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

by Gordon Burn

  Whatever room in the house she was in, and whatever the time of day, he was with her, clutching on to her clothes. She only had to make as if to get out of a chair and hed be there attaching himself to her dress, his face half buried in the folds. And it went on not just for weeks or months, but for years.

  There was another boy the same age who lived only a couple of doors down the row, but Peter would never go out and play. He hardly ventured outside on his own at all, in fact, preferring to stay quietly indoors with a game or a book or, quite simply, dog the footsteps of his mother. As somebody who had very quickly carved out an independent existence for himself on the hills and moors that still swept down to his back door, John Sutcliffe found this very peculiar.

  I would set off across those fields on me own when I was only a couple of years old, and walk as far as me legs would carry me on nice days, then sit down, have a rest and come back again. I knew every inch of those fields up there when I was a kid, hed tell his son encouragingly, but to no avail. Peter never became the sort of lad whod jump up from the tea-table and be off messing about. Hed just have his tea, go into the front room, open a comic and read or listen to the wireless.

  On a nice evening they should want to be out. It should take you all your time to get them in when its time for bed and the suns shining and all the other kids are playing out. Its part of a childs life to be like that, hed say to Kathleen and shed agree, but next time he came home thered be Peter still hanging on to her skirts.

  The best way to cure this chronic shyness, they decided, was to put him in a situation where hed be forced to mix. It had been agreed between them long before they were married that the children would be brought up Catholics, and Peter had been going to St Josephs on Sunday mornings with his mother since being able to walk. The Sacred Heart, as it was better known, was a small, moss-encrusted Victorian building, as plain inside and out as the back-to-backs by which it was surrounded and not 200 yards away from where the Sutcliffes lived. The infants school adjoining the stone church was long and low and equally utilitarian and, it was felt, was the perfect place for Peter to be brought face to face with the outside world.

  Surprisingly, although he was barely four and had led such a sheltered existence, he went off to school on his first day without a murmur and would never be known to complain, even though his skinny legs were an obvious and, as it proved, irresistible target for the mockers. It was a passivity that was to characterise his whole school career, so that at the end of it very few teachers, head-teachers or priests attached to his schools would be able to associate the name with a face.

  Several of his classmates at the Sacred Heart, as the sons and daughters of Eastern European and Italian refugees still struggling to establish a foothold in their new country, had far greater reason to feel out of place. But at playtimes in the schoolyard, it was Peter Sutcliffe who was taken for the foreigner. Where the other children were noisy and boisterous and unselfconscious in each others company, he seemed unapproachable and withdrawn. Hed never voluntarily get involved in the ordinary rough-and-tumble or take part in any games, preferring to stand in the corner formed by a heavy stone buttress and one of the school walls, observing but unobserved.

  This was where his father would invariably find him in the afternoons, whenever he wandered down to check on how much school life was achieving its objective of bringing him on a bit. Pete! hed call out to him over the damp black wall that just about came up to his waist. Peter! Why are you just stood there, lad? Although of course he knew: he was still no size at all and the other kids were just too rough for him. It would all be different, though, once he got a few years on his back; then hed soon shape up. As hed tell him sometimes in an effort to gee him up.

  For instance, thered been this lad at his own school, Jack Ratcliffe, a walking matchstick-man until hed gone into the army, gangly and skinny and not over-tall, a right weed. But what a size he was by the time he came out; fifteen and a half stone and an all-in wrestler: I couldve eaten him for breakfast when I were at school. Later on though, he wouldve made mince-meat out of me.

  By the age of five Peter still hadnt got out of the habit of clinging limpet-like to his mothers hems. And even when he was seven his father would look out of the window and see him and his mother and, usually, another woman coming up the road from school: the other womans children would be walking by her side, casually holding her hands; Peter, though, would be largely invisible in the camouflage of his mothers skirts.

