by Gordon Burn
Some of the hardest nuts in Bingley worked at Fibre Products, men like Ken Eslin who, when he threatened to shoot your legs off, was rumoured to mean it and was to spend most of his life ‘inside’. And Sammy Foulds, so innocent-looking he always carried his birth certificate, but whose appearance was deceptive. ‘The Weasel’, as ‘little’ Sammy was better known, was notorious for provoking fights in the pubs around Bingley so that his ‘protectors’, the brothers Geoff and Jack Southgate, might keep their hand in at beating people up.
Gradually, though, as he approached his eighteenth birthday, it was noticeable that Peter was starting to harden up a bit; at long last he was starting to come out of his shell. He had bought a motorbike as soon as he was old enough, which meant he had at least something in common with the men in whose company he was obviously about to spend his adult life. And it was gratifying to his father to see that, as well as motorbikes and motorcar manuals, he was starting to take an interest in ‘health-and-strength’ magazines.
He put himself on a course of one of the ‘bulk-builder’ foods advertised in the body-building periodicals and acquired the ‘Bullworker’ which was to be assigned a permanent – for a time, central – place in his daily routine. Every night after work he’d spend an hour or two locked away with it, returning it to the back of the wardrobe when he was finished. None of the family, not even his brothers, ever saw him training with the Bullworker; he was always very private. But the results soon started to become apparent and he was assisted in his quest for a new body by the manual labour involved in his new job.
*
‘Bingley cemetery is one of the most popular places of resort, and is justly accounted one of the prettiest and most attractive places of the kind in England,’ Harry Speight, a local historian, recorded in 1904. ‘The mezereons, lilacs, roses and flower-beds … present in season a fine and varied show. But to lovers of botanical treasures the extensive range of rockery, which bears hundreds of curious and beautiful Alpine plants, will prove the chief attraction.’
Although less popular as a ‘place of resort’ when Peter Sutcliffe started work there as a grave-digger in the summer of 1964, the cemetery was still as formal in design and as fussed over by its gardeners as the surrounding countryside was wild. Standing on Bailey Hills, next to the nineteenth-century Bingley Grammar school, the view was of dense, permanently black woods beyond the river on one side, and of Five-Rise Locks beyond the main road and the livestock auction mart on the other. From the Catholic section, which marked the cemetery’s highest point, cars and buildings were insignificant specks on the moors and hills that lurched and tumbled towards the horizon.
Beautiful in the summer months when cemetery ‘business’ was at its slackest, the same scenery would prove unnerving, even to experienced grave-diggers, at the end of the year when the nights started to set in and the distant lights in Harold Street were the only signs of life. Billy Moore, for instance, whose last months at the cemetery coincided with Peter Sutcliffe’s first, was never ashamed to talk about the afternoon when the flickering lamps and the whip of the wind and the encircling darkness became too much for him and a veteran helper, and they’d dropped their spades and fled.
Shortly after joining the staff, he witnessed Peter being shaken in much the same way: ‘He were digging an earth grave, were lad, just by the side of the grammar school wall an’ he were using an iron prodder to locate the top of an old coffin that were already in. He were having to keep his feet to the side because it turned out there was no lid to hit, when suddenly he let out this scream which were really more of a yelp. By the time I got there he were still shakin’, standin’ wi’ this skull on his spade. He couldn’t let go. It does jump you a bit.’ On occasions like this the diggers would douse themselves in Jeyes fluid or whatever else was handy, in an attempt to get rid of the stench.
The nature of the work, and the attitude of most outsiders towards it, made for the sort of camaraderie that few of those working at the cemetery had known in other jobs. There was a preponderance of young men and some of them could be a bit wild. ‘But if you didn’t do something to take the steam off, you’d blow the top off your head,’ was always Gary Jackson’s excuse, every time he was collared by the superintendent for going too far.
