Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (5 page)

On Midsummer Day, Monday 24 June, the temperature reached 75 degrees in London – the highest of that summer – but was followed by violent thunderstorms. Houses were flooded, crops damaged and roads turned into rivers. In some areas, fields were white with hailstones as big as marbles. It was ‘the worst June weather for nearly forty years’.
¹⁵

The summer of 1946 was one of extremes.

CHAPTER TWO

Miss Symonds

15–23
JUNE
1946

T
all and slim, 21-year-old Yvonne Symonds was an attractive brunette, with blue eyes, olive skin and a ‘Grecian nose’.
¹
She had been demobbed from the WRNS in January 1946 and had since been living with her parents at their family home in a respectable suburb of Worthing, a seaside resort on the south coast.

Yvonne was one of many young women who had joined the services since 1941, when on 18 December the National Service Act had introduced the conscription of women. Every ‘mobile’ woman in the country between the ages of eighteen and fifty had been conscripted on behalf of the war effort – some to factory work, others to one of the three female services: the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) and the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service). As it became clear that the idea of merely volunteering for war work or to join the services would soon be abandoned, many women had joined up quickly before decisions were made for them. At the time, few women had any idea what the different services had to offer and for many the decision was made lightly – some going on instinct while others went for the uniform that appealed the most. Christian Oldham, the convent-educated daughter of an admiral, joined the WRNS in 1940 and was very taken with the ‘flattering double-breasted jacket, svelte skirt and pert tricorne hat’ that made up a Wren officer’s uniform.
²
In 1942, Queen Elizabeth gave the royal blessing to the distinctive Wren hats. She had tried one in front of one of the mirrors at Buckingham Palace and declared that ‘the children loved it!’
³
Certainly the WRNS was thought to be the most fashionable of the services,
⁴
the uniform having been designed by the couturier Molyneux, who had created Gertrude Lawrence’s costumes for the original production of
Private Lives
in 1930 and the wedding dress of Princess Marina of Greece in 1934. In 1939 there had been only 3,000 serving WRNS personnel; by 1944 the number had reached a peak of 74,620.
⁵

In the early part of the war, Wrens had only been allocated to five categories covering office or domestic work, but by the time Yvonne had joined the service, women were working in twenty-five categories covering a broad range of roles from mechanics to boat crew, from signallers to ‘torpedomen’.
⁶
She had joined the WRNS at the age of eighteen in 1943 and had been stationed at various stone frigates – landbased naval depots – including HMS
Shrapnel
, which was actually the Great Western Hotel in Southampton, and HMS
Grasshopper
, which was the naval name for Weymouth Harbour where combined operations were focused on Operation Neptune, the D-Day landings. Yvonne had also worked in Portsmouth on HMS
Marshal Soult
, a disarmed World War One warship that was used as a depot ship to supply clothing and food stores to the ships that were to take part in the invasion of Normandy.

On Saturday 15 June, Yvonne attended a WRNS reunion dinner dance at a pub in Chelsea. She’d arranged to stay overnight at the Overseas Club just behind the Ritz in St James’s so she wouldn’t have to travel back to Worthing late on the Saturday night. Whilst at the reunion, Yvonne was struck by a tall, tanned, handsome man – blond, well-built, with eyes a peculiar shining blue. From his uniform she could see that he was a decorated officer in the South African Air Force. He had a plain gold ring on the little finger of his left hand and also wore a gold watch with a leather strap. He was extremely attractive, good company and full of stories about his wartime exploits. There was the occasion when he flew a plane under a bridge – much to the chagrin of his commanding officer – and the time he baled out of a burning bomber over Holland – hence the caterpillar badge that he wore proudly on his lapel. These were worn exclusively by members of the Caterpillar Club – flyers who had baled out of their aircraft and survived. Referring to the silk from which parachutes were made, the club’s motto was ‘Life depends on a silken thread’: fragile, precious and fraught with danger. Handsome, heroic and charming, the airman fascinated Yvonne. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel ‘Jimmy’ Heath.
⁷

