Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
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Then, one week after the murder and with no one either arrested or charged, the local newspaper, the Shropshire Star, ran a story on the Murrell case with the intriguing headline “Murder Victim Left an Unfinished Report.” Miss Murrell, the Star revealed, had been writing a paper on the dangers of nuclear waste, which had been close to completion at the time she was killed. With this news, a gentle exhalation was heard in many parts of liberal Britain. In Eliza Doolittle’s words, the suspicion now was that “they done the old woman in.” It was, after all, 1984.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
If ever a death had a context, Hilda Murrell’s did. Though 1984 might not have dawned on the total dystopia of Orwell’s fantasy, it was nevertheless a tense and unpleasant year, especially for those of a progressive or nervous cast of mind. In the weeks before the murder, news watchers had heard or read about a formal Russian protest concerning alleged American arms-control violations and a subsequent Soviet nuclear test in eastern Kazakhstan, events that were mere wraparounds for the news that on February 9, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Yuri Andropov, had died after only fifteen months on the job and been replaced by another Politburo geriatric, Konstantin Chernenko. On the day of the murder itself, March 21, a Soviet submarine crashed into an American warship off the coast of Japan.
In the months following Hilda’s death, a woman police officer was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London, killed by shots fired from inside; the IRA nearly succeeded in assassinating the British prime minister in a bomb explosion at her hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party conference; a Polish dissident priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, was abducted and murdered and his death later attributed to four state security officers; Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards; the Los Angeles Olympics were boycotted by the Soviet Bloc countries; there was a catastrophic explosion at the Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, India, resulting in thousands of deaths; and the Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan won reelection to the presidency of the United States in a landslide, defeating Democrat candidate Walter Mondale. This was despite his famous, inadvertently on-mike joke, “My fellow Americans, I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” One American cartoonist had depicted a grim-looking Konstantin Chernenko responding, “We begin bombing in ten minutes. Is no joke.”
But more important in setting the immediate psychological context for how the murder of Miss Murrell came to be seen by a section of the British population was a speech made by Margaret Thatcher to a gathering of Conservative backbench MPs in July 1984. At this private meeting, she drew a parallel between the battle for the Falkland Islands, won in 1982, and the struggle against trade union militancy in Britain. “In the Falklands,” she reportedly told her audience, “we had to fight the enemy without. Here is the enemy within.”5
The particular enemy referred to by Mrs. Thatcher was the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its supporters. On March 5, 1984, two weeks before Hilda Murrell’s death, miners at Cortonwood colliery in Yorkshire—threatened with closure by the National Coal Board—walked out on strike. The next day flying pickets from the Yorkshire coalfield appeared, uninvited, at pitheads in Nottinghamshire, traditionally a more moderate area. There was well-publicized violence as striking miners attempted first to persuade and then prevent their colleagues from working. On March 12, Arthur Scargill, the noisily militant president of the NUM, declared that despite the absence of a national ballot, the strikes in the various coalfields now constituted a national stoppage that all members were expected to observe.
From the beginning, the strategic objective of the NUM was to achieve a full strike in all areas, using pickets to enforce it; the objective of the authorities was to prevent such picketing and gradually to wear the strikers down. Coordinated police action, sometimes based on inside intelligence, anticipated the movement of pickets, and intercepted them, often miles from the collieries they were about to visit. The strike, which lasted nearly a year, saw more than 11,000 arrests, unprecedented police mobilization, and scenes of industrial violence and strikers’ hardship not witnessed in Britain since the 1920s.
There was significant sympathy for the miners, even among those who disapproved of their tactics. The job itself was associated with a certain labor nobility—tough men from tough communities doing tough things—that was now passing into history. There was the contrast between the strident certainty of Mrs. Thatcher and her (inevitably wealthy) supporters in the press, and the circumstances of striking miners’ families, deprived of money and forced to fall back on what was offered by churches and volunteers. Despite being depicted by some parts of the press as adjuncts to the KGB’s efforts to subvert British democracy, the truth was that in some ways the miners better represented a comfortable idealization of the country’s past than did the economics of the new right. Moreover, those non-miners who had such feelings easily persuaded themselves that they, too, were now regarded as being, in the state’s eyes, part of the enemy within. It may not have been an altogether unexciting feeling. Nor was it altogether untrue.
THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party had secured a majority in the British general election—to the surprise of some commentators, who had expected her avuncular Labour opponent, Jim Callaghan, to overcome the problems of his incumbent Labour administration and defeat the somewhat shrill and “extreme” Tory leader. This domestic shock to Britain’s political system was soon to be matched by greater shocks to the process of détente—mutual tolerance—which had been going on between the Soviet Bloc and the West since the early 1970s. When, in December 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in an attempt to prevent the bloody disintegration of the pro-Soviet government in Kabul, the entire edifice of East-West cooperation appeared to collapse.
