The Monocled Mutineer

by John Fairley

  Bartley then drove off again to his lemonade deliveries, and the curator locked the gates behind him. Before taking up a strategic position behind shrubs, with three of the undertakers’ assistants on the look-out for gate-crashers, Brunskill knocked on the cemetery lodge door to tell the Reverend Robert Law that his presence was awaited. Inside the chapel, Barron, Ritchie and Ireland impatiently occupied the front pew. Mufti was again worn by the two officers, upon whom it had been impressed that speed and secrecy were the essence, and now the tall, distinguished, grey-haired vicar was threatening the success of the operation with his tardiness. The official view had been that the parson’s presence was only necessary at the graveside, but the Reverend Law had insisted on conducting a full Church of England service, his argument being, quite properly, that the deceased had not been convicted of a capital crime – a fact which authority had been inclined to conveniently overlook until now, and one which they did not want to have interrupting the proceedings.

  The officers stirred uneasily and thought that the vicar was doing the occasion slightly more than the religious justice it merited when he intoned that it was not for anyone gathered within these walls to judge the wrongdoing of others. The Reverend Law did not intend to spare them. ‘Circumstances have been such that this man was violently removed from this life before he could be judged on earth,’ he said. ‘Let his only judgement, therefore, be made in Heaven.’ In the absence of music the vicar thought that the ‘mourners’ should follow his lead in singing the first verse only of a hymn which he presumed was known to them all. A very reluctant and markedly off-key Barron and Ritchie joined in the words, ‘There is a happy land, far, far away …’

  At last it was over, and the two officers could stop glancing back at the church door and listening for the knocking that would tell them they had been detected and their little ploy uncovered. The coffin was carried two hundred yards to a grave listed as No. 7135 in the cemetery register, under a yew tree at one of the highest points in the graveyard.

  In the register, opposite the entry ‘P. Toplis’, curator Brunskill penned: ‘Shot dead by police at Plumpton.’ Triumphantly the police placed their prepared notice on the gates: ‘Francis Percy Toplis was interred at 9.00 a.m. this morning.’

  The Penrith Board of Guardians, the local public assistance board of its time, met to hear the relieving officer, Johnstone, report that the cost of the pauper’s grave had been £5 9s. 6d., although they could set against that the value of Toplis’s clothing and other property which now legally belonged to the board. The arrangement in fact showed a small profit.

  When it was suggested that the Toplis gun should be sent to Penrith museum, Johnstone pointed out that the police wanted the gun to hang on their headquarters office wall as a memento. It was agreed to be a ‘jolly good idea’.

  The gun, like the original photographic print of Toplis lying dead in Penrith Police Station, only disappeared from view in 1977. In the whole of Cumbria, authority is without knowledge of what happened to them.

  19

  Back in the real world questions about the Penrith shoot-out were beginning to be asked with a little more penetration than the coroner had shown. The Manchester Guardian said the day after the inquest that the killing ‘was not by any means, the best end to a bad business’. In an editorial that was more slightly hinting than hard-hitting, the newspaper continued, ‘There are several minor but interesting loose ends to the story as it stands at present, and had the case of Toplis gone before a jury some of them might have been cleared up.’ Letters registering disapproval of the shooting started to reach newspapers and Members of Parliament. The London correspondent of the Yorkshire Post wrote:

  The fatal use of firearms by the Penrith Police against the suspected Percy Toplis seems to have taken some of our sentimental politicians by surprise.

  The matter is to be raised in the Commons, some members holding that the right of the police to fire on suspects should be clearly defined and restricted as much as possible.

  The authorities have no quarrel with this claim, indeed it is their own. The question of arming the police has been under consideration for some time. However, the final decision was that in view of the recent increase in crimes of the type of which Toplis was accused, and the knowledge that these criminals would not hesitate to shoot at police attempting their arrest, revolvers should be issued to police, the question of their use in exceptional cases being left to the discretion of senior officers.