  Shortly before they were due to take possession of their first council house, however, Kathleen had presented him with another son, and this one had inherited his fathers name. Michael John Sutcliffe was born on 6 September 1950. Anne was just two; Peter was in his first term at school.

  4

  Although it was old and cramped and totally lacking in what were coming to be regarded as the basic modern amenities, John and Kathleen Sutcliffe had both been happy in their first home. The way it had been built, on a narrow terrace hacked out of the dirt of the hillside, meant that the back walls were constantly damp, but little inconveniences like this didnt particularly bother them: the previous tenants had put some floorboards up to provide an extra layer which largely prevented the wet coming through the wallpaper.

  Besides which it was handy for the new shops that had been built for the people on the expanding Ferncliffe estate, as well as for the shops in town and Peters school; and Kathleens mother and sister lived just a few minutes walk away at the bottom of the hill. Mrs Coonan was always ready and willing to help out when she was needed or to babysit on the rare occasions that John and Kathleen went out together on a Saturday night.

  But it was Johns mother who, on one of her almost unheard of visits, decided that the cottage was no place to bring up a young family. She made it her business to go and see the man in charge of housing at the Town Hall and, within months, they found that they had been assigned a new house on the other side of the valley, in Cottingley. This turned out to be a mixed blessing.

  Neither John nor Kathleen had been aware up to that point that there were such things as council schemes for rehousing people, let alone how to qualify for one. So they were as much bemused as thrilled by the brand new, three-bedroomed semidetached with outside and inside toilet that they found themselves moving into at the end of 1950.

  Tacked on to the hills that rise like walls from the west bank of the river Aire, Cottingley was one of the last rural outposts of the area covered by Bingley Urban District Council: the new council estate, which was as foreign to the natural environment as most of the people selected to live on it, petered out eventually to reveal a panoramic view of the select northern suburbs of Bradford, held at bay only by wild tracts of moor.

  From Manor Road, which was to be the Sutcliffes home for the next eight years, the scenery offered nothing but open fields interrupted by a few scattered farms. There was a working-mens club, a butchers and a small post office-cum-general dealer. The shops and Bingley were near enough to be easily accessible in theory, but theory hadnt taken into account the lack of public transport, the climate and the back-breaking hills.

  Because of its exposed position on the wrong side of the valley, Cottingley was wide open to whatever weather happened to be coming down from the Dales. And, even in summer, one ingredient of this weather was usually a biting westerly wind as salt as if it came straight from the middle of the Atlantic as J. B. Priestley once wrote. Cottingley was consequently a landscape populated by huddled figures in constant battle against a down-draught which was either preventing them from getting home or blowing them there faster than they wanted to go.

  The impact of their new surroundings on the Sutcliffe family was immediate: Peter started to be taken to, and brought home from, the Sacred Heart every day in a taxi, for which the local authority footed the bill; and his father was much less often in the house.

  After leaving the Co-op bakery on account of his health, John Sutcliffe had been taken on as a wea
ver in a mill on the far side of Bingley from where he now lived; and most of his interests outside work tended to keep him in or around the town.

  His wasting illness had at first left him too weak to play his usual full part in Bingleys sporting life. But two of the men he worked alongside at the mill were keen enough body-builders to have started a small club in a garden shed behind one of their homes. They also kept a set of weights at work which they trained on during break time when they were on night shift, and John Sutcliffe didnt take much encouraging to join in. He was gradually able to restore the balance between his body-weight and his strength by firming his muscles up again.

  Working nights, as he mostly did, meant that he couldnt always make the twice-weekly training sessions with the Bingley Town team with whom he played football at weekends in the Bradford Amateur League. But he compensated for that by turning out on Wednesdays with various half-holiday teams. He never had any difficulty getting a game and, in fact, was thought by many at the time to be good enough to turn professional; there are still those who believe he could have made an England-class goalkeeper.

