A History of Modern Britain in Twenty Murders

This year we’ve been treated to two deeply troubling true crime narratives that looked back over recent history, and provoked deep thought. Earlier we had Caroline Fraser’s Murderland that attempted to connect serial killings in the American South-West.  Now we have Professor David Wilson’s examination and exploration of twenty murders that echoed through Modern Britain.

Wilson is a renowned academic who specialises as a criminologist, historian, and broadcaster.

He introduces his latest work by placing what follows into narrative context; outlining why he chose to examine these twenty specific murders and what they may tell us about Britain, and about ourselves.

He restricts his investigations to England, Scotland and Wales. Wilson only makes mention of Northern Ireland when it references killings on the mainland such as the murder of Conservative politician Airey Neave by a bomb in 1979 by the Irish Republican Army [IRA].

Wilson commences his exploration in the Nation’s capital, with the murders in the Whitechapel district of East London by Jack the Ripper in 1888. He explores the role of the press at the time, and of contemporary so-called ‘Ripperologists’ such as Paul Begg and Patricia Cornwell. The linkages to British Society - class and social hierarchy and the ills of poverty, prostitution, and alcoholism / drug addiction linked to a fear of the foreigner in our midst - which remains to this day. Wilson reports that the serial killings in Ipswich in 2006 by the ‘Suffolk Strangler’ were initially rumoured [with xenophobia] to have been perpetrated by a foreign lorry driver [heading to/from the ports of Harwich and Felixstowe]. When the ‘Suffolk Strangler’ was finally captured, this killer of Ipswich sex-workers was in fact a local man - Steve Wright.

Wilson moves to the era of 1912 to 1914 and the crime of ‘femicide’, just prior to First World War Britain. First we have murder by gunshot of Maud Clifford by her husband Percy Clifford, in what some termed a crime of jealous rage and dangerous sexuality that resulted in a murder-suicide pact. Percy Clifford was of mixed race. His father Alfred Clifford came to Britain from Jamaica in 1871, married and raised eight children. It was Percy that fought for the Empire in the Boer War in South Africa.  It would be the murder-suicide that led to his execution. It was at this time that five percent of hangings were of men from ethnic minorities [when they numbered less than one percent of the population].  The main takeaways being [a] the unusual nature of Clifford fighting in a so-called Whiteman’s War in South Africa for the British Empire and [b] twisted sexuality between Percy and Maud Clifford, that culminated in the shootings that left Maud dead, and Percy wounded.

The theme of marital murder continues with bigamist and serial killer George Smith who was convicted of murder by drowning [in bath tubs], to the commencement of scientific forensic investigation.

Post World War One, we have mention of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles [and the first appearance of Hercule Poirot], as well as other Golden Age female crime-writers such as Sayers, Allingham, Wentworth and Marsh. Though it is 1922 that Wilson discusses the murder of Percy Thompson, and the letters and links between Edith Thompson [Percy’s wife] and Freddy Bywaters. They say life imitates art, and so the stabbing to death of Percy Thompson soon reveals the machinations and motives that would not be out-of-place in a Golden Age British Mystery.

Wilson continues his weaving of crime-fiction with true-crime in his examination of the murder of eight-year-old Helen Priestly at a tenement on 61 Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934. He references the city’s Granite Noir Crime Writing Festival, and contrasting the crime-fiction south of the border by Graham Greene in Brighton Rock to the politics of the era between the nations of England and Scotland and between the two World Wars – and most crucially in a family feud in a Scottish tenement versus the crimes of the Brighton ‘underworld’.

Wilson covers the World War Two years with the murders committed by Gordon Cummins ‘The Blackout Ripper’ during the Blitz in London.

Wilson relays the ‘unsolved’ murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 in London’s Notting Hill, drawing tragic parallels to the murder of Stephen Lawrence thirty years later. The failed police investigation[s], and the ‘open secret’ of the perpetrators being racist youths brandishing knives with credible witnesses lays a mirror between the three decades that separate these two murders. There are parallels also drawn between racial tensions in the American Deep-South and that of post-Empire Britain.

And so it goes, as Wilson heads to the North to examine the murder of Jamie Bulger in 1993, the murders committed by Raoul Moat and Derrick Bird in 2010 in context to a socially changing Britain.

He closes his twenty cases with the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by Wayne Couzens – a serving Metropolitan Police Officer in South London. The conclusions he draws throw-up more questions relating to gender, race and with linkages from the Black Lives Matter movement, the effect[s] of the COVID-19 situation, the various national referendums [EU and Scotland], questions of what exactly are ‘British Values’ and the ‘State of the Union’? To questions of what exactly is meant by the term ‘the establishment’?

There is an excellent reading list of secondary literature, annotations and an authoritative index to close.

This is a well-researched book that should be dipped into, chapter-by-chapter with pauses between murders to allow the reader reflection, and to formulate thoughts on the how the ‘past’ remains alive in what we term the ever-present ‘moment’ – in our current England, Scotland and Wales.

As Fyodor Dostoyevsky said in Crime and Punishment “If one wants to know any man well, one must consider him gradually and carefully, so as not to fall into error and prejudice”

An extraordinary work, where the devil does indeed lie in the detail.