The Thing Itself (16 page)

‘So far,' I said.

Knowles gestured to a couple of the big men at the door.

‘We're always looking for fit fellows to join our leader's praetorian guard. Are you interested?'

‘In theory,' I said. ‘But I like to work my brain too.'

Both men looked at me but I held their look.

‘Do you?' Joyce finally said. ‘Do you indeed?'

‘What's your name?' Knowles said, taking out a small pad with a pencil sticking out of one end.

‘Victor Tempest.'

‘OK. Well, we'd definitely like you to attend the Olympia meeting on the seventh of June. We'll be in touch.'

Just then Oswald Mosley joined us. I didn't know what the form was so I stood to attention. He appraised me for a moment.

‘Do you box?'

‘Yes, sir.'

He suddenly feinted a left jab at my head. I swayed out of the way and automatically got my fists up and shifted my feet. He smiled and opened his fist to give me a pat on the arm.

‘Quick reflexes.'

‘He says he's got a brain too, sir,' Joyce said drily. ‘Name is Victor Tempest.'

‘Mind and body – that's good. That's what we should all aim for. Where are you from, Tempest?'

‘I was born and bred in Haywards Heath, sir, but the family is from Blackburn.'

‘A fellow northerner,' Mosley said in his upper-class drawl. ‘My family is from Manchester – Rolleston's our home. Got to protect our cotton.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘What did you father do?'

‘He was a weaver, sir, but he died in the war. I never knew him.'

I was aware that during this conversation both Joyce and Knowles were staring at me intently, weighing me up.

‘A lot of good men died far too young.' He looked from Knowles to Joyce then back at me. ‘We could do with a good man in the north-west. A man with a brain.'

‘He's in work,' Knowles said.

‘Quick advancement for the right people in the BUF,' Mosley said, his eyes still fixed on me. ‘I promote on merit. What's your job?'

I lowered my voice. Unless Charteris had blabbed, nobody in the branch knew Simpson, Ridge and I were policemen.

‘I'm a bobby, sir. A constable.'

Mosley tilted his head to one side.

‘Are you? Are you? Good man – I already know then that you stand for law and order – as do we.'

He exchanged glances with Joyce and Knowles again.

‘Stay where you are for now but let's talk again after Olympia. That rally will be the making of us. Eric, make a note.'

‘Already done, sir.'

And that was it. I left that meeting thinking this day could mark the start of a new life in uncharted territories for me – 10th May 1934. The same day the first Brighton Trunk Murder was committed, though nobody knew it then.

O
ver the next few weeks I talked with Charlie and Philip about what I should do. I had a nice little number in Brighton. Did I want to chuck it in for the uncertainties of the northern wilderness? I was keen to get on, but Charlie pointed out that in the police that didn't have to mean promotion. Getting on financially, being able to afford the good things in life, was more important.

I thought I saw Eric Knowles in Brighton once, going into the Grand. I wondered about having a talk with him but I wasn't sure it was him, I didn't know what to say and I was a bit discombobulated after an unexpected sexual encounter underneath the West Pier.

The thing was, I enjoyed my time in Brighton. The girls were easy, for one thing. I decided to put a career with the BUF out of my mind until the Olympia rally.

The days before, the newspapers were full of it, especially the
Daily Mail
. On 6th June, though nobody knew this at the time either, the trunk containing the torso of the second murder victim was deposited at Brighton station left luggage office. The next day Philip Simpson and I took an early train up to London. Charlie Ridge couldn't make it – he'd suddenly been given a double shift. We were in our civvies, our Blackshirt uniforms in bags. We intended to change at Olympia. A couple of dozen from Brighton were going up on a later train.

That Olympia meeting is now famous. This vast conference hall with about 12,000 people in the audience. A lot of society people and nobs. About 2,000 of us had been bussed in from all over the country. There were also around a thousand people out to disrupt the meeting.

Blackshirts around the auditorium were chanting: ‘Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? M-o-s-l-e-y . . . MOSLEY!' It was several years before the opposition came up with a counter chant: ‘Hitler and Mosley, what are they for? Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war!'

