Читать книгу Bill Nicholson - Brian Scovell - Страница 9

Bill Nicholson was born and brought up in a house in Scarborough, next door to a garage where a woman was later murdered. It turned out to be one of the longest and most unsolvable crimes of the century, and no one was ever charged. On 26 March 1943, two brothers named Johnson – Tommy, aged 8 and his brother Jimmy, aged 7 – were playing in the deserted garage alongside the Nicholsons’ rented house when they discovered the body.

Tommy, who was a well-known boxer in the North and still works as a boxing coach, remembers: ‘We always used to sneak into the place and play football, and we used to swing on the pump across the pit. This time my hat fell in and I went to get it back.’

In the middle of the garage floor was a four-foot deep inspection pit, covered in oil. To the boys’ horror, a naked woman was lying inside it and Jimmy, a football coach, said, ‘We thought it was a dummy until we started poking it and I said, “That’s flesh!” We went home and told our Mum and she said, “Don’t take any notice, it’s a dummy.” But Tommy said, “The first thing I did was to run down to the police station and told them, and they came back to the garage and they confirmed that the woman had died in suspicious circumstances.’ As a reward, the boys were each given five shillings.

The victim was thought to be a prostitute but Tommy said: ‘Oh no, she was married to a soldier and they ran a grocery shop in Prospect Road. She must have been walking down the road and met this man in the War, and there were no lights showing so there were no witnesses. It was an offence to leave lights on because of the risk of bombing.

‘We were told that she was strangled in our road, Trafalgar Road West, and the murderer dragged the body to Vine Street and threw it into the pit. The Army parked their trucks in the garage, but a few days before they evacuated and the regiment, which was based at Berniston Barracks, went abroad. It was easy to get into the garage. I knew someone who told me that the murderer went off with his unit and that’s why they couldn’t trace him. There were rumours that he was killed in action.’

Jimmy, a confirmed Tottenham Hotspur fan, knew Bill Nicholson and observed: ‘He was a very nice man, a real gentleman. Once we wrote to him, asking if he could let us have a couple of tickets for a Spurs game at Sunderland, and he sent them by return of post – that’s the kind of man he was.’ Jimmy’s wife Beryl was a long-time secretary of Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Scarborough’s best-known resident. ‘Bill and Darkie often watched Sir Alan’s plays at the Scarbrough High School,’ recalled Jimmy. ‘That was in the early days before Sir Alan’s theatre, The Stephen Jones Theatre, was built.’

David Duggleby, who owns the auctioneers and valuers in the revamped garage building, said: ‘A young girl was strangled and dumped in the pit and a soldier was suspected as the murderer but no one was charged. In the War it wasn’t easy to check up on soldiers who were being moved around. If it was a soldier, he might have been sent off to Northern Africa, or anywhere. This street is better known for our infamous murder than as Bill Nicholson’s birthplace, I’m afraid.’

Bill said in his book: ‘I was born in 15, Vine Street, a house which no longer exists.’ When I started writing this biography, I went to Scarborough, not knowing about the murder, and knocked at the door of one of the terraced houses in the cul de sac not far from the Scarborough Cricket ground. A young woman opened it and I asked her if she knew where Bill Nicholson, the famous football manager, was born. She laughed and said: ‘Never heard of him.’ ‘He came from a family of nine,’ I said. She laughed again. ‘You wouldn’t get nine kids in these places,’ she told me.

The day started with a pea soup of a fog, which apparently is not unusual in that part of the country, followed by continuous rain for most of the day. I turned back down the street, carrying my red and blue Sky brolly, similar to the one used by Steve McClaren when his fate as England manager was finally sealed, and I saw a bald-headed man in a fawn raincoat, who looked a bit like Charles Hughes, the former FA coaching supremo who preached the long ball game. I put the same question to him.

‘As a teenager, I used to collect Mrs Nicholson’s rent at Quarry Mount where the family moved to,’ he said. ‘So I know all about the house.’ Pointing to the end of the road, no more than twenty yards away, he said, ‘Number 15 is on the right of the Duggleby’s offices and that was where Bill was born. It is still there, as you can see.’

Now 68, Gordon Jackson spoke with enthusiasm and affection for Mrs Nicholson, Bill’s mother. ‘She was a lovely, cheery lady who always wore an apron, as mothers did in those days,’ he remembered. ‘She was always on the dot with her rent. She always offered me a cup of tea. Her husband died quite young and I never saw him.’

