Tag: Police

Grace Blackaller

Grace Blackaller

Grace Blackaller was born in 1909 and murdered on 9 April 1925. She was a sixteen-year-old amateur dancer who loved going to the cinema. Her murderer was her boyfriend, Ernest Rhodes, aged nineteen. Grace’s murder provided tabloid fodder for about two weeks in April 1925 and has since been completely forgotten.[1] The murder of women by their partners sadly remains so commonplace that it is still treated as ‘normal’. In Grace’s case, newspapers were also quick to suggest her own behaviour was somehow at fault.

The newspaper reports immediately after the murder, which are reasonably sympathetic to Grace, hint at a family set-up that is not straightforward. Grace lived in a lodging in Nevern Square, a few minutes from Earls’ Court tube station; according to her landlady she had lived there for four years so since they age of 12.[2] Her mother, however, lived on Challoner Street, which is on the other side of Warwick Road near West Kensington tube. Both locations are about a 15- minute walk apart.

It was on the corner of Challoner Street that Grace was attacked on that Thursday evening. She managed to get to her mother’s doorstep where ‘Her mother found her on the doorstep of her flat with a wound in her throat. Miss Blackaller could only mumble “a man attacked me” and died in hospital without revealing the secret of her murderer’s identity or any detail of the attack.”[3]

The mystery of the attack was sufficient for a number of tabloids to give the story front-page news, and to include a picture of Grace with the reports as well. Grace’s landlady told the Daily Mirror that Grace was working as a dressmaker and a dance teacher, and although ‘she went out a great deal at night to dances and things’ this was ‘like most girls these days’ and Grace had ‘never seen (…) with a boy.’[4] The Express printed a similar line, that ‘Miss Blackaller was not known to be on friendly terms with any particular man.’[5] In these initial reports, when it is assumed that the attack was conducted by a random stranger, Grace’s behaviour is represented as normal for the period and no moral judgements are made about her.

Grace Blackaller,
Daily Mirror, 11 April 1925, front page

The newspapers only changed their tune about Grace when the story developed further, and a murderer came forward. Press reports no longer presented Grace as a wholesome girl who had fallen victim to a random attack when it became apparent that Grace had been killed by her boyfriend, Ernest. Ernest turned himself in to the police on 11 April, when he read in the newspaper that Grace had died – he claimed that he had thought he only injured her.[6]

According to his account, on the 9th of April the couple went to the Blue Hall Cinema in Ravenscourt Park. They got back to West Kensington at about 11pm, and Ernest walked Grace home. Ernest thought his girlfriend had been stringing him along, and he suspected her of seeing other boys. When she did not take his concerns seriously, he took a razor from his pocket and slashed her throat while they were kissing.

This revelation changed the press’s coverage of the case. Sympathy for the ‘pretty young dancer who was fond of gaiety’ gave way to concerns about young girls’ ‘double lives.’[7]  At the final day of the inquest, the coroner read out a letter he had received from a concerned citizen. According to the coroner, the letter expressed ‘common-sense views,’ including the notion that girl murder victims ‘were forward minxes and made advances to young men, stayed out late at night, frequented cinemas and dance places, and had evidently been allowed to run loose.’[8] Suddenly, the previous reports that Grace’s interests in dancing and cinema were normal for girls her age, were inverted to suggest that the fact that these habits were normal was an indication of a moral and social problem.

The text of the letter was uncritically reprinted in several daily newspapers. The Director of the Liverpool Women’s Patrol stated publicly that she agreed with the letter-writer’s assessment of young girls’ lives.[9] The coroner’s decision to read out this letter during the inquest demonstrates that it was accepted that he would have an opinion on the moral aspects of the case as well as on forensic facts.

The opinion of a single member of the public was presented by the coroner as the belief of the general public, and its subsequent endorsement by the conservative press cemented it as the commonly held view. According to a contemporary journalism trade journal, voicing concerns about the modern girl sold newspapers in the interwar period the way a sensational murder sold them before the First World War. [10] In the reporting on Grace Blakaller, the popular press had managed to combine both ingredients into a successful multi-part story which reaffirmed that it was safer for a woman to stay at home and not have romantic relationships.

