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

by Gordon Burn

  He was considered merely self-centred and conceited by at least one woman who remained unimpressed by his somewhat theatrical ‘Sir Galahad’ manner. ‘He obviously thought of himself as charming and dashing and all the rest of it, but in fact he was too vain, too wrapped up in himself to really be.’

  It was a criticism that was also often made of his father, in whose footsteps John seemed to be faithfully following. Retirement had done nothing to dull Arthur Sutcliffe’s appetite for getting out and enjoying himself, and his patent pumps were a familiar feature of dances at Bingley Co-op and Ambulance Halls, and in the ballrooms at Morecambe. He was a ‘very smart-looking young old feller’ according to his son, who felt indirectly flattered when he heard people say that there wasn’t a man in the area fitter-looking for his age than Arthur. But John was also said to take after his father in ways which were less flattering.

  ‘Ladies’ man’ was a description that members of Arthur Sutcliffe’s own family did not dispute. By the time their children had grown up and left home, Arthur’s relationship with his wife had deteriorated to the point where, although they continued living under the same roof, they ate and slept separately and opened their mouths only to berate each other. In these circumstances their oldest son was not alone in feeling that his father was justified in seeking comfort elsewhere.

  The caravan on New Barns Farm at Arnside was where Arthur Sutcliffe conducted most of his affairs, as Mick, who was almost as fond of the resort as Peter, discovered for himself. On one or two occasions Mick knocked on the door of what was known as his grandfather’s ‘passion wagon’ to ask if he could let him have some dinner, and found him with a woman. But by no means all his involvements were carried on at such a discreet distance from home. He was regularly seen around Bingley in the company of various ‘lady friends’, but one particular liaison caused more eyebrows to be raised than most.

  Arthur Sutcliffe had been friendly for some time with a woman who lived in one of the ‘big houses’ up on Crownest Road. But, gradually, he started to be seen around with the daughter of the house more than with the mother. Annie Rhodes had had a deformed spine since she was a girl and, because she was a cripple, had never been allowed to do anything for herself. Suddenly, though, she was seen at St John’s Ambulance Brigade dances with Arthur Sutcliffe who, after her mother died, encouraged her to take driving lessons and buy herself a car, and generally ‘brought her on’. After a while, John Sutcliffe, too, started to take an interest in Annie, and father and son both became regular – if separate – callers at the house, usually, it was noted, after dark. John would occasionally borrow Annie’s car if he needed it, and the two of them were sometimes seen out in it together. The fact that Kathleen occasionally joined them for a ride into the country did nothing to kill the rumours.

  Throughout his childhood Carl constantly overheard the neighbours talking about things to do with his father that they assumed he was too young to understand. Peter and Mick, however, got it straight from the horse’s mouth. To Mick it was a sign of growing up, being able to talk about sex and women with his father and his brother, standing at a bar. ‘Go on, get her into bed, lad,’ his father would say, eyeing a courting couple. ‘I couldn’t wait.’ And sometimes he’d produce something that he’d picked up at work, like a line drawing of a butterfly on greaseproof paper whose ‘markings’, when the paper was unfolded, turned out to be a column of bodies, coupled back and front. Occasionally, though, he’d go further and confide in his sons that he’d been with a ‘right cracker’ last night.

  To Mick, whose philosophy could be summed up as ‘What they don’t know can’t harm them’, this seemed reasonable, even understandable, behaviour, and Peter didn’t demur. Of one thing Mick was quite certain: his mother didn’t suspect a thing. ‘She were used to him being out at cricket do’s an’ all after; they used to have a booze-up till three and four in mornin’. Then there were Musical Union an’ all sorts of stuff. She were right innocent about them kinds of things, so he could get away with it like that. She never used to ask about owt.’

  *

  By the age of eighteen, Maureen was already coming up to her first divorce. Within a year of Rachel being born in March 1969, Maureen had split up from the father and was back living with her family at Cornwall Road.

