Dr Kristopher Lovell

In this chat we discuss the media coverage of the Brighton Trunk Murders in 1934 and what the coverage tells us about celebrity culture, British society and its relationship with the press.

As always, this is only a broad overview, but if you are interested in finding out more about the period and some of the issues that we discuss, I would strongly recommned the following:

• Bingham, Adrian., Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain
• Beers, Laura., ‘A Model MP? Ellen Wilkinson, Gender, Politics and Celebrity Culture in Interwar Britain,’ Cultural and Social History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2013), pp. 231-250 https://doi.org/10.2752/147800413X13591373275321Burney, I., & Pemberton, N. (2011). Bruised witness: Bernard Spilsbury and the performance of early twentieth-century English forensic pathology. Medical history, 55(1), 41–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025727300006049
• Mass Observation, The Press and It’s Readers
• Val McDermid, Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime  

History Fireside Chats are produced, recorded and researched by Dr Kristopher Lovell. The audio was recorded using the Samson SAC02: https://amzn.to/3211eTx  

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Music Used (Public Domain)

• Bach, Cello Suite no. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, I. Prélude/ Public Domain
• London Philharmonic Orchestra – Symphony No. 104 in D major ‘London’ (Haydn) – 4th Movement – Allegro spiritoso/ Public Domain
• New York Symphony Orchestra – Willem Mengelberg – Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21 – 1st Movement – Adagio molto – Allegro con brio/ Public Domain
• Gus Arnheim & His Orchestra with Harry Barris, It’s the Darndest Thing, 1 January 1932/ Public Domain

Episode 6 – A Murder a Day:
The Brighton Trunk Murders and the British Press

Hello and welcome History Fireside Chats.

In today’s History Fireside Chats, I want to talk about the Brighton Trunk Murder of June 1934 and what the media coverage tells us about British society during the 1930s.

There were two sensational murders that took place in Brighton. In both cases, decomposing body parts were found inside trunks.

The first trunk was discovered in June, inside Brighton railway station and contained the torso of a young unidentified woman. Later, the victim’s legs were found inside a suitcase in London King’s Cross. The rest of her body was never found, and her identity was never discovered. All that was known, following an autopsy by Bernard Spilsbury, was that she was a young woman who had been five months pregnant.

The murder became a national sensation. Even more so when the investigation took a rather usual turn. As the police were conducting their investigation they stumbled across a second trunk containing the body of 42 year old Violette Kaye. Despite the similarities to the first murder, Kaye’s death was entirely unrelated. She has been killed by her boyfriend Toni Mancini after an argument weeks before the first trunk had been discovered. Bernard Spilsbury also conducted the post-mortem on that body

Mancini’s trial was a controversial national sensation. Mancini would several years later, on his death would admit to the press that he had accidentally killed Violette Kaye himself, but at his trial he claimed she was a prostitute who had been murdered by one of her clients. He had only hidden the body because he feared the police would not believe him.

But in this chat I don’t actually want to focus on the murders as such. I certainly don’t want to speculate on culprits and the victims. Instead I want to explore the media’s coverage of the first murder in order to kind of explore what it tells us about society in interwar Britain – particularly the relationship between the press and its readers.

The First Murder And Press Sensation

News of the discovery of the first trunk in Brighton train station became a national headline. The murder was front page news across the press. Popular newspapers all carried major headlines on their front pages outlining in detail the discovery of the woman’s torso and legs wrapped in brown paper.  Great speculation centred around the mysterious note that only contained one word: ‘Ford’[1] There were reports throughout the press that she was a woman in her 40s and it wasn’t until Bernard Spilsbury revealed that the body belonged to a young expectant mother that the press started to comment on her age in more detail.[2]

A survey of the Daily Herald shows that this news story appeared on most days throughout the final week of June. News reports followed every aspect of the case in voyeuristic detail in many ways, with each new revelation being explained in gory detail to the readers.  

