘When I began to witness many of my friends and neighbours, some of whom “had to get married”, having baby after baby, almost tied to the kitchen sink and struggling to make ends meet while their husbands went out every night, drinking and betting away their wages just as my father had done, I began to feel uncomfortable and restless.’21 She disliked their husbands, drinkers who flirted endlessly with other women, and came to the conclusion that ‘very few men could be trusted’.22 She felt her friends had been ‘trapped into family life, with no money and no freedom’.23