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Chappelow |
Lusty early years of a mysterious eccentric
As the Allan Chappelow murder retrial begins, Dan Carrier traces the reclusive’s
life as a young man in the 1950s
WHEN detectives broke down the front door of Allan Chappelow’s tumbledown Hampstead home in June 2006 and discovered his decomposing body, not only did they have the arduous task of finding who was responsible for the 86-year-old’s death, but they faced a further puzzle.
With no close relatives and few friends, the police had to piece together his character.
As an Old Bailey re-trial of Wang Yam, the man charged with Mr Chappelow’s murder, starts next week, the New Journal can shed light on his early years.
A long out-of-print book penned by the reclusive victim reveals a young man with liberal views and a lively interest in the opposite sex.
Allan Chappelow wrote A Russian Holiday in 1955, an account of a journey he made during the height of the Cold War to the Soviet Union.
He travelled with a group of students on a tour from Moscow to Leningrad, Stalingrad and Georgia and his account reveals his lively interest in women but also suggests a sadness over his lifelong bachelorhood. Friends at his funeral said he had often spoken of getting married, even just months before his death.
He was studying a postgraduate course in philosophy at London University and paid £95 for the privilege to take part in an exchange visits with Russian students. He packed a bag full of camera equipment and left his Downshire Hill home.
Allan was a man of independent means – his father had left him the family home in Downshire Hill and enough money to play the stock market. He had tried, after leaving Cambridge University with a science degree, to become a professional photographer. He hit upon a wheeze of asking aged celebrities to pose for portraits – and believed he could then sell them on to national newspapers to use for the subjects’ obituaries.
It lead him to the door of George Bernard Shaw, who did not appreciate the intrusion – Allan snapped him as he was thrown off Shaw’s land. It sparked an interest in the playwright, and he wrote two books on GBS.
In A Russian Holiday, Allan describes meticulously the sights he saw and the conversations he got into with the Russians he met. He expresses a deep belief in the collective notions of socialism and a fear of America and capitalism. But, above all, his fascination with women is apparent through out.
One, Tanya, attracts him particularly and has two chapters to herself – and there is even a hint that they were more than friends. “Tanya was tall and fair and had a very good figure – slim and graceful,” he writes.
He discusses with her the Russian attitude to beauty – “blondes are highly sought after” – marriage and sex, and delights in hearing about the mores of Soviet youth, which to a young Englishman of that time would be considered extremely liberal.
“There is no such thing as the weaker sex in Russia,” he adds. “They mostly are strapping, sturdily built Amazons.”
He goes on to praise their dress sense. “Svetlana, one of the guides, definitely had ‘chic’ when she chose. At the seaside she for once used lipstick – of a bright vermillion shade – to match her red bead necklace, red bangles, and red shoes with ‘peep toes’ and wedge-type heels. The Russians, incidentally, love red – for aesthetic more than politic reasons.
“While on this topic of feminity, may I add that some Russian women are very beautiful? The dark- haired, passionate-looking Georgians have always been recognised as such. There is another type in which spiritual rather than sensuous beauty predominates, an unspoilt innocence and sweetness and candour shining out from clear, often blue eyes set amid high cheek bones and exquisitely delineated features that really need no lipstick or adornment.”
Allan was no “fellow traveller”, despite studying at Cambridge, which was known for its strong Communist links. He had voted Liberal but was not a member of any party, and makes a point of stating his credentials as a neutral observer.
“I was intensely curious about seeing the Soviet Union first hand,” he writes. “We were fully in a position to form our own impressions quite independently of facts supplied by our guides, interesting though these often were.
“I made a point of recording verbatim many such conversations, both with the guides and with other Russians with whom I came into contact, as it seemed this authentic evidence would be of value.”
He adds that he went with “a completely open mind, with no political axe to grind”.
“Somerset Maugham once pointed out that ‘it is not necessary to eat the whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like’.
“I do not claim to understand everything everything about Russia, Communism, International Politics, Human Nature or What The Men In The Kremlin Really Think.
“What I have tried to do is record exactly what I saw and heard – accurately, impartially and in as much detail as possible.”
And although written in a stilted manner by an amateur travel writer, the book throws light on the man who was to make the news in tragic circumstances more than 50 years later.
“It was good to be back,” he writes at the end. “Good to see the old motorbike in the garage. Good to find a nice large pot of tea and simple meal of fish and chips and a warm welcome from the family awaiting me (‘You got back then?’). Good to open accumulated letters, good to have a bath and then – good to sleep in my own bed. Yes! I’d had a wonderful time, but it was good to be back home once more.”
Good to be back in the family home – where he would tragically perish five decades later. |
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