Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller

by O'Connor, Sean

  Percy Thompson had died of stab wounds and both his wife and Bywaters were arrested and charged with murder. Percy Clevely was called as a prosecution witness to the Old Bailey on 6 December 1922.12 He was cross-examined by Travers Humphreys who had appeared for the Crown in the trials of Oscar Wilde, Dr. Crippen and George Joseph Smith, the ‘Brides in the Bath’ killer.

  Despite a lack of convincing evidence that Edith Thompson had in any way instigated the murder, both she and Bywaters were executed in January 1923 – with Mrs Thompson dragged, drugged and unconscious, to the gallows, causing mass protestations of her innocence and a strong lobby against the death penalty. This controversial case, essentially a miscarriage of justice, was to continue to fuel the debate for the abolition of the death penalty throughout the rest of the century. Such was the public fascination with the case, that later, when the contents of the Thompsons’ home were put up for auction, the hedge in the front garden was completely stripped of its leaves by people wanting a souvenir.13

  Edith Thompson’s beautifully decorated, double-fronted Edwardian house – her pride and joy – was minutes away from the more modest Clevely family home in Dudley Road. But for the young Heaths and their little son, Neville, it must have seemed extraordinary that a murder could have taken place in the streets of Ilford – on their own doorstep. Bessie’s brother Percy was in the papers – and not just in the Ilford Recorder and the East Ham Echo, but in the national press, too. This sort of scandal just didn’t involve ordinary people like William and Bessie Heath. But wouldn’t it be a fascinating tale to tell their grandchildren by the fireside one day – the time when Uncle Percy was a witness in the most sensational trial of the age?

  After Edith Thompson’s execution, there was much local sympathy for her family who continued to live in the area. In the wake of such traumatic events, how did they find the resolve to face the world with such quiet dignity?

  A generation later, William and Bessie Heath were to find out for themselves.

  In about 1918 the Heaths had some studio photographs taken of their young son. Dressed in white, with long, golden curls, he looks girlish, as was the fashion of the day. His eyes are bright and lively and we know them to be a dazzling blue. In one photograph, he leans against his mother’s head, his left arm resting on her shoulder, his baby teeth just visible as he and Bessie smile into the camera. His mother is an attractive woman, not yet thirty, with even features and dark hair. There’s trust and love in the photograph. A proud and contented mother, an adored and beautiful child.

  Possibly motivated by William’s work as a manufacturer’s agent in the textile industry, the young family left Ilford in the spring of 1920 and moved across London to Merton in south-west London. At the same time, Bessie had announced that she was pregnant again. The Heaths set up home in a corner property in a street of smart Edwardian houses at 1 Bathurst Avenue where, on 5 September, Bessie gave birth to another son, Carol William Clevely Heath – a younger brother and companion for little Neville. But tragedy was soon to cloud their lives.

  Tubercular meningitis, popularly known as consumption, was an epidemic in the early twentieth century with no known cure. Feared by the entire population, it was known to be infectious and deadly. Children under four were most vulnerable as their immune systems were not sufficiently developed to fight the ravages of the disease which affected the lungs and resulted in lethargy, fever, weight loss and coughing – sometimes, distressingly, bringing up blood. Tragically for his family, Carol Heath soon began to exhibit symptoms. The disease was hugely contagious and both Bessie and William would have been vulnerable to it, but the family member at the highest risk of infection would have been Neville, who was six at the time. Many adults who developed the illness would be treated in sanatoria, effectively removed from society in order to prevent the spread of their disease, but Carol, being still a child, was cared for at home. Both parents would have been aware that his prognosis would be very bleak; in this period, the vast majority of individuals who contracted the disease did not survive. At the beginning of February 1923, Carol’s condition deteriorated and he fell into a coma. He never recovered and died at home on 24 February 1923, his mother at his bedside. He was just two.

