A Thorn in Their Side - Hilda Murrell Threatened Britain's Nuclear State. She Was Brutally Murdered. This is the True Story of her Shocking Death - Softcover

Green, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782194282 ISBN 13: 9781782194286

Publisher: John Blake, 2013

Synopsis

In 1984, at the age of 78, world-renowned rose grower Hilda Murrell was found brutally murdered in the Shropshire countryside. She had just gained approval to testify on the unsolved problems of radioactive waste at the first British planning inquiry into a new nuclear power plant at Sizewell, Suffolk. The police theory that a lone, panicking burglar robbed and abducted Hilda in her own car for petty cash erupted into a sensational political conspiracy involving prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's plans for British nuclear energy and the controversial sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the 1982 Falklands War. The West Mercia police took until 2005 to secure the conviction of Andrew George as Hilda's unlikely murderer—in 1984 he was a 16-year-old truant from a local foster home who could not drive. The case spawned numerous books, plays and TV programmes as it became one of the most baffling British murders of the 20th century. Now, Hilda's nephew Robert Green—a former Royal Navy Commander who operated nuclear weapons before holding a key position in Naval Intelligence during the Falklands War—tells the story of his extraordinary pursuit of the truth. Believing that Hilda was abducted by those who wanted to find out what she knew about the Falklands conflict and problems in the Sizewell nuclear power plant, and undeterred by ongoing harassment, Green exposes the implausibility of the police theory and uncovers explosive new evidence that should have acquitted Andrew George. This is the incredible true story of Hilda Murrell—and one man's quest to find out how and why his beloved aunt met such a violent and bizarre death.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Green served for 20 years in the Royal Navy from 1962-82. As a Fleet Air Arm observer/ bombardier-navigator, he flew in Buccaneer nuclear strike aircraft and anti-submarine helicopters. On promotion to Commander in 1978, he worked in the Ministry of Defence before his final appointments as Staff Officer (Intelligence) to the Commander-in-Chief Fleet. Having taken voluntary redundancy in 1981, he was released after the 1982 Falklands War, and trained as a roof thatcher in Dorset. In 1984, the murder of his beloved aunt and mentor Hilda Murrell led him to examine and then challenge the hazards of nuclear electricity generation. This, plus the break-up of the Soviet Union, followed by the 1991 Gulf War caused him to speak out against nuclear weapons, the first ex-Commander with nuclear weapons experience to do so.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Thorn in their Side

By Robert Green, Kate Dewes

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Robert Green and Kate Dewes
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78219-428-6

Contents

Title Page, 
AUTHOR'S NOTE, 
FOREWORD BY MICHAEL MANSFIELD QC, 
MAIN CHARACTERS, 
DEDICATION, 
CHAPTER 1: MUCH MORE THAN MY AUNT, 
CHAPTER 2: THE FIRST WEEK, 
CHAPTER 3: MORE THAN A BURGLARY GONE WRONG, 
CHAPTER 4: DALYELL'S EXPLOSIVE ALLEGATION, 
CHAPTER 5: CONSPIRACY THEORIES STRENGTHEN, 
CHAPTER 6: INCONVENIENT EVIDENCE, 
CHAPTER 7: COMPLICATING DEVELOPMENTS, 
CHAPTER 8: STALKER, SMITH AND INTIMIDATION, 
CHAPTER 9: COLD CASE REVIEW, 
CHAPTER 10: THE TRIAL, 
CHAPTER 11: A STITCH-UP, 
CHAPTER 12: OTHER RELATED VICTIMS, 
CHAPTER 13: CASE CLOSED?, 
CHAPTER 14: 'BIGGER THAN THE SHREWSBURY POLICE', 
CHAPTER 15: WILD CARDS AND FACING FACTS, 
INDEX, 
Plates, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

MUCH MORE THAN MY AUNT

A 4am phone call usually means trouble – especially if it is from police. 'What? He was only 16 at the time?'

In Britain it was 5pm on 7 June 2003, and Detective Chief Inspector Jim Tozer of West Mercia Police was calling from Shrewsbury. He rang us in New Zealand to tell us Andrew George, a 35-year-old local labourer, had been arrested and charged with abducting and murdering my aunt, friend and mentor, Hilda Murrell on 21 March 1984. Her mutilated body had been found three days later in a poplar copse six miles outside the ancient capital of Shropshire, where Hilda had lived all her 78 years. It was one of the biggest and most famous British murder cases of the century, with allegations of political conspiracy and cover-up around the nuclear industry and the 1982 Falklands War.