As I was about to leave, he asked: ‘Do you know about the murder?’ I didn’t. Throughout my visits to interview Bill at his house close to White Hart Lane, he had never mentioned it. The local newspaper called it ‘The Garage Crime’. Gordon couldn’t remember the name of the victim, but scouring through the files of the Scarborough Evening News, I discovered that she was 33-year-old Mary Elizabeth Comins from Middlesbrough. Her husband was serving in the 8th Army in Northern Africa and she was in the habit of entertaining a number of soldiers after working as a barmaid. There were no leads for the police to follow and Coroner Dr D.L. Sutherland said her clothing – a black lambswool coat, a black shirt and top, plus gloves – was found; also her handbag. After a five-hour autopsy, the Coroner said the only apparent cause of death was superficial bruises to the throat. Mrs Comins lived alone at 7 Wrea Lane and took casual jobs at a pub and a grocery shop. More than 2,000 interviews were conducted and although Scotland Yard detectives were called in, eventually the case had to be filed away. Several witnesses had seen the victim in Dean Road earlier in the day, not far from the former prison, and heard her laughing and joking with a soldier.

Some months later, it was reported that Mary’s husband was shot and killed in Northern Africa, but Jimmy Johnson thought that wasn’t true. Other rumours were circulating, one saying that the murderer had died in the fighting in Africa. In 1943, the Scarborough police reported 386 crimes in that year and 80 per cent of them were solved, but the most infamous was never solved.

Forty-seven years later Keith Burkinshaw had a similar experience: he once owned a house in the posh part of Bengeo, a suburb north of Hertford, but the man who bought it off him was murdered and the house partially damaged by arson. ‘I was working abroad at the time when it happened,’ he recalled. ‘It was a large house, five bedrooms, and I met this man a couple or so times and we agreed over the sale. He was an accountant, I think, around 50, and he had been married several times. I was shocked when I heard that he had been garroted and the house was burned down. I don’t know the full story but I think he might have been involved in organised crime. No one was charged.’

The driveway to the house was shared by the residents of two flats and caused a lot of arguments. On two occasions, the BBC’s Crimewatch featured the case, once reported on by Jill Dando – she herself was murdered in Fulham in 1999. Barry George was tried and convicted for shooting and killing the presenter, but he appealed and was subsequently released in 2008.

South Beds News Agency reported on the murder which took place in the early hours of 1 December 1990, saying: ‘Patrick Hurling, 45, was brutally murdered in his £250,000 mansion home in Bengeo and he had been battered and eventually strangled, probably with a wire flex. His killer, or killers, later set fire to the body. Expensive jewellery, including a diamond-encrusted bracelet and rings were taken from the body. Detectives have always ruled out that he was a victim of a burglar and there was no forced entry. The evening before he left his firm of Hurling Roberts in Waltham Abbey to drink with colleagues in a nearby pub. He left about 10pm in his £30,000 BMW accompanied with a woman with dark, long hair, who was never traced. Twenty minutes later he had a fish and chip supper on his own. It was around 5am when neighbours spotted a fire raging in his garage.

‘In a downstairs bedroom the body of Mr Hurling was found slumped in a praying position against a bed. It had been wrapped in a blanket and duvet and set on fire. The body was badly burnt beyond recognition and it was later identified from dental records. A post-mortem showed he had died from strangulation from a ligature.

‘Mr Hurling was an accountant who led a high profile life and was married three times. Friends said he was a sociable man with an eye for the ladies. Fifty detectives were assigned to the case and 1,700 people were interviewed and 600 statements were taken. Police thought they had enough evidence to charge two suspects but the Crown Prosecution Service disagreed and no action was taken.’

There were disturbing similarities with the murder case at 15 Vine Street, Scarborough. It was extraordinary that two managers of Tottenham Hotspur lived in houses where someone was murdered and no one was charged.

Bill Nicholson was born on 26 January 1919 and was the second youngest of nine children – five boys: George, Fred, Joe junior, Bill and Ted, and four sisters: Doris (known as Dolly), Edith, Ida and Nellie, all deceased. They were hardy people and seven of them lived past the age of 70, five surviving into their eighties. As children, they had just one scooter between them and they used to queue up at the door to take their turn.

