Abstract
From an age when Britain loved to read about sex and scandal, the story of a muck-raking reporter with his own scandals to hide
Duncan Webb, a journalist renowned for sensational exposés, was determined that his final story would not appear in print. Aware that death was imminent, he wanted his wedding to the former wife of a murderer to remain a secret. He chose a register office in the tiny market town of Bala in north Wales, more than 200 miles from Fleet Street. He concealed his identity by calling himself a farmer and giving a false address. Nothing of the bride's background, such as her two previous marriages, was vouchsafed to the registrar. Their witnesses were willing participants to the subterfuge. It worked. No whisper of their wedding on August 21, 1958 emerged in public before Webb died, aged 41, just 18 days later. Although their marriage did eventually become common knowledge, the reason for it has remained a mystery ever since. Until now.
Webb was a newspaperman who justified that journalistic cliché about being larger than life. A movie scriptwriter would find it hard to make his career appear credible. For a period of eight years until his death, he was the most famous investigative journalist in Britain. In 1955, Time magazine described him as “the greatest crime reporter of our time”. Articles praising his work, and his bravery, appeared in papers across Europe. Producers hired him as an adviser on television's earliest detective series. Rival reporters were in awe of his abilities. He was the hero of a novel by Murray Sayle, the late Sunday Times foreign correspondent, who wrote: “Webb set a standard of honest reporting later to flower in various Insights, Daylights and other forms of group-grope investigative journalism. But no one ever did it better.”
In an era when murderers went to the gallows, vicious gangs ran protection rackets, smash-and-grab raids were common and prostitution was big business, crime was the number one topic for the popular press and The People, then a broadsheet selling more than five million copies every Sunday, specialised in revelatory crime stories. Its irascible managing editor, Sam Campbell, created Webb's public image as a heroic crime-fighter, giving him ample resources for his investigations and encouraging his penchant for exaggeration. He recognised Webb's reporting skills and enabled his eccentric character traits to flourish. Webb told readers he was under constant surveillance by gangsters, his office was protected by bullet-proof glass, his front door was fitted with eight locks, he was protected by minders and he slept at a different address every night. In fact, Webb was a bundle of contradictions. As a pontificating campaigner in the pursuit of truth, he could be more than a little economical with the truth himself; he inveighed against criminals but he played Boswell to a brutal gangster; he championed law and order yet had a habit of ending up on the wrong side of the law himself.
Born in 1917 and raised in Plumstead, south London, Thomas Duncan Webb was 16 when he joined the South London Press. Webb did not speak or write about his local newspaper experiences, nor explain how, within four years, he managed to get a job as a sub-editor on the Sunday Graphic. He was working there when, aged 22, on the day war was declared, he quit to become an able seaman aboard a hospital ship. He recounted his wartime seafaring adventures – including two occasions in which he saw action – in his first book, Sailor You've Had It. In May 1944, having risen to the rank of chief officer, he was formally discharged from the merchant navy as physically unfit. It would appear he picked up some kind of infection in west Africa that caused abnormally high blood pressure. This gradually weakened his kidneys. For the rest of his life he required daily injections and frequently spent periods in hospital. By the time he was 36, he was warned he would be lucky to live longer than five years.
Months before his discharge, he resumed his journalistic career by joining the Daily Express and got into the first of his several scrapes with the law. He was overheard, while in a Plymouth hotel kiosk, phoning the Express news desk with a story about ships he had seen in the port, part of the early D-Day build-up. He was arrested for “communicating the movements of His Majesty's ships” and pleaded guilty to a breach of defence regulations. The magistrates, accepting he had been foolish rather than malicious, fined him £50. More happily, following a typical whirlwind wartime romance, Webb married an Express reporting colleague, Vivien Batchelor. Soon after, Webb became a war correspondent. He was sent by the Express to Normandy in the wake of D-Day, disobeyed military instructions not to go ashore and narrowly escaped death during an attack by a German plane.