When Mosley came on, there was an enormous roar and a discernible amount of booing. He yelled his speech without notes, head thrust forward, fists on hips. I didn't really catch a word of it. Reading about it in the
Mail
the next day, he said once in power he would pass a bill to enable the prime minister and a small cabinet of five to bypass parliament to make laws. He would also abolish other political parties.

Whilst he was saying all this, hecklers were being ejected. The stewards were forceful. I was stationed with Simpson at one of the upper exits on to the foyer. I helped drag some of the interrupters out but I'd been clearly instructed not to leave my post.

However, I didn't like what I was seeing once the interrupters were outside the auditorium. Some were hurled down the stairs. Others had their heads banged repeatedly against the stone floor. Stewards were ramming fingers up their nostrils so they couldn't easily move or breathe.

All the stewards were armed with something – rubber piping, coshes, daggers, knuckledusters. I saw something I hadn't seen before. Razors set in potatoes. The other thing I'd never seen before was that the stewards used razors to cut the braces or belts of the interrupters so they couldn't fight back because they were trying to hold their trousers up.

I was disgusted. I intervened a good few times to pull my comrades off the ones receiving the worst beatings. The stairs grew slick with blood. Broken bodies lay huddled everywhere. And all the time, on stage, Mosley postured and grimaced, stepped forward pugnaciously and then back, fists on hips, head tilted back, bellowing his message.

Going back on the train, the stewards took their uniforms off because they were frightened of being set on. I'd lost Simpson in the crowd in Olympia so I travelled back alone. I took mine off because I was ashamed.

After that, decent folk ran a mile from the BUF, whilst the violence attracted all these other supporters looking for trouble.

I didn't know what to do. It wasn't that I hadn't seen violence before. I'd turned a blind eye many a time to bobbies putting the boot in. But what kind of organization was I in?

I went down to the Skylark to see if Charteris had anything to report but he wasn't around. I hadn't seen him in Brighton for a while.

Then the trunk was discovered at Brighton station's left luggage office and bedlam broke out. On 19th June I spotted Charteris hurrying along the prom. He didn't have time to talk – couldn't wait to get away in fact.

‘What does the Galloping Major have to say about Olympia?' I said.

Charteris was darting looks left and right.

‘Look, it's doing my reputation no good being seen with a bobby in public.'

‘What does he say?' I insisted.

‘I haven't seen him for ages. That was just, you know . . .'

‘What do you think?'

‘I wasn't there. Sounds like some Reds got what was coming to them.'

‘Are you down here for long?'

‘Two or three weeks,' he said. ‘I'm staying with Jack Notyre.'

The next couple of weeks were hectic as we dealt with the avalanche of information coming our way. The next time I saw Charteris, he was at least a witness and possibly an accomplice in the second Brighton Trunk Murder.

The one thing he hadn't told me was that Jack Notyre's other name was Tony Mancini and for six weeks he'd been carting around in a trunk the corpse of Violette Kay. Violette Kay, the woman I'd once seen dancing as one half of Kaye and Kaye on the Palace Pier and again as Mrs Saunders in the Skylark.

T
here had been a lot going on I didn't know about – or maybe didn't want to know about. For instance, whenever I'd seen Charteris in Brighton he'd been living with Notyre/Mancini and Violette Kay. The last time, after he'd killed Violette, Notyre had moved another woman in for a bit – the waitress from the Skylark. On that occasion, Charteris stayed with Notyre nearly a month with the poor dead woman in an increasingly smelly trunk at the bottom of the bed.

Charteris and Notyre had met in prison in July 1931. Charteris was in for a month for stealing. Notyre was in for three months for loitering with intent in Birmingham. They palled up in London on and off over the next couple of years.

The police questioned Notyre about Violette Kay on Friday 13th July in connection with the murder victim found in the left-luggage office at the station. At the time he said she'd gone away and because she was not in the age range specified by the pathologist who'd examined the torso we'd let him go. But somebody must have been suspicious – or Notyre thought they were – because on that Sunday 15th July he did a runner.

