The A303
Page 8
By the time the local papers were published, a week had elapsed since the killing, and the hunt for Percy Toplis had become a hot national story. The national press lingered long enough in Hampshire to attend a bizarre inquest convened in a barn near the scene of the crime at which the jury, seated on sacks of chaff, recorded a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against Toplis – the first time in modern legal history that someone had been declared guilty of murder in their absence. By then Toplis was busy leading his pursuers an undignified dance. He spent a few days bouncing cheques and impersonating army officers in London before scarpering to Wales and then Scotland.
On 1 June, five weeks after the discovery of Spicer’s body, Toplis was spotted in a bothy in the wilds of the Cairngorms, not far from Tomintoul. The village police constable, accompanied by a gamekeeper and a local tenant farmer, approached the bothy. Toplis opened fire, wounding two of the men, then rode off on his bicycle, allegedly singing the popular song ‘Goodbyeee, don’t sighee/There’s a silver lining in the skyee/Bonjour old thing/ Cheerio, chin-chin/Napoo, toodle-oo, goodbyeee.’
He was traced first to Edinburgh, then Carlisle. On 6 June he set off to walk from Carlisle to Penrith wearing his military uniform. On the road between Low and High Hesket he stopped for a rest and sat on the grass outside a Wesleyan chapel to read the newspaper. He was still there when Constable Alfred Fulton chanced upon him. They chatted for a while and Toplis offered the constable his newspaper. PC Fulton then returned home, where his wife said she had seen a man pass the house who looked remarkably like the fugitive Toplis. Fulton hastened back to apprehend his acquaintance. ‘If it’s Toplis you want, I’m your man,’ the soldier said, and levelled his gun at Fulton’s head. The constable threw down his truncheon and handcuffs and legged it.
By the time he returned, armed and accompanied by two other armed officers, Toplis had reached the village of Plumpton and had changed into a brown suit. At this point the police contingent was joined by a demobbed army officer, Charles de Courcy-Parry, the son of Cumberland’s chief constable, who was riding a motorcycle and brandishing a Belgian automatic pistol, a wartime souvenir. Without much ado the police opened fire. Allegedly it was de Courcy-Parry who fired the fatal bullet, although in later life – as a celebrated Cumbrian huntsman as well as a well-known sporting journalist – he always refused to confirm this.
Three days later Percy Topliss was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery on the north side of Penrith. The Manchester Guardian, sniffing an unseemly hurry, said it was a ‘bad business’. The Penrith Observer disagreed. ‘There are sentimental and perhaps soft-headed people who deplore the fact that Toplis was shot dead instead of being merely winged,’ the local paper declared. ‘Toplis went bad as a lad, gradually but rapidly went from bad to worse, and the world is well rid of a scoundrel of the most dangerous type.’
That should have been the end of it; certainly that was the intention of the authorities, who did their utmost to hush up the story of his end. But in the 1970s two journalists, William Allison and John Fairley, became intrigued by the story. In the main it was that of a singularly bad man whose criminal career began in boyhood in a Nottinghamshire mining village and encompassed attempted rape, innumerable cases of theft, fraud and blackmail, at least one murder and two attempted murders. Toplis’s speciality was impersonating army officers and members of the upper classes. He preyed on women, cheated friends, ruthlessly exploited the good nature of others, and wherever he went left a trail of bounced cheques, forged papers, missing money and betrayed hearts.
Among his many exploits, Allison and Fairley discovered that while stationed at Bulford in 1920, Toplis had run a black-market operation in which army petrol was stolen and sold cheap to local taxi firms. Sidney Spicer had been the contact; the assumption was that Toplis murdered him either because of a dispute over the proceeds of the scam, or because he feared that Spicer was going to finger him. But the two journalists also had what they thought was a far more sensational revelation – a genuine scoop. They found evidence that Percy Toplis – conman, fraudster, blackmailer and thief– had played a crucial part in one of the infamous scandals of the First World War: the mutiny at Étaples.