On his return, Webb flew with the RAF across the Channel to observe bombing missions. On one of them, to witness the Battle of the Bulge, the plane was struck by flak and he was required to bale out. He landed 40 feet up a tree in the Ardennes, breaking an arm, two vertebrae and several ribs, one of which punctured a lung. In considerable pain, he eased himself down, branch by branch, until he dropped into deep snow. His boots had been ripped off and he spent hours crawling up a steep valley. His feet were frostbitten by the time he was found by local resistance fighters who got him to a casualty station in Charleroi. Pneumonia set in and he was taken to a military hospital in Brussels. The RAF flew Vivien over to see him and after two weeks he had recovered sufficiently to be transferred to a hospital in London, where he was entertained by a group of journalist friends, including the renowned war reporter Hilde Marchant, who smuggled in Guinness.
Murders are so Vulgar
Webb's Express career did not last long. In August 1946, he was arrested after an embarrassing fracas involving a prostitute in Soho. He was charged with assault and impersonating a police officer. According to court records, Webb refused to leave the woman's flat once they had had “connections”. After she threatened to call the police, he left but she followed him into the street, screaming for help, and a passer-by came to her aid. Webb responded by hitting the man in the face, telling him he was a policeman and was arresting him. Soon after, a real police officer turned up and it was Webb who was put into handcuffs. He pleaded guilty to assault, was bound over and ordered to pay 15 guineas in compensation. The other charge was dropped. He was dismissed from the Express but it is unclear whether he was also dismissed by Vivien. She certainly disappeared from his life around this time.
The following year, Webb joined the Daily Graphic in a news editor role. A desk-bound job did not suit Webb and he often clashed with the editor, Henry Clapp, because he wanted to spend time “on the road”. Neither Clapp nor the owner, Viscount Kemsley, shared Webb's fascination with crime. The inevitable split came in October 1949 when Webb became obsessed with a particularly gruesome murder. He wrote an article about a torso which had been found in the marshes of the Thames estuary. Clapp refused to run it on the grounds that it would upset Kemsley's wife. Webb resigned, and later wrote: “My superiors claimed it was not the business of a newspaper to go prying into the affairs of corpses with no arms. Lady So-and-So, the wife of the proprietor, would not like it… ‘We are a respectable newspaper’, they said. ‘After all, murders are so vulgar’.”
Vulgar or not, murders were big sales winners and Campbell, the man behind The People's post-war rise in fortunes, was only too happy to satisfy the public appetite for them. He hired Webb, who resumed his inquiries into the torso murder. It transpired that the victim was a north London car dealer, Stanley Setty, and that his dismembered body had been thrown from a plane. Police soon arrested an amateur pilot, Donald Hume, after discovering traces of Setty's blood under the floorboards of his house. Charged with murder, he claimed he had not killed Setty but had found the body and decided to dispose of it. One of the key witnesses at his trial was his wife, Cynthia. By chance, Webb had met her the year before when she was working as a receptionist at a fashionable nightclub.
That brief meeting gave him an entrée to Cynthia. Getting close to witnesses in high-profile trials, and paying them for their stories, was common practice among crime reporters at the time. But Webb's involvement with Cynthia moved from the professional to the personal. Their growing friendship was thwarted by Hume's solicitor, who demanded she go into hiding, with her six-month-old daughter, until the trial. Alarmed at her being represented by the same lawyer as her husband, Webb sent her a telegram and a letter advising her not to give evidence until she had her own legal representation. It resulted in Webb being summoned to the Old Bailey to explain why he had tried to interfere with a witness. During sharp questioning by the judge, Webb explained that he feared the lawyer would coax Cynthia into selling her story to a rival newspaper. In a statement that stretched credulity, Webb told the court: “I did not understand she was a witness.” But the judge let it pass and dismissed him.
Much more surprising was the outcome of the trial. To the amazement of police and lawyers, some of the jurors believed Hume's far-fetched story about being innocent of the murder. So Hume was convicted only of being an accessory to the killing and was sentenced to 12 years in jail. Afterwards, Cynthia gave an exclusive interview to Webb, which appeared on The People's front page: “I never dreamed it of the man I loved.” The following year she divorced Hume on the grounds of his cruelty and, in great secrecy, maintained a relationship with Webb. She also hid from her daughter, Alison, the identity of her real father.
