PART FOUR
DESMOND CUSSEN - THE ALARMING INCONSISTENCIES
Over the years, Desmond Cussen, Ruth’s so-called alternative lover, has been described as a bit of a drip, an unassuming, docile, father figure. He looked like a spiv with dark, greased back hair; with a round boyish face and an unnatural looking thin moustache. He was usually portrayed as Blakely’s scathing rival for Ruth’s affections.
There are many unanswered questions about who Cussen really was; very little is known about him. The only information comes from scant details in books over the years about Ruth Ellis. Firstly he joined the RAF aged seventeen, trained mainly in South Africa, was a bomber pilot, throughout the war, flying Lancasters and was demobbed in 1946.
Secondly he was wealthy, became a director of a family-owned retail and wholesale tobacconist business called Cussen and Co.
And thirdly from the early 1950’s he lived in a prestigious apartment in Goodwood Court near Harley Street.It seems odd therefore that twenty-three days after the start of my research I began uncovering alarming inconsistencies to the accepted story about him. Was it just poor research by commentators over the last fifty years or had those writers been fed misinformation, part of the big lie being spread, to hoodwink the public about the real Ruth Ellis story? I wondered. Either way, the truth has been obscured.
In March 2002 I contacted Companies House in an attempt to find information about Cussen and Co.
Whilst examining hand-written documents on microfiche (luckily still available from Companies House archives) I discovered that Desmond Cussen lived in Garlands Road, Leatherhead with his parents, in a detached house called Dapdune. This was quite a find; the first in a series of lucky breaks, opening the door to some significant findings. It was my first lesson in detective work: examine every local connection. Garlands Road is less than two miles from my home.
Dapdune was coincidentally just 300 yards from Leatherhead hospital where Arthur Neilson, Muriel Jakubait’s father, was an in-patient for a year. He’d been sent there during the war from south-east London suffering from a cerebral thrombosis following an injury sustained in the London Blitz.
It seemed stranger than fiction that I should come across Ruth’s alternative lover, at exactly the same time as I was investigating the area around Leatherhead hospital.
With further research I realised that in the late 1940’s Garlands Road was no ordinary road. Top people lived there in houses of substance. Some of the properties have been demolished but two of the original houses are still standing.
General Ironside, who was one of Churchill’s generals in the Second World War, lived secretly in one. In 1941 he was Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, in charge of the Home Guard.
One of the pleasures in my new detective role is scrutinising every new lead!
So on 2nd May 2002 I wrote to the Leatherhead local paper asking for anyone to contact me if they had memories of wartime in Garlands Road. It was a long shot. 1940 is a long time ago.
I struck lucky. I received three replies. One led me to a new witness, John Steel, an elderly Leatherhead gent, with a phenomenally accurate memory for everything wartime. He was an ARP warden based in General Ironside’s house that had been commandeered by the government for the Home Guard when it was first formed.
Although he didn’t know it, Mr Steel’s recollections about the young chap who he paired up with in the Home Guard were to prove invaluable in my search for the truth.
Mr Steel told me how he teamed up with a young man, an only child, about eighteen years old, with straight fair hair, about 5’9″, of muscular build and handsome. He was from an exceptionally well to do family. He added, “He was a cut above the rest of us, well spoken and well educated, a gentleman” and lived next door at Dapdune. “His father looked like a city gent.”
The two young men worked together at night-time two to three times a week from summer 1940 until April 1941, guarding bombed places against looters and keeping watch for parachutists. He couldn’t remember his partner’s name, it was a long time ago, but said he was very good with a gun, a “crack shot.” They regularly practised shooting 303 rifles on a local rifle range. At other times they were taken in a lorry to Bisley to practise with Sten guns.
The day after our first interview I had a call from Mr Steel. He said, “I’ve remembered the young man’s name, it was Cussen.”
He had no idea, until our book was published three years later, that his Home Guard partner was the same man who would play an important role in Ruth Ellis’s life and death in 1955.
By 4th June 2002, three months after beginning my research, new light had been thrown on Cussen’s wartime activities. When he was seventeen he was not in the RAF, he was in the Home Guard working alongside John Steel. What is more, Cussen was not the docile character we’d been led to believe – even as a young man he was a crack shot.