It wasn’t just through news reports that detailed the investigation but newspapers also illustrated the images, illustrated the moment the discovery of the dead body happened. The Illustrated Police News for example depicted the discovery of the naked body, complete with an illustration of the torso surrounded by aghast and horrified policemen.[3] The press heavily speculated that the pregnancy was the main motive for the murder and this speculation appeared to have been fuelled by Spilsbury’s reports that claimed that a botched operation (or an abortion) might have been the cause of death rather than an intentional murder.[4] There appears to be little evidence of this, but as we shall talk about in a minute this stemmed from Spilsbury’s moral crusade.

The murder was a major news story because it captured the imagination of the public. As the Evening News was eager to note, thousands of letters were sent to the Brighton Police Station from the public who were eager to offer their own interpretation of the murder and to offer their own suggestions for the culprit.[5]

Every step of the murder investigation was covered by the press who were eager to replicate and describe in graphic detail the way the girl had been murdered.[6]  The press revels in the discussions of police re-enactments and recreations of the crime.[7] And we see throughout the weeks in June and July rumours of people claiming that their saws and work tools had gone missing.[8][9]

Because the crime was never solved successfully there’s no resolution to the press coverage, which eventually fades away until other crimes and news stories became more prominent. One leading article in the Sunday Pictorial in late June claimed that the investigation did one thing for certain: it gave the public a greater understanding and appreciation of the work of ‘the guardians of the law’.[10] And whilst that might be so, the extensive coverage of the crime also tells us a few more things about the culture of the press during the interwar period that I want to talk about in more detail.  

Crime Sells

The coverage of the crime was incredibly extensive, there are countless newspaper articles from every daily newspaper in Britain at the time, all talking about the crime in graphic detail. And newspapers are not talking about this for any altruistic reason or to help the police with their investigations. The coverage was extensive because newspapers believed it helped them sell more newspapers. The interwar press was in the middle of a war: a battle for circulation. And newspapers offered their own special deals (such as insurance schemes or free gifts such as encyclopaedias or books) to secure readers and to secure subscriptions. But newspapers in the 1930s also participated in this battle for circulation by changing their language and tone to make it much more appealing to the masses. And what we see in the interwar period is political news and hard news declining, giving way to more entertainment-based news stories. And nothing entertained the British readers more than a good crime story.

It had been recognised early on in the popular press. Lord Northcliffe launched, in 1896, the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail was marketed as a penny newspaper sold for half a penny and it appealed to a wider range of readers than ever. It was the first to exceed the coveted million reader mark in 1902. And it gave birth to really the idea of a popular press – a press that was read by the majority of people. And one type of newspaper story seemed to really exemplify the press more than any other story: crime. Especially murder. Northcliffe himself recognised the value of a good crime story in his infamous motto: ‘Get Me a Murder A Day!’.

Crime stories had always really been a key part of the popular press – look for example at the Jack the Ripper coverage. But the interwar period arguably saw the language and style of newspapers change to become much more conversational, much more popular and much more exploitative of crime on a regular basis. The key reason really was advertising. Circulation and readership dictated how much revenue a newspaper made. Advertising agencies would pay a substantial fee to a newspaper that had a wide readership. And Britain was a newspaper reading nation. Almost everyone was reading a newspaper everyday in the interwar period and many were reading two Sunday newspapers every week.

The key to that was reducing hard news in favour of entertaining soft news because it was what people, newspaper thought, loved to read. And this seems to be true en masse. The newspaper, News Chronicle, surveyed their readers in 1933 and that survey showed that the main interests of its readers were accidents, crime, divorce and human interest – the Report on the British Press by PEP came to a very similar conclusion.[11] If you wanted to sell a paper, sell a murder. And that’s precisely what the majority of popular papers do.

The Brighton Trunk murder was just one example of a violent crime in June 1934, but it seemed to be a crime that really resonated with the public and subsequently that’s why it appeared on the front pages of the press constantly throughout the final weeks of June. And more importantly, it was a story that newspapers thought will sell more copy and gain more readers.