  The chief constable was, therefore, acting on the Home Office instructions when he used his discretion in starting armed on the hunt for a man known to be desperate enough to shoot at sight officers attempting his arrest. The view in official quarters in London is that the discretion exercised must be upheld by the authorities in spite of what may be urged to the contrary. The ‘matter’ was never raised in the House of Commons.

  In an attempt to stem the criticism, the Penrith Observer fairly lashed out. Under a headline ‘Facts and Gossip’ it thundered :

  There are sentimental, and perhaps soft-headed people who deplore the fact that Toplis was shot dead instead of merely being ‘winged’ … Toplis went bad as a lad, gradually but rapidly passed from bad to worse, and the world is well rid of a scoundrel of the most dangerous type.

  It was not enough to lay the spectre of these events. By now the 9,000-strong population of the old market town was buzzing with rumours that not by any standard had the whole truth been revealed about Toplis or his violent end. So the Penrith Observer tried again. It suggested that the police had undisclosed information, and that their erratic behaviour had been the result of outside pressure. The article continued:

  The Chief Constable, the Deputy Chief Constable, and certain other responsible officers, did all they could to place at the disposal of the Press whatever information it was advisable to make public.

  Much in their possession, of course, was of a highly confidential character, and it would have been greatly against the public interest to have allowed it to be published. The police headquarters were besieged by reporters and photographers from all parts of the country; altogether there must have been over seventy in the town, but they were met by unfailing courtesy and received the greatest help.

  Some of this proved to be undeserved, as irresponsible and unscrupulous men, when their turn had been served, published matter that ought to have been regarded as confidential. Others, in their feverish search for stories, broke well-known rules, and might easily have caused great trouble to those concerned.

  At the top of the list of secrets could only have been the fact that Toplis, who had been a deserter on and off for over three years, was not merely a monocled outlaw. He had also been one of the main motivators of a dangerous mutiny about which no news must ever be allowed to leak out.

  Certainly the Cumbrian establishment was sensitive to the feeling that all had not been correct in the Toplis killing. Only a fortnight after the inquest, the Standing Joint Committees of Cumberland and Westmoreland had the resignation of Chief Constable de Courcy Parry in their hands. The tough ex-boxer, ex-Derby County FC centre-half, was leaving after eighteen years in charge. Superintendent Barron, his deputy, presented his departing chief with a silver rose-bowl and a signed photograph of his senior officers. He made a point of the fact in his speech that the chief’s health ‘had broken down under great strain’.

  Superintendent Barron then saw his own name safely on to the short-list, and waited confidently for the Committee to appoint him Chief Constable. To his consternation, and the fury of his friends on the local paper, he was passed over. A new chief was brought in from Scotland. The Penrith Observer regretted: ‘It is a curious fact that an officer, who for months together, during the last two years, has carried out all the duties of the Chief Constable was not thought deserving of the permanent position.’

  But the police committee was most anxious not to give any immediate endorsement to an affair which considered opinion was coming to
see, as the Manchester Guardian had put it, as ‘a bad business’. The frantic consultations with London, the army and the Home Office on the night of the ambush were now becoming known. If the chief constable and his deputy had indeed submitted to pressures from Whitehall which, at best, laid no emphasis on taking Toplis alive, then it was better for a new figure to take over the force with his reputation, and particularly his independence, untarnished.

  In due course, Norman de Courcy Parry, formerly Chief Constable of Cumberland and Westmoreland, was given a Whitehall appointment as Inspector of Constabulary. It was promotion; apparently his health had recovered. He had already been made a Commander of the British Empire. Inspector Ritchie, Sergeant Bertram and Constable Fulton did not have to wait so long for their reward. The Penrith Town Council felt able to make a payment of £10 each to Ritchie and Bertram, and £15 to Fulton.

  Fulton, who retired from the police force with the rank of sergeant, died in 1977, leaving de Courcy Parry as the sole survivor of the 1920 Sunday night ambush.

