Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper

by Gordon Burn

  GORDON BURN

  Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son

  The Story of Peter Sutcliffe

  To my parents

  … and the power to light the room came from another country, well to the north, where snow had already fallen

  John Cheever, Bullet Park

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  House

  PART TWO

  Room

  PART THREE

  Other Rooms

  PART FOUR

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  House

  1

  Although less than six miles along the Aire valley from Bradford, the enduringly Victorian ‘Worstedopolis’ whose dormitory it has increasingly become, Bingley is in many ways a country town, distrustful of, and often hostile to, what are all too easily interpreted as slick city ways. It is a conservative community, tolerant of mild eccentricity but more given to ‘shamming gaumless’ than to acts of flamboyance or outward display.

  Travelling north to prepare a biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë almost a century and a half ago, Mrs Gaskell, whose train would have called at Bingley en route to Keighley for Haworth, only a short distance down the line, was immediately struck by the sullen and suspicious demeanour of the people ‘in such a new manufacturing place’:

  ‘The remarkable degree of self-sufficiency they possess gives them an air of independence apt to repel a stranger … Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speach blunt and harsh … a stranger can hardly ask a question without receiving some crusty reply if, indeed, he receive any at all. Sometimes the sour rudeness amounts to positive insult. Yet, if the “foreigner” takes all this churlishness good-humouredly, or as a matter of course, and makes good any claim upon their latent kindliness and hospitality, they are faithful and generous, and thoroughly to be relied upon,’ Mrs Gaskell concluded in 1857, and little that has happened in the intervening years would cause her to radically revise that view.

  ‘Foreigners’, in fact, which meant Bradfordians as well as southerners and those from further afield, were probably a less rare occurrence in Bingley in the mid-nineteenth century, when the railway and the canal were both bustling thoroughfares, than they have become today.

  Shoppers and commuters are the only passengers likely to alight these days at Bingley station; and the holidaymakers who are the only cargo that the Leeds–Liverpool canal now carries linger just long enough at the top of the Five Rise Lock overlooking the town to bemoan the unsightly concrete bunker erected by the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, and the ‘Damart’ sign defacing the handsome chimney of the former Bowling Green Mills, before opening the throttle on their rented narrow-boats and gamely chugging on.

  As recently as the early 1960s, however, when the Arts Council was still a warren of cobbled streets staggering down to the river, and the shopping precinct was still the site of the Myrtle cinema, Bingley, because of its advantaged position, was regularly choked with visitors from the surrounding towns, come to seek a breath of fresh air.

  From Main Street, once part of the principal road from Bradford to Lancashire and the North, Bingley very quickly climbs up the steep sides of the valley, until the blackened stone of the semi-detached villas and Victorian terraces on the gentler slopes is overpowered by the paler brick of the post-war estates which provide the physical link between the heart of the old town and the scattered hamlets and villages high up on the moor’s edge.

  It was to places like Gilstead and Eldwick that the hikers and bikers would come on August Bank Holiday Mondays and at Whitsuntide, toiling up the hills to the town’s outer boundary in their hundreds, and then on, past High Eldwick, across Rombald’s Moor to Ilkley, a sight as predictable as the rain that beat down on the Airedale Agricultural Society Show, held in Myrtle Park, every summer, and the Round Table’s ‘Moonlight Express’ which left Bingley station for Morecambe illuminations at 7.01 p.m. on the first Friday of every September.

  These and other seasonal certainties – the St George’s Day parade, the Children’s Gala, ‘progging’ for ‘Plot Night’ (Guy Fawkes), the Sunshine Christmas Club – loaned a steadying rhythm to the Bingley year which in its turn has proved a reliable ballast against unwanted – always referred to locally as ‘unnecessary’ – change.

  John Sutcliffe has benefited all his life from the stability and sense of continuity that a small, semi-rural community like Bingley provides, and he has always endeavoured in his own way to guarantee it for the future.

  On 11 November 1960, for instance, Mr Sutcliffe, a good-looking man, well-known locally for his achievements on the cricket and football fields, was a featured soloist when Bingley Musical Union, the town’s male voice choir, performed with Hammond Sauceworks Band in the Princess Hall. Highlights of the evening, as that week’s Bingley Guardian duly recorded, were ‘The Lord Is My Light’ (27th Psalm); ‘In the Gloaming’; selections from South Pacific; ‘Comrades in Arms’; ‘Plantation Songs’; ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; and ‘Abide with Me’. A collection taken for Bingley Blind People’s Association and Bingley Children’s Gala raised £20 1os.

  Fifteen years on, the setting was different – the main hall of the recently completed Bingley Arts Centre. But on the evening of Sunday, 7 March 1975, Mr Sutcliffe was again one of the soloists when the Musical Union again appeared with Hammond Sauceworks Band, performing by and large the same programme, and was prominent in the photograph that accompanied the Bingley Guardian’s notice hailing it as ‘without doubt one of the most successful combinations of sounds to which music lovers in the Aire valley have ever been treated.’