  Kathleen looked after the baby during the day so that Maureen could go out to work, and then went out to work herself in the evenings, cleaning at the College and afterwards, on her way home, cleaning offices in the centre of the town. One night, around her fiftieth birthday in January 1970, she stopped dusting to answer the phone.

  ‘I was calling to tell her I wouldn’t be knocking off at the usual time because they’d asked me to work over on account of some patterns they wanted making,’ John Sutcliffe would later claim. ‘This was probably the first time I’d ever spoken to her on the telephone, plus I’d had all me teeth out a couple of months previously and she didn’t seem to recognise the voice.

  ‘“Who’s that?” she says. So I said, “Who d’you think it is?” really just joking. And she named another feller altogether. She gave me another feller’s name. “Oh,” she said, “is it Albert?” Well, it shook me to me toenails.

  ‘“Oh,” she says. “Albert,” she says. “When can I see you again?” So I went along with it. “Well,” I said, “when would you like to see me again?” And by this time I were bloody trembling, trying to carry this conversation on. In the end I said: “I shall have to leave you now. I can’t talk to you any more, there’s some people just come in. I’ll call you again tomorrow.”’ Which he did, still pretending to be the other man. And the next day. And the day after. By which time he had hatched a plan.

  The Bankfield Hotel is a Victorian pile in a sylvan setting that most Bingleyites only ever see the inside of at retirement parties and silver weddings, and Maureen was intrigued to know why her father wanted her to meet him there at 7.30 p.m. on a Saturday, but he wouldn’t tell her. All she could get out of him was: ‘Just do it.’

  The first person she saw when she stepped through the heavy swing doors at the Bankfield was Peter. Hovering in the background was Sonia. Peter, it turned out, didn’t know what he was doing there either, which prompted Maureen to remark that it was like This-Is-Your-bloody-Life.

  Their father arrived shortly before the appointed time but still didn’t offer any explanation, even though Maureen kept at him about being late already and having to get to a ‘do’. Peter told her he’d give her a lift when whatever they were there for was over, and his father bought a round of drinks. He kept looking behind him towards the entrance from where they were sitting, until Maureen saw her mother pacing up and down nervously outside. This surprised her because Kathleen had definitely told her she was going out for a meal and a drink with some of the women from work. The next thing she knew her father was tapping her mother on the shoulder and leading her triumphantly in the direction of the three familiar, if bewildered, faces in the bar.

  It was ‘typical’ of her father, Maureen would say when the whole story had been unspun, pretending to be somebody else for three nights running on the phone, and then going home and behaving as if nothing was wrong: he was ‘right deep, really secretive, like all the lads.’ There was something in all of them that, even when they didn’t need to, made them evade telling the truth. They all always kept everything in.

  It had been on the third night of impersonating ‘Albert’ that John Sutcliffe had finally asked Kathleen to meet him that weekend at the Bankfield Hotel. He said he’d arrange for a meal and book a room for the night, adding, as if it was an afterthought, that she should bring ‘something comfortable to slip into; something nice to wear in bed’.

  On the Saturday afternoon he had gone upstairs and found a brand new nightdress, still in the bag it had come in from Marks & Spencer, in the top drawer of the tallboy in their bedroom where he knew his wife kept her things. And, having sat her at the table with Peter and Sonia and Maureen, it was this t
hat he now produced with a flourish from the handbag that Kathleen mutely surrendered, like a conjuror drawing a rabbit from a hat. She didn’t remonstrate with him, or cry, or do anything dramatic, but Maureen thought she had never seen anybody look so embarrassed in her life. Her mother seemed numb; all the blood had drained from her; she seemed stunned.

  The first person to speak was Maureen’s father, who thrust some money at Peter and told him to go and get them all another drink. And then, as if to soften the blow, or so at least it seemed to Maureen, he told Kathleen that there wasn’t another woman in Bingley like her; that she was a special person, but that he’d been hurt.

