The Monocled Mutineer

by John Fairley

  At four o’clock, slight rain was dampening the gathering gloom at Nottingham’s Midland station as another damper on excessive excitement pulled into platform two. A full train-load of wounded from the final battle for Arras was lifted out and put on to the waiting ambulances. It was a slow business. Many of the men were desperately ill and the stretcher-bearers were elderly. Nottingham had few able-bodied men left for the home front.

  In the narrow front windows of the fifteenth-century Flying Horse Hotel in Nottingham, Percy Toplis sat watching the ambulances go past through the market square. Knots of people waved Union Jacks at them. Lighted shop windows and open curtains illuminated the soggy bunting wrapped around the lamp standards.

  But Toplis was not to be depressed. On the contrary, 11 a.m. on 11 November marked the beginning of what he was confident was to be an extremely successful day for him. As from that moment he felt himself immune from the firing squad. Not that there had ever been any sign of the dullards in the Military Police looking in the army’s own records for the whereabouts of their ‘most wanted deserter’. For, on his arrival back in England, Toplis had taken the boldest course, gone straight to the army recruiting centre in Nottingham and joined another regiment, the Royal Army Service Corps.

  He had been taken to Clipstone Camp, his new depot. It was comfortably near Shirland, a village close to Alfreton in Derbyshire where his mother had just moved, and the duties were hardly onerous. There were hardly any duties at all. The celebration of the Armistice had not been constrained at Clipstone by the solemn sentiments of Nottingham. When the news had arrived – a newsboy with a quire of Evening Post specials – Private Toplis had made immediately for his place of duty, the canteen piano.

  He knew the favourite tunes, especially ‘The Old Hundredth’. But the singing had not lasted long. There were too many men who wanted to be off to girlfriends and families. And there were few enough among the soldiers present who knew anything of Mons and Ypres or Passchendaele and the Somme. There was little sentiment to be wrung from ‘the long, long way to Tipperary’. And the pubs were open in Ollerton. Toplis had realized that it was time to prepare for the imperatives of peace. He had gone back to his billet and carefully packed the equipment which was to provide him with a living: one full walking-out uniform of an officer in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, complete with Mons decoration and a number of chevrons on the sleeve; one chequebook drawn on the London County and Westminster Bank at Beckenham, Kent, originally the property of a certain Lieutenant Copeland Barker of London; and a revolver with twelve cartridges.

  Toplis had tested the less violent aspects of his equipment a month before at Hucknall on his way in to a weekend’s furlough in Nottingham. He had called in at Frank Tweed’s jewellery shop in the High Street and looked at a number of gold bracelet watches. There was a fine Benson for £8 17s. 6d. But as Toplis started to write out one of Lieutenant Copeland’s cheques, he sensed that Mr Tweed was becoming uneasy, and that a Mons star might not be a total guarantee of creditworthiness. With a flourish he scribbled in the sum of £9. ‘The extra half a crown is the mark of a gentleman,’ he cried, and walked out with the watch. A fortnight before that, a bank at Mansfield Woodhouse had fallen for the same style.

  Now that the fighting had stopped, Toplis felt he could abandon the army for the time being. In the post-war confusion he could find both security and opportunity in the outside world. The Flying Horse had not been difficult about honouring a cheque on this day of all days, and Toplis saw no reason to do his drinking anywhere else but in its comfortable lounge. As the evening set in, more revellers appeared, determined to overcome the atmosphere of sobriety. A lorry crammed with American soldiers, cheering wildly and flying the Stars and Stripes, tore through the market place. A stray aircraft dropped Verey lights, and parties of girls from the munitions factory marched up and down waving flags and singing. Toplis called for another black beer. As he turned round, two men walked in through the door and strode straight towards him. One was Detective Sergeant Hames, Nottingham Police. The other Toplis recognized immediately as Mr Frank Tweed, jeweller of Hucknall. Temporarily the peace had started badly for Percy Toplis.

