2

BRAIN DAMAGE

In 1957 John West left Marcle School and went to work on the farm with Fred and their father. Life as an unskilled labourer was poorly paid, but the West boys could expect nothing better. Their father had been a farm worker all his life, as had their maternal grandfather, William Hill, and his father before him; there was no reason to hope or think that John and Fred would ever do anything else. An acquaintance of Fred’s at the time, Patrick Meredith, says that he fully expected Fred to be ‘walking behind a cow with a stick for the rest of his life’.

It was hard, unforgiving work, and not without its physical hazards, as Fred found out when Walter suffered a serious accident shortly after the boys had started on the farm. The old man was lying under a tractor attempting to mend a part when the handbrake failed, allowing the machine to roll forward and trap his chest. He was freed, but was left with just one functioning lung.

Walter’s eldest sons began to go into the nearby market town of Ledbury at weekends. The town represented Much Marcle’s nearest ‘bright lights’, five and a half miles to the north at the foot of the Malvern Hills. Its high street featured a cinema, chip shop, milk bar and youth club. In the middle of the town, opposite the clock tower, stood the Tudor Market House. Raised up on sixteen oak pillars, this offered a sheltered place for teenagers to meet.

Some of the youths who gathered under the Market House lived in Ledbury, while others, like John and Fred, came in from the surrounding villages, travelling by motorcycle or pushbike. Their average wages were little more than three pounds a week, so entertainment was necessarily simple. Evenings were spent chatting and smoking under the Market House, or lounging in the cheaper seats at the Ledbury Picture House, where Fred enjoyed watching John Wayne films. They did not go to pubs, but drank coffee in the chip shop, which doubled as a café.

One of the few places for teenagers to go in the evenings was the Ledbury Youth Club, run by Ken Stainer, a veteran of the King’s African Rifles who persevered with the club despite considerable opposition. The view expressed in letters to the local newspaper was that the club was part of the then fashionable problem of ‘delinquent youth’, and should be shut down. Its loud rock ‘n’ roll music, smashed windows and noise of motorcycles were apparently constant problems. But, in retrospect, the entertainment was remarkably innocent: with nothing more intoxicating than coffee and Coca-Cola to drink, the teenagers played table tennis and billiards, watched television and listened to records by Adam Faith and Elvis Presley. A few of the girls attempted the jive while the boys, including Fred, slouched in the background dragging on cigarettes.

Now that he was aged sixteen, Fred was taking more of an interest in his appearance. He had started to shave properly, combed his hair before going out and wore clean clothes. The girls who attended the youth club considered him to be one of the best-looking boys around town, and Fred’s future sister-in-law, Christine West, remembers that he was the talk of her school. Fred was ‘always chatting up girls’, she says. But his manner was crude. For every impressionable teenager who had a crush on Fred, there were many more who considered him boorish and unpleasant. These teenagers ridiculed Fred as a ‘country bumpkin’ and called him a ‘dirty Gypsy’, although, contrary to widespread belief, there is no Gypsy blood in his immediate family.

If Fred saw a girl he liked, at the club or at a local dance, he simply grabbed at her – it did not matter to Fred whether she was interested in him or not. He also took a perverse delight in trying to steal girls away from other boys. In the same way that he had goaded John by pulling faces at him through the parlour window, Fred went up to other boys’ dates ‘just for the hell of it’, says his brother Doug. When it came to a fight, John would have to step in to defend his brother, because Fred would never hit back.

John’s willingness to stick up for Fred, no matter how badly he behaved, was part of a fierce code of loyalty that the West family shared. An attack on one would always bring the wrath of the others. ‘We could row amongst ourselves till the cows come home, but nobody else was allowed to pick on the family,’ explains Doug.

Fred often visited H.C. Cecil’s motorcycle shop off the High Street in Ledbury. He found motorcycles exciting and knew that, if he had his own transport, he would also have some freedom from Moorcourt Cottage. A small machine was within his reach if he saved carefully.

The motorcycle that took Fred’s fancy was a 125cc James with a mauve-coloured tank. His mother was against the idea, but relented on the condition that Fred promise to sell it if he had a crash. He agreed and took delivery of a brand new James around the time of his seventeenth birthday. A photograph shows Fred proudly straddling his new machine, while his brothers and sisters gather round grinning: little Gwen perched on the tank between her brother’s arms, and sister Daisy resting against his shoulders.

Brian Hill was a country boy who, like Fred, came into Ledbury at weekends and loitered around the Market House. Brian became one of Fred’s few friends and was allowed to ride the motorcycle. At the chip shop, which was among their regular haunts, Brian remembers that Fred would ostentatiously park the James outside before sauntering in – ‘he tried to be the big one for show’. When they were not riding the motorcycle, they often parked it in the alley next to the Plough public house, stripping it down to clean the engine.

