Ghosts & Gallows (15 page)

On this occasion, a young twenty-two-year-old girl Bessy Manning spoke through the trumpet and gave details of her death from tuberculosis as well as the passing of her brother, Tommy Manning, in a car accident. When asked for an address, the voice gave details of a house in Canterbury Street, Blackburn, to which Barbanell wrote with details of the sitting. Mrs Manning responded and confirmed all the information given at the séance. Barbanell subsequently arranged for Mrs Manning to be brought to London and he drove her himself to a house in Teddington in Middlesex, where she again was able to speak to her deceased children, who gave information of which no person other than the mother was aware. Spiritualist newspapers of the period contain many references to communications and reunions such as these and Estelle Roberts was easily the equivalent of today’s celebrity and television psychics, taking part in large organised events such as demonstrations of clairvoyance at the Royal Albert Hall in front of over 6,000 people. Roberts wrote her memoirs, which were published in 1959, and died in 1970 at the age of ninety-one.

The flowering of Estelle Robert’s mediumship in the inter-war years took place during the last great phase of interest and investigation into Spiritualism, both in Britain and abroad, by paranormal organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research. Where physical mediumship was concerned it was a golden age the likes of which, both in respect of public demonstrations and the involvement of psychical researchers, will in all honesty never be seen again. High-profile controversies, such as the exploits of ‘Margery’ in America and the wartime ‘witchcraft trial’ of Helen Duncan at the Old Bailey, did much to foster an atmosphere of mutual distrust between mediums and their supporters on one side, and psychical researchers representing the scientific establishment on the other. Changes in intellectual fashion where psychical research was concerned – the Rhine revolution with its emphasis on parapsychology and statistical analysis – eventually consigned the investigation of mediums to a kind of paranormal Dark Ages. The vast majority of psychical researchers soon began to prefer statistics to the séance room while the Spiritualist movement, secure in its own beliefs, eschewed scientific investigation of any kind.

Where psychical research was concerned, the mediumship of Estelle Roberts was no different to that of say Helen Duncan, Jack Webber or Alec Harris
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. Her refusal of an offer to be tested by the Society for Psychical Research and the need for darkness in her direct-voice séances created the usual suspicion in the minds of the ghost hunters, and the fact that Roberts was one of several mediums (including Kathleen Barkel and Maurice Barbanell) whose spirit guides gave an emphatic ‘no war’ prophecy in the months before the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939
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gave the sceptics much to work with.

Events such as this notwithstanding, it is true to say that Estelle Roberts was for many years one of the most well known Spiritualist mediums in Britain, and it was this notable fact which drew her into a sequence of tragic events which took place in the English Midlands in the opening months of 1937.

Some time around the middle of May 1937, Walter Marshall, a gas-works manager from Bawtry, together with his wife and three sons was spending an afternoon boating on the River Ryton, a tributary of the larger River Idle in Nottinghamshire. Around a quarter of a mile upstream from the junction of the two rivers on the approach to Scrooby Mill, the punt ran aground on a sandbank and while attempting to free themselves they disturbed a large sack which had also been caught up in the sand. The sack gave off a dreadful smell and using one of the oars Marshall pushed it away into the silt. After freeing the punt the party carried on their way and the sack was lost to sight. Despite many recent newspaper headlines, both local and national in the previous months, its significance was not recognised by Walter Marshall and his family at the time.

Five months before, at around seven o’clock on the evening of 5 January 1937, Wilfred Tinsley, a coal carter, and his wife Lilian became concerned at the whereabouts of their ten-year-old daughter Mona, who had not returned home from school that afternoon. The Tinsleys lived in a council house in Thoresby Avenue, Newark and Mona, one of seven children, attended the Wesleyan School in Guildhall Street, which was about twenty minutes walk away. Mona had in fact been seen out of the school at the end of the day’s lessons at four o’clock by her class teacher, Miss Hawley, and normally got back to Thoresby Avenue half an hour later. When she failed to appear around that time her parents were not unduly concerned as they had relations in the area and assumed that Mona had called in to see them on the way home. Two and a half hours after she should have been back, Mr Tinsley went out to check, but their family members knew nothing of the young child. At a quarter to ten Wilfred Tinsley went for the police.