And we can see the success of this wider approach very clearly in the Daily Herald. As noted earlier the Daily Herald featured the Brighton Trunk Murders very heavily on their front pages. The Daily Herald during this period was  a left wing newspaper that used a lot of gimmicks and insurance schemes and entertaining news stories such as crime to massively inflate their readership. And it worked. Readership of the Daily Herald went from just over a million readers in 1930 to over two million in 1937 making it one of the leading newspapers after the Daily Express. The battle for readers saw newspapers reduce their hard news in favour of  new, exciting and sometimes exploitative language involving murders, deaths and crime. Which is why we see in the coverage of 1934 the voyeuristic and graphic images of the naked torso, which is why we see references to how pretty the victim’s feet were in newspaper articles. All exploiting the victim in order to gain further readership.

And we see this trend continuing past beyond the interwar culture. Mass Observation surveyed the public in 1949 and found that crime stories were still some of the most popular stories even among very young readers. One 14 year old boy surveyed said in 1949 that he read the Mail because of the ‘murders and cartoons’. A girl a year younger read the Mail for the same reasons: ‘I read the things that have happened to people – like murders, or burglaries or anything like that.’[12]

Celebritisation In The Press  

In addition to the increase in crime reporting and the voyeuristic tone in the interwar press, because of the focus on mass readership,  we also seen a manifestation of another aspect of the interwar press in the coverage of the trunk murders – celebritisation. The interwar period saw an increase in celebrity culture in almost all aspect of British society including politics, sports and even crime. We see a form of celebritisation not only in the way that the victims and perpetrators often became celebrities themselves. We see this throughout the C20th in the UK and in America if you look at the Black Dahlia or Ted Bundy. We all see it in the criminal justice system during the Brighton Trunk Murders and earlier. 

Criminal investigations involving foren sics and forensic autopsies have a long and often controversial history. They were certainly nothing new in the 1930s, but what was relatively new was the celebritization of pathology thanks to charismatic Bernard Spilsbury who gave evidence in murder trials throughout the C20th. Spilsbury commanded space in the courtroom and column inches in the press through his charismatic style. His breakthrough moment was the trial of Dr Crippen.

Bernard Spilsbury was a renowned pathologists and was often referred to as the greatest pathologist of his time. If you stumble across a famous murder trial in the interwar Britain, you will almost undoubtedly come across Spilsbury name. The press followed his career eagerly including his involvement in the infamous Brides in the Bath murder. As Val McDermid notes in her engaging book Forensics: The Anatomy of a Crime, Spilsbury was eager to play up to the press attention with appeared to fuel his hubristic courtroom style and reputation as the ‘greatest living pathologist’.[13]

Modern reassessements have shown that even in Dr Crippen’s case, Spilsbury’s conclusions are highly questionable. Burney and Pemberton have discussed in great detail how Spilsbury used his celebrity and status to enforce his on morals on the justice system. Notoriously information was withheld in a murder trial that would have exonerated the suspect because of Spilsbury’s own homophobia and prejudices.[14]

In some ways the performance rich style of Splisbury in the courtroom made him a darling of the newspaper industry, and his status as darling seemingly caused him to be even more hubristic and self-assured.[15]  We see juries in the 1930s being persuaded less by the science of forensics and more by the personality of Spilsbury and the fact that he had been turned into a celebrity by newspapers only reinforced this status. And a lot of crimes and trials in the 1920s and 1930s were forensically dubious because people valued personality over the science. 

By the time of the Brighton trunk murders, Spilsbury’s reputation started to decline. His failings had started to become known among forensic circles. But we still see throughout the press coverage in 1934, references to Spilsbury and his celebrity. There are key headlines throughout June that refer to Spilsbury as a way of drawing the readers’  attention to the newspaper. By constantly using his name,  they would make sure they retained readers as much as possible.

There is a slight irony in some ways in the relationship between the press and Spilsbury. The press played kind of an important role in the decline of Spilsbury’s reputation. One thing that the media loves more than making a celebrity is breaking a celebrity and seeing their downfall.[16]

Coverage of the Brighton Trunk Murders tells us a lot about the culture of the media during the interwar period and helps us to understand how the media used crime stories to bolster their readership. And this relationship between the media, and crime and readership remains very true today. We see this in the success of Netflix’s ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘Tiger King’ as well as in the success of Sarah Koenig’s Serial podcast. All which demonstrate that one thing readers and listeners love more than anything is often crime stories, true murder stories in particular .