On the evening of 28 November 1958, Fred was riding his James 125 home along the Dymock road when he had an accident. He was just a few hundred yards from Moorcourt Cottage when he collided with a local girl named Pat Manns, who had been cycling in the opposite direction, back to the neighbouring hamlet of Preston Cross where she lived with her parents.

There are a number of possible explanations for the accident: there may have been a car involved; the country road was not lit and the lights on both the push-bike and motorcycle were dim by modern standards; at the point where they collided there were also several potholes. It has even been suggested in village gossip that Fred deliberately rode into the girl. Whatever the cause, they were both sent sprawling across the road.

A labourer from Bridges Farm found the teenagers lying in the dark. The girl had cuts and scrapes, but was not seriously injured. Then the labourer turned to the boy. Fred was lying motionless; he was out cold and there was a fair amount of blood. When the ambulance arrived, the patient was judged to be in too serious a condition to be taken to any of the local cottage hospitals, so he was driven fourteen miles to the city of Hereford, in the west of the county.

In the early morning Fred’s battered helmet and Wellington boots were returned to Moorcourt Farm by a friend, who also delivered an alarming account of Fred’s injuries. While an anguished Daisy sat mooning over her son’s belongings, Walter walked up to Preston Cross to apologise to Pat Manns’ family.

Fred lay unconscious in Hereford Hospital. His vivid blue eyes were unfocused, rolled back in their sockets as if he were dead. Daisy held his hand and tearfully blamed herself for allowing him to buy the motorcycle. The wait stretched into days, and there were fears that he would never come round. A full week passed, and then, on the seventh day after the accident, Fred roused himself from the depths of unconsciousness, his befuddled mind slowly cleared and he woke up. He later described the experience as like ‘coming back from the dead’.

The relief felt by his mother was tempered by a sober appraisal of her son’s injuries. Fred was a mess of lacerations and broken bones. He later claimed that a steel plate had to be fitted in his head to keep his shattered skull together. His nose was broken; injuries to one arm would give him trouble for the rest of his life; and one leg was so severely smashed it had to be held together by a metal brace while the bone mended. Fred was given callipers and a metal shoe. For months after the accident, he stomped about Moorcourt Cottage like Long John Silver, thumping the floor with his foot as he went. ‘You could always tell when Freddie was coming back because he dropped one leg harder than the other. You could hear him coming at night,’ says his brother Doug.

When, after several months, the leg-iron came off, he still had a marked limp and had to use crutches to get around. The accident also altered what good looks he previously had: his nose was crooked and one leg would forever be shorter than the other. The experience also left Fred with a lifelong dislike of hospitals.

Despite these not inconsiderable handicaps, he drifted back into what social life he had enjoyed in Ledbury, hanging around the Market House building and the youth club. Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’ was one of Fred’s favourite records, but his leg was so stiff that his movements looked comical when he tried to dance. He was angry with himself, and for the first time in his life, became aggressive when other boys started making fun of him by saying that he ‘wasn’t any good’.

Fred was also finding life difficult at home. He told his friend June Ledbury that he was unhappy living at Moorcourt Cottage, that he ‘couldn’t hack it’ any more and that his father was getting him down.

It was at this time that Fred met one of the most significant women in his life. Catherine Bernadette Costello, known as Rena or Rene for short, was the girl who would become his first wife. She was a pretty sixteen-year-old with blue eyes, auburn hair and a scar on her brow. They first met at a dance held at the Memorial Hall in Much Marcle, opposite the red-brick village school where Fred had been educated. Rena was staying with relations in the area, having moved down from Scotland in the summer of 1960.

Rena was from Coatbridge, an industrial town a short drive from Glasgow in the district of Strathclyde. Her mother, Mary, left home when Rena was a young child, and Rena’s father, Edward, who worked in a scrap-iron yard, had to bring up his five daughters and their two orphaned cousins on his own. The family, who had little money, lived in Calder Street – a long, straight highway near the centre of the town. It is a grim area, dominated by a huge factory complex. Even the Church of Scotland near the Costello home is a monstrosity of dark stone, more depressing than inspiring. The men drank hard in the evenings and the streets glittered with broken glass after the pubs had closed.

Rena was a delinquent, in trouble with the police from a very early age. Her first appearance at Coatbridge Juvenile Court was for theft, in May 1955, when she was only eleven. Rena was admonished and sent home, but she was back again the following year, also charged with theft. Rena made her third court appearance in 1957, and this time was given a two-year probationary sentence. When she was caught stealing yet again, in March 1958, the magistrates committed her to an approved school, but this served only to harden her character and make her even more reckless. When she reached the age of sixteen, Rena left home and moved to Glasgow, before travelling south to visit relations in England.