  For a fortnight, the police attempted to make inquiries into the background of their prisoner. There were two adjournments of the case for further investigations. This only served to encourage Toplis, and the police got everything wrong. His age was given as thirty – ten years too much; his occupation as miner – six years out of date; his army unit as the Royal Army Medical Corps stationed at Salonika.

  Toplis, familiar with the ways of the magistrates, concentrated on diversions and sympathy ploys rather than contesting the charges. He told the Nottinghamshire Hall Bench that he had only tried the frauds because his war wounds affected him. When the magistrates proved unmoved, he coolly asked for the return of £7 which had been found on him. Their worships declined and dispatched him to six months’ hard labour. The army gave him a dishonourable discharge. It was to be the last time the law would catch up with Percy Toplis – alive.

  14

  As the spring of 1919 moved into summer, the hopes and expectations of the Armistice sagged into bitterness, confusion and conflict. The great armies which had broken through into Germany the previous autumn had expected to be in Berlin within a week, followed by a brief nibble at the fruits of victory and a quick demobilization, after which it would be ‘back to their cats and canaries’, good quiet jobs and homes fit for heroes. Six months later, they knew it was not to happen thus.

  The truce had locked the armies impatiently in aspic. Germany might refuse the terms. The Allies might need to fight again. Right through the winter of 1918/19 the troops had waited for the peace talks to begin. The food was, if anything, even worse than during the war. There were riots and disturbances. Two companies of the Hampshires refused to parade. One of the ringleaders was taken in. A London Rifle Brigade man reported ‘turbulent scenes’ when the news came that recruits who had only been with the brigade a month or two were to be demobilized before veterans who had served since 1914. Bitterly, he recorded another Christmas in uniform:

  One eighteenth part of a scraggy turkey. No gravy. Beef. Potatoes. Three and a half ounces of pudding. Unsweetened custard. Three quarters of a fig. One third of a rotten apple. And paper chains.

  The sense of grievance grew when it was rumoured, correctly, that large batches of troops who had never left England’s shores were being demobilized.

  Peace officially came and went with the signing of the treaty in June 1919. But in that month there were still ten full divisions in the Rhineland. The streets of Cologne saw British machine-gun posts, both the German and the British authorities being in fear of a Red revolution. The troops stayed on, with prison sentences and heavy punishments to contain their discontent.

  Back home in England there was little comfort. The miners, as a starred occupation, had been conscripted late and demobilized early. They returned to the pits in early 1919 to find crippling inflation and a confrontation with the mine-owners. By July there was an all-out strike in the Yorkshire coalfield and trouble in Wales and Scotland. When the rest of the troops did get home, there would be few jobs, and many of the men returning would be unfit for the jobs that there were.

  Into this confused and tense situation Percy Toplis emerged from jail in Nottingham. Norman de Courcy Parry, the chief constable’s son, whose path was to cross fatally with Toplis, recalls this period:

  ‘The country had very quickly become flooded with men for whom there was no hope of employment, men who had been wounded, gassed, or shell-shocked, and men who had never learned any trade at all but the art of killing their fellow men, men who were accustomed to survive under circumstances of intense hardship and discomfort which civilians were unable to envisage.

  ‘Intense bitterness and resentment arose between the returned soldier and those who had remained at home in lucrative situations, and had even taken their girlfriends.

  ‘The
war was forgotten, and to many crime seemed to be the simplest way of making a living. The police were faced with ruthless men, caring for nothing, and extremely experienced in combat as well. There was no way of dealing with those who were out of touch with reality and those needing just the slightest mental assistance did not receive it. Many had brainstorms, many more could not sleep without a light, and sudden noise, a creaking door, or the crash of something breaking up, might send even a strong man temporarily hysterical. It was a very intense time for parents and wives.’

  For Toplis, neither parents nor wives were a consideration – and confusion was his natural element.