And what is essential about that in the 1930s is that newspapers use crime stories and the fascination that circulated around them, to draw readers in, to draw their attention before moving on to political issues or current affairs. If your front page draws or drags a reader into your newspaper then  you can use the rest of the newspaper, it was argued, to persuade them of your own political opinions. And we see in the 1930s newspaper clearly attempting to do this. The Daily Mail would use crime stories to draw the readers in, and would then attempt to persuade the reader of their political viewpoints. The same for left wing papers like the Daily Herald – if you got their circulation and if you got someone’s readership through an insurance scheme or through crime stories then you could hopefully persuade them to support you and the Labour party later on in the paper.  This however we will be discussing in more detail another day.

If you would like to find out more about the press, celebrity and culture in the interwar period I would recommend the works of Adrian Bingham[17] and Laura Beers.[18] A very engaging and well researched account of the history of forensics, that is very accessible to those who are less science focused like myself, comes from from Val McDermid. And a closer analysis of the life and times of Bernard Spilsbury can be found in the work of Burney and Pemberton.

A transcript, footnotes and a list of all works consulted for this podcast is available on my website at KristopherLovell.com

I hope you enjoyed this chat. In the next podcast we will be talking about Journalism by Attachment – subjectivity and objectivity in the reporting of the Bosnian conflict.

History Fireside Chats are edited, produced and researched by Dr. Kristopher Lovell.

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[1] Anon., ‘Amazing Trunk Discoveries,’ Daily Herald, 19 June 1934 p. 1

[2] Anon., ‘Amazing Crime Discoveries: woman’s body at two stations,’ Daily Herald, 19 June 1934, p. 1

[3] Anon., ‘Found A Dismembered Body’, Illustrated Police News, 28 June 1934, p. 9; anon., ‘Two Human Legs Found at Kings Cross Station’, Illustrated Police News, 28 June 1934, p. 10

[4] Anon., ‘Marks Found on Victim’s Legs’,  Daily Herald, 23 June 1934, p. 11

[5] Anon., ‘Brighton Trunk Mystery Hoax’, Evening News,  23 June 1934, p. 9

[6] Anon., ‘Girl Believed Killed in Fish Shop at Brighton’  Daily Herald, 20 June 1934, p . 1

[7] Anon., ‘Yard Swoop On London Garage’, Daily Herald, 30 June 1934, p. 1.

[8] Anon., ‘Trunk Murder’, Daily Herald, 29 June 1934, p. 1

[9] Special Correspondent, ‘Trunk Murder Arrest Expected To-Day’, Daily Herald, 28 June 1934, p. 1

[10] Anon., ‘Showing Us’, Sunday Pictorial, 24 June 1934, p. 10

[11] Political Economic Planning, Report on the British Press, p. 30.

[12] Mass Ob, The Press and It’s Readers, p. 43-44

[13] McDiarmid, p. 75-7

[14] McDiarmid, p. 77

[15] Burney and Pemberton, passim.

[16] Burney and Pemberton, pp. 56-8

[17] Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain, passim.

[18] Laura Beers, ‘A Model MP? Ellen Wilkinson, Gender, Politics and Celebrity Culture in Interwar Britain,’ Cultural and Social History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2013), pp. 231-250

 

Music Used (Public Domain)

• Bach, Cello Suite no. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, I. Prélude/ Public Domain
• London Philharmonic Orchestra – Symphony No. 104 in D major ‘London’ (Haydn) – 4th Movement – Allegro spiritoso/ Public Domain
• New York Symphony Orchestra – Willem Mengelberg – Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21 – 1st Movement – Adagio molto – Allegro con brio/ Public Domain
• Gus Arnheim & His Orchestra with Harry Barris, It’s the Darndest Thing, 1 January 1932/ Public Domain