The Monocled Mutineer

by John Fairley

  In this war of nerves the army seemed afraid to lift a finger. The embarrassments of Toplis’s past army life were daily compounded by new audacities, but the present indignities were puny compared with the revelations which might have accompanied a public court martial. Finally it was Toplis who tired of the pantomime. On Boxing Night, Fallows was on duty as orderly in the depot vehicle office when a Sunbeam car appeared outside the window. Fallows peered out and thought he recognized Percy at the wheel. As the car reached the gate the sentry challenged it. The car stopped with the engine running, the driver produced a chit, the sentry saluted – and the car was on its way. Toplis was opting out of the Royal Army Service Corps for the time being, with the bonus of the Sunbeam car, property of the War Office, value £100.

  It was the car that finally outraged the army. Its description, and that of its driver, were circulated quickly as Toplis set off across Salisbury Plain, intent on spending New Year with a lady of his acquaintance in Bath. For the purposes of this particular romance he was a company sergeant-major.

  The afternoon of 27 December found him walking out in the full-dress uniform of his rank with Miss Evelyn Shipton, the daughter of a greengrocer in the town. It was still a bright clear day as he parked the Sunbeam outside the Pump Rooms and helped Miss Shipton out. Over the road was a small cafe of sentimental memory to the couple. They had often taken tea there when Toplis had been on business visits from Bristol. The car had put Miss Shipton in an affectionate mood. Clearly her young hero had been doing well. Despite a little residual pique at his three-month absence, she let his hand rest on her knee as the waitress arrived with the cakes. There had been a moment of indiscretion, fortunately with no dire results, the night Percy had left for Bulford. She was determined not to repeat it, at least not so soon. Yet Percy was not only attractive, but also persuasive. Miss Shipton glanced out at the car. A little trip to the country perhaps. ‘People seem to admire your car,’ she said. Percy looked up to see two military policemen surveying the front of the Sunbeam. They turned and began to walk across the road. Swiftly Toplis got up and made for the door. Coolly he held it open while the two Red Caps walked in and went over to speak to the waitress. He was round the corner and running before he heard the sounds of pursuit. By the time he got to the Great Western Railway Station there was no sign of the chase and a train was in for Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth. Thankfully he settled back in a third-class carriage. The train was full of soldiers. There were one or two military policemen. But they would not lightly tangle with a company sergeant-major.

  Down at Bristol Temple Meads station, however, was a Red Cap with no such scruples. Corporal Arthur Rayment, boxer and veteran of Étaples and the Western Front, had had a busy Christmas. A whole battalion of Irish troops bound reluctantly for India had simply got off the train at Temple Meads, officers and all, and declined to continue. Rayment had spent a few hours rounding them up from the pubs of Bristol, ending up with their captain, dead drunk in a hotel bedroom. On Christmas Eve, Rayment had been attacked by a huge wild Canadian brandishing a cut-throat razor. Rayment had felled him with a punch of knuckle-duster force, but only after getting a fair beating himself. The message that now came down the line was scarcely welcome.

  ‘Please detain and hold passenger on 4.35 Bath/Bristol train. Wearing uniform of Company Sergeant-Major. May be armed. Name Francis Percy Toplis. Description: Medium height, reddish hair. Age 22. Looks older.’

  Rayment took three colleagues and went across to Platform No. 4. Troops piled off the train, but there was no sign of the distinctive sleeve of a company sergeant-major. Rayment warned the guard to hold the train and boarded the end carriage. He was prepared for a fight. It seemed unlikely that his man would use a gun in a crowded train. Slowly he edged down the train over the mêlée of kit-bags into the second coach. At the far end a company sergeant-major was coming out of the lavatory. Instinctively, Toplis decided to bluff it out.

  ‘What the hell do you mean, Corporal? I warn you, I’m not used to being approached in this way. If you’ll just get out of the way I can get back to my seat.’

  Rayment, a big man, gripped him by the arm. ‘I’m sorry, I have written orders to take you off this train for questioning.’ Quietly enough Toplis capitulated. This was neither the time nor the place for force. The policemen searched him and removed the Webley. Chatting cheerfully, Toplis was taken back to the police post.