  The Heaths were devastated by the loss of their son, but were particularly concerned about how it would affect his older brother, who was now ‘grief-stricken’.14 For the six-year-old Neville, without other siblings to console or distract him, Carol’s death was deeply traumatic. His later relationship with his brother Mick gives an indication of how much Heath valued this fraternal bond. Heath’s sole concern whilst in prison was to try to secure his brother’s future. For Mick, too, this affection was reciprocal, even following his brother into the RAF when he was old enough, attempting to live out his brother’s dreams.

  After Carol’s death, Heath had the upbringing of an only child. Mick would not be born until 1928 and it’s very likely that Bessie Heath may have become pregnant in the interim, but not succeeded in bringing more children to term. The relationship between Heath and his parents was very loving – as his letters from prison testify. He felt them well suited to each other, with neither dominating the other – always kind and possibly, he admitted, indulgent towards him.15 It’s not surprising that the Heaths should have adored their golden-haired boy given their loss, but even so, Heath didn’t think his mother was unusually possessive or emotional. Though he never shared any personal difficulties with his parents, he felt that if he were ever to do so, it would have been with his mother.

  As a young boy, Neville began to reveal an acquisitive streak as well as a pronounced slyness. Though his mother later dismissed his childhood misdemeanours as ‘stupid and unnecessary’,16 he was developing habits that he was to continue to practise as an adult. On one occasion he had been caught taking cakes from a confectioner and putting them on somebody else’s bill. When he was found out, his first instinct was to run away. Tellingly, Bessie Heath noted that ‘there was no need to [steal] as he always had plenty at home’. On another occasion, his parents found some cheap things in Neville’s pocket which he admitted he had stolen, but were of ‘no use to him’. None of young Neville’s petty thefts were driven by need; they were driven by desire. Subsequently, Bessie Heath said that ‘he was told how seriously wrong it was but [he] was not harshly treated’. Even as a child, Neville Heath had a growing awareness that he had a knack for getting away with things unpunished. Certainly Spooner felt that Bessie Heath had been an over-indulgent mother and that she had possibly, in sparing the rod, spoiled her child.17

  Though his parents were Church of England by faith, young Neville was sent to Holy Cross Convent, a local Roman Catholic school in Wimbledon. This, the Heaths felt, was the only decent school in the neighbourhood and it’s clear that from an early age his parents were ambitious for their son and wanted to give him the best start in life. Although kindly treated at the convent, he felt isolated with the other Church of England children, but he bore no lasting ill will towards the nuns who taught him in the three years he attended. He then proceeded to a local council school until he was old enough to go to a secondary school.

  Significantly, even when he was discussing his past with a psychiatrist after his arrest, Heath insisted that he had actually spent this period at a private prep school. This suggests that Heath felt embarrassment or at least some anxiety about his background and education and, certainly, for the rest of his life he was to conjure a much more upmarket CV for himself than the modest reality.

  By 1928, William Heath was still working in the textile trade, though now specifically as an underwear manufacturer. In the spring of that year, Bessie Heath found herself pregnant again and, perhaps wanting more space for two growing children, the family moved to 1 Melrose Road, a semidetached cottage in a leafy, almost rural, garden estate. The house itself was around the corner from St Mary’s in Merton – an ancient parish church where Lord Nelson used to worship. At Melrose Road, Bessie gave birth to
another son, Michael Robert Clevely Heath, always known as ‘Mick’. Despite the difference in their ages, the two boys were very close. Unable, at first, to pronounce Neville’s name, Mick took to calling him ‘Nen’, a family nickname that stuck for the rest of Heath’s life.

  In 1932, the family moved house again, this time rising considerably up the property scale which presumably also increased their social standing. The Heaths’ new home was a solid red-brick Edwardian villa, situated on the corner of Merton Hall Road, just outside Wimbledon town centre and in the same road that would house, from 1940, the Wimbledon School of Art. The house remains today – a five-bedroom property, typical of suburban London, with a garden looking on to playing fields at the back. It was a house of some comfort – certainly of no privation. Immediately the family moved in, Bessie took advantage of the extra rooms and offered them to paying guests, renting out rooms to as many as four lodgers at a time. At its most crowded in 1939, the house was home to seven adults plus the eleven-year-old Mick Heath. Several of these lodgers became long-term tenants including Lavinia Scoley who stayed with the Heaths from 1932 to 1938. There would continue to be lodgers at Merton Hall Road throughout the 1930s and for the duration of the war. The Heaths were never to live there alone and even in 1946 they had a single lodger.18