George's DNA had been identified in seminal fluid on the underslip Hilda was wearing, and his fingerprints had been found in her house. He was remaining silent, but would be held in custody for questioning over the next 72 hours.

My wife Kate and I got no more sleep that night as several British newspapers and the BBC sought my reaction as Hilda's next of kin. As leader of the Cold Case Review, Tozer had spent two weeks in Christchurch, New Zealand the year before, when he had heard why my relationship with the police had broken down in 1986. He had formally apologised on their behalf, and seemed prepared to follow up some new leads suggested by us. With a sinking sense of dread and disappointment, I realised he was now asking me to believe a truant teenager had abducted and murdered Hilda.

In March the following year, 2004, Kate and I flew to Britain for a weekend of events in Shrewsbury to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Hilda's murder, starting with an expedition to three of her favourite haunts. Coincidentally, we were also able to be in court when Andrew George pleaded not guilty on 21 March.

On the morning of Saturday 19 March, about 20 of Hilda's friends and supporters met outside the Shropshire Wildlife Trust opposite the Norman sandstone abbey, immortalised as the alma mater of Ellis Peters' mediaeval monastic sleuth, Brother Cadfael. In a gathering storm, we drove to the head of Maengwynedd, a remote Welsh valley, to lead the annual pilgrimage to the cairn where Hilda's ashes had been scattered high on the side of a tussocked spur of the Berwyn Mountains. Their summit formed the skyline of an idyllic view up the Tanat River valley from Hilda's weekend chalet Fron Goch, meaning 'Red Bank'. It perched beside the limestone crags of Llanymynech Rocks, straddling the Welsh-English border half an hour's drive northwest of Shrewsbury.

In her last letter to me, Hilda had described what was to be her final visit to those mountains, in September 1983:

There was a wonderful day three weeks ago when the sunshine was golden all day with soft balmy warmth and a perfectly clear sky as we so rarely see. I cut sandwiches and went to Maengwynedd and parked by the sheepfold ... I had lunch sitting against the wall facing the mountain. Then I got into my boots and set off.

I thought I would just go as far as I could and then turn back. I took it slowly but gradually walked up the slope towards the col. I then began to think about what would be visible if I got there, so I kept on. Sure enough, when I got to the top of the pass, there was Tryfan with its bristly hump and the masses of Glydr and Carnedd on each side of it. I went two or three hundred yards to the right and the Snowdon massif came into view ... I can't tell you how lovely it was – the whole range blue and clear-cut, a marvellous sight.

The pleasure was increased by the fact that a big finger-stone which had stood on the pass to guide travellers from time immemorial, and fell down about the end of my walking time up on the pass about thirty years ago, had been set up again. It is a splendid stone, eight to nine feet high and slender; I greeted it like an old friend. It was warm to the touch ...

An intrepid Central TV News cameraman filmed us clinging together around the quartz cairn, wind gusts howling as the women belted out a Greenham peace song. Later in a parallel valley, I unveiled a commemorative slate stone engraved with 'Hilda Murrell 1906-84' in a birch grove established in her memory in 1994. We planted another 50 seedlings around the flourishing ten-year-old trees before visiting the garden of Fron Goch.

The next afternoon we gathered in the Shropshire Wildlife Trust's lecture room in the old Benedictine Infirmary of the abbey to reminisce about Hilda. Friends gave delightful anecdotes from her life, including 'botanising' holidays with her in the French Alps, and a hilarious, accident-punctuated piano recital by Myra Hess in 1940. The famous Hungarian pianist, who had lifted Londoners' spirits during the German blitz with free lunchtime recitals in the National Gallery, had accepted Hilda's invitation to come to Shrewsbury to raise funds for Jewish refugee children.

I showed some fine childhood photographs of her with younger sister Betty, my mother. Their father Owen had taken them in the garden of their Victorian home at the family horticultural nursery founded by his father Edwin Murrell. As I gave verbal snapshots of her upbringing, I revelled in this rare chance to share memories of a fascinating woman.

Hilda was often too ill to attend Shrewsbury Girls' High School. When 13 years old she was absent for a complete term with an overactive thyroid; and migraines dogged her all her life. Yet she thrived at school, developing formidable intellectual abilities and organisational skills. As well as becoming head girl and securing the school's first scholarship to Cambridge University, Hilda honed a precocious writing talent by editing the school magazine and contributing articles.

She also kept nature diaries, in which she expressed her passion and burgeoning expertise on Shropshire's rich botanical and bird life. Her love of mountaineering was kindled by Owen, who often took the family to Snowdonia, where they stayed in the famous Pen-y-Pass Hotel. She was thrilled to meet there some of Britain's top rock climbers when the sport was in its romantic infancy, and where mountaineers like George Leigh Mallory trained for the early Everest expeditions.