  It was around this time, however, that dark rumblings started to be heard about the unlikelihood of the Musical Union surviving beyond its centenary, then only fifteen years in the future: young men were no longer following their fathers into the choir as the present members had followed their fathers before them; young men didn’t want to spend their Monday nights in an underheated room rehearsing ‘Love Divine’ and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’; life was full of too many other distractions.

  *

  Peter Sutcliffe was third-generation Bingley, a chain that he would finally break himself by moving out to Bradford after he was married. His greatgrandfather, John ‘Willie’ Sutcliffe, an imposing presence, head of the accounts department at Bradford Co-operative Society, had made the move in the opposite direction with his young wife in the 1890s; and once settled in Eldwick, then little more than a scattering of grey stone terraces easily mistaken from a distance as merely a hilly outcrop of the local millstone grit, had quickly established himself as something of a figure in the community.

  J. W. Sutcliffe’s uncle was already installed as church-warden at St Lawrence C. of E., Eldwick; his wife became a stalwart of the church Ladies’ Committee and it seemed natural that, when the time came for their first grandchild to be born, John Sutcliffe would be born in the large, plain house with a view of the moors that had seen his own father grow up.

  A gradual descent down the side of the valley towards the centre of Bingley and a lifetime in manual labour have left John Sutcliffe full of nostalgia for both the scenery of his childhood and the exalted position enjoyed by his grandfather.

  As a child he’d ride the tram into Bradford with his grandmother sometimes, and there the two of them would marvel at the sight of his namesake, big John ‘W
illie’ Sutcliffe, at work. ‘He must have had a staff of about twenty girls in his office. It seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, and there were all these desks all the way down with girls scribbling away at them. And me grandfather’s desk was at the top of the office, high up, facing them all. I met a man who worked for Bradford Co-op, many, many years after me grandfather had died, who told me they used to tremble in their boots when they saw him coming. He said he were a proper tartar.’

  This picture of his grandfather in his public role, familiar from retelling to succeeding generations of the Sutcliffe family, is indelibly linked in John Sutcliffe’s mind with a second, more informal one: his grandfather at the dinner table, at home, working his way through huge platefuls of offal that seemed all the more delicious to the small boy watching at his elbow because it was food that his grandmother, in common with most women of her acquaintance, couldn’t bring herself to cook, much less eat.

  ‘He used to eat some of the most esoteric stuff that you ever saw in your life, and he had to be who he was to get it in the quantity and quality that he did. He was a great man for tripe and pigs’ trotters and best beef sausage, chicklins [chitterlings, pigs’ intestines] all stuff like that … He absolutely loved offal.

  ‘And when I was a kid, I used to stand at the side of his chair when he was eating his evening meal and I used to look up at him, just like a little pup watching somebody with food. And he’d just go on eating away and eating away, a very well-built, well-made feller, with a great full moustache, until all of a sudden he’d look down as if he hadn’t noticed me till then and say, “Hello, would you like to try a bit of this?” And he’d chop me a lump off. It didn’t matter what it was; it were me grandad’s dinner; and it were beautiful.

  ‘And it’s stood me in good stead to this day that I can eat anything out of a butcher’s, be it trotters or be it cow-heel or be it tripe or chicklins – anything at all in the offal time. I love it.’

  This appetite for what he’d very quickly identified as ‘man’s food’ did little to dent the reputation John Sutcliffe enjoyed even at that early age for being what is known in West Yorkshire as ‘a real lad’, or just ‘real’. Constantly in scrapes, one of his earliest memories is of an incident that he says happened when he was just eleven months old, at the cottage in High Eldwick that was his parents’ first home.

  His mother had taken a tin of gravy out of the oven and left it on a table under the kitchen window to cool. Hoicking himself up with the aid of a table-leg and a chair, he’d somehow managed to make contact with the rim of the tin and had pulled the hot, clinging gravy down all over himself. He’d be reminded many times in later life how lucky he was not to be permanently disfigured; but, although he was fortunate not to get it full in the face, the left side of his chin and his left shoulder are still noticeably scarred. ‘I can remember doing it,’ he says. ‘I can remember screaming me head off when it happened.’

  Not the sort of man to easily forget anything – he’s always ready with the time of day, correct to the nearest second and carries the local bus timetables around in his head – John Sutcliffe’s memories of his first six years, spent on the edge of a farm in the middle of nowhere, are especially acute. After a period of neglect, he has taken to revisiting the scenery with which he was on such intimate terms as a child in order to remind himself, so he likes to tell his friends, that times haven’t always been so bad.

  ‘Up there, the summers were always summers and the winters were always winters,’ will begin a typical reminiscence of the ‘real’ weather enjoyed on the moor-top. Such as the times when all you’d be able to see going to school was the top of an old drywall sticking up above the snow, which you would have to lead your little sister along by the hand. Or the fireballs which, another time, the same stone wall served to protect them against, sending them blazing into the tops of nearby trees in the premature dark.