  One of the reasons for taking in paying guests would have been that the Heaths had hopes of securing their sons places at the local grammar school, where the fees were £3 10s. per term.19 Rutlish School was situated at the junction of Kingston Road and Station Road in Merton Park – a ten-minute walk from Merton Hall Road. Neville Heath’s time there from 1929 to 1934 was typical of the period – a conservative haven of safe (if prosaic) middle-class values; a world of cricket teas, rugby XVs, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, sports days and prize-givings.20

  Rutlish, a typical suburban grammar school, had been set up in 1895. In 1921 an ambitious new headmaster, Edward Varnish, had taken over with an agenda for radical change. One teacher who had joined the school in the 1920s, remembered that he found the school ‘undergoing a revolution’:

  [It was] filled with community spirit that I have never seen surpassed elsewhere and seldom equalled. It was clear from the first that Mr Varnish had in some way captured the imagination of boys and staff and made them believe that all belonged to a place that was unique and bound to succeed.21

  Varnish promoted his ambitions, however, at the expense of the fabric and upkeep of the actual school buildings. In 1933, a school inspector recorded that the school was in an appalling state of squalor:

  The old premises are dark and dingy . . . There is no library, no changing accommodation, no waiting room. The hall is inadequate. No gymnasium. Several forms are not adequately housed. No manual room. No geography room. The cadet corps headquarters were makeshift. There was no dining room. Cloakrooms wretched.22

  But Varnish wasn’t interested in the physical aspects of the school – he wanted to change its ethos. His agenda in the 1920s and 1930s was very much focused on reforming the school along the lines of one of the great English public schools. The foundation of Varnish’s plan was a House system to instill in the boys a sense of competition and belonging. On entering the school each boy was allocated to one of eight houses named after an ancient warrior race: Argonauts, Crusaders, Kelts, Parthians, Romans, Spartans, Trojans and Vikings, the house that Heath joined. Each of the houses was made up of about sixty boys with a housemaster and a captain. Over the school year, points would be awarded to each individual boy for sporting and academic achievements and these would be added to a house score at the end of the year. The winning house would be known as Cock House.23 This fostered a sense of camaraderie within each house as well as a sporting sense of competition between them.

  The ethos ‘For King and Country’ married to driving ambition was firmly established at the heart of Rutlish tradition – even enshrined in the school song:

  We are arming for the fight,

  Pressing on with all our might,

  Pluming wings for higher flight.

  Up! – and On!24

  Several of the younger masters had seen active service in the First World War and ninety-eight Rutlish Old Boys were remembered on the War Memorial at the back of the school hall.25 This environment was to engender a martial spirit in the generation of boys like Heath who were educated at the school in the period leading up to the Second World War. In 1922, Varnish had initiated a Cadet Corps, which was affiliated to the 5th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment Territorial Army. Though this was an attempt by the head-master to follow an established public school tradition, it was also very much a sign of the times, as the thirties progressed and Germany’s international ambitions were becoming clearer. In the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Rutlish Cadet Corps – including Heath – were the proud recipients of the inaugural ‘Nation Cup’, which was established to acknowledge the most outstanding Cadet Corps in Britain. The trophy was presented to the Corps by the Prince of Wales in the garden of St James’s Palace in June 1933.

  Varnish introduced a series of other innovations in order to ape the public school system. They began to play rugby rather than soccer and by the early 1930s Heath was playing for the First XV. He was also appointed as a prefect, this system also initiated by Varnish. As well as keeping order, prefects were authorized to give canings as punishment. These were always carried out in the presence of a witness and entered into the Punishments Book.26 By this period, such beatings were ubiquitous in British public and grammar schools to the extent that in France the act of flagellation had famously been dubbed ‘the English vice’. Though there’s no reason to suspect Heath of overindulging his authority as a prefect, in all probability his time at Rutlish will have been his introduction either as a witness or a participant to corporal punishment.