  Equally, in the summer months, he was in great demand as an opening batsman. He played for three different clubs in his first five years home from the navy and, even in late middle-age, was still in a position to be able to pick and choose.

  Bingley Musical Union, the all-male choral society, also occupied a great deal of his time. As well as rehearsals on Monday nights in an upstairs room at the Fleece or the Ferrands Arms, and concert performances around the locality, there were social evenings (including a Ladies Night once a year when members could bring their wives) and mystery tours out into the surrounding countryside: unsuspecting drinkers at places like the Commercial Hotel, Cockhill Moors, would be regaled with full-blooded versions of sentimental favourites like Shenandoah and The Little Drummer Boy, and the choir would then sing their way home in the dark.

  He allowed his interest in the legitimate theatre to lapse for some years after the war but then was drawn back into it in the mid-fifties by a cricketing pal whose wife harboured theatrical ambitions such as he had once known.

  Operas, musical comedies, farces, dramas, the place hums with them. Every second typist is an ingenue lead somewhere, every other cashier a heavy father or comedian The local papers print whole pages of amateur stage photographs. Nearly every organisation appears to run a dramatic society as an offshoot There are soubrettes and tragedians in all the shops. The very factories produce their own reviews and pantomimes. All the towns a stage , Priestley wrote of the Bradford of the 1930s, at the height of the Depression. And, twenty years later, John Sutcliffe was among those helping to keep the tradition alive.

  Idle and Thackley Amateur Dramatic Society was the first to harness his talents: hed bicycle to Fishers Mill, where rehearsals were held in the canteen two nights a week, straight from work. His services were also called on by another amateur group in Shipley, whose productions frequently overlapped with theirs. And, when word eventually got back to Bingley about his appearances in other towns, he was recruited for the Amateur Operatic Society there.

  He was never given any of the principal leads which, he realised before he ever joined, were subject to a closed-shop: Jack Bailey, a local businessman, and Audrey Whitwham, the daughter of the tobacconist in Main Street, always had first claim on the best parts. But he wasnt in it for the glory, as he often commented, but for the fun.

  Hed be given a taste of what life might have been like occasionally when a production transferred to the Bradford Alhambra for a weeks run. He appeared there with the Bingley Amateur Operatic Society in Oklahoma in 1960 when the audience included Kathleen and a family that now numbered five: Peter, at fourteen, was the oldest; Jane was the youngest at four. Maureen, who was eight at the time, was thrilled to hear two women in the row behind them single out the gorgeous man who was her father for special praise.

  On top of all this he never stopped being a member of the choir at St Wilfrids, Gilstead, where he had started with his father as a boy. Even after the move away to Cottingley, he continued to cross the valley twice a day for the Sunday services, with a lunchtime session at the Fisherman or the Ferrands to slake his thirst in between.

  Kathleens attendances at the Sacred Heart, however, gradually started to fall away. The children were always sent but, with the breakfasts to make, the house to clean and the Sunday lunch to cook, the slog from Cottingley, involving steep hills in both directions, became too much. Then in the evening, by the time shes seen to all the teas and everything, its probably too late for church, as her husband always patiently explained.

  From the smart looker of her youth, Kathleen Sutcliffe had slipped imperceptibly into the cosier role expected of a woman of her age and class. Warm and kind-hearted were the epithets now applied to a woman on whom the birth of six children in ten years (she was never to forget our Tommy, the baby who died) was beginning to take its toll. Part of what made her such a good mother, though, was the way she hardly ever complained; she gave every appearance of being quite content to live in her husbands shadow.

  Months of constant night shift, which was slightly more rumunerative than working days, together with an active social life, meant that John Sutcliffe didnt see as much of his family as he might have while they were young: he was never around enough for his presence to become taken for granted. When he was in the house, however, his children were left in no doubt at all who was master: he brooked no contradiction, and his word was law.

