THE
MUSICAL
MILKMAN
MURDER
IN THE IDYLLIC COUNTRY VILLAGE USED TO FILM MIDSOMER MURDERS, IT WAS THE REAL-LIFE MURDER STORY THAT SHOCKED 1920 BRITAIN
QUENTIN FALK
To Hollie and Bernard
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
1 MURDER MOST FOUL
2 SCENEOF THE CRIME
3 LADIESAND GENTLEMENOF THE JURY
4 NO ORDINARY TRIAL: DAY ONE
5 MUSIC, MADNESSAND MURDER: DAY TWO
6 NO SUCH THINGAS DELICACY: DAY THREE
7 A VERY PECULIAR MAN
8 INTHE LINEOF FIRE: DAY THREE CONTINUED
9 THE FINAL ACT: DAY FOUR
10 ‘DON’T LET MY MUSIC DIE’
11 LIFEFOR A LIFE
12 THE JUDGEAND THE HANGMAN
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX I – A MODERN LAWYER’S VIEW
APPENDIX II – COMPARING NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Plates
About the Author
Copyright
This story, as so many stories often do, began – or, more properly, first took shape – in the manner of a Chinese whisper, when you aren’t quite sure whether its repetition is an accurate account of the original telling or else just an increasingly mangled version of that initial truth.
When my father bought back Old Barn Cottage in 1966 after it had been out of the family for 23 years, I was vaguely aware of some of its dim, distant history known locally, and lip-smackingly, as ‘The Musical Milkman Murder’. But who murdered whom – was the milkman the murderer or the victim? I didn’t know and wasn’t even particularly concerned to discover at the time.
All I think I knew then was that the killing – whether by axe, shotgun, strangulation or poisoning – apparently occurred a couple of years before my paternal grandfather, Lionel, had first purchased the place, then known as plain Barn Cottage (he later added the ‘Old’) for £700 as a weekend retreat from the family’s North London home in 1923, before selling it in 1943 (for £1,800), at the height of the Second World War.
Our first real inkling of its infamous past came in the very early 1970s when some neighbours spotted a middle-aged woman standing outside the gate looking at the place with sad eyes. They approached her discreetly and helpfully informed her that none of the family who owned the property was currently in residence. They then enquired why she was staring so intently at the rose-covered cottage, a pretty cliché of Buckinghamshire brick-and-flint, adorned with gables and criss-crossing Elizabethan timbers, dating originally from the turn of the 17th century.
She told them that, years ago, there had been a murder there. Yes, they replied, they knew of it, although they didn’t have any of the real facts of the case to pass on to her. Then, to their stunned surprise – and later ours when the news was relayed to my father and his family – she told them that her father, the milkman, had murdered her mother Kate, and that she, Hollie, just two at the time, was their surviving child. More shockingly, Hollie – probably aged about 54 as she revealed all this to our increasingly astonished neighbours – then told them that she’d only very recently discovered the terrible truth about her dead parents via an anonymous call.
Growing up first with her father’s sister and then with her paternal grandmother, she had always been fobbed off whenever the question of her parentage arose. All she had been told was that they had ‘died from the fever’. She remembered vividly once asking her aunt whom she was most like – her father or her mother? ‘Your father,’ came the chilly reply. End of conversation.
When, following the stark revelation about her parents, further elements of the truth began to filter out – that Hollie had been born in the infirmary of Winchester Prison, the possibility of a botched suicide pact, and so on – Hollie, by now on her third marriage and the mother of five children, as well as grandmother of increasingly more over the succeeding years, wanted finally, desperately, to nail down the real facts of the case. Her first port of call – after first making contact with Births, Marriages and Deaths at Somerset House – simply enough, was the location of the final resting places of her father and mother.
To Mrs Hollie D from the Governor of HM Prison, Oxford, 10 September 1973:
Dear Madam,
Thank you for your letter of 9 September. It is confirmed that a George Arthur Bailey was executed and buried at this prison. As regards your mother, I am unable to assist you. I advise you to write to the Registrar of Births and Deaths, Somerset House, London WC2 to find out the date of death and the parish in which she was buried and using this information to write to the Vicar of the parish concerned for information regarding the location of the grave.
Two days later, the Governor of Oxford Prison wrote again to Hollie in response to a note the day before asking if she could visit his grave: ‘Thank you for your letter of 11 September … I am sorry that it is not possible to allow visits to graves in the prison. I hope you are successful in tracing your mother’s grave.’
Whether she was pointed in the right direction by Somerset House, one doesn’t know, but, on 26 September, she wrote to Buckinghamshire County Council for information and received an extremely swift response from the Superintendent Registrar referring her next to the local vicar at Little Marlow – and he even enclosed a stamped, addressed envelope for the cleric to reply.
On 11 October, she received the following from Rev John Crawford, Curate of St John the Baptist, Little Marlow: ‘Thank you for your letter. The number of your mother’s grave in Little Marlow Cemetery is No 256; burial on 6 October 1920. The numbers are all lost or misplaced so it would be hard to locate but it is in the oldest part facing the chapel door. Wishing you every blessing in the future.’
In November, she wrote to the Editor of the News of the World, Cyril Lear, asking if he had any back copies of the paper for 1920, the year of the murder. Her approach to the paper specifically may have been to do with the possibility that the anonymous tip-off about her parentage had originated from that now defunct Sunday newspaper. He politely replied that he couldn’t help but suggested instead that she contact the Newspaper Library at Colindale, which continues to store a remarkable collection of national and regional newspapers.
The trail then ran cold, it seems, until it became apparent, in March 1974, that Hollie had made contact with my father, eight years after he bought back Old Barn Cottage; she had sent him what few bits of documentation about the case she’d managed to track down. He invited her to tour the cottage properly and she sent him this letter, after her visit, on 29 March:
We were very pleased to meet you, and thank you for your kindness in letting us look over the cottage. I felt no sadness. I was three years old two days after my mother was buried. I always wanted to know where my mother was buried; as you can see, I only found out last year. My father’s mother brought me up. I was brought up to believe that it was meant to be a triple suicide, but my father lost his nerve and it was only my mother that died. I know he was hung at Oxford