The Newark Borough Constabulary quickly instigated an intensive search for the missing child. During the night empty properties in the town were checked, lorries passing along the Great North Road were stopped and examined, and officers searched the banks of the River Trent looking for some clue to Mona’s disappearance. The following morning, policemen visited all the Newark schools and assemblies were called. The children were asked that if any of them had seen Mona Tinsley on the previous afternoon following the end of the school day, they should speak immediately to the police. Soon Chief Constable Barnes, who was leading the search, had his first clues.

A neighbour of the Tinsleys, eleven-year-old William Plackett who lived two doors down, said he saw Mona between four thirty and a quarter to five in the company of a man near the Newark bus station, and, later the same day, two women also came forward. One confirmed the schoolboy’s sighting of Mona near the bus terminus while the second lady, a Mrs Annie Hird who, similarly to William Plackett, lived two doors away from the Tinsleys in Thoresby Avenue, said that in the quarter of an hour before the Wesleyan School was due to finish for the day she had been walking down Balderton Street (now renamed Balderton Gate) and passing the end of Guildhall Street when she had seen a man she recognised as a former lodger of the Tinsleys standing alone on the street corner looking across towards the door of the school. The policemen returned to Thoresby Avenue and Barnes spoke with Wilfred and Lilian Tinsley. The couple at first were evasive but eventually admitted that fifteen months earlier, in October 1935, a man calling himself Frederick Hudson had lodged there for a short time. He had been introduced to them by Mrs Tinsley’s married sister Edie Grimes, who, like her other two sisters and her brother, lived in Sheffield, and during his time with the Tinsleys was known as Uncle Fred by their children. Hudson eventually left after three weeks having had difficulty in paying the rent. His departure had been amicable but he had at no time been given authority to take charge of Mona or her siblings.

Barnes sent officers to Sheffield while in Newark the intensive search for Mona Tinsley continued. By the late afternoon of 6 January, the police had taken a statement from Charles Reville, a local bus driver who, the previous day, had taken the regular 4.45 p.m. bus to the nearby market town of Retford, approximately twenty-two miles south-east of Newark. Reville acted as both driver and conductor and remembered seeing a young girl answering Mona’s description in the company of a man who bought a half-crown return for himself but, ominously, only a tenpence single for the child. They had both got off his bus at a stop in Grove Street, Retford.

At Sheffield, policemen visited the addresses of the Tinsley’s relatives and were soon knocking on the door of Thomas and Edie Grimes in Neil Road. In a similar vein to her sister, Edie Grimes and her husband were at first unhelpful and denied knowing anyone by the name of Frederick Hudson. When pressed, Mrs Grimes admitted she knew a man named Frederick Nodder but had not seen him for some time. When Barnes’ men checked with colleagues at Sheffield police station it soon became clear that Hudson and Nodder were one and the same person, who had good reason to go under an assumed name.

Frederick Colmore Nodder was a motor mechanic and sometime lorry driver from Sheffield in his early forties. Separated from his wife and two children, he was the subject of an affiliation order (known at the time as a ‘bastardy warrant’) for unpaid maintenance on an illegitimate child. It later transpired that soon after leaving his wife, Nodder befriended Mr and Mrs Grimes and took up lodgings with them and, in their company, had visited the Tinsleys at Newark on more than one occasion. The police returned to Neil Road and interviewed Edie Grimes again, who continued to be uncooperative and insisted that she had not seen or heard from Nodder since he left to live with her sister and brother-in-law. While one officer spoke to Mrs Grimes, another policeman questioned a neighbour and it became clear that Mrs Grimes was lying. She had good reason, as she and Nodder were having an affair, something her husband may have known about and was possibly a voyeur. Her elderly neighbour recalled seeing a lorry with the word ‘Retford’ painted on the side parked in Neil Road close to the Grimes’ house the previous month, over the Christmas period. When confronted with this statement, Thomas Grimes admitted that Nodder had called on them around that time but insisted that he had no idea of his present whereabouts. This may have been true but his wife certainly did know where Nodder was living.