It was a particularly bad time for all this to happen. The recent deployment in Eastern Europe and the western Soviet Union of intermediate-range nuclear weapons—the SS-20s—was about to be matched by the controversial stationing of U.S. intermediate-range nuclear weapons on European soil. Cruise and Pershing missiles were to be located at sites in Great Britain and West Germany, a decision which, in conditions of deteriorating relations between the superpowers, seemed to many Britons and Germans almost outrageously provocative. In the view of some, the threat of nuclear war, having lessened throughout the 1970s, was now growing once more. The election in November 1980 of derided right-wing former actor Ronald Reagan to the leadership of the free world revived images of Slim Pickens in the movie Dr. Strangelove sitting astride a Russia-bound bomb like a cowboy at a rodeo.
Britain saw a sudden expansion in the membership of CND, an organization that had been in decline since the mid-1960s. In September 1981, a march, attended mostly by women, terminated at the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, one of the sites chosen for the stationing of cruise missiles. There, some of the women set up what was later called the Greenham Peace Camp, a permanent site that became a cultural fixture. From across Britain, activist women of all ages (though mostly of middle-class backgrounds) came to Greenham to pin woolly favors to the fence, write poems, sing songs about the earth, and, occasionally, try to enter the base. The Greenham woman became a kind of prototypical citizen activist, the Women’s Institute plus politics. My mother, last heard of in this book in November 1963, was one of those who visited Greenham.
By 1983, tension was rising. Mrs. Thatcher, partly as a consequence of her victory over Argentina in the matter of the Falkland Islands, had been reelected by a landslide in the general election, this despite a full recession and unprecedented levels of unemployment. Ronald Reagan, in a speech to an evangelical group in Orlando, Florida, described the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the modern world,” and a human chain of fifty thousand or so CND protesters linked the Greenham base with an arms factory fourteen miles away.
The Br
itish government was far from relaxed about the resurgence of the CND, as it was far from relaxed about almost any enemy. Thatcher’s supporters often gave the impression that opposition to the government and sedition were much the same thing. So the government took pains to counter CND’s arguments overtly and, as Britons discovered, state security also made efforts to monitor CND covertly. One year after Hilda’s murder, in March 1985, a departing MI5 officer, Cathy Massiter, went on television to reveal how the telephones of CND members had been bugged and an agent infiltrated into the London office of the organization. The same tactics, she told viewers, had been used against the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known as Liberty), because both bodies had been officially classified as “subversive.” Massiter had blown the whistle because she believed that the surveillance operation had been “getting out of control.”m6 This wasn’t all. The case of a woman named Madeleine Haigh, who wrote a pro-CND letter to a local newspaper in 1981, only to find Special Branch on her doorstep, seemed to justify any paranoia on behalf of simple sympathizers with dissident causes. Nearly two decades later, the rationale for such intrusions was supplied by Sir Philip Knight, chief constable of West Midlands Police from 1975 to 1985.
KNIGHT : It was perceived that CND had links to the Communist Party, and it was automatically, I think, assumed, that there would be people in there who had subversion as their main aim, and we wanted to try and find out who they were.
QUESTIONER: So if I had gone on a CND demonstration in the early eighties I was therefore a legitimate person for investigation?
KNIGHT: Unfortunately yes, you probably could have been, yes.
QUESTIONER: And a knock on the door.
KNIGHT: Possibly, yes, possibly.
QUESTIONER: By Special Branch officers.
KNIGHT: Possibly. Yes. Unless you inquire, you don’t find out. You can’t just pick it out of thin air whether somebody is a subversive or not. You have to inquire.7
The same series revealed that at around the same time Special Branch had had a mole inside the National Union of Miners.8
Thatcher’s enemies extended from the peripheral (New Age travelers in convoys of old buses who insisted on setting up camp on other people’s land) through the irksome (“loony-left” local councils trying to operate little oases of socialism in what they saw as the wasteland of Thatcher-ism) to the, in the case of the Provisional IRA, genuinely threatening and murderous. In 1984, as we have seen, the IRA came close to murdering the prime minister herself, and in that year killed fifty-one people in Northern Ireland, most of them civilians.9 The intelligence operation against the IRA was characterized by the employment of informers and agents, whose cover sometimes necessarily involved them in the commission of crimes.
Death of a Rose Grower, Part Two
The summer of 1984 saw the police make no progress on catching the murderer of Miss Murrell, and soon some of those scrutinizing their efforts began to focus on supposed inconsistencies in official accounts of the crime. For example, the police had described Ravenscroft as having been “ransacked” as though by a burglar searching for anything of value, and the telephone wires as having been pulled out of the socket. But to a number of observers, the scene-of-crime video seemed rather to suggest that the “intruder or intruders had systematically gone through everything, including Hilda’s papers and books, which had then been replaced in their original positions.”10 Brian George, her gardener, also said that the telephone wires seemed to him to have been expertly disconnected rather than simply yanked out. And then there was the sexual aspect of the attack. At various times, the police were supposed either to have suggested that the traces of semen were too slight to be able to obtain a blood-group match, and at others that the sperm count was low enough to indicate that the attacker had had a vasectomy.