Her life had already been something of an adventure in comparison to Fred’s, who had only travelled as far afield as Barry Island. He tried to impress Rena with exaggerated stories, including the colourful account of his recent motorcycle accident. He said that he had actually died after the smash, but had come back to life when his body was laid on the cold marble of the mortician’s slab.

It was not Fred’s fantasies which won Rena over. They came together because she was one of the few girls Fred had met who was prepared to accept his crude ways – and, crucially, his demands for sex. Rena was so coarsened by life herself that she must have been grateful for any affection, even Fred’s. She agreed to sleep with him. The relationship became so intense that Rena tattooed Fred’s name on her left arm, using a sewing needle and black Indian ink.

Probably because of her association with Fred, and the fact that she was staying out late at night, Rena had to leave her relations’ house where she had been lodging. She moved into the New Inn public house in Ledbury High Street, sharing with a Scottish girlfriend. The girls were only there a matter of weeks, and are remembered by landlady Eileen Phillips only because they stayed out late and damaged the furniture in their room by being careless with bottles of hair lacquer.

By the autumn of 1960, Rena was struggling to find work and short of money. There had also been arguments with Fred, who was a jealous boy. She packed up and went home to Scotland.

With Rena gone, Fred turned his attention to the younger girls he knew around Much Marcle. It was at around this time that he began to pester a thirteen-year-old girl from the village.* It was later claimed that he seduced the girl, and continued to have sex with her secretly for the next six months, culminating in a scandal the following year.

He also continued to visit the Ledbury Youth Club a couple of nights each week. The club was held in a dilapidated former domestic science building in a part of the High Street known as the Southend. The building was on two levels, and both the ground-floor and first-floor rooms were used on club nights. An iron fire escape led from the first floor down into the yard. One evening, in the autumn of 1960, Fred made a grab for a girl who was standing near him on the fire escape steps, but instead of giggling or running away, as his victims invariably did, she turned and hit Fred. He lost his balance, toppled over the railing and fell headfirst on to the concrete below.

Teenagers rushed out of the club to look at Fred’s stricken body. He lay perfectly still, and all efforts to revive him failed. He had fallen no more than ten feet, but had banged his head and was out cold, his blue eyes dilated, blood wetting his curly hair. An ambulance was called and he was taken to the cottage hospital in Ledbury. He was still unconscious when he was examined by the doctor, and was referred on to the main hospital in Hereford where he had been a patient just over a year before.

Once again Daisy had to wait by her son’s bed and pray for his recovery. Once again his blue eyes lolled back in their sockets. This second period of unconsciousness, however, was not as long as the first, and he came round after twenty-four hours. But there were lasting effects: Fred became more short-tempered and irritable. His family began to wonder whether he had suffered brain damage.

Now that Rena was gone, and Fred had sold his motorcycle, he had little to do on his weekends in Ledbury, but Brian Hill was still a faithful companion and one day the boys turned to petty theft for excitement. In the spring of 1961, they were sauntering through Tilley and Son, a stationery store near the Ledbury clock tower, when Fred saw a display of ladies cigarette cases. He hissed to Brian, ‘Christ, these are nice!’ and on the spur of the moment put the cigarette cases into his pocket. The boys managed to make it outside without being caught and, flushed with success, Fred also snatched a gold watch-strap from a display in Dudfield and Gaynan’s, one of the town’s jewellers.

The boys slipped furtively along the High Street and turned into a toilet by the Plough public house. Fred said it would be safer if they hid what they had stolen until they were ready to go home. Brian, who was a year younger than his friend, agreed to do whatever Fred thought was best, so they stashed the cigarette cases and watch-strap on top of the cistern and then whiled away the hours until late afternoon.

The shopkeepers had worked out that the thieves must be the two scruffy boys who had been loitering around the shops earlier in the day. They gave the police a description, and when Fred and Brian attempted to leave the town, they were stopped. Fred had the merchandise in his pockets.

On a warm spring day in April 1961, Fred made his first-ever court appearance, standing alongside Brian Hill in the dock of Ledbury Magistrates Court. They were charged with stealing a rolled gold watch-strap, worth just over £2, and two cigarette cases. Brian and Fred pleaded guilty and were fined £4 each, plus costs. Outside the court Fred put on a brave show, grumbling about the size of the fine, which was more than he earned in a week. Brian Hill’s mother was infuriated by the whole affair, and by Fred’s devil-may-care attitude in particular. She told Brian that he was to have no more to do with his friend, whom she believed had led her son into trouble. The case earned Fred his first newspaper report: three paragraphs on page one of the Ledbury Reporter.