After those discoveries I was determined to find everything I could about this very private man. In the Air Force List at the Public Record Office the entry for Desmond Cussen, 197248, was odd. It stated he achieved pilot officer status in the General Duties Branch on 10th April 1945 and left on 10th October 1945.
Nothing about Cussen was quite what it seemed.
During an interview in August 2005 on BBC Radio London, Vanessa Feltz was curious to know what Cussen was doing between 1941 and 1945. I could not give her an answer. It would appear that he was doing nothing.
The only way to find out about RAF personnel is to call up their service record. As I’m not next of kin, I’d reached a dead end. Service records for RAF personnel after 1921 are MOD property.
Since the winter of 2005 I have made discoveries about Cussen’s service record; that’s another story. However I strongly suspect he grew up in a family that was used to deception.
The Cussen and Co microfiches led to another breakthrough in my investigation. It came as something of a surprise to find a hand written document signed by Cussen in London in May 1964. This was Cussen’s one and only trail left anywhere since 1955.
He gave his address as the Atlantic Hotel, Queens Gardens in London where I discovered he’d lived for two years. It can be no accident that Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, John Profumo and osteopath Dr Stephen Ward were frequent visitors there at the same time as Cussen.
The whole point is that, according to Public Record Office documents, the police in 1955 claimed they were searching for Cussen the evening before Ruth was hanged, to interrogate him about the gun used to kill Blakely; but couldn’t find him.
The hanging could easily have been postponed until they’d found him. But it was not. It was all too quick.
When Cussen signed the business document in London in 1964, he was still a free man.
Ruth had protected Cussen in her police statement, claiming a man gave her the gun in a club three years previously. She did not give anything away about Cussen until 12.30 p.m. on July 12th, the day before she was hanged. She broke her silence, confessing to her solicitors that Cussen supplied the gun. She had not admitted it before because of getting “someone into possible trouble.”
The day after the hanging, the front-page article of the Daily Sketch demanded, “What are the police doing about this man? Are they going to charge him? If not, why not?”
Cussen was not arrested. It all went according to plan. It’s clear to me he had some sort of immunity.
He was no ordinary tobacconist businessman.
Cussen and Co microfiches led to another vital discovery, more proof of Ruth’s connection with Dr Stephen Ward, who was a key player in the Profumo affair in the 1960’s, and circumstantial evidence of Cussen’s connection to the secret service. One month and thirty phone calls after beginning my detective work I traced Cussen’s accountant. He told me on the telephone that Cussen had told him in the early 1960’s [at the time of the Profumo scandal] of Ruth Ellis’s friendship with Dr Stephen Ward.
By early June 2002 I had pieced together quite a dossier of first hand evidence about Cussen; a bigger picture was developing.
The impression of the “ineffective drip” was quite misleading.
Quite by chance, in December 2003 I made another major discovery. I met Mr Wallis, a retired Leatherhead dentist with an interesting story to tell about the very private Paddock Club at the end of a long gravel drive in the Surrey village of Ashtead. He was a member from the late 1940’s until 1955. So too were Desmond Cussen and David Blakely.
At the magistrate’s court in 1955 Cussen stated he’d known Blakely, “Just over two years, maybe three.” He lied again at Ruth’s trial when he said on oath that he’d known Blakely “Approximately three years.”
I now have evidence of Cussen’s long term friendship with David Blakely. They’d actually enjoyed each other’s company for approximately six years; something that has never been made public. The pair frequently visited the Paddock Club, which was a mile or so from Cussen’s Leatherhead family home, since the late 1940’s. It was a place where the best people from London secretly congregated when there were parties on.
It’s obvious now; Cussen lied about their friendship to cover the secret world they’d actually been part of for several years; a world that Ruth could have blown wide open if she had lived.
From small beginnings about Cussen’s family home in Leatherhead, combined with solid research another side to Ruth’s alternative lover was emerging. Everything pointed to undercover operations and the British Secret Service.
Somewhere hidden in books written about the Cold War, Cussen’s other identity is waiting to be uncovered.