To further demonstrate how deeply the narrative that Grace was at fault for her own plight was embedded, these were Ernest Rhodes’ lawyer’s comments when Rhodes was committed for trial: ‘without eliminating the question of provocation, (…) my defence will be – and I shall call on the highest medical evidence to support it – that he [Rhodes] did not know the nature and quality of the act or that, if he did know, he did not know he was doing wrong.’[11]

In other words, the first line of defence was that Grace provoked Ernest, which, it was implied, would diminish his culpability. The second line was that Rhodes did not know that running a razor across someone’s throat could lead to that person dying; and the third line was that Rhodes did not realise that committing an act of violence was wrong. It was this final argument that would be successful; Rhodes was committed to an asylum rather than prison and was released for good behaviour in 1933.

Again, the press reporting partially paved the way for this, as Rhodes was described as ‘a boy with rather a lot of peculiarities’ who was ‘constantly talking about Norman Thorne’ – a young man who had killed his girlfriend in December 1924 and who was awaiting his execution in April 1925.[12] Obsession with a killer was presented as a sign of insanity which, in combination with the narrative that had been constructed around Grace’s ‘provocative’ lifestyle, allowed Rhodes’ legal counsel to mount a successful defence. The daily press was instrumental in influencing the public’s opinion about this case which limited public sympathy for Grace and painted her as culpable for her own murder.

You can read more about Grace Blackaller in my book, Interwar London after Dark in British Popular Culture.

[1] Except by amateur historians and true crime enthusiasts who have pored over the story on internet fora

[2] ‘Murdered Girl: Woman’s Story’, Daily Mirror, 11 April 1925, p. 15

[3] ‘Dance Girl Murdered in London’, Daily Express, 11 April 1925, p. 1

[4] ‘Murdered Girl: Woman’s Story’

[5] ‘Girl Murdered in London’, Daily Express, 11 April 1925, p. 7

[6] ‘Dead Girl Dancer: Story of Youth’s Written Confession’, Daily Mirror, 14 April 1925, p. 2

[7] ‘Murdered Girl: Woman’s Story’; ‘Double-Life Girls’, Daily Express, 23 April 1925, p. 2

[8] ‘Dancing Girl’s Death’, The Times, 23 April 1925, p. 14; ‘Dead Dancer: Boy For Trial’, Daily Mirror, 23 April 1925, p. 21; ‘Double-Life Girls’.

[9] ‘Girls’ Double Lives’, Daily Mirror, 24 April 1925, p. 2

[10] Newspaper World, April 1927, as quoted in Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 48

[11] ‘Dance Girl Drama’, Daily Mirror, 29 April 1925, p. 2

[12] Ibid.

The Dark Eyes Of London (1939)

The Dark Eyes Of London (1939)

One of the more popular genres of literature in interwar London was crime fiction, and one writer became synonymous with London crime stories of this period: Edgar Wallace. Wallace was a born and bred Londoner who worked as a journalist before becoming a full-time fiction writer. At the end of his life he moved to Hollywood to write for the talking pictures. Wallace wrote over 175 books, a number of which were adapted for the screen.[i]

The consumption of written fiction experienced a boom in interwar Britain due to a convergence of several factors. Levels of literacy increased as a consequence of the 1918 Education Act which raised the school leaving age to 14. Penguin books costing sixpence each were first printed in 1935. Improved working conditions and legislation generally led to people having more leisure time in which to read; and reading became a common activity on the daily commute.

Wallace published the novel The Dark Eyes of London in 1924. In the story, Inspector Holt of Scotland Yard is approached by a young lady, Diana. Diana suspects that her wealthy father has been murdered for his life insurance money, on the orders of a criminal who pretends to run a charity home for the blind. The story was turned into a film in 1939, under the direction of the experienced Walter Summers. Although Wallace is credited as a co-writer, he passed away in 1932, so  had no active involvement in the film’s production

The film version of The Dark Eyes of London is notably heavier on the horror elements than the original story. The murders of the old men are undertaken by one of the criminal’s henchmen, Jake, who is ‘disfigured’ and appears as a semi-Frankenstein’s Monster. The film was released in the US under the title The Human Monster, to further underscore the body-horror elements. In the UK it was awarded a rare ‘H’ certificate by the BBFC which restricted its audience to those aged 16 and above. Most notably, the criminal mastermind is played by legendary horror actor Bela Lugosi, in a rare appearance in a British feature.