Their father, Joe, was born with a congenital defect to a leg and walked with a limp throughout his life before he finally succumbed to cancer of the bowel in 1938, aged 61. Edith Gowan, their mother, was living at 23 Vine Street when she married Joe in 1899. The driving force of the family, despite a tough life in desperately poor circumstances, she lived long enough to see Bill holding up the FA Cup at Wembley in 1961. ‘That must have been her proudest moment,’ said Bill. ‘Unfortunately, she wasn’t fit enough to see the match in person and saw it on TV.’ The 9-inch TV set was black and white.

Bill was just 19 when his father died (Edith died at the age of 83). Joe had always found it difficult to earn enough to keep a family of nine children and so Edith had to go out to work as a cleaner. The older brothers and sisters were expected to look after the younger ones; it was the only way to cope. When Bill became a manager, he observed: ‘A football family is no different to a proper family: everyone has to help each other.’

All the children were born in a large, rented three-bedroom house with a sitting room, a scullery and a front room that was only used on Sundays. With an impressive archway, the building was part of the livery stables next door and Joe worked for a hansom cab company. Bill shared his father’s love of horses and enjoyed mucking out the stables, often accompanying his father as he drove the carriage along the Scarborough’s promenade in the summer months. He polished the brass harness, cleaned the carriages and rubbed oil on the horses’ hooves.

Bill must have been kept busy because in those days, as today, the town was always under aerial attack from indiscriminate seagulls. In the winter, however, there wasn’t quite so much work and it was hard to pay the bills. In the early thirties, when the horse and carriage became obsolete, the stables were turned into a garage, where charabancs (the posh word for coaches) were parked and it became a motorcar business.

Joe senior instilled his own willingness to work hard into his children and never once complained about the problems with his leg. ‘No one ever talked about it,’ said Bill. ‘Yorkshire people in those days were private folk and it was looked on as bad manners to discuss other people’s ages or their disabilities. I used to go out with him on the horse and carriage from a very early age. Every Sunday the cab would be used to take people to church in their best clothes and during the summer it would parade up and down the promenade and take customers to and from the station. It was hard work for a young boy, but I enjoyed it. Though I liked the horse, I was frightened of falling off when I was put into the saddle and never managed to ride it.’

Years later, Linda spoke of his love of big horses: ‘He really loved them. When he and Darkie came over on a vacation to New Hampshire we went to see the Budweiser Clydesdale horses not far from where I live and the lady grooming them said she could tell he had worked with horses by the way he stroked one particular horse named Willie. He had a certain rapport with the horse and his eyes were smiling. I am sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Mum called him “Willie!”’

Scarborough, a hilly borough with a population of around 100,000, is thought to have been founded in 966 AD when a Viking raider named Thorgils Skarthi arrived in that part of north-east Yorkshire, although there is evidence that the Romans were there first. Famous inhabitants include Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Hollywood actor and film director Charles Laughton, Sir Jimmy Savile, the Sitwell family, actors Ian Carmichael and Sir Ben Kingsley, TV journalists and presenters Selina Scott and Jon Snow. World War I poet Wilfred Owen convalesced there and Yorkshire fast bowler Freddie Trueman lived there for 17 years.

But the town has had few famous sportsmen and hardly any footballers of any class. Bill was probably the best. Next in line was Colin Appleton, the former wing-half who captained Leicester City in the 1961 FA Cup Final, which Bill Nicholson described as ‘One of the worst Cup Finals ever played.’ The other is Jonathan Greening, the West Bromwich Albion forward and captain. For someone like Nicholson, brought up in a far-off seaside town and sheltered from the stresses and strains of the big cities, to be plucked from that environment and sent to London on his own for a trial at Tottenham six weeks after his seventeenth birthday was an extraordinary and courageous story.

He loved Scarborough and leaving the town must have been a wrench for him. Besides his work alongside with his father, Bill did a newspaper round before going to school each day. He had to get up at 5am and earned 30p a week. ‘It was a straightforward upbringing with the emphasis on hard work and reliance,’ he recalled. ‘We made toys and games for ourselves and simple things brought the greatest pleasure, like playing marbles or riding scooters. Scarborough was a good place to live.’

The town was built around two wide, sweeping bays and the castle, constructed in the 12th century on a headland, was constantly fought over and changed hands seven times during the Civil War. On 12 December 1916, two German warships, SMS Derffliknger and SMS Von der Tann, landed 500 shells on it and the surrounding area suffered widespread damage. After Elizabeth I died, Scarborough’s fortunes changed and it became a fishing village. In 1627, local gentlewoman Mrs Farrow noticed that spring water was seeping through the side of the cliffs and showed signs of magnesium sulphur. An expert in the field informed her that the water was a cure for constipation, an ailment suffered by most people of the time. Suddenly Scarborough became a fashionable spa, attracting wealthy folk from all over the country. Unlike Bath, Tunbridge Wells or Buxton, it had the advantage of being on the coast and taking the waters had been introduced.