First, he and Charteris went dancing until the early hours, then on to an all-night restaurant. They went back to the flat for a couple of hours until at 4.30 they returned to the all-night restaurant. Charteris walked with Notyre to Preston Park – they thought the police would be watching Brighton central station – and put him on the first train to London.

‘You were in Brighton on the tenth of May,' I said to Charteris, in his formal interview in the Royal Pavilion. ‘Where were you staying then?'

He looked shifty.

‘I was staying with Jack – but not that night.'

‘Just as well or you'd have been sharing a bed with a corpse. Where were you?'

‘I was at the Grand with the Galloping Major. When I got back the next day, Jack had this big black trunk and said he was packed and ready to move. Said that Violette had buggered off with a bookie. I went and hired a trolley for a couple of pence and helped him wheel it up to his new place. The trunk weighed a bloody ton. He said he had crockery and stuff in it and I had no reason to disbelieve him. I didn't know I was carting Violette around.'

Charteris had always been a plausible liar so I didn't know how much he knew about the murder. Certainly he had a good alibi for the murder itself – he would have had to be a pretty cool customer if he'd helped earlier in the day, then gone to the Blackshirt meeting at the Pavilion in the evening.

Early in 1935 I left the police. A combination of things. My bosses didn't like the relationship I'd had with the press. And word had got back I'd been with the Blackshirts at Olympia. They didn't seem to know about Philip Simpson and I didn't say. It was ironic that I'd been thinking of quitting the BUF yet my membership had lost me my job.

I'd been hesitating because I'd been impressed that Mosley had set up a youth movement that was a bit like the Boy Scouts – Baden-Powell was a fascist sympathizer, of course. There was a lot of paraphernalia – uniforms, badges, saluting, flags – but the idea was a good one.

I went up to Chelsea for a meeting with Joyce and Knowles.

‘I'm ready to move up. Is there anything for me?'

Knowles picked up a sheet of paper.

‘You're from Lancashire, yes?'

‘My family is.'

‘You still have family there?'

‘Not who speak to me.'

I think my mother's father was still alive but we didn't have anything to do with him.

‘We've got a problem up there. Last week a group of our members in Colne overheard a bunch of men talking in a foreign language. Someone told our members these foreigners were learning about cotton so they could go back home and set up in competition. Defending cotton is one of our main aims. Our members attacked the foreigners. Beat them perhaps too enthusiastically. And then we discovered the foreigners were a bunch of Esperantists from Burnley and Bacup, in Colne to celebrate the opening of their new premises.'

I burst out laughing. Joyce and Knowles both gave me fierce looks.

‘You have to admit—' I started to say, then stopped when Joyce gave me a warning look. ‘That wouldn't happen under my command,' I said more soberly. ‘I've been a policeman. I know how to assess situations.'

‘The BUF official policy is against chain stores and in favour of local shopkeepers. A number of chain stores are moving into those northern towns. That and cotton must be our focus.'

Joyce leaned forward, his hands clasped.

‘Are you up to it? Will you help us revolt against the united muttons of the old gangs of British politics?'

Two weeks later I was back in the town of my ancestors. My district stretched across through Accrington and Burnley to Nelson and Colne. I found the BUF were popular in the north-west because of that history of individualism that came out of Methodism decades before. The Tories usually got a lot of working-class votes and even the unions were conservative. The cotton manufacturers were major contributors.

But the set-up was a bit of a joke in my area. My second-in-command was the head of the woman's unit, Nellie Driver. First thing she said to me was: ‘A God-fearing non-boozer can thread ten needles whilst the boozer is still trying to pick the needle up.'

She complained all the time that nobody saluted her with a ‘Hail Nellie' when they saw her. Nellie moaned that in Nelson they had to share premises with a spiritualist group doing shell and photograph seances. The spiritualists kept putting their notices over the Blackshirt ones on the joint noticeboard – and wouldn't let them use the sink.