  On the rare occasions when they did go out together as a family it was usually by coach to a cricket ground in one of the northern counties, to watch John Sutcliffe play. Unlike the sons of his fathers team-mates, however, Peter never used to pay much attention to the game; hed invariably disappear with his mother to go for a walk around the shops. To him, its just a crowd of idiots banging a ball about with a piece of wood, John Sutcliffe would later explain, a bit shamefacedly, to his pals.

  When Peter was ten and coming up to leaving his junior school, his father made a last-ditch effort to cure him of this aversion to sport. He made a leather football and a football strip his main present that Christmas and, on the first fine day of the holidays, decided it was time he tried it on. There was a pitch straight across from their house in Manor Road, so they were perfectly placed.

  Coom on lad, get your football gear out, he said, trying to drag him away from his comic. Ill go over and have a game wi yi. Which brought the expected response: Oh its too cold Im not bothered I dont want Until his father came close to losing his temper in the end. Theres no point having a football and a new set of gear if youre not going to use it. So, come on. Frame yerself.

  He started off by demonstrating how to dribble the ball and follow it and keep it under control, running up the pitch in his own well-dubbined brown boots, shouting instructions as he went. Then it was Peters turn.

  Well, he took to that ball as if hed been born wi one tied to his toe, John Sutcliffe would say when retailing the story in the years to come. He took it the full length of the field, no bother. Never lost control. So I says, Right, lets go back now. So he dribbled it right back again the full length of the field, and kept it under control all the way. So I thought, Well, hes a bloody natural. I thought: Hes going to enjoy this.

  Back in the house, though, Peter took the strip off and never put it on again. A couple of years later his mother gave it to a boy in the same street who was interested in football and regularly watched Mr Sutcliffe taking part in matches that his son, in the house only fifty yards away, studiously ignored.

  Peter Sutcliffes embarrassment about anything to do with his body, pronounced throughout his youth, became particularly acute in the summer when, streaming with hay fever, he had to accompany his family on holiday.

  For the last thirty years of his life John Sutcliffes father kept a caravan at Arnside, a small, rather genteel, coastal resort on the southern edge of the Lake District, about a two-hour drive fro
m Bingley. He used it all year round as a refuge from his wife, with whom relations had grown more and more strained as theyd grown older. But in summer, his children took it in turns to stay there with their families.

  The Barbers, the owners of the site at New Barns Farm, had gone to great pains to ensure that it wasnt a blot on the landscape: the caravans had been distributed throughout a wood in a way that guaranteed privacy for their occupants and an unpolluted view from the far side of the river estuary into whose waters the Barbers land eventually disappeared. Many of the owners had erected rustic fences with lychgates around their mobile homes, whose names Haven, The Hollies were spelled out in poker-work over the doors.

  John Sutcliffe and his family were unusual in that they arrived from the station on foot, after a considerable route-march, whereas most of those staying at New Barns owned their own cars. But, once they were unpacked, they quickly made themselves at home.

  The Sutcliffe caravan was parked in a good spot, on the edge of White Creek, a pebbled beach in a small bay sheltered by the surrounding hills. And John Sutcliffe never lost any time in stripping down to the trunks or army-surplus shorts that were his uniform for as long as the weather held up. Hed wade across to Grange-over-Sands at low tide, bringing back flatfish that hed located with his feet, and was hardly out of the water. But, self-conscious as he was about a body that he knew to be weak and skinny, Peter could hardly ever be lured in.

  Even on the hottest day, when the river was alive with noise and splashing and the beach littered with towels, Peter was reluctant to take so much as his shirt off and often, in fact, wasnt anywhere to be found.

  *

  The wind always blows strongest on the tallest tree is the maxim by which the show-jumper Harvey Smith, who was born in Bingley and now owns much of the towns outer fringe, has always claimed to live his life, but he is not loved for it locally. Bingley people like their trees, if not quite felled, then at all times ruthlessly cut back. Which is where John Sutcliffe first fell foul of that part of the community in which he lived.