Somebody was always pouring water over somebody or dropping a brick on somebody’s head, and Gary Jackson was usually standing by with his camera to capture the results. He took pictures of people getting up to mischief with the statuary and being dunked in the horse-trough and posing as what would be passed off on the more gullible as ‘corpses’, with dried and cracked mud all over their faces.
But it was one of the ‘old-timers’, a man called Eddie Bishop, who was on the receiving end of most of their stunts. ‘Bish-bosh’, as he was known, was a creature of habit and was therefore regarded as a sitting-duck: the only smoker in the stone outhouse where they all gathered to eat their ‘jock’, his ash-tray was alternately nailed to the table and primed to blow up; the cupboard he went to religiously every evening was booby-trapped with whitewash, and every time he slurped his tea half a dozen others slurped in unison with him, every time he folded a slice of bread into four and pushed it into his mouth, half a dozen others did the same.
The curious thing was that Peter seemed quite close to old Bishop, who had shown him how to brick out a vault and board up a grave and the other basics of the trade. If he took exception to the ‘dogging’ that his workmates found so amusing, he showed it no more than Bishop did himself. In fact, nobody was ever sure what Peter was thinking because his expression hardly ever changed: from arriving at work in the morning until packing up for home, he wore what some chose to interpret as a sneer of superiority and others as a conspiratorial half-smile. Billy Moore tended to side with the former: ‘He never gave you an answer to anything, just his grin, as if to say, “Balls. You’re talking rubbish.”’ But Gary Jackson wasn’t so sure: ‘He’d come in late every morning, nice and quiet, as if he had his day planned out, always with this right pleasant smile.’
‘You had to be present at commitals, “ashes to ashes” an’ all that,’ another workmate, Laurie Ashton, remembers. ‘You had to follow job right through to finish and sometimes, if it was a kiddie, say, I’d get right upset. But never Peter. He’d help old ladies away from the graveside right polite, like, help them down off the boards. But Pete wasn’t a lad for showing his feelings in any shape or form. For instance, you couldn’t get him mad, ever. All you ever got were just that daft smile.’
The only thing that drew any comment at the time, however, was his modesty, the way he’d always wander off into the bushes to relieve himself rather than stand up at a tombstone like the others; and the fact that he never removed the black leather-look jacket that he always wore, even at the height of summer, much less his shirt. He hardly seemed to perspire at all, in fact, and, back in the cabin, only rolled his shirt-sleeves up to his elbows to have a wash, whereas the rest of them stripped off and got under the ‘Ascot’ for a good scrubdown.
But nobody attached too much importance to this and before long he was being referred to familiarly outside working hours as ‘our Pete’. He’d tag along if some of them went down to the White Horse at lunchtime, although he never really took to drink; and he’d stand by while they all whistled at the girls going past the top of Park Road in the centre of Bingley, although never joining in himself.
The working day at the cemetery always ended with a game of darts in the ‘mess-room’ whose stove and coal fire glowing in the permanent semi-darkness helped sustain a relaxed, almost clubby atmosphere. Peter gained in confidence enough to bring his own electric tape recorder on which records from his collection were interspersed with family noises and snatches of his father singing party-pieces such as ‘Molly Malone’. And Laurie Ashton got permission from Mr MacTaggart, the cemetery superintendent based in Myrtle Park, to tow up the old Chevrolet he’d got his hands on so that they could work on it in the yard.
As a result of ‘going pals’ with Laurie Ashton, Peter was soon borrowing his father’s dress-waistcoats, pale shadows of Laurie’s spangle-fleck ones, and affecting bootlace ties. What really drew them together, though, was an interest in engines, and in this they were joined by Eric Robinson, another throwback Teddy boy and one of Laurie Ashton’s oldest friends.
A neighbour of the Sutcliffes, Robinson had been in and out of institutions since adolescence for the sort of misdemeanours endemic to Ferncliffe Estate: his last conviction had been for breaking and entering and stealing butter, lard and a jar of pickles worth 4s 4½d from one of the Main Street shops. For this he was thought to be ‘shook to feathers’ or ‘rajjed’ or just ‘thick’ by many people; but those who considered him ‘shrewd as a cart-load of monkeys’, like Douglas MacTavish, the cemetery superintendent, who wouldn’t employ him for this reason, were probably nearer the mark.
