The Fowler Family Business - Jonathan Meades

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wishful thinking – you know, I let it get the better of me. I suppose I must have wanted him to be Bobby Camino.’

      ‘You haven’t been listening have you Henry. What I’m saying is, even if this Bobby Camino does attend a funeral where you’re there in an official capacity you do not on any account go running after him asking for his autograph. Not if it’s Warren Mitchell or Dick Emery or Gerald Harper or Ted Moult you do not even if you are right about who it is. Do you read me? There’s no place for Mateys in Fowler & Son, no place whatsoever.’

      ‘Yeah, of course – but I wouldn’t with them anyway – it’s just that “Teresa” … It’s about Stanley. That’s what it’s about.’ And Henry Fowler hangs his head.

      ‘Teresa’, written by Doug Truss, Joe Meek and Mike Penny, was recorded by Joe Meek at his makeshift studio above Messrs Kaplan’s handbag-and-suitcase shop at 417 Holloway Road N7 in June 1961. Roger Laverne (né Jackson) and Heinz (Burt) played organ and bass. The record’s release on the Top Rank label was delayed because of Truss’s (Bobby Camino’s) contractual obligations to Pye.

      The first time Henry Fowler and Stanley Croney heard it was shortly before noon on 28 October 1961 on the BBC Light Programme’s ‘Saturday Club’. Henry persistently opened the breakfast-room window and flapped at the air with a tooled-leather magazine holder to remove the smell of Stanley’s cigarettes – his current and last brand of choice was Kent. Henry kept an eye on where Stanley was putting his feet, shod today in mock-croc almond-toed slip-ons with a rugged buckle. He feared for the cushion tied to a ladder-back chair, he feared what his parents might say if they saw the heeled depressions in the oat fabric and if they detected the sweetish odour of the tobacco. Stanley feigned oblivion to Henry’s concern, observed that the song was ‘for kids’ even though he’d keenly beaten the table in time to the repetitive scat wail.

      When the programme ended Stanley went to the toilet, so he never heard the name Jesse-Hughes. Henry, plumping the cushion flattened over two and a half decades by his father’s weight, listened to the midday news bulletin: at a special sitting of St Alban’s magistrates court a forty-three-year-old grocery company representative had been remanded in custody in connection with the murder of five women. Dudley Jesse Hughes (there was no indication that the name was primped with a hyphen) spoke only to confirm that name.

      When seven months later at the Old Bailey he pronounced the sentence of death by hanging on Jesse-Hughes Lord Justice Killick ejaculated as was his wont and because it was his wont his marshal had a spare pair of slightly too-tight trousers at the ready so that when His Lordship went to dine at his club, a hank of white shirt protruded from beneath his waistcoat, from the top of his flies, prompting murmurs of approval from novice members such as Norman Idmiston.

      Jesse-Hughes asked in his death cell to hear ‘Teresa’ by Bobby Camino. Teresa was the name of his poliomyelitis-stricken wife for whose sake he had polygamously married five widows in the counties of Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire (two), the Soke of Peterborough and Suffolk, had had them amend their wills in his favour and had then over twelve years killed them with atropine, in a dometic accident (shiny stair treads), by drowning (a bath, a river), and by tying a fifth, a jabbering Alzheimer, to a chair in a frosty garden for the night. It was the variety of method which according to former Reynold’s News crime reporter Claude Vange in ‘The Last Gentleman Murderer’ kept the police off his trail for so long.