  Back in Shirland, some weeks after the inquest, a handsome young woman in black appeared carrying a young baby. Mrs Toplis took her in. For nearly a year the two women lived together, the younger one hardly venturing out at first, though the locals soon recognized a southern accent. For this indeed was the mysterious ‘Dorothy’ whose letter had been found on Toplis’s body. She had met Percy while he was based at Bulford. Dorothy was already past her mid-twenties, older than Percy, and she had obviously gained a hold on his affections beyond the usual brief flirtation which was the Toplis hallmark. The baby was Percy’s. Eventually Dorothy met and married an older man in the district and he adopted the young boy. Today Dorothy is dead but Percy Toplis’s son is alive and well in eastern England quite unaware that his father was one of the most colourful and notorious men in England.

  Toplis’s old adversary Edwin Woodhall left the Secret Service to found a detective agency and then to become the Edgar Lustgarten of his day. He had more than forty books published, mainly working over famous old crimes and he appeared in a Peter Lorre film in the thirties, narrating the authoritative prologue. His scripts fetched thousands of pounds. His wife and children, who now live in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, remember a surprisingly uproarious life in and around Fleet Street in the years after the First War. Woodhall died penniless in 1941.

  Another man followed with special interest the death of Toplis and the rise of the legend in the newspapers.

  At Vevey in Switzerland, Brigadier-General Andrew Thomson, RE retd, perused the Continental Daily Mail anxiously for any hint of the dark secret of the mutiny that he and the army had so successfully conspired to conceal. There was not a whisper about his encounter with Toplis, the man who had consummated his disgrace. The secret was to survive a further fifty-two years after Thomson’s death in February 1926.

  Thomson left behind £12,004, and an obituary in The Times which dismissed his war service in one sentence: ‘In the Great War he was mentioned in despatches and was specially employed in Holland in 1918.’ He never set foot in England again but he does have one last obscure memorial, a faded photograph in the Sandhurst Collection.

  And now that the full story is known the thoughts of Lieutenant James Davies, too, go back to those days of 1917. After that he lost a leg at the battle of Amiens in August 1918. Demobilized, he returned to England and went back on the stage. During the Second World War, he became Britain’s only one-legged infantryman, serving with the Indian Army and having two bullets shot through his tin leg in a skirmish on the Northwest Frontier. Now over 80, he lives in retirement in the Cotswolds.

  And, still defying the British Army, Percy Toplis has his own place of honour – gazing arrogantly down from a photograph on the shelves of the Imperial War Museum, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant. Old soldiers and their exploits never die, nor do they entirely fade away.

  POSTSCRIPT

  On the day after Toplis’s violent end, 7 June 1920, an unsigned telegram had arrived at the office of the Bristol Evening Post. It read: ‘Toplis lives on. He always will.’ Certainly, his posthumous presence was still being felt in 1978 in a series of unrelated events, one of which reached Parliamentary level.

  In 1978 the British government made its first official admission that there had been a mutiny at Étaples, and with it came an admission that records of the rebellion had probably been destroyed. Socialist Member of Parliament Eric Moonman asked the Minister of Defence in the House of Commons whether any papers relevant to the Haig Board of Inquiry into the Étaples mutiny in 1917 were retained by the Public Record Office, if any were not accessible to public inspection, and, if so, why such an exception to the normal rule had been made.

  Dr John Gilbert, Minister of State, in a written reply stated:

  Although the Public Record Office holds a war diary for the Étaples Base, which describes the events of the mutiny and records that a board of inquiry was set up on the authority of the commanding officer, it has not been possible to trace any papers relating either to the board of inquiry, or to one involving Field Marshal Haig. The rules governing the disposal of Army records which were in force until recently provided that records of boards of inquiry need be kept for only ten years, so it is probable that the Étaples board of inquiry records were destroyed many years ago.

