Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (8 page)

Will you let me know if this letter is entirely readable or no, but the pen seems to be getting very bad,

All my love,

Margery
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Margery Gardner’s letter of 20 June was the last communication her mother would have from her daughter. Within twenty-four hours, she would be dead, her body beaten and savaged. She was thirty-two years old.

Married, but estranged from her husband, Margery lived an insecure existence, moving between various bedsits and furnished flats in the Chelsea and Earls Court areas of west London. A middle-class woman by birth, from a distinguished Sheffield family, her life had been destabilized as much by her own ambitions as by the seductive but disorientating opportunities of the war years.

The journey of her life was a movement away from suburban security towards the attractions and dangers of a metropolitan, bohemian world in the midst of war. Though a trained and talented artist, by 1946 she had no regular income and lack of funds was the constant, exhausting issue in her life. She earned a little money from a series of unskilled jobs – turning her hand to anything including the odd session as a film extra. Though she sold some of her artwork to friends and was privately commissioned to paint murals, this never amounted to enough to make ends meet. Her husband provided no maintenance for her or their baby daughter, leaving it to Margery’s mother and brother to help her out. This hand-to-mouth existence made Margery very dependent on the goodwill of her friends and the various men she had relationships with. Happy for them to stand her drinks and buy her dinners, she was sometimes similarly happy to sleep with them. She was promiscuous, certainly, but not (as was claimed by Heath after her death) a prostitute. Indeed, Detective Inspector Spooner observed that she was a woman of ‘good breeding and education as well as good looks’.
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A memorable figure on the drinking scene in Chelsea, she was popular and well liked, often seen in the neighbourhood wearing her signature coat – made of ocelot or ‘leopardette’ – a highly patterned leopardskin fur.

Margery lived a ‘bohemian kind of life’
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amongst a milieu of outsiders: artists, homosexuals (she was friends with Quentin Crisp) and petty criminals. When the war against Fascism had come to an end, the war against crime in London began. In 1946, the Metropolitan Police had 7 million people within its jurisdiction. Thousands of police officers had joined the armed forces; hundreds had been killed or wounded and recruitment had been stopped during hostilities. The Met was 4,000 men below strength – just as a new wave of crime exploded.

Against the depleted ranks of the police force was ranged a new type of criminal – cunning, ruthless and well informed. Many had served in the armed forces, some with distinction, and many more were deserters. They were younger, fitter, harder, more resourceful and more energetic than their pre-war equivalent. Crucially they also operated in a world with a new, post-war morality. Many commodities were scarce or rationed. Cigarettes and liquor carried heavy duties which had increased their prices to four times their pre-war costs. Years of hardship and scarcity had bred a public hungry for the comforting extras of life. Even the most honest citizen couldn’t resist the temptation to buy ‘something on the side’. The black market was booming and the new style of post-war crook took advantage of it. Housebreaking, robbery, shoplifting, even kidnapping became more common as the police struggled to control increasingly powerful criminal gangs.

In September 1945, Margery was questioned by the police herself. She was riding as one of five passengers in a car driven by a friend she’d known for about two years, Peter Tilley Bailey.
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Tilley Bailey was a small-time gentleman crook with several convictions for stealing cars and burglary. He had been drinking and had stolen the car, driving eastwards at fifty miles an hour along Knightsbridge on the wrong side of the road, ignoring the traffic lights. The stolen vehicle was recognized by a police patrol car, which soon gave chase. One of the police officers jumped on the running board of the stolen car, but missed his footing and fell off. A member of the public driving a high-powered vehicle then joined in the car chase, ramming Bailey’s car but failing to stop him. Tilley Bailey accelerated, but the police car continued to pursue him, following him twice around Hyde Park at great speed. Bailey then abandoned the car at Hyde Park Corner and tried to run away. Shortly afterwards, when he was caught by the police, he said, ‘Well, I gave you a good run for it.’
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Tilley Bailey was arrested and charged at West London Magistrates’ Court for dangerous driving and carrying housebreaking implements (these were actually rubber gloves). In his defence, he said that he had been drinking and that it was only a prank. The magistrate, Sir Gervais Rentoul, took a very dim view of the case.