Yvonne was not alone in succumbing to the glamour and romance of air force flyers like Heath. Many observers of the period noted the particular effect that airmen’s uniforms had on women. Joan Wyndham, who left a bohemian background in Chelsea to join the WAAF, recalls a dance she attended shortly after joining the service. Hopeful of romance with a glamorous young airman, she was distressed to find no pilots present and that she would have to make do with ‘pintsized Romeos’ and other ‘wingless wonders’. An airman’s wings were a badge of heroism and the uniform had a particular sexual allure (‘I can’t describe the effect wings have on a WAAF!’).
⁸
In
The Naked Civil Servant
, Quentin Crisp makes a keen distinction between the sort of servicemen his gay friends fancied (young, lower-ranking sailors) and those his female friends were attracted to: ‘[Women] prefer airmen, by which they always mean the higher ranks.’
⁹
Romantic novels of the period were keen to exploit the iconography of these new ‘Knights of the Air’ in titles such as
Flying Wild
,
A Flying Visit
,
Winged Love
,
Air Force Girl
and
Wellington Wendy
.
¹⁰
One airman, William Simpson, summed up the appeal of his uniform to women; in a nutshell, it was ‘redolent of glamour and courage’.
¹¹

Having charmed Yvonne with his wartime tales, Heath suggested that she join him at the Panama Club in South Kensington, where he was a member. They’d be able to have an after-hours drink. For a guileless young woman like Yvonne, this must have seemed to be the epitome of metropolitan sophistication. The Panama Club was only a short taxi ride away from Chelsea, situated near the Natural History Museum and just round the corner from South Kensington underground station. The club had been set up here at 23-24 Cromwell Place in August 1945 after its former premises had been destroyed by enemy action. Open from 3 p.m. to midnight, the club provided drinks, food and entertainment for members only. After drinking in public houses, many non-members tried to get into the club when the pubs closed, so the staff, led by receptionist Solomon Joseph, supervised admission to the club very strictly. He had been in trouble with the law before for licensing and betting offences and was determined not to have any more brushes with the police.
¹²

At the reception area of the club, Heath signed himself in with Yvonne as his guest on the yellow visitors’ form. Solomon Joseph unbolted the door and ushered them into the club. For Yvonne this was an adventure into a glamorous night-time society, escorted by the most dashing of men – a world away from the cosseted life she lived with her parents in Worthing. Heath led her through the reception area and up the short flight of stairs to the first floor where there was a small bar. They carried on up to the club room on the second floor.

The club room at the Panama was partitioned into two sections – the area to the right was a dining room about 16 feet wide and 37 feet long with a dozen tables lining the longer walls, with sofas behind them and some small chairs. At the far end of the room was an area for the band, which played every night from 8 p.m. The dance floor dominated the centre of the room and was in full swing when Heath and Yvonne arrived.
¹³
The Perry Como hits ‘Surrender’ and ‘Prisoner of Love’, The Ink Spots’ ‘To Each His Own’ and Margaret Whiting’s version of the old Al Bowlly classic ‘Guilty’ were all popular tunes with dance bands that summer.

The left-hand section of the second floor was a lounge and bar where members had drinks served to them by two waitresses, Joyce and Phyllis, who had worked there since the club had moved premises. It was in the club room while the band played dance music that Heath first suggested that Yvonne should sleep with him that night. Yvonne, despite her time in the WRNS, was a polite and well-brought-up young woman. She was also a virgin. She refused. After their evening together, Heath hailed a taxi and dropped Yvonne off at the Overseas Club in Park Place. He took her rejection of his advances with good grace. So she had no concerns about arranging to meet him again the next day. He seemed the perfect gentleman.