  In The English Vice, Ian Gibson notes that for many flagellants, very often the first excitement in connection with beating takes place in early childhood when a whipping inflicted by an adult has been witnessed, undergone or read about. Freud and the German sexual psychologist Krafft-Ebing observed that several of their patients had remarkably similar case histories, dating their first awareness of sexual arousal from reading flogging scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.27 There was also a very strong tradition of school stories in boys’ fiction published throughout the Victorian period and many of these described canings, whippings and thrashings as a matter of course. This was carried on into the twentieth century in twopenny weeklies like The Gem and The Magnet as well as in annuals such as Boy’s Own and Chums. A typical scene from the period Heath would have been reading appears in Chums Annual (1927–8):

  [Chummy] was wondering how many strokes it would be, whether it would draw blood, whether he would cry in front of all the form!

  Mr London picked up the ground-ash and pointed to a vacant desk in front.

  ‘Bend over there,’ he commanded.

  Chummy put himself in position and put his handkerchief into his mouth.

  Mr London brought the stick down with all his force, four times, four deliberate, even strokes, and each stroke raised a purple weal under Chummy’s shorts . . . and that is how Chummy came to worship Mr London with all his heart and soul.28

  There’s little difference, it would seem, between these stories aimed at children and the seamier reaches of ‘adult’ fiction.

  But it is not only the casual sadism that these boys’ weeklies depicted that might have influenced the adolescent Heath. George Orwell made a study of the culture surrounding these comics, often (inaccurately) described as ‘penny dreadfuls’ in his 1940 essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’. He observed that ‘nearly every boy who reads at all’29 went through a stage of reading one or other of them. The most celebrated and the oldest were The Gem and The Magnet, each of which promoted an idealized view of life in public schools: St Jim’s in The Gem, Greyfriars in The Magnet. These are represented as ancient institutions much like Eton or Winchester. The boys in t
he stories never aged and remained perpetually about fourteen. The stories were endlessly repetitive, focusing on horseplay, practical jokes, ragging, fights, canings, football, cricket and food.30

  Orwell notes that boys who did actually go to public schools read the comics, but nearly always stopped reading them at about the age of twelve. But boys at cheaper private schools, like Rutlish, ‘that are designed for people who can’t afford a public school but consider the council schools “common”’,31 carried on reading them until they were fifteen or sixteen. Orwell’s point was very much about class. These weeklies promoted a dated and conservative ethos that was consumed by vast numbers of schoolboys, like Heath, who felt excluded from some sort of paradisal boyhood promoted in their pages.

  One Rutlish old boy from this period remembered that from his first day, two specific objectives were outlined: ‘By the time you leave Rutlish School you will be able to swim and to speak the King’s English.’32 Another pupil felt the Varnish agenda was extremely simple: ‘Get educated, talk proper and you will succeed in life.’33 Elocution was pivotal to a Rutlish education and was drilled into the boys by Herbert Cave, an English master who had written a book on the subject in 1930, Practical Exercises in Spoken English.34 The Governors’ Report of 1933 particularly commended this – ‘a successful attempt had been made to turn out boys with power to speak correct Standard English’35 – by which they meant Received Pronunciation. This was to prove invaluable to Heath who was to use his accent and the assumption of a patrician manner to masquerade as a member of the upper-middle class throughout his life and career.

  Given how frequently he was to attempt to pass himself off as a product of Eton and Oxbridge, it’s clear that something of Varnish’s social ambitions for his boys rubbed off on the young Neville Heath; his yearning for upward social mobility, his self-aggrandizement and snobbery was ignited by Varnish’s public-school ambitions for his grammar-school boys.36 J. D. Casswell, Heath’s defence counsel, was later to identify this key element of Heath’s character. He was, he said, ‘a man never satisfied to remain in the station to which he had been called and for which he was qualified’.37