The most significant event of Fred’s youth came two months later, in June 1961. Moorcourt Cottage was thrown into turmoil when Fred was suddenly dragged before local police on a shockingly serious charge. He was bluntly told that he had been accused of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl – the relationship which had allegedly started the previous December. A doctor had examined the child and discovered she was pregnant. It was suggested that Fred had had sex with the girl four or possibly five times, and emphasised that she was a full six years younger than him.

Far from being overwhelmed by the seriousness of the allegations, Fred was belligerent with the police, answering Detective Constable Baynham’s questions as though they were completely unimportant. What was more scandalous to Daisy, when she found out, was that the family knew the thirteen-year-old well; Fred had been trusted in her company. ‘She was disgusted,’ says Daisy’s sister-in-law Edna Hill.

Police, teachers and social workers became involved in the affair that followed. When Fred was questioned about his attitudes to sex, it emerged that he had been molesting young girls from his early teens, and that he did not consider his actions to be unusual or shocking. In fact, he was sulky and petulant, put-out that he had to talk about it at all. Of course it was right that he touched little girls, he argued, adding truculently, ‘Well, doesn’t everyone do it?’

The police charged him with having unlawful carnal knowledge of a child, and Fred was briefly kept in a cell while bail was arranged.

It was his complacent attitude to the charges that finally set him adrift from the normal world. After the accidents, the petty thieving and the grabbing at girls, he had now made it absolutely clear that he was not fit to live with civilised people. Daisy agreed that the boy could not spend another night under her roof. It was a turning point in his life, a rejection that Fred would remember with great bitterness. He was sent to live with his mother’s sister, Violet, and her husband Ernie at Daisy Cottage in Much Marcle. None of the family back at Moorcourt Cottage would speak to him. The young girl had her child aborted and Fred’s case was set down for trial in November.

Fred quit farm work, further distancing himself from his family. His decision was partly due to his father, from whom he wanted to get away more than ever. But he would have had to leave the land anyway. Machinery was replacing manual workers, and the life that Walter had led was dying out. Many young men of Fred’s generation found they had to move away from the village. For Fred it would mean a lifetime of odd manual jobs, but he always returned to the first trade he took up – building. He started as a labourer, and then learned the rudiments of carpentry and bricklaying until he came to think of himself, rather grandly, as a fully-fledged builder. John worked alongside him for a while and then went off on his own to become a lorry driver. Building sites afforded Fred ample opportunities to steal. He was working on a housing estate outside the town of Newent, Gloucestershire, when he was arrested for stealing pieces of hardware from the site. When Fred appeared at Newent Magistrates Court he attempted to justify his actions by saying that other workmen took things, so why not he? Fred was fined £20.

He was still getting himself in trouble with girls, and one former girlfriend (who cannot be named for legal reasons) claims she was raped twice by Fred at this time. He had wanted to marry the girl, who lived in Newent, and had even offered her an engagement ring. But she was only fourteen, five years younger than Fred, and Daisy West warned them not to have sex – she did not want the police coming to the house again. Despite this, the girl claims that Fred raped her on two occasions after she had turned fifteen, and that, curiously, he collapsed on to his back after the first assault as if he were experiencing some kind of attack.

On 9 November 1961, shortly after his twentieth birthday, the scruffy labourer with piercing blue eyes appeared in court to face the most serious criminal charges of his young life. He stepped into the dock at Herefordshire Assizes, before Judge Justice Sachs, to be tried for the alleged sexual abuse of the thirteen-year-old girl. Despite Daisy’s disgust, Fred was still a member of the family and she agreed to be called as a defence witness.

The other defence witness was the West family GP, Dr Brian Hardy. It was during the questioning of Dr Hardy by defence counsel that the possibility that Fred had suffered brain damage emerged for the first time. Doctor Hardy agreed with the defence that Fred had sustained head injuries through at least one motorcycle accident, and might be epileptic as a result.

A severe head injury is one of the most common causes of epileptic fits, and the longer the period of unconsciousness following an accident, the more likely it is that the victim will develop fits. Depending on the area of the brain scarred by the injury, there may also be personality changes. Brain damage was an explanation for Fred’s behaviour that was seized upon by Daisy West. When it was her turn to speak, Daisy said that Fred took the blame for many misdemeanours which were not his fault – but her testimony proved unnecessary when, at the last minute, the child who had made the allegations refused to give evidence and the trial collapsed.

Fred walked free from the court, but he was not welcome at home and it is probable that this rejection marked his character. ‘He thought he was the black sheep of the family,’ says his friend, Alf Macklin.

At the age of twenty, Fred was a convicted thief and widely believed to be a child molester. His moods were volatile and he may well have suffered brain damage. Shunned even by his own family, he had already become an outcast of society.

*This girl cannot be identified for legal reasons.