Such relatively minor discrepancies were first pulled together and described in print in the magazine the New Statesman in the autumn of 1984. A freelance writer and member of CND, Judith Cook, published an article speculating on whether, far from being a botched burglary, the Murrell murder might, in fact, have been the consequence of a political decision. Cook had discovered, she wrote later, that “there were those in Shrewsbury who had been convinced, almost from the outset, that the answer did not lie close to home but a good deal further away; that Hilda, either by accident or design, had been the victim of something a good deal more sinister than a simple burglary followed by assault.”11
In part, this suspicion was based on Hilda Murrell’s own fears, now given posthumous voice. According to acquaintances to whom Cook had spoken, before her death Hilda had been “frightened and very secretive.” On February 25, she had called her friend and antinuclear campaigner Gerard Morgan-Grenville, and in the course of the conversation had said to him something like, “If they don’t get me first, I want the world to know that one old woman has seen through their lies.” Morgan-Grenville’s account of this phone call comprised the first interview in a program in the prestigious World in Action current affairs series transmitted a year after the murder. Hilda had also spoken of the existence of a “nuclear brøderbund,” some sort of shadowy organization.12
Cook pointed out that Hilda had, a few days earlier, finished her paper for the Sizewell B inquiry, and noted that another comrade from the Shropshire Peace Alliance later claimed that Hilda had called him between eleven and eleven-thirty a.m. on the day of her abduction to ask him to come over and look after some papers of hers because “she was under some kind of surveillance and she was expecting a visit from Inspector Davies or Davy.”13 The inference was clear: Hilda had felt herself to be under scrutiny from the authorities because of her antinuclear activism. They, not burglars, had been the stuff of her nightmares.
And then, argued Cook, there was the diligence, or lack of it, being displayed by the police investigators. In the summer of 1984, she wrote, “three senior officers involved in the murder hunt were discovered to have been playing golf when they should have been out pursuing their enquiries.” This mattered because “the suggestion was made that possibly the police had their own reasons for not wanting to pursue the killer with too much enthusiasm.”14 But what might those reasons—aside from the desire to play golf or a degree of fatalism because the case was now going cold—actually be? Logic suggested one possible alternative: the police knew or suspected who had done the old lady in but didn’t want to catch them. And if that was the case, then the question was, why?
At the time of Hilda’s death, her closest living relative seems to have been her nephew Rob Green, who at that time was living in Dorset and training to be a thatcher. Green soon tended to the view that his aunt’s death was somehow connected to her involvement in protests against nuclear power. Others, however, became convinced that it was Hilda’s connection to Rob Green that had provided the motive for her murder, for Green was bound up with that great cause célèbre of the first Thatcher term, the sinking in 1982 of the Argentinian battle cruiser General Belgrano.
The Belgrano affair had entered British folklore partly because it seemed to provide the one chink in Mrs. Thatcher’s adamantine exoskeleton. As the British task force had steamed toward the occupied Falkland Islands, and before full battle was joined, various diplomatic initiatives were under way in attempts to avert conflict. These were unpromising, given the mutually exclusive positions of the two sides. At the same time, Britain declared an area around the Falklands a “total exclusion zone,” within which hostile ships should expect to be attacked. The Belgrano was close to but not inside this zone when the submarine HMS Conqueror fired three torpedoes, which sank the ship, killing 323 of her crew.
A year later, in the course of her general election campaign, the one moment of awkwardness for the Iron Lady came when she was questioned on a live TV show by a middle-aged woman named Diana Gould. Combative but polite, Gould forced Thatcher to admit that the Belgrano had been heading away from the Falklands and suggested that the attack might have been part of a
deliberate attempt by the government to forestall peace negotiations and ensure the issue would be decided by force of arms. It was widely, almost plaintively, believed on the center and left in Britain that had the Falklands not been invaded and an atmosphere of jingoism thus created, then the Tories would have lost the 1983 election. That being so, it was natural to invert this proposition and to suggest that, guessing this in advance, Thatcher had opted for war to improve her election prospects. If so, this was a major scandal and might even lead to Thatcher’s downfall.
And who were best placed to expose any such scandal but those who had been part of the Belgrano operation? The men on the Conqueror perhaps, or those in Thatcher’s war cabinet, or the men and women of naval intelligence, who saw all the signals sent on that day? As it happened, one of those men was Commander Robert Green of the Royal Navy, nephew of Hilda Murrell—a fact that immediately captured the attention of that British parliamentary phenomenon, Old Etonian Labour MP Tam Dalyell.
Dalyell, once described as “more a campaigning journalist than an MP,”15 had made the fate of the Belgrano his life’s obsession since the sinking. Indomitable and unembarrassable, the MP for Linlithgow in Scotland was regarded by many as a somewhat absurd figure. But as the journalist Andrew Brown was to comment later, Dalyell, “by dint of an almost ludicrous persistence, which involved getting himself thrown out of the chamber five times, managed to implant in the national consciousness the idea that there had been something markedly less than heroic about the action which, more than any other, secured the safety of the task force that recaptured the Falklands.”16