When Eric bought a Vauxhall Wyvern, Peter loaned him £20 towards the cost of it and, although not licensed or insured himself yet, taught him to drive it up on Baildon Moor. In 1964 the two of them went with Laurie to buy his ’57 Plymouth Fury and Pete demonstrated how much bolder he was becoming by tipping a three-wheel Reliant up on to its single front wheel and pushing it like a barrow across the showroom floor. Little things like this could start him off laughing uncontrollably and, reliving it later, he was even worse.
Such small adventures were nothing, though, to what Eric sometimes got up to after he’d ‘necked’ eight or nine pints. Eric and Laurie were gun fanatics, like most young men in Bingley, but Eric didn’t confine his activities to ‘squirrelling’ and ‘ratting’ on the council tip. He owned Lugers as well as air-pistols and when he wasn’t taking aim at the television, pretending to fire, he was taking aim at his mother. On one famous occasion he finally drew his gun in the middle of a western and blew the set to bits. Another time, Laurie had to stop him killing his stepfather bare-handed for having a whippet puppy put to sleep: by the time he managed to pull Eric off him, his stepfather was blue in the face.
Peter always found this kind of thing hysterical, and the high spirits that he was learning to give free reign to in the company of his two pals inevitably started to spill into his job. The grave-diggers often earned a bit of extra money by acting as pallbearers for the undertaking firms who used the cemetery’s Chapel of Rest, and the long black coats they had to wear while carrying coffins never failed to start Peter off. ‘He had a right laugh with ’im, if you got him going,’ Laurie Ashton remembers. ‘A right catching laugh.’ But his sense of humour and the sense of humour of the others slowly started to diverge.
Peter hit old Eddie Bishop quite heavily over the head with a mallet one day while Bishop was boarding up a grave, and quite soon afterwards was spotted in the Catholic section hurling a rock on to a coffin that had just been set down in the earth. ‘Now then, that’ll waken you, you bugger,’ he said, and laughed the way he did, through his nose.
A part of the job that most of the men particularly dreaded was being asked to go into the Chapel of Rest to clean or re-creosote the floor, particularly if, as the registrar would warn them when he handed the key over, there happened to be ‘one in’. The only two who didn’t seem particularly bothered were Peter Sutcliffe and Gary Jackson, who was to go on to take charge of a cemetery himself. ‘It’s not the dead as what can harm you, it’s the living,’ as Gary so often said. But knowing the others’ feelings neither he nor Peter could resist the occasional morbid joke: before the duplicate key to the Chapel had been issued, one or other of them would position themselves on a slab under a shroud; then, when the man cleaning the floor crawled within touching distance, they’d allow an arm to swing slowly, heavily down …
Because of their unsqueamish attitude towards the ‘customers’, Gary and Peter were able to supplement their £9-a-week basic wage occasionally by helping the undertakers out in various ways. ‘They only had about three undertakers,’ Gary Jackson says, ‘and five-bob were five-bob in them days. You’d do things like change their pyjamas if they’d died in bed, wash them down, that sort of thing. It were a bloody good way of earning a few shillin’ in the lunch-hour.’
There were pitfalls, however. There were two chapels in Bingley cemetery, Church of England and Catholic, and it was part of the Catholic chapel that served as the Chapel of Rest. The etiquette was that you’d lock yourself in and draw heavy blue velvet curtains to screen off the body to which you were attending. ‘It were very private, which obviously were a good thing. But one time I were washing a girl down who’d been in a bad accident when suddenly her mother came tearing at me from behind. She thought I were molesting lass.’
