The Murder of George Roberts.
July 1941.
The temple of dreams, that’s what they called all those Odeon’s, Ritz’s Regal’s, Palladiums and Queens. Such grand places, luxurious, where you could be whisked away to realms of fancy worlds of magic.
At least that was how it was for the audience. Until Saturday they were showing Arise My Love at the Plaza – next week it was to be Hurricane and The Prisoner of Zenda. Wonderful escapes. But as far as Sidney Williams was concerned there was nothing particularly glamorous about the Plaza in the Metropole buildings in Dover.
He started work after the last performance, ended at 9.30 p.m., staying all night as a cleaner and night watchman, on the look out in case Jerry dropped incendiaries on the building. To him the night of July 3rd 1941 seemed much like any other as he set about cleaning the auditorium. It was a lonely job but at least in a way George Roberts was company for the cleaner. Though they did not meet that night, Williams assumed that the manager was in his office as usual, sleeping there. Ever since his transfer from the A.B.C. cinema at Chatham Mr Roberts had rolled out the mattress in his office, taken his pillow out of the cupboard and spent the night there; well, digs were costly and his home was in Gillingham. It did not seem a bad arrangement.
When Mrs Foot went to the female staff room she noticed that the photo frame and the vase which were usually on the window sill had been transferred to a shelf. And on the tiled floor she saw a dark stain, which she scrubbed off.
Mrs Southwell saw a stain too, on the manager’s carpet and assuming he had been sick, treated the mark with disinfectant. A couple of towels were also missing. The mattress was rolled up as usual but unusually on top of it were Mr Roberts’s pyjamas and dressing gown. She was used to seeing the mattress, the pillows even, but it was the first time she had seen the manager’s nightwear.
When Mrs Robert’s, no relation to the manager started to dust the office she noticed the bunch of keys on the desk. They belonged to Mr Roberts, she knew that, but they had never been left out before.
Though all three cleaners noticed something slightly odd, they did not think of mentioning these matters to each other, after all cleaners take it in their stride, stains, spills, furniture changes, minor carelessness.
It was only later when Mr Roberts’s secretary Ellen Tolputt arrived at 10.30 a.m that anyone expressed surprise at the manager’s absence. Finding the keys on the desk Miss Tolputt opened the safe. Where was the £3 pound float? Wasn’t one of the blue canvass bags missing?
Uneasy, Miss Tolputt telephoned the Granada A.B.C. Cinema, whose manager Sydney Sale was senior to Mr Roberts. In response to her call, one of the assistant managers came round to the Plaza. Together he and Miss Tolputt counted the cash still in the safe. They expected a sum in the excess of £40 but over £32 was missing. Cash missing? A manager missing? They sent for Mr Sale who had until now a high regard for the 50 year old George Roberts, put two and two together, concluding that he had gone off with the cash, he called the police.
Detective Inspector Datlen and Detective Constable Thain of the local C.I.D. came to the cinema, Miss Tolputt explained to them that she had seen Roberts at 10.30 the night before, as he was returning to the Plaza after a brief visit to the nearby Friends Social Club.
The detectives inspected the marks on the carpet. In the female room their attention was drawn to the window ledge. Peering down from the window to the cemented basement area they could make out a reddish mark that looked as if it had been brushed. The detectives, accompanied by Sale, decided to look inside the disused basement. With torches they inspected a workshop and some small rooms. Sale went into one of them “I went to the recess at the far end of the room and there I found Roberts”
The top of the dead mans head was split open. On the right side there were three wounds, two of which had deeply penetrated the skull. Two other heavy blows had been delivered to the back of the head. Immediately Scotland Yard was informed and two specialist officers, Superintendent William Rawlings and Detective Sergeant Marshall were sent to Dover to work with Inspector Datlen. From the start the police were confident that whoever had committed the brutal murder knew about the manager’s habits and the cinemas interior.
There were no signs of a break in and no fingerprints of any help to the investigators. The staff were interviewed and asked to make statements, some items of their clothing were sent off to the Hendon Police Laboratory, as was the heavily bloodstained axe which had been found in the basement room. On the face of it however, all staff had sound alibis.
Despite energetic enquires and scores of interviews, no arrest was made. The last two murders in Dover had occurred in 1936 and they had been speedily resolved. This time however, in its 18th July 141 edition, the Dover Express opined that “it appears as though this Dover’s first mystery murder will be an unsolved one, unless someone who could speak does not persist in remaining silent” And the motive, locals asked, what could it be? Was it simply robbery? Or revenge? Had Roberts a secret enemy?
Then, quite out of the blue on 21st July an arrest was made. On the afternoon of that day Superintendent Rawlings asked 18-year-old Leslie Hammond to come to the police station. Hammond, one of the four operators at the Plaza, had already made a written statement and Rawlings had been reconsidering it. There was a matter he wished to clear up.