  In the truculent array of drunks, trouble-makers and victims of fights that Christmas of 1919, Toplis, the absentee, seemed hardly to need special watching. In any case, the cells were full. Rayment himself had arrested seventeen people that day. He was happy enough to fill in Form 13252 and see Toplis packed off to the overspill guardroom down the river at Shirehampton Remount Depot, a stone’s throw from old familiar territory at Avonmouth.

  For Toplis, survivor of the death cell at Étaples, who had masqueraded his way back to England from Boulogne under the noses of Secret Service agents, Shirehampton was a pushover. The second night he joined casually in a game of pontoon with his guards. It was a game he had learnt in a hard school with the Aussies at Étaples. He was winning comfortably. The guards were boys with no idea when to risk a fifth card or how to hide a good banker’s hand. Towards midnight, one left to check the log. When he came back, it was to find his colleague staring at his own pistol in Toplis’s hands. A simple bit of pickpocketing had sufficed. Toplis locked them both in his own cell and walked out of the depot. Nerve, confidence and experience had stood him in good stead once again. He was free to face the arrival of the New Year of 1920 in jovial mood. It was to be his last, since he was to die by June.

  Toplis did not at that moment, however, wish to desert His Majesty’s Services altogether. The wages and accommodation were not to be scoffed at in such troubled times. By January he was enrolled in the Royal Air Force. Even now, more than fifty years on, the RAF are less than keen to admit any responsibility for a man who had taken their more senior service for a helter-skelter ride through five years of war and peace. He was enlisted as Aircraftman Francis Percy Toplis. They paid him. Nothing else is forthcoming.

  In all the colourful Toplis story of 1920, the army kept a low profile, but the RAF stayed invisible. The last chapter in the chronicle of Percy Toplis, deserter, hero, confidence trickster, ladies’ man, mutineer, Bolshevik, escape artist, and gentleman of St James’s, began with a crime Toplis had never before been embroiled in: murder.

  On the balmy morning of Sunday, 25 April, Sidney Spicer, the young Salisbury taxi driver, was found shot in the head under a hedge at Thruxton Down, near Andover, in Hampshire. The body had been dragged for forty yards across the road over the bank and into the hedge. There were blood marks on the tarmac. The local police acted quickly. They issued this description of the man they wanted for the murder:

  Name: Private Percy Toplis, Regimental number EMT 54262 RASC, enlisted August 1919, deserted December 1919, of smart appearance, affects a gold monocle. Age 34 or 35, sometimes has ginger moustache, cut à la Charlie Chaplin.

  Superintendent Cox of the Hampshire Police was unforthcoming about the evidence against Toplis, but to his thinking it was sufficient to launch the most intense and dramatic postwar manhunt. For six weeks the hunted man ranged the length of Britain, flaunted himself, then melted away; tantalized the newspaper-reading public with exploit after exploit, before, like Pearl White herself, invariably escaping in the nick of time.

  Within three days of the murder, Superintendent Cox arrested Toplis’s friend, Private Harry Fallows, and charged him with harbouring and maintaining Toplis. The same day the inquest on Sidney Spicer opened in the rather original setting of a barn at Thruxton Down, with grain heaped on the floor, harness hanging from old beams under a ceiling concealed with cobwebs. Members of the nine-man jury, as well as the Deputy Coroner, Captain J. T. P. Clarke, sat on bags of chaff. The coroner opened by declaring proudly: ‘This court has got one piece of evidence that is not available in any other cou
rt, and that is the body of the deceased man.’ And sure enough there the body was, in an open box outside the barn door. The jury trooped out for a look.

  Coroner Clarke sought to explain the emotive choice of a barn, yards away from the spot where the body had been found. From his seat on the chaff bag, above him a horse saddle hanging on the wall, he said, ‘The circumstances of the case are probably known to all of you better than me. It is one of those tragedies that occurs in an out-of-the-way part of Hampshire and gives it a world-wide interest. That reason has induced me to adjourn from the small room in the farmhouse to this barn. The room that we were offered was small and would have been uncomfortably crowded.’

  The inquest was then adjourned with only evidence of identification. By the time it was resumed in more easeful circumstances more than a month later at Shipton School, a local magistrates’ court had started proceedings against Private Fallows on the charge of harbouring.

  The first thing that their worships heard from a Mr Sims, acting for the public prosecutor, was that the army was washing its hands of Toplis as fast as possible. He was disowned and dumped on the RAF as their problem. Mr Sims said, “There can be no doubt at all that the person who inflicted that wound on Spicer was an ex-soldier named Toplis, a deserter from the RAF at the time, masquerading as a quartermaster-sergeant.’

