The Winnats Pass Mystery

2020 The Winnats Pass Mystery Alan Sargeant Anarchism/Communism 8/28/2020 The Winnats Pass Mystery: The Death of Harry Fallows In the aftermath of a fractious year that had seen the much feared General Strike promise to set Britain ablaze with devastating flames of crisis and sedition, the national papers made the most of an unremarkable start to the New Year. The famous Winnats Pass in the craggy High Peaks of Derbyshire, a favourite rambling and cycling spot among Sheffield and Manchester city folk, had been the scene of a ‘sensational discovery’. The bodies of a young man and woman, who had been missing from their homes in Manchester since January 1st 1927, were found at dusk on Saturday 8th by 17-year old rambler Fred Bannister from Manchester. The victims of the tragedy were Harry Fallows of 28 Hinde Street in Moston, Manchester and 17 year-old Marjorie Coe Stewart of 44 Hinde Street. Incredibly, the story emerged just days before another missing persons’ story had been resolved. Glasgow-born activist Nancy Graham had disappeared from her home on the evening of Wednesday 5th. Her husband, a naval architect trained at John Brown & Co Ltd in Clydebank, had discovered his barely conscious wife a week later in the empty home of a Presbyterian minister in Upton near Liverpool. If the discovery of the bodies in Castleton hadn’t been linked to the Toplis ‘Grey Motor’ case, the story may well have missed the press columns entirely. The dead man was 26 year-old Harry Fallows, the former corporal in the RASC Vehicle Office at Bulford Military Base who just several years before had been charged with harbouring and maintaining the fugitive Percy Toplis — legendary leader of the mutiny at the Etaples Base Camp in France during the war 1. Archive records show that over a three day period in September 1917, thousands of British soldiers transiting through France had downed arms and rioted over demeaning Page | 2 Winnats Pass Mystery, Alan Sargeant — [email protected] camp conditions and the atrocious routine abuses being meted out by instructors and camp police. It was rumoured that Percy Toplis was among the more lawless of the men involved. Toplis’ story was eventually re-imagined in the 4-part BBC drama, The Monocled Mutineer in the 1980s, a blistering critique of the war written by Alan Bleasdale, starring Paul McGann and directed by lifelong Socialist, Jim O’ Brien. And for a four-week period in September 1986 it caused nothing short of chaos for the Tory Government. The facts relating to the ‘Etaples Mutiny’ had been covered-up for the best part of seventy years, partly as a result of embarrassment and partly to suppress a broad scale civil uprising in the immediate aftermath of the war. The fury of the troops had been settled by negotiation. Acknowledging the mutiny had meant conceding the possibility that violent revolution could be a successful model for change. With the exception of the occasional allusion in parliament — usually made by nervous Rear Admirals in hushed, evasive tones or by boisterous Scottish Socialists teasing the cat out of the bag — the mutiny was dutifully buried beneath the thickest of murmurs and whispers. It was only the determination of Douglas Gill and Gloden Dallas — two military historians of a uniquely militant and enquiring bent — that led to it being unearthed and re-examined under a harsh, if not exactly panoptic, academic light (Mutiny at Etaples Base in 1917, Past & Present, OUP, Nov 1975, No. 69). A book by John Fairley and William Allison followed — and the rest, as they say, is unwanted history. Little is known about the riots themselves. The first national press report on the incident was published some thirteen years later by the Manchester Guardian, based on the eyewitness statement of a junior officer, but anything other than informal oral testimony evidence remains frustratingly thin on the ground and what there is remains dogged by rumour and speculation. As Mark Lancaster, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence confessed in April 2017, the official records pertaining to the Haig Board of Inquiry into the Etaples Mutiny Page | 3 Winnats Pass Mystery, Alan Sargeant — [email protected] had been lost (Hansard, Citation: HC Deb, 24 April 2017, cW). But there are clues in Haig’s diary and letters written by other officers. On the third day of the riots Field Marshall Douglas Haig had written in his diary that the disturbances had occurred when “some men of new drafts with revolutionary ideas” had produced red flags and refused to obey orders (Douglas Haig: Diaries and Letters 1914-1918). The Camp Diary of Base Commandant Brigadier Thomson fleshes the story out in a little more detail, whilst leaving out the militant Socialism that may or may not have inspired it. Some two