A lovely photograph of her aged 21 at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1927 showed her already wearing her long brown hair in a demure bun. She revealed only the left side of her face with eyes downcast in almost mediaeval style, because of shyness linked to her right eye, blind from an accident in the first weeks of her life. Taking her final English Tripos Section A exams in 1926, she gained Class 2, Division 1 Honours. In 1927 Hilda became the first female family member to graduate from any university, let alone Cambridge, when she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts with similar honours in the Modern & Mediaeval Languages Tripos (French).

On returning home, her father persuaded her to join the family firm because of his worsening arthritis. Despite her preference for an academic career, she threw herself into learning the skills required of a professional plantswoman. By 1937 she had settled into her twin roles as an unprecedented, 31-year-old unmarried woman director of 'Edwin Murrell Nurseryman & Seed Merchant (founded 1837); Rose and Fruit Trees a Speciality', and as resident carer for her parents.

The rose fields were ploughed up during World War Two to grow potatoes, barley, oats, vegetables and fruit. In 1939 Hilda's compassionate and campaigning side emerged when she found Shropshire foster homes for 14 Jewish refugee children from Germany and Czechoslovakia. Her financial flair, love of classical music and Cambridge connections enabled her to raise funds for them by persuading not only Myra Hess but top fellow Hungarian violinist sisters Jelly d'Aranyi and Adila Fachiri to give concerts in Shrewsbury.

With peace achieved in 1945, Hilda gained a head start over rival growers of old-fashioned roses when Constance Spry, the world's most celebrated flower arranger, quietly passed her unrivalled collection to her. The golden years of Murrell's Roses followed, with Hilda bringing style, grace and passion to the business. She personally wrote an annual catalogue that became a collector's item in the rose world.

Hilda's clientele read like the aristocratic guidebook Debrett's Peerage. Nearly all of them women, they included Lady Eve Balfour, Lady de Vesci, Lady Rocksavage, and the Duchesses of Gloucester, Devonshire and Rutland. On 13 October 1951 she complained gleefully in her diary:

Letter from Dowager Duchess of R. Also one from V. Sackville-West asking to send catalogue to Duchess of Wellington. Am beset by duchesses.

Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson were one of the best-known aristocratic couples in the country at the time. When they started restoring Sissinghurst Castle, Vita invited Hilda to help her design the now famous White Garden. They became firm friends, and Vita promoted Murrell's Roses in her Observer gardening column.

In 1960 Hilda sold the old nursery site for housing development and moved the business to the southeastern side of Shrewsbury, becoming sole managing director. Two years later came the first gold medal at Chelsea Flower Show, for an ingenious miniature rose garden on a large table. Between 1952 and 1969 her 'Shrewsbury Roses' amassed 56 top awards, 14 of them from Chelsea.

Approaching retirement in 1970, she wanted to sell the business to David Austin, a promising Shropshire rose-grower and breeder of new varieties of old-fashioned roses. In his 20th anniversary tribute, he explained he could not afford her asking price. So she sold it to Brian Murphy, a local brewer who brought in Percy Thrower, Britain's first radio and TV celebrity gardener, as his front man. Sadly, Hilda's old rose collection languished in weeds while Thrower focused on the more profitable hybrid tea and new perpetual flowering roses.

Surprisingly, she made no fuss. With retirement allowing her concern for the environment full rein, she refocused her energy, intellect and organising flair on the growing menace of the nuclear industry. For relaxation, she enjoyed applying her plantswoman skills to developing the gardens at Ravenscroft, her new home in Sutton Road, and at her weekend retreat, Fron Goch.

Hilda's diary entry a few weeks before her death read:

Letter from David Austin proposing to name a rose after me ... An old-fashioned warm pink after the manner of Constance Spry ...

She accepted with deep pleasure – but never saw it. By the time the first blooms were displayed at Chelsea that May, her murder had upstaged them as a hellish, more enduring legacy.

Hilda was much more than my only aunt – and I had no uncles. After my mother died in 1964 when I was 19, I discovered that, despite my youth and inferior intellect and education, Hilda and I 'clicked'. She was great fun, with an infectious enthusiasm for, and curiosity about, life. From the moment I arrived for a visit we talked non-stop. Deeply interested in me and my career, she never invited any other friends to meet me. Having first helped fill the void left by my mother, she became my trusted friend and mentor. By the late 1970s, ours had become an unusual relationship: she an active anti-nuclear campaigner who voted Liberal, myself an apolitical but typically Conservative naval Commander with nuclear weapon experience and a top security clearance.