I cannot conceive anything much worse than the lives and limbs of citizens being at the mercy of a drunken fellow driving round the West End at fifty miles an hour chased by the police.
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Tilley Bailey was jailed for six months and disqualified from driving for five years.
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Margery, claiming she had no idea that the car was stolen, was released without charge. This fringe of small-scale criminality amongst Mayfair crooks and Chelsea opportunists was the world that Margery Gardner inhabited.

Like many of her generation, Margery’s short life was bookended by cataclysmic world conflict. She had been born Margery Aimee Brownell Wheat on 21 May 1914, just a month before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife plunged the world into the Great War. She was the eldest daughter of John and Elizabeth Wheat, a respectable couple from Sheffield. Her parents had married in 1912 when John Bristowe Wheat had reached the age of fifty-three, claiming that he could not afford to marry until his own father retired from the family business, a venerable firm of solicitors that had been in the family since 1763. His wife, Elizabeth Brownell, was twenty years his junior and also from an old Sheffield family. The couple rented 24 Oakholme Road in Sheffield shortly after their marriage and the family would remain there for the next forty-seven years.

The house remains – now a hall of residence for Sheffield University. It is a spacious semi-detached property built of local yellow sandstone and sits on a quiet road of similar properties in a leafy suburb of the city near the botanical gardens. With large rooms, but a small garden, it was a comfortable and manageable home for the Wheats to bring up their family. After Margery was born, a boy, Robin, followed in 1915, then Gilbert in 1916. Two hand-tinted studio photographs survive of Betty Wheat and her three children, showing a close and happy family. However, soon after the photograph was taken, the family was shaken by the loss of young Robin who died from a constricted bowel before he had reached his fourth birthday.

Margery attended a local kindergarten in Sheffield, before going to live with an aunt in Chippenham where she shared a governess with her cousin.
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At the age of fifteen, she was sent to a private school, the Manor House, in Brondesbury, north-west London, where she stayed until she was eighteen. Here her interests developed in the arts, which were to continue throughout her life – singing, acting and painting. She spent most of her time drawing and was particularly skilled at drawing horses, but always in motion: battles, bullfights and scenes from the Wild West. From an early age, Margery was impelled by a sense of adventure.

Her drawing abilities led to a Bronze Medal awarded by the Royal Drawing Society and her headmistress thought the young Margery precociously talented, ‘more than half a genius’.
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It was no surprise to her family that, having left school, Margery wanted to continue her art studies in London. Her father, however, wouldn’t allow her to do so until she had reached the age of twenty-one, so she returned to the north and attended the Sheffield School of Art. It was while studying here that Margery began the first of her ill-starred relationships with men. According to Mrs Wheat, Margery fell in love with a man named Moseley whom she had met in London. But Margery’s mother very much disapproved of the relationship – not thinking it ‘a suitable association’ – and, in order to affect an end to it, she encouraged Margery to return to London to continue her studies at the Chelsea School of Art.

Mrs Wheat had her way and succeeded in splitting up Moseley and her daughter. But her plans to protect Margery were to have unforeseen and far-reaching consequences. This was 1935 and the 21-year-old Margery Wheat was now a rebellious young woman curious about the world around her. Dark-haired, fashion-conscious and extremely good-looking, she was also as headstrong and single-minded as the horses that she loved to draw. London offered glamour, excitement and freedom, in contrast to the safe but parochial life of her family. Both temperamentally and generationally, Margery was alien to her parents, her father being seventy-five when she was only twenty, very much an eminent Victorian in contrast to his daughter, who was yearning for the new, the extraordinary, the modern.
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The temptations and freedoms of metropolitan life enthralled Margery and the idea of London as somewhere to finish her education or pursue a career took second place to her pursuit of adventure. She was distracted from her studies at Chelsea and started socializing with what her mother considered ‘undesirable company’. Soon, Mrs Wheat suspected that her daughter’s interest in the study of art was little more than a pretext for living an increasingly bohemian life in London. In 1936, she still held sufficient sway with Margery to prevent her making a trip to France with her Chelsea friends, but her influence on her daughter’s life was already beginning to wane as Margery established her life – and her independence – in London.

