This is the third in a 11-part investigation into the 1934 ‘Bow Cinema Murder’. You can read all entries in the series here. 

So who was the man who rang the Hoard’s doorbell on the morning of 7 August 1934 and attacked Dudley and Maisie with such deadly consequences? The initial police investigation assumed that the crime was committed by one or perhaps two criminals, who potentially allowed themselves to be locked into the cinema the night before. Investigators were reported to be questioning known criminals in the East End for clues.[1]

The truth was somewhat different, and closer to home. The attack on Dudley and Maisie was committed by a nineteen-year-old employee of the Eastern Palace Cinema: John Frederick Stockwell. John had only worked at the cinema for a few months, after being hired by Dudley. As an attendant, it was his duty to check tickets and show patrons to their seats. Like many neighbourhood cinemas at the time, the Eastern Palace operated on a ‘continuous performance’ basis, meaning that once the first screening of the day started, screenings continued on a loop until the end of the day. Patrons could show up at any time and stay as long as they liked. A crew of male and female attendants were therefore constantly occupied with letting people in and out of the auditorium.

Like many people in the East End, John Stockwell came from an impoverished background – but he was not brought up locally. He was born on 2 March 1915 near King’s Cross. His father had died at the front at Mons before John was even born. His mother re-married, but died in 1926 when John was 11. John had a brother, Horace, who was three years’ his senior – by the time the men had grown up they were no longer close. After his mother’s death, John went to live with an aunt, Elizabeth Brown. Because John’s father had died in the war, Elizabeth received a financial contribution from the state for John’s upkeep. Elizabeth decided around 1930 to move away from central London, and out to Bromley in Kent.

For the teenage John, who was no longer required to attend school, the change from Kings Cross to Bromley was not beneficial. Elizabeth reported that John no longer accepted her as a parental authority; he appears to have been out and about with a group of other young men. Eventually, Elizabeth decided she could no longer support John living with her, and he moved to a Salvation Army Boys Home in Bow Road some time in 1930. These homes were designed exactly for people like John: young men who lacked family or community support. They intended to give these men the skills to get employment and become independent. The SA arranged for John to get a job at a cloth manufacturer at Barbican. During his time there, John stole some cloth; he was caught and appeared before the Magistrate’s court in December 1931. John was sentenced to two year’s probation, meaning he had to meet up with a probation officer regularly.  

The Salvation Army had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to criminal activity, so John lost his lodgings. He had met, through the Army’s church activities, a local widow, Ellen Roake, and had become particularly close to Eliza’s youngest daughter Violet. Ellen agreed to take John on as a lodger, and he moved into the tiny Roake family home in early 1932. John and Violet became an official couple. After a short period working for a pastry chef, John was unemployed until he found the job at the Eastern Palace Cinema, which was only a 15-minute walk from the Roake’s home. One of the cinema’s other attendants, Charles Whitnell, lived practically next door to the Roakes.

 

As an attendant, John earned 32 shillings and sixpence a week. He paid 15 shillings a week for his board and lodging, leaving him with less than £1 a week for any other expenses. At the time of the murder, he did have a savings account with the Post Office, but it contained only 30 shillings (£1.50). Clearly, John had always lived in poverty. The nearly £90 that he stole from the cinema safe after attacking Dudley and Maisie was probably more money than he had ever seen together in his life; it was certainly more than he could ever imagine to save up himself. By August 1934, John and Violet had been going out for several years, but he could probably not imagine how he would ever make enough money to enable them to get married and start their own family.

He also had virtually no contact with his family at this point, and no social community to fall back on; he’d been removed from the community in King’s Cross in which he had grown up. The East End neighbourhood in which he lived from 1930 was one in which family ties counted for a lot, and he was perceived as an outsider. During the police investigation, his colleagues reported that they had found John odd, and his previous conviction for theft was known and made people suspicious of him.

None of these things justify his attack on the Hoards, but they do illustrate that the lack of structural social care in interwar Britain left individuals vulnerable. If you did not have a strong personal support network, you could very quickly find yourself in a situation that felt interminable. Once John committed the theft of cloth in 1931, what little social support he had been able to count on was also removed. In addition, rigid class boundaries made it even less likely for someone in his position to materially improve his circumstances. It is understandable, then, that someone of his young age, with little adult supervision to guide him, came to the conclusion that the only way to get ahead was to break the rules and commit a theft.

Once John had committed his attack and stolen the money, he managed to leave the Eastern Palace Cinema unseen. Tuesday was his weekly day off work. That evening, when Violet finished her shift at the Kearley & Tonge biscuit factory in Bethnal Green, John treated her to a trip to the Stoll cinema in the West End. Unbeknownst to Violet, he used part of the stolen money to pay for the tickets. On the way to the cinema, they discussed Dudley Hoard’s murder, as it was splashed over the evening papers. It would be the last evening they spent together, as the next day John used his stolen money to escape London, triggering a multi-day manhunt that captured the attention of the nation.

[1] ‘“Yard” reconstructs the crime,’ Daily Herald, 8 August 1934, p. 2