Months later, The People published the story on which Webb's subsequent fame was to rest – the exposure of an infamous Maltese family who trafficked women from Europe and dominated prostitution in post-Second World War London. He revealed that five brothers named Messina – Salvatore, Alfredo, Eugenio, Carmelo and Attilio – ran a network of brothels in Soho and Mayfair. They imported women from Belgium, France and Spain, married them off to Englishmen to secure UK passports and residency, and then set them up in flats to ply their trade as prostitutes. The Messinas took most of the women's earnings and lived high on the hog, each driving a Rolls-Royce. They used petty gangsters as enforcers and bribed Met police officers. Attilio boasted: “We Messinas are more powerful than the British government. We do as we like in England.”
Bent Coppers and a Back-Alley Beating
Webb spent months on his investigation. It began with documentary research, tracing the ownership, leases and rents on properties suspected of being used by the Messina women. Then, more colourfully, he had to prove that the women in those flats were prostitutes by knocking on their doors, usually observed by a witness, one of the freelances or friends Webb grandly called his “agents”. Once assured the women were indeed offering sex, he had to extricate himself without accepting their services. This often led to arguments and sometimes to violence. The seedy reality was always masked from readers by Webb's adoption of a six-word statement that subsequently became the catchphrase for a legion of scandal-mongering reporters: “I made my excuses and left.” Sayle's friends later claimed that it was he who coined it. Others believe it was invented by Campbell. Whatever the truth, Webb made it his own.
Throughout the summer of 1950, he made many excuses while attempting to discover the scale of the Messinas’ prostitution network, largely run by a 37-year-old French woman, Marthe Watts. Ordered by Eugenio to frustrate Webb's inquiries, she assaulted him outside a Soho bar. More alarmingly, after a car came close to running him down, a woman told him: “That was meant for you, dearie.” He was then punched by a man who said: “It's about time you journalists were done proper.” The attacks reinforced Webb's belief that he was on the right track. His investigation culminated, in September 1950, in one of the most famous page one headlines of the era: “Arrest These Four Men: They are the emperors of a vice empire in the heart of London.” In Sayle's view, despite the brash presentation, Webb had exposed the reality that gangs were allowed to operate due to the corrupt complaisance of the Met police. Four of the Messina brothers immediately fled the country. The one who remained was jailed the following year and three of the others were to eventually end up in prison. Webb's series ran for eight consecutive weeks, always on the front page. Questions were raised in parliament about police inaction and the Home Office took the heat as The People called for “full-scale warfare against the masters of London's vice empire”.
Webb bathed ever after in the glory of his Messina story and blatantly embellished its significance in the following years. “I smashed the gang of ponces,” he wrote in 1953. “I drove them back to the brothels and gutters of the back streets of Europe from whence they came.” A couple of years later, employing the shameless hyperbole that was his, and The People's, stock-in-trade, he wrote of having “cleaned up” Soho. In fact, prostitution was to flourish in the area for more than 20 years.
In the following years, Webb became embroiled in the clash between two London gang leaders: Jack Comer, known as Jack Spot, and Billy Hill. Both were hardened criminals but Webb befriended Hill, viewing him as a valuable source for stories, and championing him in articles which suggested he was, unlike Spot, a reformed character. Spot retaliated by luring Webb to an alley behind the Dominion Theatre and punching him to the ground, causing him to break his wrist. Charged with assault and possession of a knuckle-duster, Spot pleaded guilty and was fined £50. Webb then pursued him through the civil courts for damages and was awarded £732.
Webb went on to ghost Hill's autobiography, Boss of Britain's Underworld, which was launched in June 1955 at a lavish, and controversial, party in Gennaro's, the building now occupied by the Groucho Club. Webb, abandoning all pretence of being a neutral reporter, wrote of Hill being “a crook, a villain, a thief, a thug” but also “a genuine and a kind and tolerant man”. According to one of the most ruthless gangsters of the period, Frankie Fraser, Webb “had personal reasons for getting Billy on his side”. Having fallen in love with Cynthia Hume, he was “terrified” of what her ex-husband might do once released from prison.