  Although it was Private Fallows who was on trial, the story of Toplis and the fateful weekend dominated the proceedings. Slowly the story, or at least a version of the story, began to emerge.

  Despite the little adventure with the army’s Sunbeam car, and the inconvenience in Bath and Bristol, Toplis had not deserted his business interests at Bulford Camp entirely. Harry Fallows reported that his friend Percy had shown up several times for a meal and a chat at the cookhouse. He had strolled about the camp, saying that he was a civilian attached to the Air Force Commission in London. There were discussions with the Redskins about the petrol racket. The police, military and civilian, were causing no difficulties, but some of the taxi firms were cutting up rough about the price and threatening to spill the story to the authorities. Through March and April no action seemed necessary, and Toplis cheerfully called in on Fallows from time to time in the company mess at No. 2 Depot, had a bite to eat and then faded away back to London.

  On the Saturday afternoon of 24 April, Fallows was asleep on his bunk at Bulford when a corporal came into the hut and said: ‘A sergeant-major wishes to see you.’ Fallows went out down the mile-long winding hill from the camp towards the Rose and Crown. There was Sergeant-Major Toplis playing the piano alone in the Cromwell Institute, picking out his favourite tune – ‘Let the Great Big World Keep Turning’.

  Toplis stopped and turned to Fallows: ‘Do you fancy a stroll?’

  They had only gone a few paces when a Red Cap sergeant stopped them and asked Fallows if he had a pass. Toplis, as usual, was immune because of his uniform, but they both turned back. Near the Bulford railway siding Toplis put his coat down and they sat down in the sun. A small dog came bounding up and they romped with it for a few minutes. But Toplis was restless. Shortly he said he would come back at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon to give Fallows a ride in a landaulette car which he had bought. He put his monocle in his eye, said goodbye and turned to go towards Bulford station. For a moment he paused. ‘Still got the old friend.’ And he dropped six bullets out of the chambers of a Mark 6 Webley revolver.

  ‘You’re a fool to carry a thing like that about in England,’ said Fallows.

  ‘Well, I’m going to Ireland soon. You can shoot on sight there.’ And he was on his way. That small exchange was to seal Toplis’s fate. It was only a few hours later, however, at eleven o’clock that same Saturday night, according to Harry Fallows, that Toplis came back to Bulford.

  ‘He knocked at the door of the cookhouse. I thought it was the provost sergeant and opened the door, but it was Toplis, and he said, “For God’s sake give me a drink. I feel as parched as hell.” I gave him a drink of tea and he said if I didn’t go on the joy-ride to Tidworth right then, I should not be able to have one at all as he had some business on. He borrowed a towel to wipe his hands, but he didn’t wash.

  ‘Instead of starting the car, Toplis gave it a push down the hill towards the railway siding, jumped in and threw the clutch in. I asked him why he did it that way. He said he didn’t want everybody poking about.

  ‘At North Tidworth he changed hats with me. When I was picking his up from behind the seat, I found his revolver. It was still loaded in all six chambers. When we got to Savernake Forest we had a bit of sleep. But first he took some clothes out of the front of the car, took them about twenty yards away, put some petrol on them and burnt them. He said they were oily rags. It was no use leaving them in the car and he wanted to warm his hands.’ At Cirencester the car stopped dead out of petrol. Toplis bought a tin. By ten o’clock on Sunday morning, while Superintendent Cox was viewing the body on Thruxton Down, the two motorists had reached Gloucester and the car had broken down. They had it repaired. But it was not Toplis’s day. On the way down through the Forest of Dean he hit a cow and it took an hour to straighten out the bumper and mudguard so that it was nearly seven in the evening before they reached Swansea, With every hour that passed the beautiful Darracq car was becoming a more conspicuous and dangerous liability.

  They stayed at the Grosvenor Hotel, Fallows recollects, Toplis with his revolver beside his bed:

  ‘We slept until ten o’clock. He told me then to buck up. I wasn’t moving quick enough. We had breakfast. He went into a barber’s shop and had a shave, and left me alone. I met him coming out of a garage down the street with the car. He shouted for me to jump in and said, “That man won’t buy the car, he thinks I’ve stolen it.” There was a policeman at the bottom of the hill and Toplis said: “He’s watching us. You get out here.” He borrowed my spectacles. I walked round and met him at the bottom of the road. Toplis was tense. “You had better get back to Bulford quickly.”’