Étaples was a training camp in northern France where Allied troops were toughened up by a regime of ferocious bullying to prepare them to be killed on the Western Front. In 1917 the arrest of a New Zealand gunner for desertion provoked a four-day revolt, after which one soldier was shot for mutiny, three others got ten years hard labour, and thirty more were sentenced to various punishments. The military authorities insisted at the time that all the ringleaders had been identified and dealt with. But according to Allison and Fairley, the actual organiser was Toplis, who subsequently managed his familiar trick of vanishing into thin air leaving others to pick up the pieces.
They called their book about him The Monocled Mutineer, a reference to his trademark toffs eyepiece. Several years after it was published, the BBC decided to commission the Liverpool writer Alan Bleasdale to dramatise it for TV. Bleasdale was hot property at the time, following the acclaim for his Boys from the Blackstuff, a series of television plays depicting the impact of unemployment and social deprivation in the economically ravaged north-west. Bleasdale apparently saw the Toplis story as an opportunity to explore class attitudes in a historical context. It was bad luck for him that the central premise in his source material – that Percy Toplis led the Etaples mutiny – turned out to be wrong (Toplis was almost certainly in, or on his way home from, India at the time). But the fatal mistake was made by someone at an advertising agency recently hired by the BBC, who labelled The Monocled Mutineer ‘a real-life story’.
The row that it set off when it was shown in 1986 seems extraordinary from a distance of twenty-five years. But it’s easy to forget the rancorous climate of that time and the vicious character of public debate after seven years of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. An ugly alliance between the right-wing press and Tory backbenchers eager to suck up to their leader directed a firestorm of abuse at the series, its writer, and the hated BBC that had seen fit to spend public money on it. The assault was led by the Daily Mail, which branded it ‘a tissue of lies’ and portrayed it as yet more conclusive evidence of the socialist bias of the BBC. The Mail clamoured for a new chairman to be appointed to cleanse the Augean stables of the accumulated neo-Marxist filth. Its own choice was Lord King, Mrs Thatcher’s favourite industrialist and the saviour of British Airways.
In the event King was considered too much of a bruiser by the Cabinet, and the job went to the one-legged but almost equally combative Marmaduke Hussey. One of Hussey’s first moves was to force the resignation of the BBC’s director-general, Alasdair Milne, a leading hate figure for right-wing columnists who appeared to hold him single-handedly responsible for the moral decline of the nation.
I watched The Monocled Mutineer again before writing this chapter. My first reaction was wonderment. What on earth was the fuss about? How could it have provoked such a baying frenzy of outrage? Then something of the flavour of the era came back to me: the ferocious polarisation between left and right that had characterised Thatcherite politics, the venom her sense of mission released, the belief that drove her and with which she infected her supporters that they were engaged in a mortal struggle with the forces of darkness. The BBC was a convenient target for this bile. It was extravagant, arrogant and riddled with left-wingery (as illustrated by the notorious Maggie’s Militant Tendency Panorama programme). It was unpatriotic (interviewing the Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness for the Real Lives documentary about Northern Ireland). It was immoral (Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective). It was subversive (the Secret Society investigation into the Zircon spy satellite). No one laughed when the Prime Minister’s husband called it ‘a nest of reds’, or when Norman Tebbit accused it of anti-American pro-Libyan bias in its coverage of the US air strikes on Tripoli in April 1986, or when the devotedly Thatcherite Daily Mail columnist Paul
Johnson described The Monocled Mutineer as ‘another bit of agitprop designed to inflame class hatred and denigrate Britain’.
It is nothing of the sort. It has its flaws, and occasionally it goes out of its way to make a tendentious political point. But overall it is drama of the highest order, powerful and rather beautiful. It is extremely well acted, outstandingly so by the young Paul McGann, who is unnervingly convincing as Percy Toplis. It is loving and convincing in its recreation of setting, costume and historical detail. It is touching, shocking and compelling, despite a pace that seems remarkably leisurely by the frenetic standards of today’s TV drama. The depiction of class issues is in fact quite subtle; even Paul Johnson – assuming he took the trouble to watch it – might have noticed that the sadists and bullies at the Étaples training camp are the working-class NCOs, while the character of the upper-class commander (played by Timothy West) is drawn with considerable sympathy.
Far from inciting me to class hatred, The Monocled Mutineer filled me with nostalgia. It recalled vividly a time when the BBC regarded it as its duty to make elegant, serious drama for educated television watchers. It reminded me how swiftly and thoroughly things change. Nineteen eighty-six seems a very distant time and place.