      Henry Fowler was to follow the case with scrupulous attention. His father joked that the judge’s black cap should be replaced by a topper because the name was a better fit! Not that Mr Fowler was pro hanging. There is, tragically, little that the embalmer can do with a roped throat. The contusions will always show through. They are the brand the hanged take to the other side. The hanged are marked with a blue-black thyroid beyond eternity – no wonder, then, that suicide in the cell the night before is so favoured an option. Henry was never sure whether Jesse-Hughes’s request to hear ‘Teresa’ was granted. He was not sure whether Jesse-Hughes had really asked for it or whether that was a journalistic fabrication. Indeed he was not even sure if he had read it or had been told it by some schoolmate (sychophant? tease?) who knew of his fondness for both case and record. He wondered how the request would have been granted. Was there an electric socket for a portable record-player in the death cell? Did Jesse-Hughes, a non-smoker with a horror of nicotine-stained fingers, succumb and smoke his first and last whilst he listened to Bobby Camino’s song about the imaginary girl who shared his crippled wife’s name?

      The last cigarette that Stanley Croney smoked was an Olivier, one of a handful he had helped himself to from Mr Fowler’s EPNS cigarette box on the way back from the toilet and put in his flip-top Kent pack. He had also swallowed a draught of White & Mackay’s whisky from the bottle’s neck. When he returned to the breakfast room with one arm into a sleeve of his bronze mac Henry had switched off the radio and was wiping invisible ash from the table with his sleeve before casting his eye about the room to ensure that there was nothing for his parents to complain of. Then Henry checked his hand-me-down wallet’s contents of ten pounds, his aggregate sixteenth birthday present from three weeks previously. They left the house at 12.09 to catch a train into central London. They walked down the hill where the big Victorian mansions glared through dripping laurels and rhododendrons. Stanley, anxious about his shoes, walked on the road rather than on the pavement whose drift of wet leaves might conceal a surprise gift from a dog. They passed the forlorn park and the pavilion surrounded by scaffolding and the malnourished trees. A Kent-bound train rattled past the allotment strip where old men hid from life in huts made of doors and iron and wire and string, smoking copious weights of shag. The smoke from their makeshift chimneys was hardly distinguishable from the glary white sky. The road curved after a terrace of railway cottages, and there was the rusty old girder bridge.

       Chapter Three

      It was going on fifty feet that Stanley Croney fell. It was a seventy-foot drop to the rain-glossed cinders beside the shiny tracks that stretched into oblivion. It was almost a hundred feet high, that rusty old girder bridge. The representatives of the emergency services casually disagreed about how far the tragic lad had fallen – but who, naked eyed, can estimate height or distance with anything more than a well-meant guess when a young life has been lost and there are procedures to follow and the dense nettles on the embankment sting through uniform trousers and speed is vital because all train services have been halted. It was high, that rusty old girder bridge.

      The coroner noted but did not question the disparities. He scratched at his eczematous wrists that cuffs couldn’t quite hide and listened with sterling patience to the policeman, to the ambulancemen, to the doctor, to the firemen who had surely overestimated the distance because of the duration and difficulty of their haul of the unbruised, uncut body up the steep embankment. And he had heard evidence from PC 1078 Grady in two previous cases and considered him to be a cocky smart alec and careless of details.

      Thus he assumed (wrongly, as it happens) that the bridge was seventy feet above the tracks. He heard evidence from Henry Fowler; from the hairdresser Jimmy Scirea whose salon Giovanni of Mayfair Henry Fowler had run into, ‘all agitated’, asking to use the phone; from Janet Cherry who had talked to the two youths before they turned on to the bridge and who described Stanley as being ‘in a definitely frisky mood, you know, sort of excitable … show-offy – he was often like that. He was a character.’ He had performed ‘this funny bow, old-fashioned, sort of like in the olden days if you follow my meaning’. His friend, whom she knew only by sight, had merely nodded curtly and looked ostentatiously at his watch whilst she talked briefly to Stanley about a party they might both attend that night. She had been surprised not to see Stanley there because he had asked twice whether Melodie Jones would be going. ‘He was very direct. He wasn’t shy.’

      Of course he wasn’t. He was a one, a daredevil, a cheeky monkey. This wasn’t the first time. Everyone can remember the early hours of New Year’s Day 1960 when after being ejected from the Man Friday Club (under age, over the limit, we’ve our licence to think of sonny) he had run up a drainpipe and had scaled a roof of the Stanley

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