  Unusually, this seemed to strike a chord in Peter, who, although his family didn’t know it, after months of turmoil had only recently got his relationship with Sonia back on the rails. ‘I know how it feels, Dad,’ he tried to say, but his father shrugged his sympathy aside. ‘You can’t,’ he said dismissively. ‘You’re not married.’

  But something about the way Peter had spoken, an unaccustomed directness in his tone, made Maureen feel that he did. ‘He’d been hurt really bad. He’d taken it really hard. I didn’t know when or how then, but you could just tell.’

  *

  Carl, at ten, and Jane, at thirteen, were too young to be told what was going on; they would pick up bits and pieces of the story in the course of the years to come. On the night when the rest of the family were down at the Bankfield, Jane sat at home on her own feeling disgruntled, convinced that everybody was out having a good time.

  Mick, almost on principle, had turned a deaf ear to his father’s instruction to turn up at 7.30 and, when he finally rolled home that Saturday, was made to pay the price. ‘Because I hadn’t tekken part, in me father’s eyes I’d let him down. He said, “You’re not my son any more,” an’ shut the door in me face an’ locked it. He said, “You’re finished, you.” So I walked back on to me mate’s an’ slept there.’

  When it was eventually explained to Mick what had ‘gone off’, all he felt was anger at ‘such a fuckin’ lousy trick’. It seemed to him his mother had been ‘set up’ for no reason. Mick had known Albert for years, and liked him, which was strange, because Albert was a police sergeant who only lived two streets away. But he was a ‘decent bloke’ who shared Mick’s interest in guns, and the two of them had occasionally gone out ratting together.

  Mick had a Bedlington terrier at the time that his mother liked to walk at nights on the field that dipped down to the canal from the bottom of Cornwall Road. And, because Albert also had a dog, the two of them would often meet. ‘Albert used to walk his dog on past our house. He’d even knock at door sometimes and the pair of them would go for a walk on road an’ back. I mean, me an’ our Peter watched them out of bedroom window one night. “Look at the silly old sods,” he said. “They think we haven’t seen ’em sneakin’ down path.”

  ‘You could see right to end where they went, then turned round an’ walked back wi’ dogs. They’d have a talk at bottom, then she’d come back in. But he never did owt. There were nowt sexual involved. It were more company than owt, because me father were never in to bloody talk to ’er. If he did come in he’d be washed and straight back out, an’ when he came back at night he’d be popped.’

  Maureen, too, thought it was unlikely that her mother would have slept with the policeman. For one thing, she didn’t know where she would have found the time. ‘She were an honest, ordinary, motherly type of person who, all she ever did all her bloody married life, was work and bring up kids. She didn’t have any pleasure or any hobbies or anything because she had too much to do. She probably just wanted somebody to appreciate her. Somebody to tell her she was still an attractive woman which, at that point, she was. Because she had a miserable bloody existence. She’d had a hell of a miserable life. She just put up with anything. She kept it all to herself.’

  For Maureen’s father, however, the nightdress in Kathleen’s handbag, which she’d brought only because he’d asked her to bring it, had been sufficient evidence. And he couldn’t rest until he’d wrung a full and detailed ‘confession’ from his wife. ‘Good God,’ he’d boom at her, ‘the woman I married, the mother of my children, the woman I’d loved and trusted all my life having an affair with another feller under my nose and you wonder why I’m making such a fuss?’ In the end, she gave in to his demands to be put in touch with Albert, who, he had established, she’d known for ‘near-on three year’.

  ‘She kept trying to convince me that there’d been no sort of … sexual connotations in this relationship. So, after a couple of days, I said, “Well, I want to see this feller,” who, it turned out, had a wife and a family and his own police house and everything. His wife had a good job at a big store in Bradford; a supervisor-type of woman. I said, “I want to have a word with him.”

  ‘And it all came out then. She told me everything. All about going to his house and spending the afternoon in bed, and going out in his car and parking it at the top of Harden, and sometimes just down the road by the cricket-field in a little cul-de-sac, and having sex … It all came out. She didn’t hold anything back.