When Bill was growing up, food was relatively cheap. He recalled: ‘There was little money to spare but we ate vast quantities of food, particularly on Sundays. The day started with a large traditional English breakfast, followed by a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding lunch, with tea later in the afternoon and then supper, the remainders from lunch served cold in the evening.’ His parents were too busy to attend church themselves, but the children went to the Salvation Army Sunday School and later, an Anglican church. Jean Bell, Bill’s younger daughter, born in 1948, said: ‘My dad wasn’t really religious, but he led a very moral life.’

Despite living next to the sea, Bill never tried swimming. ‘My parents couldn’t afford bathing trunks for us,’ he said. ‘So none of us were swimmers.’ But he told his daughters that his grandchildren should be encouraged to swim and so Richard, Colin and Shaun started swimming after a year.

‘Scarborough was a pleasant place to grow up in and we took advantage of living near one of the best beaches on that part of the country,’ said Bill. ‘I spent many happy hours on the beach and when the sun was out, it was very crowded. The ladies were dressed in long, black dresses and hats and carried parasols. The men wore suits and bowlers, or cloth caps. No one sunbathed and you never saw a naked torso. And there weren’t many deckchairs either.

‘The ugly-looking mobile huts on wheels were still there and were used to take people out to the boats or to swim, but not many people swam. The children would burrow away with their buckets and spades and we were encouraged to enter sand-building competitions. Sand artists used to build elaborate castles and replicas of all kinds of things. Horses were a speciality and people threw coins as a token of their appreciation.’

The huge Grand Hotel dominated the beach. In Bill’s younger days, boys with a poor background might gaze wistfully up at the building, but they would never go inside. Jean said: ‘I am pretty certain my father never went there. Most of his holidays were at Scarborough and when his mother was alive, we stayed with her. Later we stayed at one of the sisters, or sometimes at a small hotel.’

Bill once went on holiday to Israel, a rarity from the normal pattern of going back to his birthplace but in later life, he visited Spain, Portugal and Greece. He liked staying in good hotels – the kind denied him in his youth. The once grandiose Grand Hotel, which later became a Butlins, was completed in 1867 and the owner wanted it to represent a calendar so the property had four towers to show the seasons, twelve floors for the months and 365 rooms for each day of the year.

‘I remember how cold it was when we went to Scarborough for our two-week holiday,’ said Jean. ‘It was always two weeks – my dad never took any more. When the tide went out, the sand was firm and he organised running games to keep us warm. We played all kinds of sport, including cricket. Dad played a few charity cricket matches, but he wasn’t a club player.’ Her sister Linda remembered: ‘He always got us involved in as many sports as possible, even bowls. He thought it made you fitter and that’s right, because my parents both lived into their eighties. He did find some time to relax in a deckchair, but the weather wasn’t always kind in Scarborough but even then we’d play badminton or kick a ball about to keep warm.’

Her husband Steve, paying tribute at Bill’s funeral in 2004, said: ‘Bill was raised in a happy, close and loving working-class family, all in a small, terraced house, where his beloved mother ruled the roost. Bill spent any free time with his mates, kicking about a tin can or anything else that they could afford, usually in the alley behind the backyard. The neighbours must have been irritated, but the skills he learned obviously bore rich harvest. These same back alleys are now clogged with cars.

‘Bill always enjoyed returning to his roots to see the Nicholson family and re-acquaint himself with Yorkshire. He knew the local streets like the back of his hand. The whole family knew the best fish and chip shops, greeted Auntie Mary’s donkeys by name – just like old friends – and either got stuck into cricket on the beach, built sandcastles against the tide, investigated rock pools, or followed our most well-practised pursuit, sheltering from the rain. Sundays were spent up on the Yorkshire moors with a picnic near Goathland, always in the same spot.

‘After he became a famous football manager, Bill tolerated having his picnic food presented on a paper plate on such occasions, but we all knew that he would rather have had it sitting at a decent dining table with a knife and fork. Evenings were often spent in the family home, where his older sister Edie continued to live. They played cards for pennies and Edie kept the change in an old tobacco tin. We were creatures of habit.’