  In 1978, de Courcy Parry, Jnr, cross-examined on television, about the last moments of the outlaw, said that the gun battle had ended with Toplis shooting himself, and for good measure demonstrated to the cameras how Toplis had turned his own gun towards his body to make the final shot. The chief constable’s son had previously signed statements and given Press interviews in complete support of the 1920 inquest version of events.

  If de Courcy Parry’s latest account is accurate it follows that there is a great question mark hanging over all the sworn statements and evidence given before the inquest verdict of ‘Justifiable homicide’.

  Already deeply troubled by a confession that the ‘rules’ had allowed for the selective destruction of records as embarrassing as that of the Étaples mutiny, thereby casting a doubt over the accuracy of the whole of British military history, Moonman switched his attack to the civilian front.

  He attempted to find out from the Home Secretary if the verdict of the Penrith inquest would be upheld in the light of the last surviving witness’s surprising change of mind, but the question was mysteriously blocked at source. It did not get as far as the Home Secretary, being returned from the Commons Table Office with a penned note reading: ‘A matter of past history and one for which there can be no Ministerial responsibility.’

  This curt dismissal could have become the final valediction but for the intervention of a childhood friend of Toplis, Frank Dayson, now of Roblin, Manitoba, who rallied other ex-servicemen to the cause of erecting a tombstone on the unmarked pauper’s grave at Penrith. The local authority in England confirmed that there was no bye-law which could prevent this happening, and added, that, in any case, they had no wish to interfere with the plan.

  Dayson had already decided the epitaph for the stone: In Grateful Memory of Percy Toplis, The Monocled Mutineer.

  EPILOGUE

  The manhunt for Percy Toplis has been a newspaper sensation. For some years afterwards the search for any vanished miscreant was compared with the Toplis saga. A number of unsolved crimes were eagerly pinned on the man with the monocle. A Miss F L Shore had been murdered the previous January on a train going from London to Hastings. Toplis was said to match the description of her mysterious companion. Then the naked unidentified body of a man was found beside a road in Hampshire. The newspaper theory was that Toplis killed him in order to steal his clothes.

  But it was six years later in the Derbyshire hills that the saddest aftermath occurred. A walker from Machester, Frederick Bannister, out rambling, decided to investigate a cave, at the entrance of which, a week earlier, he had seen and spoken to a couple sitting outside. Making his way in through the narrow entrance,
he found the body of a woman sprawled on her back, her handbag and a broken cup nearby. Calling police, they then found the body of a man with bottles of disinfectant poison beside him. The dead man turned out to be Private Harry Fallows, Toplis’s friend and companion from Bulford Camp. It was Fallows who had driven with Toplis all the way to Swansea, when Toplis bade his last farewell to the British Army. The woman was 17 year old Marjorie Stewart from Moston in Manchester.

  It emerged that Fallows, who was by then 26, had been living nearby with his sister, after parting from his wife. When the girl was only 15, her father had warned Fallows off and told him not to see her again. But that previous New Year’s Eve she had left a note saying she was going away with Fallows. He, too, left a letter saying he was going with her. They then vanished for more than two weeks until the finding in the cave. The inquest verdict was suicide. It is perhaps a credit to both families that, after a joint service, they were buried together in the same grave at Castleton in Derbyshire.

  Toplis’s family also managed to make further acquaintance with the law. His brother Vincent Toplis was caught with two companions burgling the Ripley co-op store in Westhouse in Nottinghamshire. He escaped by throwing a pair of hobnailed boots at the apprehending constable, but was later captured at his mother’s house in Shirland.

  The Étaples Mutiny itself was successfully buried for another sixty years. No hint of it appeared in any official history, nor any published accounts. When the book and then the major BBC television series, starring Paul McGann, appeared, there was at first denial by many historians and experts on the World War. The story was still being denounced in 2014 by the British Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Gove. But the evidence of the participants has finally overwhelmed any attempts at cover-up, though many of the records have been either lost or destroyed by enemy bombing in the Second World War.