  So it was that in the summer of 1919 a confident young man of 22 presented himself once again at a recruiting office, this time in London, and re-enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps as No. 54262 Toplis, Francis Percy. The continued effrontery is incredible. Two hundred and sixty-three men were officially admitted to have been shot for desertion – six of them in that very year, 1919. Yet Toplis, as renowned a deserter as any in the land, got back into the army under his own name. To this day the army have no explanation, and they maintain that they cannot check. The official line is that his wartime papers must have been among those destroyed at a Walworth warehouse during the blitz on London in the Second World War, a blaze that conveniently removed the papers of another figure from the Étaples mutiny, Corporal Wood.

  It was not, however, Toplis’s intention to require too much from the army. Just food, pay and an occasional bed. In return, he did not intend the army to require too much from him. In this spirit, Driver Toplis, Mechanical Section Royal Army Service Corps, arrived with a draft at the Avonmouth Depot near Bristol in August 1919.

  He had not chosen to stay in the Service Corps by accident. In that frenetic year after the ending of the war the corps had become the Mob of the British Army – and Bristol was its Chicago. For the Service Corps had access to a liquor craved as urgently in Britain as booze was in Prohibition America: petrol. Percy Toplis stepped into the barracks at Avonmouth aware not only that the corps would feed and clothe him, but that it could also provide a handsome living. What he did not know was that the corps already had its Al Capone gang – the Redskins.

  Private V. Scott of Heywood, Lancashire, then a young lad of 17, remembers the reign of terror the Redskins maintained inside the barracks.

  ‘We slept on bed boards laid out on trestles with straw mattresses on top. These had to be kept clean and scrubbed. The Redskins just ordered the young ones to do the work for them. If they didn’t they were beaten up. These were old soldiers who hadn’t taken their discharge after the war and they meant business. One of them always carried a cut-throat razor with him. And he wasn’t afraid to use it. In the end it all finished up with a murder. But long before that we were terrified into doing anything they wanted.’

  The terror in the barrack room, however, was a mere sideline to the Redskins. Their main objective was the weekly milking from the tanks at Avonmouth Depot of thousands of gallons of petrol which on the black market could fetch double the official price. The Redskins had the system inside Avonmouth camp sewn up. They happily left the young recruits to play around on the huge caterpillar tractors learning to manoeuvre the big guns while they concentrated on the lorries and cars. There was a Redskin on every shift at the ‘oil well’, checking out each driver from the pumps. Every driver had to sign for a full tank of petrol and take half a tank. There were Redskins in the Quartermaster’s Office checking and approving the sheets, there were Redskins on the gates, and Redskin drivers to take full loads of petrol out to the market.

  By the time Toplis arrived, the Redskin leader, Corporal Harry Pearson, had the organization running with exemplary smoothness, except for that perennial bane of the entrepreneur: distribution. There was an immediate treaty. According to Private Scott, the Redskins knew of Toplis, some of them having been at Étaples. Certainly they recognized a fearsome opponent or a powerful ally – and settled for peace. Toplis’s toughness was known and proven. By late 1919, his patina of elegant and confident trickster was lacquered beyond the fear of flaking, on to four years of war experience.

  Toplis set about organizing the transport owners of Bristol. As long as they paid cash on the nail they were guaranteed a regular delivery of army petrol at whatever time was most convenient to avoid the eyes of prying employees or the attentions of the constabulary. Toplis negotiated in the most relaxed style, meeting at the old Guildhall pub in Bristol, or even journeying to the Assembly Rooms at Bath if there was a particularly handsome deal on the horizon. There was never any mention of the problem of the law, or hint of the presence of the Redskin heavies.

  But the alliance with the Redskins was strictly business. Back at the barracks, Toplis remained aloof and as lordly as a loafer in St James’s. Young Scott was employed at 2s. 6d. a week to scrub the Toplis bed board. There was 6d. here or 1s. there to spare Percy the other minor impositions of army life.

  For three months the operation flowed on without a ripple. Then, in October 1919, the army intervened in its usual capricious fashion. A draft notice arrived ordering Scott, Toplis and the Redskins to Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain. There was talk of protest, even desertion, but Toplis airily assured them that there would be ample, even greater, opportunities in the sprawling morass of the Royal Army Service Corps’ biggest base. And so it was to prove.