Not as distant, however, as 1725, when a Church visitation to the village of Thruxton found that 152 people lived there, of whom but one – ‘and she a poor woman without any family’ – was a Papist, and none a Dissenter. Under the heading ‘Gentry’, the record notes: ‘There is no person of note of either sex residing in the village.’
Nothing is said on the important subject of public houses, but we can be sure that Thruxton was not without. Almost 300 years later there are two. The one in the centre of the village is the George, which employs a man with a sandwich board advertising its attractions to plod up and down the eastbound carriageway of the A303 near the turnoff for Thruxton. The other is the White Horse, which has a sign on the A303 but would not, one feels, stoop to a sandwich board.
The White Horse is much the older of the two, fifteenth century in parts, or so they say. It is a pretty, whitewashed, thatched inn with low beams and inglenooks and fireplaces festooned with brass tongs and pokers and the like. It used to stand right on the A303, opposite the stone house where they took the tolls for the Andover–Amesbury turnpike road. Then the Highways Agency decided that as part of the dual-carriageway project, the section past Thruxton should be elevated, which was completed in the mid-1980s. This was good news for the village, which was protected from the worst of the racket. But it was not quite such good news for the White Horse, which found itself a little close to the elevated section for comfort. It rises like a sheer rock face immediately outside the front door, with the result that the traffic flashes by at the level of the thatched roof and hardly more than spitting distance away.
Pub and road
The atmosphere in the pub the night I stayed there might be described as subdued. The landlord was perfectly welcoming without being in the least bit genial. He revealed that he had previously managed what he called ‘a gentleman’s club’ at Westminster. I had the impression he felt the move from the buzz of Queen Anne’s Gate to the shadow of the A303 represented a coming down in the world. ‘Put it like this,’ he said when I asked him how it was going, ‘it might not have been the best time to get into the pub business.’ I overheard him telling the only other diners about the good days when the bar was thronged with horse-racing types from the stables at Kimpton Down and motor-racing fans attending events at Thruxton’s own Formula Three circuit.
I slept in a room whose window looked out from beneath the thatch at the railings beside the A303. I went to sleep with the road in my ears and was awoken by its inexorable crescendo towards the morning peak-time. I lay listening to it, trying to locate a metaphor for the noise. It was harsh, like a sheet being torn, or waves breaking, but waves of wholly inconsistent size coming down at wildly fluctuating intervals – no comforting regularity, but restless, volatile, unsettling. A very different kind of sea.
Thruxton village is gathered together on the north side of the A303. But the parish of Thruxton extends in a slender strip the best part of six miles from Weyhill in the east almost to the Hampshire–Wiltshire border in the west. Travellers heading that way may well be momentarily distracted by the appearance over to the left of Quarley Hill, which is shaped rather like a flying saucer and is the site of an Iron Age hillfort assiduously dug over by students of prehistoric ditch systems, palisading, middens and allied matters. But they are likely to be recalled to the present by a green sign welcoming them to Wiltshire. It would be nice if there was another one saying ‘And Hampshire Bids You Farewell’ or words to that effect, or – even better – if the two councils could collaborate on a sign expressing both sentiments.
But Hampshire doesn’t?
The odd thing is that there is no welcome to Hampshire for those motoring east on the other side of the A303. I did wonder if there might be an obscure and ancient disagreement between the two counties over the exact position of the border, which does wander whimsically hereabouts. The absence of a sign is all the more peculiar as elsewhere Hampshire is keen – some might say excessively so – to announce itself as ‘Hampshire – the Jane Austen County’.
I’d like to know where this business of identifying a county with literary celebrities began. Was it with Warwickshire (Shakespeare County), Yorkshire (Brontë County) or Dorset (Hardy County)? In fairness, if it was Warwickshire, the choice of notable scribe was pretty limited, although George Eliot was born and brought up near Nuneaton. But why should Hampshire be just Jane Austen County? Why not Dickens (born Portsmouth), Izaak Walton (died Winchester) or Gilbert White (The Natural History of Selborne) County as well? And why doesn’t Somerset market itself as T. S. Eliot (buried East Coker) or Samuel Taylor Coleridge (born Ottery St Mary, lived Nether Stowey) County? Wiltshire could call itself Trollope County or go the whole hog and change its name to Barsetshire, since Anthony had the idea for the sequence while wandering around Salisbury.