In March 1936, Margery was living in an hotel for single middle-class ladies in South Kensington and was embracing life at the heart of the Chelsea art scene during one of its most colourful periods. Tutors at Chelsea at the time included Henry Moore, William Roberts and Ceri Richards. But it was the social life surrounding the world of Chelsea artists and students that Margery was most enamoured with. Her brother Gilbert later commented:

[It was] the night life of the capital, and the unusual and unconventional ways of the Chelsea art world that appealed to her. More and more she became involved in a world as far removed from the home she had left as it is possible to imagine.
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Margery’s letters home during this period are a detailed catalogue of gallery visits, exhibition openings, parties, romances, ‘very jolly evenings at the flicks’
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with drinks and debate at Chelsea’s famous Blue Cockatoo restaurant. At one of the parties she attended in 1936, Margery met 22-year-old Peter Gardner. He was the son of a brigadier in the regular army and had been born in Cairo in 1914. Peter’s mother had died of malaria when he was only fourteen and from then on he proved a troublesome son. He had been expelled from school and though he trained as an officer at Sandhurst, he had been dismissed before completing the course in 1933. He was estranged from his father, who had married again since the death of his wife and started a new family. In October 1936, Margery’s father died at the age of seventy-eight. Soon after, she and Peter Gardner became lovers.

With the political crisis in Europe looming, Margery married Peter at Chelsea Old Church on Cheyne Walk in the spring of 1939. In their wedding photograph, Margery and Peter make a stylish couple and according to Margery’s mother, ‘she seemed very much in love with him’. But for Margery the reality of married life with Peter was to prove frustrating. With him seemingly unable to hold down a regular job (‘he tried several jobs but could never keep a position very long’),
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the couple moved from rented flat to rented bedsit at various addresses in Chelsea; they never had a secure home of their own. When war was finally declared in September, Gardner took a position with the Air Ministry. Towards the end of 1940, he was called up for service with the RAF as Aircraftsman 1st Class, but never advanced any further, despite his officer-class background and credentials.

Margery accompanied her husband, living with him near each of the RAF camps where he was stationed. When he was based in Blackpool, eager to work, she took an apprentice position at a hairdressing and beauty salon where she had to pay £1 a week ‘for the privilege of learning the trade’.
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It was a far cry from her romantic dream of bohemian, metropolitan life.

In Sheffield too, Mrs Wheat was also facing a difficult war. With Margery now married and Gilbert away fighting in France, she was left alone to face the bombings that targeted the steelworks for which Sheffield was world-famous as well as the armaments factories that had been set up to bolster the war effort. On the 12 and 15 December 1940, Sheffield suffered the hardest night of the Blitz. Opposite Paradise Square, the home of the Wheat family business, the cathedral was damaged and Marples Hotel took a direct hit. Six hundred and eighty people were killed and 1,500 injured. Forty thousand people were made homeless.
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Margery and Peter’s itinerant married life was soon to feel both internal and external pressure. In the summer of 1941 Margery gave birth prematurely to a stillborn child. But there was little time to mourn. For its size, Chelsea was one of the most heavily blitzed boroughs in London, due to its position on the river, situated close to two power stations and near the centre of government. The worst night of bombing was 16 April 1941 when 450 German bombers attacked south and central London for eight hours. The loss of life and property was considerable. Though the population of Chelsea had dwindled from 58,000 in 1939 to only 16,000 people, 1,000 civilians were killed in the attack, with twice as many seriously injured. Nowhere seemed safe – even the Royal Hospital Infirmary was hit, as were eighteen hospitals and thirteen churches. Chelsea Old Church where Peter and Margery had been married only three years earlier suffered a direct hit, leaving the church a devastated wreck.
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With the familiar landmarks of London and Chelsea obliterated overnight and the knowledge that home in Sheffield was just as vulnerable to attack, Margery must have been under constant strain. Nothing was secure, nothing was certain and the world around her was in chaos. At the same time, her marriage began to fracture, with Peter revealing himself to be a troubled and needy man – alcoholic and highly strung.