On Sunday morning, Heath rang Yvonne at the Overseas Club and suggested that they spend the day together. Yvonne met Heath at the club dressed in a blue and white print dress with a full-length light summer coat.
¹⁴
They took a taxi to Knightsbridge to one of Heath’s regular haunts, the Nag’s Head, a mews pub in Kinnerton Street, where they stayed until about 2.30 p.m. From there they went for tea to an hotel, most probably the Normandie, another favourite haunt of Heath’s, which overlooked Knightsbridge Green. At tea, he again pressurized Yvonne to sleep with him, ‘over-persuading’ her. As was clear from many of his relations with women, Heath was deeply charismatic, very convincing and had a winning way with words. He was confident in his looks and took great care with his appearance. He was very aware of the seductive power of both his uniform and his tales of wartime heroism, and extremely confident in his physical allure. After the trial, an officer friend of Heath’s who had known him a number of years stated that ‘women were fascinated by him. Such was his magnetism that it was invariably embarrassing to be in his company when the girls were about’.
¹⁵

Yvonne, trusting, inexperienced and swept along with the force of this apparently whirlwind romance, was conflicted. She was hugely attracted to this handsome, charming man. He told her that he loved her; why didn’t they get married? If they were ‘unofficially engaged’, surely that would make it acceptable for them to sleep with each other? With wartime brief encounters still very recent history, there was nothing unusual in the swift trajectory of this courtship. The war had encouraged young people particularly to live for the moment and, as Virginia Nicholson observes in
Millions Like Us
, her study of women’s lives in the 1940s, ‘sex was a way to challenge extinction’.
¹⁶
This sense of impetuous desire with little-known bedfellows continued into the early post-war period and Heath was expert at exploiting it.

There’s a sense too that he was well aware that women’s attitude to sex had evolved since the 1930s. Since the outbreak of war, more women were having sex before marriage – or with men other than their husbands – more women were using contraceptives and more were contracting sexually transmitted diseases. The diarist Joan Wyndham confessed to the intimacy of her journal that she was aware at the time she was writing that pre-war mores were breaking down: ‘Inside me I could feel every moral code I had ever believed in since childhood begin to crumble away.’
¹⁷

For Yvonne, the speed and illicit nature of her romance with Heath intensified the experience, like one of the films she’d seen at the pictures. And here she was, living it herself – two young people desperately in love, wanting to be together. Now that marriage had been proposed, the engagement felt tangible; Yvonne agreed to sleep with him.

The couple took a taxi to Victoria to pick up Heath’s luggage and then on to the Overseas Club to pick up Yvonne’s small, cream overnight bag. Around 7 p.m., Heath telephoned ahead to an hotel he knew in Notting Hill to tell the manageress that they were coming. He told her that he was calling from a telephone box at Euston. Half an hour later, they arrived at the Pembridge Court Hotel, just off Notting Hill Gate.
¹⁸

The Pembridge Court was a private hotel known for its ‘good class clientele’. Elizabeth Wyatt ran the business with her husband Henry and her daughter-in-law, Alice. It was a typical mid-nineteenth-century double-fronted, stuccoed building with a pillared front porch entrance. It stood (as it still does) on Pembridge Gardens, nestled just off the southwest corner of Pembridge Square. It consisted of a ground, first and second floors with a basement beneath. On the first floor were three bedrooms, numbers 1, 3 and 4, as well as two private rooms. On the second floor were bedrooms 5 to 10 and a bathroom. On the intermediate landing between the two floors were a communal bathroom and lavatory.

Yvonne followed Heath through the outside gate and up the five stone steps to the entrance hall. He signed the register as Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs N. G. C. Heath of Black Hill Cottages, Romsey. Mrs Wyatt asked Heath how long they would want the room for? He said that he would like to book it for three or four nights, possibly five. He told her that he had stayed at the hotel a couple of years earlier when he was in the South African Air Force. Mrs Wyatt felt sure that she recognized him and that he had been a guest at the hotel on a couple of previous occasions.

Lieutenant Colonel Heath was offered Room 4 on the first floor. He was given a key to the room and another to open the front door, which was locked at 10 p.m. every night. Mrs Wyatt accompanied the couple up the stairs to show them their room. This was situated at the back of the building, at the top of the flight of stairs. The room was typical of the price range and period – 19 feet by 15 feet with a window overlooking the back garden. Opening the door, the wardrobe was against the left-hand wall. Behind the door, to the right, were twin beds, a couple of feet apart. On the wall opposite the foot of the beds was a fireplace with a gas fire and a small gas ring. The gas fire was to prove crucial later on. As there was no open fire in the grate, there was no necessity for a poker. Mrs Wyatt later confirmed that there had never been a poker in the room.