Come to think of it, why shouldn’t trunk roads brighten their image with some literary associations? The A303 could be the Tennyson Road (Guinevere died in Amesbury and Alfred immortalised her in his Idylls of the King). The A4 at Reading could be the Wilde Road (Oscar jailed there for gross indecency) or the Austen Road (Jane went to school there), then become the Sassoon Road at Marlborough (where Siegfried went to school), and the Chaucer Road at Bath (the Wife). The possibilities for the A40, which goes through Oxford, or the A10 to Cambridge, or the A1 between London and Edinburgh, are mind-boggling.
* * *
They don’t grow beans there any more; oil-seed rape and barley, more likely. But the field is still there, where a heap of dreams and ideals came a cropper amid a welter of truncheon blows and kicks from big black boots on a summer’s day in 1985. It was known as the Battle of the Beanfield.
I was travelling to Scotland by train in September 2010 when I read in the paper that Sid Rawle was dead. The photograph with the obituary brought him back: the shoulder-length hair thinning on top and tucked behind tall, straight ears; the slight body encased in denim; the patchy beard, the lazy, smiling eyes, the smile itself proclaiming delight in the comedy of life and his part in it. ‘King of the Hippies’, the headline called him. ‘He fought for love, peace and land’, said his obituary. He’d died of a heart attack sitting by the campfire at his ‘Superspirit’ summer festival in the Forest of Dean.
I doubt if the name meant a great deal to later generations of Guardian readers, but it struck a deep chime with me. In 1972 – when I was in my green Saab 96 phase – Rawle and his followers, who called themselves the Diggers, helped stage the first People’s Free Festival on Crown land in Windsor Great Park. The idea belonged to Bill ‘Ubi’ Dwyer – William Ubique in full – the Irish-born prophet of LSD-induced psychedelia. Dwyer said it came to him in the course of an acid trip, and he informed sceptics: ‘I personally have God’s permissi
on for the festival.’ He was too wild and Irish to make much sense for the benefit of the media, whereas Sid Rawle – who did not take drugs and preferred to devote his energies to the pursuit of young women – was more than ready to deploy his soft Exmoor accent to expound the doctrine of free love and land for all.
Rawle was already a familiar figure to longer-serving journalists in Slough when I joined the Slough Observer. He had lived there with his mother, working for a time as a park attendant, and he was fondly remembered for having organised a ‘love-in’ in the meticulously maintained public gardens opposite Slough Town Hall, which provided many hundreds of juicy column inches for the newspaper.
Windsor Great Park was well out of our patch, so I never covered the free festival. But for the reporters based in Windsor the story of the conflict between the solid, bourgeois citizens of the town (backed, it was said, by the Duke of Edinburgh himself) and the counter-culture imported by Rawle and Dwyer and their kind was irresistible. By the summer of 1974 Windsor had had enough. Daily editions of the Windsor Freek Press distributed among the 15,000 festival-goers – and eagerly seized upon by the local hacks – chart the progress towards the final confrontation. Much of the advice concerns drugs. Acid came in brown, green, pink and orange microdots. People were cautioned against something called ‘S.T.P.’, allegedly developed from nerve gas, morphine (‘anyone who sells this shit deserves everything that’s come to them’), and ‘garbage hash’ mixed with patchouli oil.
The pigs – as the men in blue from Thames Valley Police were invariably known – were becoming an increasing problem. Anyone ‘busted’ or ‘pulled’ was urged to stay cool. At the same time pigs were to be urged to ‘fuck off the site’. One editorial begged people to ‘shit and piss in the bogs. . . Don’t shit in any old place.’ On the Thursday after the August Bank Holiday 600 officers of Thames Valley Police invaded the site and cleared it. The following year Dwyer and Rawle were both imprisoned for breaching an injunction banning them from promoting a 1975 festival. A cartoon in the very alternative International Times showed the female holder of the flame of justice crying ‘BURN KILL BUGGER PILLAGE MANGLE MAIM RAPE FUCK FLAGELLATE’, which made some kind of point.