Hammond had stated that he had been outside the Plaza talking to his brother until 9.55 pm. He was due to do fire-watching duty later and, having time to fill in, he had gone for a stroll. He described a roundabout route he had followed, taking in Cannon Street, the Market Square, the Monument, Northampton Street and several others until he turned back into the High Street. He had eventually reached the Midland Bank where he was to fire-watch at eleven o’clock. The walk had taken him 65 minutes.
Rawlings had followed the same route. It had taken him 44 minutes. Could Hammond account for the 21 minutes discrepancy, the detective asked. And supplementary to that, why had Hammond given the wrong time for his arrival at the Midland Bank? He had not turned up until 11.30 pm. Now the discrepancy was 51 minutes. Did he have an explanation?
Hammond hesitated for five minutes before attempting to answer the Superintendent’s questions. Finally he spoke “I cannot think,” When they talk about Mr Roberts I get a funny feeling here” (pointing to his head). “I feel I went back to the Plaza but I can’t think.”
Superintendent Rawlings told the boy to take his time, to try to remember what happened on the night of the manager’s murder. Eventually Hammond was persuaded to pick up a pen. He now wrote a new statement for the detectives, confessing to the murder.
Hammond had gone back into the cinema sometime after ten o’clock and had waited in a side vestibule for Roberts to come in from the Friends Social Club. When he saw the manager arriving he had darted into the switch room for the axe he had taken from the re-wind room earlier in the day.
“I then went out into the vestibule” Hammond told the police, “and hit Mr Roberts with the axe. He fell down and I struck him in the face. Then his head was bleeding so I tied a tablecloth round it and then carried him into the female staff room”.
Hammond had planned to hide the body in the little used basement but could not make it through the auditorium or other public areas as the night cleaner might see him, instead he threw the corpse out of the female staff room window into the basement area, a drop of over twelve feet.
“I went through the hall, through the front vestibule, through the workshop into the second little room.”
Hammond returned to the office and wiped the floor with towels taken out of the cupboard. He took Robert’s overcoat and put it over the body. Then he washed away the blood in the entrance. The statement continues: “I went into the office again and saw the keys of the safe on the floor. I opened the safe and took out some money. I locked the safe and put the keys on the desk. I picked up the axe and went into the female staff room, got on the table and threw the axe through the window into one of the rooms in the basement below the window. I went to the gents and was sick”.
Hammond left the building unnoticed by the night cleaner and went the short distance to the Midland Bank for his fire watching duties, arriving at 11.30 pm. His activities in the Plaza, murdering Roberts, disposing of the corpse, clearing up, had taken over an hour.
After some days he must have begun to feel secure, the police seemed to have come to a halt in their investigations and then suddenly Superintendent Rawlings had called him in and his whole story crumbled.
Everything came out. Some of the money he had hidden in a cistern in a public lavatory. In the outside lavatory at his house there was a parcel tied with tape. In it were notes to the value of £18 a tidy sum of money for someone on a weekly wage of £1. 12s. 6d. When he was stripped and searched, a crumbled bag of silver coins was found hidden in his underpants, though why he had kept it there is unclear. The bag was clearly marked “Plaza Cinema Dover” It was also initialled R. W. in pencil Rose Williams was the cinema cashier.
“I don’t know why I done it” Hammond told the police. Charged with murder in September 1941, Hammond was tried over two days at the Old Bailey. The case against him seemed watertight, however early in the proceedings his council, Mr Waddy had a submission to make and the Judge in accordance with the council’s wishes, asked the jury to withdraw.
Hammond’s statement, Waddy claimed, was not admissible. It was damming to any defence and if the prosecution were to open the case with it, Hammond would have no chance. Waddy’s claim was that Hammond had been ill treated by the police, making his statement on July 21st 1941 under duress. Waddy was then allowed to question three police officers who had conducted the interview. The Judge and Mr Justice Cassels, then heard lengthy legal arguments and evidence about the admissibility of Hammond’s statement.
In the end, however, he rejected the defence’s case. He regarded what Hammond had said voluntary. The jury returned to the courtroom. The prosecution read out the statement that Hammond had made, and all was now lost. Suggestions of insanity were rejected, and inevitably Hammond was found guilty. He was sentenced to death. In October 1941 Hammond appealed against his conviction, the hearing taking place before the Lord Chief Justice and Justices Humphrey and Lewis. The matter turned once more on the admissibility of his statement. The appeal was rejected.
On 11th November 1941 on the eve of what would have been his execution, the Home Secretary granted a reprieve and Hammond was sentenced to life imprisonment. Hammonds was a drab little crime. It lacked the drama that an audience at the Plaza might have looked for, no thrills, no glamour, just a squalid affair.
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From the Kent Murder Casebook by W. H. Johnson, available Dover Reference Library.