During the afternoon of 6 January, Chief Constable Barnes established through enquiries at public houses and motor garages in Retford that a man by the name of Nodder was living on Smeath Road near the village of Hayton, some three and a half miles from Retford. The house, called ‘Peacehaven’, was recently built and still stands today, although the surrounding area was not so built up. When Barnes together with a detective-sergeant, two other officers and their driver arrived at around seven in the evening, they found it lonely and isolated; it was also in darkness with no immediate sign of the occupier.

The policemen, having checked with the next-door neighbour and finding that Nodder had been seen there during the day, decided to wait and took up positions near the house and in the roadway. The night was dark with a gale-force wind. After nearly four hours Nodder appeared and, after Barnes had established his identity, went with him into the house using the back door, the front being fixed shut with screws. When questioned, Nodder denied any knowledge of Mona Tinsley or her whereabouts, although he admitted he knew her and claimed to have spent the day in Newark looking for work. The bastardy warrant enabled Barnes to hold Nodder while the police searched for evidence that might connect him with the child’s disappearance, and he was taken to the cells in Newark police station.

The following day the police returned to ‘Peacehaven’. The house was searched thoroughly, floorboards were lifted and, aware that what had begun as an enquiry for a missing person could develop into a murder hunt, officers dug up the garden and opened the attic. Amongst a pile of newspapers and magazines a piece of paper was found covered with a child’s handwriting and, similarly, a child’s fingerprint was discovered on a plate on the kitchen draining board. The immediate neighbours were also interviewed and the daily maid – a woman living two doors down from ‘Peacehaven’ – stated that the previous morning, while taking rubbish to the dustbin, she had seen a young girl wearing what she thought was a blue dress standing in the back doorway of Nodder’s house; Nodder himself was digging in the garden at the time.

While the police were turning over ‘Peacehaven’, Frederick Nodder was taking part in an identification parade at Newark police station. The Tinsley’s neighbours, William Plackett and Annie Hird, together with the bus driver Charles Reville confirmed that Nodder was the man they had seen on 5 January, but, when questioned again, the motor mechanic denied having taken the Retford bus that afternoon.

Realising that the search for Mona was stalling for lack of new evidence, Barnes organised an appeal for information to be broadcast on national radio and statements were issued to the Press with a request for maximum publicity. Notices were sent to police stations and posters with the child’s photograph and description were circulated. Three people quickly came forward – a passenger on Charles Reville’s bus together with two labourers, both acquaintances of Nodder – who stated they had seen a man and Nodder himself respectively in the company of a small girl resembling the missing child the previous Tuesday afternoon. Nodder’s drinking buddies noticed that he appeared to have come from the Retford bus stop and was walking with the girl along the road to Hayton village.

The following evening, just after ten o’clock, Nodder made a request to see a detective sergeant. William Francis, who was on duty, went to the cells and Nodder stated that if Edie Grimes was brought to the police station he would make a statement that would lead to Mona Tinsley being found alive and well. Francis telephoned to Sheffield and a car was sent to Neil Road. At a quarter to one in the morning, Nodder was brought into Chief Constable Barnes’ office, where Mrs Grimes was waiting. Indicating the policemen, Nodder said to his mistress, ‘They know about us,’ and asked if Mona was with her in Sheffield, to which Edie Grimes said no.

Nodder then made a statement in which he admitted seeing Mona in the street in Newark on Tuesday afternoon. She had asked after her Auntie Edie in Sheffield and asked if he would take her to see her baby cousin Peter, who she had not yet met. As he expected to see Mrs Grimes the following day (they were meeting regularly once a week at the time), Nodder said he reluctantly agreed and took Mona back to ‘Peacehaven’, where she stayed the night. However, his meeting with Edie did not take place, so he took her in the evening on the 6.45 p.m. bus to Worksop with instructions on how to get to Neil Road in Sheffield, together with a letter explaining his actions to Mr and Mrs Grimes. After seeing her off on the 8.15 p.m. bus to Sheffield, he drank at two pubs in Retford before returning home, where he was met in the road by Barnes and his men. His excuse for not taking the child to Sheffield himself was fear of trouble due to the warrant for non-payment of his illegitimate child maintenance. If anything had happened to Mona Tinsley, then it must have been during the time that he was travelling back to Retford or drinking ale in the Sherwood Foresters Arms.