  Bulford was, indeed, to provide another revolving stage for the display of Toplis’s exotic talents: exploiting the army, entertaining the troops, painting London red, seducing the ladies, becoming involved in a murder and, finally, sparking off the fatal, fascinated manhunt which was to rivet the attention of British newspaper readers for more than six weeks before its climax on the lonely road in Cumberland.

  Bulford more than lived up to Percy’s expectations. As Private John Anderson of Felling-on-Tyne recalls:

  ‘It was a shambles. People were joining up in their thousands. And war veterans were trying to get out in their thousands. No one knew what anyone was doing. The new recruits hadn’t been kitted out or sorted into companies. The old soldiers went round in civilian clothes, it was chaos. The young lads in off the street like me were starving. They had to put Military Police on the dining halls to stop us coming round for second helpings. The rackets were enormous. The cooks were selling off food to people in Salisbury, often before it even got delivered to the camp. And of course it was the biggest driving school. There were stacks of lorries and stacks of petrol.’

  Toplis and the Redskins settled in. There were not so many transport firms around, but Toplis soon homed in on the readiest of markets. The taxi drivers of Winchester, Salisbury, even Southampton, were only too eager to keep their faltering trade topped up with army petrol. Rumour had it that the contact man was a certain Sidney Spicer, who drove a cab in Salisbury. Certainly his trade, illicit or not, was to prove within the year abruptly fatal for himself and for Toplis.

  In the meantime, with a comfortable income assured, Toplis set about enjoying himself. The weekends, from Thursday to Tuesday, were reserved for a Burlington Bertie life in the metropolis. The Press was later to discover his tracks at the Savoy and Ascot, his buying shoes in Pall Mall and suits in Savile Row, his recounting, as ‘Captain Williams’, exploits at Hill 60, his philandering with the daughters of the aristocracy and compromising young ladies in teashops. But, for a couple of days midweek, with Thursday’s pay parade in view, it was pleasant enough to wander around impressing the lads back at Bulford.

  His young friend, 19-year-old Private Harry Fallows, built up an awed picture of Toplis’s army life. It was rare to see Percy in the same uniform twice running. He had an endless supply of badges, from RAF to Army Remount. He appeared sometimes as a private soldier, sometimes as a sergeant-major, often as an officer, and then invariably adorned with his gold-rimmed monocle. One memorable day, Fallows says, he appeared in the camp in the uniform of a full colonel:

  ‘He walked out of the hu
t and down towards the canteen. He told me to follow a few yards behind. The young blokes just melted out of the way. Anyone who got trapped in his path brought off a mighty salute because officers weren’t seen much round there. But then, as we got near the canteen a bunch of old hands came out. They saw him, but it was against their principles to salute anyone. Percy wasn’t having that. He could put on this real toff gentleman’s voice. And he roared out: “Soldier, don’t you know the rules of this army. Let’s see your arm up there. And again. Faster, or I’ll damn well shoot it off for you.” And at that, he whipped this Webley 6 revolver out of his holster and fired off three shots. Just like that. One, two, three. The soldiers just hit the ground and stayed there. When they looked up “Colonel” Toplis was doubled up with laughter, shouting: “Just where you belong, Thomas. Just where you belong.” They were chaps he knew, you see. He’d fired all right, but the bullets had gone in the ground. He just told the lads to come down and have a drink with him.

  ‘For all that, he had too much of that revolver in the camp. He had a lot to say about it. He kept talking about doing this and that. In the end we took no notice. It was well known in the camp that he was a deserter. He had a set of proper discharge papers. But once, when I was a temporary clerk in the company office, I copied out a confidential document which said he was a deserter and gave it to him.’

  Clearly the army knew that it had taken the viper back into its bosom. But authority did nothing. By Christmas, according to Fallows, Toplis rarely bothered to show up at the camp at all. He would appear on Wednesday evening in time for Thursday’s pay parade, and then vanish again. Occasionally he would while away a few hours making out his own leave passes and handing them to the soldiers.