The Dark Eyes of London was shot at Welwyn Studios, a small studio in the new Garden City which was explicitly designated for the production of thrillers and second features (ie features shown as part of a cinema programme but not expected to be the main attraction).[ii] Walter Summers was no stranger to bringing the horror atmosphere to film.[iii] In short, The Dark Eyes of London had all the ingredients to become a British exponent of the pulp horror genre; and the finished product leans into this heavily.

Its genre tropes serve to obscure the underlying xenophobia and ableism on which the film’s story is reliant. Lugosi’s character is called Dr Orloff; a name clearly intended to signal an unspecified Eastern European descent. In Wallace’s original story the equivalent character is called John Dearborn. Like many British interwar films, the criminal element is marked as foreign, reflecting increased anti-foreign sentiments that circulated in the run-up to the Second World War. The threat Orloff brings to the British nation is signalled right from the film’s opening, when his eyes are superimposed over a shot of Tower Bridge. At the end of the film the foreign threat is neutralised and the union of the British couple, Inspector Holt and Diana, is celebrated.

The opening of The Dark Eyes of London

The treatment of disability in The Dark Eyes of London is even more explicitly problematic. Two types of disability are shown in the film: Jake, Dr Orloff’s henchman, has unspecified ‘deformity’; and Dr Orloff himself pretends to be blind. Jake’s appearance is intended to horrify the audience, with fake teeth, rolled-back eyes and a hunchback. He is also mute and his level of intelligence is left unspecified. He is possibly the ‘Human Monster’ to which the US title of the film refers – he certainly features prominently on the film’s poster.[iv] Jake is the one who commits the murders on Orloff’s direction; he is presented as having no free will and no understanding of right or wrong. At the film’s climax Jake turns on his master and kills Orloff before conveniently dying himself.

Introduction of Jake in The Dark Eyes of London

There are clear echoes of Frankenstein and his Monster here, but without the nuanced consideration of free will and agency of that novel, The Dark Eyes of London simply reduces Jake to a spectacle. His appearance bears no relation to real-life disability. The other characters variously treat Jake like a servant, animal, or child, reinforcing a narrative that those with a physical appearance that deviates from the norm do not need to be treated like equals.

The depiction of blindness in The Dark Eyes of London is markedly different. Orloff pretends to be blind to escape suspicion from the police, as blind people are assumed to be severely limited in their mobility and therefore unable to conduct criminal activity. The film’s plot heavily leans on the use of braille as a way of transferring covert and criminal messages. This is presumably the reason why Wallace chose for his criminal mastermind to be running a home for the blind. The blind are depicted as being separate from the rest of society, in their own community that cannot be penetrated and that may be devious. Although Orloff’s pretend-blindness is condemned because he uses it to evade criminal investigation, it is not treated as morally objectionable.  

Had it not been for Lugosi, who continues to have a dedicated fanbase, The Dark Eyes of London would likely have been forgotten. It uses horror genre tropes which allows the audience to put it in the same bracket as other B horror films from both sides of the Atlantic. However, these generic conventions hide underlying assumptions about which kind of people are the heroes (white, British, able-bodied) and which kind are villains (foreign, disabled). Some of these generic elements were specifically introduced in the film adaptation of the story, reflecting both the increasingly anti-foreign sentiments in the late-1930s and problematic visual cues used in cinema of the period, more generally.

The Dark Eyes of London is available in full on YouTube.

[i] According to Jeffrey Richards, 33 of Wallace’s books were turned into films in the 1930s alone. Jeffrey Richards, Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: IB Tauris, 2010), p. 254

[ii] Steve Chibnall, Quota Quickies; The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 26-27

[iii] Ibid., p. 100.

[iv] Bela Lugosi is not pictured on the US poster at all despite having top billing.