A true patriot, Hilda particularly loved the British Isles, their long history and how it had shaped the landscape, architecture and, of course, the gardens. She was seldom nostalgic. On the contrary, she constantly probed the future, always with an eye to protecting our cultural heritage and increasingly polluted environment. Moreover, Hilda introduced me to the political world, of which she had an unexpected understanding.

I first fully appreciated the extent of her awareness and wisdom in 1970 when I was selected to join a junior officers' staff course at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. An intense three-month introduction to public administration, international relations and current affairs, the course aimed to prepare us as 25-year-old Lieutenants for the wider responsibilities of higher rank. I could just about cope, until I had to give a talk on any issue of topical importance. I turned to Hilda, who briskly suggested my theme should be 'the impending oil crisis', outlining a scenario of over-reliance on oil leading to conflict in the Middle East. This had barely been thought of in the corridors of power in Westminster, let alone among a bemused audience of young naval officers and their tutors. When the oil price rocketed fourfold two years later, I reminded her of her prescience in a phone chat. Her response was immediate, and equally baffling: 'The next one will be nuclear.'

A few months before her murder, Hilda recalled in a letter to John Baker, the anti-nuclear Bishop of Salisbury, her reaction to finding out about plutonium:

I decided on the spot that such an element should have been banned as soon as its nature and its forever-ness were realised, that we had no right to inflict such a thing on the planet and posterity. That seems to me all that needs to be said. The nuclear thing is totally evil and must be abolished, root and branch.

She tried out her findings on friends and fellow members of several committees, including the Shropshire branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE). She soon discovered most of them did not share her zeal, and unlike her they shrank from challenging experts and Establishment contacts. This drove Hilda to express her indignation in letters to The Times, like this extract from one in 1976 protesting at the unaccountable decision-making process to expand nuclear-powered electricity generation:

[P]oliticians have been making such decisions for the last thirty years, without our knowledge or consent, or that of Parliament ... Now, of course, the vested interests both of finance and prestige have accumulated to the point where it would take almost superhuman courage to stop the dreadful process; on the contrary the politicians have again decided that it must not only go on, but increase. Do please publish this ordinary citizen's plea for some moral courage and wisdom, or even ordinary commonsense, instead of so much amoral cleverness.

Not surprisingly, her request was denied.

Early in 1977, Hilda received a copy of the Flowers Commission's 1976 Sixth Report, Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sir Brian Flowers' background as an eminent nuclear physicist and part-time member of the UK Atomic Energy Authority gave it unprecedented weight, and what became known as the Flowers Report had a profound impact on British public opinion. Hilda felt vindicated when the report echoed her fears about the nuclear industry's dream of moving towards a 'plutonium economy':

We should not rely for energy supply on a process that produces such a hazardous substance as plutonium unless there is no reasonable alternative.

Above all, she latched onto this key recommendation:

There should be no commitment to a large-scale nuclear programme until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. We are clear that such a demonstration will require a substantial programme of research.

This was the moment when she committed herself to doing all in her power to oppose the nuclear industry's plans.

On 28 March 1979, a US pressurised water reactor at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania malfunctioned. Equipment failures and operator ignorance led to a major core meltdown, and the plant was written off.

Less than two months later, Margaret Thatcher swept into power as Britain's first woman Prime Minister. I was working in the Ministry of Defence just across the street as a newly promoted Commander. Thatcher coined the phrase 'one of us' to describe those she favoured and trusted. As resentment and resistance grew to her 'conviction politics', anyone who disagreed with her and stood up to her learned that she regarded them as 'the enemy within'. She and some close Cabinet colleagues would narrowly escape death in October 1984 when the Irish Republican Army blew up their Brighton hotel during the Conservative Party annual conference. It was an era when legitimate opposition was considered at best subversive and, at worst, treasonable.

In my position as Personal Staff Officer to the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy), I was a fly on the wall as my Admiral facilitated the internal debate on replacing Britain's four Polaris nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines with a scaled-down version of the massively expensive, over-capable US successor system, Trident. By then, Hilda had convinced me that radioactive waste was the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry, and Three Mile Island had endorsed her view that nuclear power was unacceptably hazardous. However, the new Prime Minister, an enthusiast for all things nuclear, was determined to introduce an ambitious programme of new nuclear power plants. Worse than this, she forced the British nuclear industry to accept a US pressurised water reactor design similar to the one at Three Mile Island.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: John Blake
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782194282
• ISBN 13: 9781782194286
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 428