In July 1956, Webb got into more hot water for an article about the brothel-keeping activities of a man who was awaiting trial on a charge of living off immoral earnings. It was a blatant contempt of court. Webb insisted he didn't know of the man's impending trial, an explanation that resulted in the judge delivering a scathing condemnation of Webb, The People and its editor. The directors of Odhams Press, the paper's owners, decided Webb's wings must be clipped. In future, he should be given foreign assignments or those deemed to be “safe” or “soft” in Britain.
Webb, an opponent of capital punishment, went on to champion the cause of people he felt to have been wrongly convicted. After Ruth Ellis was hanged, he complained to the Home Office that key evidence had been withheld. Police had failed to check the veracity of her claim that she had been manipulated by another man who got her drunk, handed her a loaded gun and drove her to the pub where she shot her lover. More than 40 years later, documents released by the Home Office suggested that Webb was correct.
Sensational Setty Twist
He also went to great lengths to help Iain Hay Gordon, a young man convicted of murdering a judge's daughter in Northern Ireland in 1952 who escaped hanging because he was adjudged “guilty but insane”. Six years later, Webb raised doubts about his conviction, posing pertinent questions about the police pressure on Gordon to sign a confession. Gordon was sure Webb played a vital role in his quiet release from mental hospital the following year. Webb was posthumously vindicated in 2000 when Gordon was formally declared innocent after the Northern Ireland appeal court quashed his conviction on the grounds that his confession was inadmissible.
In February 1958 came a sensational twist to the Donald Hume case after his release from prison. He admitted in a story he sold to the Sunday Pictorial that he had murdered Setty after all. At the time, the double jeopardy rule meant he could not be charged with the crime, but he took no chances and fled abroad. Cynthia was alarmed by the publicity. Meanwhile, a weakening Webb knew his time was running out. In early August, he flew to the USA to report on organised crime and collapsed while interviewing a Los Angeles police chief. He managed to make the flight back to Britain and immediately set about organising his secret wedding to Cynthia. The witnesses were Wynn Jones and his wife Gwen, who were living in Bala. Jones had been manager of the Barclays bank branch in Warren Street, north London, used by Cynthia, and was befriended in turn by Webb. Eighteen days after the ceremony, Webb died in Charing Cross Hospital of heart failure caused by malignant hypertension and chronic nephritis. Webb's death was widely reported and featured on the front page of The People, along with a lengthy tribute by Hannen Swaffer who wrote that Webb “was not only the greatest crime reporter… he was also a real-life private eye, whose feats rivalled the exploits of the daring hired investigators in American thrillers”.
So why did Webb marry Cynthia? There is abundant evidence to suggest it was done to give Cynthia's eight-year-old daughter by Donald Hume a new identity to avoid her knowing her father was a murderer. It meant that the girl named Alison Hume at birth became Amanda Webb. She had grown up unaware of her real parentage, believing the only man in her mother's life to be Webb. I felt unable to write about this when I discovered the truth more than 10 years ago because I couldn't trace Alison/Amanda and felt it would be ethically wrong to reveal it without her knowing the truth.
Then, years after an appeal on my Guardian blog, I received a letter from Geraint Jones, son of Wynn and Gwen. Not only had he grown up hearing stories about Webb, but he had met Cynthia and Amanda during their frequent visits to their Welsh home. He revealed that some time in 1971, when she was 21, Amanda had grown curious about her background and questioned his parents about the identity of her real father. They decided she should be told the truth. “It came as a dreadful shock to her,” said Geraint. “She was desperately upset and seemed worried that the killer instinct might be passed on to her.” Geraint thinks Cynthia went to Australia while Amanda – who would, if living, be 69 – emigrated to Canada or, possibly, Alaska. It has proved impossible to discover what happened to either of them. Call it Duncan Webb's final mystery.