and a half years after the mutiny, Winnats Pass suicide victim, Harry Fallows had been the star witness at a hastily convened inquest that saw Toplis — the ‘man with a gold-rimmed monocle’ and much-touted ringleader of the mutiny — tried and found guilty in absentia for murder of taxi-driver Sidney Spicer. The theory that Superintendent James Cox of Hampshire Police was pursuing was that Toplis had stolen the car, murdered the cab driver and taken Fallows on a joyride to Swansea, where Toplis then ditched the car after failing to sell it on. A dramatic nationwide manhunt had then been launched before Toplis, the military “Ishmael”, was gunned down by Police in Penrith. As a result of the 1978 book by John Fairley and William Allison and the explosive drama by Bleasdale in the 1980s, a legend has evolved that the ambush on Toplis had been sanctioned by the British Home Office and secretly coordinated by British Secret Service. It was and remains a far-fetched claim but the circumstances surrounding the death of his accomplice, Harry Fallows in some remote recess of the Dark Peak in January 1927 — so soon after the Great Strike — adds a dash of plausibility. This was a pivotal year for Anglo-Russian relations and Mi5 and Special Branch were up to their necks in intrigue. The notorious Police raid on the Soviet ‘Arcos’ offices in London which took place in May that year, was based partly on evidence that there was Soviet Military spy- ring operating from Longsight in Manchester under the coordination of Cheka Page | 4 Winnats Pass Mystery, Alan Sargeant — [email protected] agent, Jacob Kirchenstein and featuring Metro-Vickers worker, Fred E. Walker. Just weeks after the death of Fallows, James Cullen — a founding member of the British Communist Party who had been sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for his role in the Etaples Mutiny — published his own account of the riots in France and like Haig he heaped no shortage of blame on Bolshevik trouble-makers. More curiously still, it was on the actual day of the raid of the Soviet offices that Newcastle MP, Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan presented the Access to Mountains Bill to Parliament. A meeting to support the Bill would take place in Winnats Pass that June and it was here that Sheffield and Manchester Socialists declared their full intention to support it. The arrival of former Communist MP, Walton Newbold to contest the High Peaks at the next election, had seen this little-known limestone gorge transformed into a political magma chamber and the death of Fallows, peculiarly enough, had taken place in one of its main vents. But what does all this have to do with Toplis? Well one story published in the wake of the villain’s death cast Toplis as an armed and dangerous anarchist with links to an organized Soviet cell operating in the East End of London (World Pictorial News, June 11 1920). Although it’s likely to be lacquered in misconceptions and half-truths, some reports in the Scottish Press at the time of the murder inquiry do much to support the rumour. Arriving at a Temperance Hotel in Inverness, Toplis is reported to have blithely told the property owner that he had “recently been in Russia”. The hotelkeeper went on to describe how Toplis, a ‘modern day Yorrick’, had made quite an impression on guests by delighting them with tunes on the piano in the hotel lounge. The tunes he was most fond of playing? “Nearer my God to Thee and the Russian National Anthem” (Highland News, June 5th 1920). The boasts and his playing of the anthem probably did little to help his cause. There had already been speculation that Toplis had been involved in the brutal murder of former Etaples matron, Nurse Florence Nightingale Shore, bludgeoned to death on a train travelling Page | 5 Winnats Pass Mystery, Alan Sargeant — [email protected] between London and Bexhill-on-Sea. The Nurse’s cousin, I would learn much later, was the cousin of Raphale Farina, the sitting Head of Mi5’s Russian Section, who was at this time compiling a list of suspected Communist sympathizers and suspicious Russian émigrés active in Bexhill and Hastings. The role of Harry Fallows in the ‘Grey Motor Car Murder’ inquiry was even less straightforward than the role alleged to have been played Toplis, whose guilt was never firmly established. Despite Harry being arrested as an accomplice in the murder of Spicer, all subsequent charges were withdrawn against him and he was only ever called as a witness at a hastily convened inquest in Salisbury that Toplis found guilty of murder ‘in absentia’. Harry had made no attempt to deny that he had ridden with Toplis in the stolen vehicle immediately after the murder but claimed to have been elsewhere when Spicer was killed.

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