Hearing that they were looking for somebody to do similar work on a part-time basis for an hour or two some evenings, Peter went after, and got, a job in the town morgue. The morgue was in the gas-lit maze of streets at ‘the top of the town’, behind the King’s Head; and in the pub afterwards he would be full of the white marble ‘billiard table’ with its plug-hole ‘pockets’ and ‘the bad ’un from a car smash, all mangled’, that they’d just got in. He was always going on about showing them round sometime, that is, if they wanted, and finally one night Eric Robinson called his bluff: ‘But soon as we were round corner, Peter says, “Oh hell, I’ve forgotten the key.” So we never actually got in.’
The next time Eric went missing up at the cemetery, however, Peter showed him something designed to impress. ‘There’d just been a funeral, all mourners had gone and Pete an’ Laurie were left to do filling in. Anyway, Peter were straight down, opened coffin lid up an’ started delvin’ in. It were a woman of about sixty-four. “Oh there’s nowt on that,” he said after a couple of minutes, an’ that were that.’
Peter had already boasted to Eric about the ‘loot’ he was taking from bodies, and in particular about the recent occasion when he’d offered his sister Maureen a choice of half a dozen rings. ‘“Oh you’ve no need to go to jewellers,” is what he told me he said to her, “you can have one of these.” When she asked where he got them he’d said, “Off the bodies at work,” and had a good laugh at the way she flinched. It seemed right comical to him.’
Tales about what was supposed to be going on at the cemetery gained a wide circulation in Bingley, and one man, a workmate of Peter Sutcliffe’s father, with relatives buried on Bailey Hills, even went to the local police to complain.
Laurie Ashton knew what was happening, although he didn’t like to dwell on it too much. He stood by and watched Peter open coffins on a number of occasions, but he never saw him touch any rings: ‘He’d help any women off the boards right gentle, like, but soon as they were gone he were down into the grave. He’d loosen the wing nuts, which would take about three minutes because there were six of them and he were always very deliberate, then he’d slide the lid back slowly until you could just see the face. Very carefully, he’d lift away the square of lace they used to cover it and stare hard for about thirty seconds, concentrated, intent like, like he was waiting for something to move. When he were finished we’d do back-filling, put muck back in, an’ that were it.’ Peter would seem quietly content then; he would wear a look of calm, quiet satisfaction on his face.
*
There had been a seven-month hiatus in Peter Sutcliffe’s graveyard career, when he
’d been sacked for constantly coming in late. And just before the end of 1967, he was sacked for the second and last time. ‘He accepted that he was on his bike,’ Douglas MacTavish says. ‘There was no problem about it. “Can’t wake up in the mornings,” he said quite cheerfully. He was never an awkward bloke.’
7
Peter’s interest in motorbikes had soon become evident in the room at Cornwall Road that he shared with Mick and Carl. The first cheap bike he bought ended up in hundreds of parts spread out on newspapers on the floor, which is where it stayed because, having got it completely stripped down, he never worked out how to put it together again.
Tinkering with engines was all the neighbours ever saw the teenager Peter Sutcliffe do. Every night until dusk he was out at the front of the house, occasionally chatting to another boy from the estate in his jumpy, desultory fashion, but usually alone. He’d nod a polite ‘hello’ to any older neighbours who happened to pass, but he only had to see a girl or a courting couple coming to instantly ‘colour up’.
Even to those who only vaguely knew him, Peter was immediately associated with grease and bikes. It was surprising, therefore, that when the time came for him to take his driving test, he failed. The reason, or so he claimed when he got back from Keighley, was that he hadn’t looked in his mirror when turning a corner, when in fact there was no mirror on his bike. He crashed into the house in the closest he’d ever get to a rage, made a great show of ripping up his ‘L’-plates in front of his father and swore that he’d never wear them again. Which he never did.
Although motorbikes and cars were to remain a major preoccupation and virtually his only topic of conversation throughout his life, he drove them for many years without the benefit of a licence. Most of his vehicles also went untaxed and uninsured much of the time, a fact from which Peter appeared to derive some small, obscure thrill.