  ‘And in the summer I can remember the … the heat of the sun and the smell of the hay and everything about life in the country. It was so … lovely and warm and brilliant. Not so long ago I went to watch a cricket match up at High Eldwick, just up where I used to live, and when I left Bingley it were absolutely bucketing down; it was coming down like stair-rods: when I got up to where the cricket field is, you could see right down over the Aire Valley, and from Keighley, right through Bingley, Saltaire, Shipley, there was a thick white cloud hanging low over the river that never moved. Up where I was, though, it were beautiful. It was a glorious, sunny day.’

  In similar vein, he can wax lyrical about the generosity of the farmer on whose land their cottage stood: ‘“Now then, lass,” he’d say to me mother, “anytime tha wants a tunnip, go over t’field and get yersen one.”’ And even about the earth-toilet, located some distance from the house on the far side of a dirt road. He says he dreams of returning permanently, to see out his days. ‘I’ve always said I’d like to finish me time back up there again. I really would. I’d really love to go back and live in that cottage where we lived.’

  And yet, based on what he always told them while they were growing up, John Sutcliffe’s children never thought of his upbringing as anything but ‘hard’: in the emotional, if not the purely physical sense, he always seemed to them to have been deprived. It was certainly an impression that their own experience of his mother, a difficult, demanding, undemonstrative woman, tended to bear out.

  Only Peter, the oldest of John Sutcliffe’s six children, would ever find anything resembling a welcome at his grandmother Sutcliffe’s door. For the rest, whether they’d been sent up on an errand or just happened to be passing, she’d keep them standing outside, and in all weathers.

  It had registered with John Sutcliffe at an early age that his mother was his father’s social inferior. Returning from summer holidays spent with his grandparents in Mrs Cannon’s very proper ‘holiday home’ on Queen’s Promenade in Douglas, Isle of Man, he’d be especially struck by the fact that his mother was from cruder stock – ‘from right at the lower end of the social scale,’ as he’d describe it later; ‘as low as you possibly could be in a town this size.’

  The daughter of a foundryman, she’d been brought up in what is still known as ‘the bottom of the town’, meaning the terraced cottages in the shadow of Bingley Parish Church which the antique collectors who come to browse there now consider ‘picturesque’. Unlike her husband, who had been a pupil at Bingley Grammar school until the age of sixteen, Ivy Sutcliffe had left school when she was twelve and gone straight into the mills which, in the first half of the century, was where virtually everybody went.

  Mrs Sutcliffe allowed marriage and the birth of five children to only briefly interrupt her career as a box-minder; the responsibility for minding, feeding and generally bringing up the four youngest fell on the oldest boy, John.

  In characteristically bravura fashion, John Sutcliffe would boast in later years about how he’d conned his way into the village school at the age of three by telling a local farmer’s daughter that his mother had said she was to take him: ‘I were bored. I were fed up being up there on me own all day. I used to see the kids, all considerably older than me of course, trotting off to school of a morning, laughing and carrying on, and it seemed real. So eventually, off me own bat one day, I just followed them. And I went to school ever after.’

  It is a fact, nevertheless, that this conveniently freed his mother to go on earning the money of which she was to become more and more fond. Although he held down a decent job as a textile ‘designer’ – really a sort of night foreman – in a mill in Shipley, her husband had never capitalised on the grammar school education that his scholarship had won him. And, unlike both husband and son, she couldn’t wait to swap the moorland cottage for a modern home with the latest in modern amenities.

  This finally happened in the late 1920s when the Sutcliffes were among the first to move into a terrace of semis whose leaded lights and dainty porches stood in marked contrast to the scenery in which it
had been set down: the U-shape of Rylands Avenue seemed to have been branded on to the otherwise unspoiled Gilstead hillside as baldly as it might have been on to the haunch of a cow.

  John Sutcliffe continued to make the two-way hike to his old school in Eldwick every day until the age of eleven, when he transferred to the ‘Modern’ school down in the town. At the beginning he was regarded as a bit of a ‘country cousin’ by the other pupils, who had nearly all grown up surrounded by the sound of clogs on flagstones and the whoop of factory whistles. But an outgoing nature, combined with a fairly strapping build, quickly won him friends. He was a natural at all sports, especially football and cricket, and first choice for all school-and, later, town-teams.

  He also showed some talent for acting, particularly comedy, and had played ‘Idle Jack’ in Dick Whittington and ‘Buttons’ in Cinderella with amateurs at the Victoria Hall, Saltaire, as well as Wackford Squeers in a school production of Nicholas Nickleby, by the time he was fifteen.

  His mother, however, had little time for such frivolities, and preferred to see him delivering papers to her far-flung neighbours morning and night and at weekends: if he begged hard enough she might sometimes give him the odd sixpence back out of his 4/6 weekly wage.

  There was no question of him staying on at school past the age of fourteen even if he had been able to: his mother wanted him out earning, which he took to be no more than her due: ‘She weren’t really concerned where I worked so long as I was bringing in a wage. Which was natural. She’d spent her life working hard to give us a decent home to live in, and she wanted some contribution back. By gum she got it as well. She med sure of that. Oh yes.’