  ‘So I had him come to my house then and we thrashed it all out. I told him, I said, “Look, this thing stops and it stops dead. Otherwise your wife is going to have to get to know. Plus I shall go to your superior officers and I shall report your conduct to them.” I said, “We are members of the public who are supposed to be protected by people like you. And it comes to a pretty pass when we need protecting from people like you.” I said, “I’m quite prepared to forget all about it, provided you give me your solemn word that the affair is over.”

  ‘“Oh,” he said, “I can promise you that. That’s it. It’s finished.” Then I found out that the following Friday night, straight after, they’d met again. So I had to have him back then and let him know I knew. She was there as well. And this time I said, “Now, what are we going to do? Am I going to go down and see your superintendent? Or are you really going to wrap it up?”

  ‘“Oh,” he said. “Oh my goodness, yes. I’ve only got another year to do and then I get my retirement pension. Please don’t go and say owt down there.” And that was it. That was the end. There was going to be no more.’

  ‘The seeds of mistrust,’ however, as John Sutcliffe liked to put it, ‘had been sown.’ He found himself sidling down Dubb Lane at nights, past the offices where Kathleen was hard at work. And he started checking up that she was where she said she was on the rare occasions when she went out for a drink with the ‘girls’ from work. One night he opened the door of the Queen’s Head and saw his wife in conversation with a man at the bar. He went home ‘and waited and waited’ until she came in. When she did he hit her with the back of his hand across the face. He broke the face of his watch at the same time against the frame of the door.

  Thinking back to the Saturday at the Bankfield Hotel, Peter would say that he believed he could see his mother start to die from that day.

  12

  Peter had always said that he intended to wait until he was at least thirty before he got married, and he was constantly lecturing Mick on how wise he would be to do the same. Mick, however, ignored all his brother’s good advice and took the plunge some months before his twenty-first birthday, in 1971.

  ‘He told me when I got wed, he said, “You’re a fool.” He says, “It won’t fuckin’ last the way you go suppin’.” He says, “You can’t go suppin’, you know, when you get wed, because you won’t have any money. At home, you’re giving your mother a fiver-a-week, which means you can go out on booze every night an’ still have summat left and run a little car as well. But once you get wed, you’ll be ploggin’ – giving it all over, handing all money over to wife. You’ll have to get shot of motor.”

  ‘“It’s the best time of your life,” he says. “You ought to be enjoying yourself up to thirty, then, if you want to settle down, get wed then.” Which is right, like,’ cause it only lasted about three or four years.’


  It surprised nobody that Mick was the first of John Sutcliffe’s sons to make a move; the fact that his oldest brother wasn’t Mick’s best man was the only thing that drew any comment. But if this, as was widely believed, was because Sonia didn’t want Peter to be put in the position where he might feel obliged to return the compliment when it was his turn, she had been vindicated before the ceremony was over: as Mick knelt before the altar with his new bride, the trousers of the suit which he had had tailor-made for the occasion split from crotch to mid-calf on an inside seam, leaving the groom to hobble out of the church as though he was wearing leg-irons. Sonia, wrapped in grey fur for the group shots afterwards, failed to see the humour of the situation.

  Her affair with the Italian had dragged on throughout the whole of the second half of 1969, until, at the end of six months, Peter finally succeeded in wrenching a promise from Sonia that she wouldn’t see the other man again. It signalled, as those who knew them couldn’t help noticing, a change in the balance of their relationship.

  Sonia, previously mute on her visits to Cornwall Road, started to make her presence felt, albeit indirectly. ‘Come out here a moment,’ she’d say to Peter, ordering him out of the living-room and into the kitchen, where she could be heard ‘quietly upbraiding’ him for something that he had said or done which didn’t meet with her approval. Sometimes, though, she’d just slap him down without bothering to extricate him from the family, which left his father open-mouthed in disbelief.