  He thrust a pound in Fallows’s hand and gave him back his own cap. Fallows shook hands with Toplis for the last time and caught the train to Salisbury. Toplis set off for familiar territory, across the River Severn to Bristol.

  Back at Bulford there was uproar, as Private Jack Anderson remembers:

  ‘Everybody was ordered out of their huts by the Military Police and we all had to stand while they got underneath the huts and searched. We had a chap apparently in our lot that looked very much like him. They took him away and gave him a right going over before he could prove where he had been. The whole camp was sealed off and it was hours before we were allowed back in our billets. There was no going to the canteen. Nothing. Even to us new recruits, Toplis was a well-known figure at the camp. He was a well-spoken chap and we all knew he went off to London and posed as an admiral or something. But that day no one seemed to have anything to say to the police.’

  James McMahon, the mutineer who had luckily escaped the consequences of Étaples, was by now a corporal and a Bulford soccer team mate of Toplis. He recalls:

  There was enormous panic. He was such an arrogant bloke that everybody felt he would just come strolling back in. He really did run that place, most of it from a distance, and when he did choose to show up from time to time, everybody from the rank of Lieutenant up, went in fear of him. But there is no denying that for the rest of us he had a great deal of what would now be called charisma.

  While they were searching underneath the huts, the camp provost sergeant was busy shaving off his moustache, I remember. Toplis had threatened to ‘get’ him one day, and this was part of his attempt at disguising himself. But, really, the only exercise that Toplis ever bothered to turn up for was football. I used to play alongside him in the team, and he gave me a photograph of himself. Of course he never turned up again, and later I sold that photograph to a London newspaper for £2.

  Meanwhile Superintendent Cox was trying to work out a timetable of murder. He had some witnesses. Private
Jack Holdrick at the RASC’s Embarkation Depot at Southampton Docks had come forward to say he had seen Toplis on the Saturday afternoon, also at about half past two, near the Clock House in Southampton High Street. According to Holdrick, he asked Toplis what he was doing. ‘He said he had had his ticket from the RASC and was in the Air Force. Toplis said: “You know the car missing from Bulford on Boxing Night? It was me. I sold it in Cirencester for £100. I am going to Bulford to get another one. If I can’t get it by fair means I shall do it with this.”’

  Holdrick then told the police that Toplis had produced a Webley service revolver from his back trouser pocket, and confirmed he was wearing a sergeant-major’s crown on his arm and RAF khaki. Yet this melodramatic and hardly characteristic encounter amid the shopping crowds at Southampton apparently took place at the same time as, according to Fallows, Toplis was playing the piano to himself twenty-five miles away in the Cromwell Institute at Bulford.

  Another RASC man, Driver Arthur Sellwood, told the police he left Salisbury at about nine o’clock on Saturday evening in Sidney Spicer’s taxi. When they arrived near Amesbury railway bridge on the journey to Bulford they had to fill up. Just then a man came out of the hedge near-by, walked to the driver and asked him to take him to Andover. Spicer said he was going the other way, but would call for him on the way back if he wanted. Sellwood said the stranger had a British Warm coat with a sergeant-major’s crown on the sleeve.

  Superintendent Cox then tried out the complicated journey this evidence suggested: from Amesbury railway bridge through to the Rose and Crown at Bulford where the car had been seen to turn round; back to Amesbury to pick up the stranger; then on via Andover to the fatal spot at Thruxton Hill; and back to Bulford and No. 2 Company Depot by eleven o’clock in time to meet Fallows. Sixteen miles: it was possible. Indeed, the story was good enough for the Andover coroner. People did not usually parade with revolvers and draw them on every conceivable occasion, he told the inquest jury. Toplis had been seen in the same uniform as that worn by the mysterious stranger at Amesbury. Captain Clarke admitted that there seemed to be a little discrepancy about time, but not too much notice should be taken of that. People did not know what they were doing every minute of the day. The jury was absent for about fifteen minutes. Returning to court, the foreman said they were agreed that Spicer met his death as a result of gunshot wounds. And they returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against Percy Toplis. If caught, he would now certainly be hanged.