It Must Never Happen Again: The Lessons Learned from the Short Life and Terrible Death of Baby
288
It Must Never Happen Again: The Lessons Learned from the Short Life and Terrible Death of Baby
288Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781844547890 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bonnier Books UK |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2009 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
It Must Never Happen Again
The Lessons Learned from the Short Life and Terrible Death of Baby P
By John McShane
John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2009 John McShaneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84454-789-0
CHAPTER 1
WEDNESDAY'S CHILD
It was the Victorians who changed the shape of Britain forever. Acombination of the railway age and the rapidity of mass house-building that ensued turned once-green pastures into the urban sprawl we recognise today in our large cities and towns. Tottenham, north London, where poor, doomed Baby P lived and died, is a perfect example of such change.
The Romans built Ermine Street to take their troops and traders to Lincoln and on to York, through what was to become Tottenham. That route would evolve into the A10, now clogged with traffic moving slowly in and out of London, much of it travelling bumper-to-bumper, at speeds slower than the Romans managed some 2,000 years earlier.
There was a settlement, albeit a small one, in the area over 1,000 years ago. Its modern name is believed to have derived from those days: in medieval times Tota, a local farmer, occupied a hamlet there and 'Tota's Hamlet', as it was known, was mentioned in its by-then truncated form as 'Toteham' in the eleventh-century Domesday Book. Eventually, this transformed into the modern 'Tottenham'.
By the 1700s a few large houses had been built in the area, which was largely still open fields, enabling their affluent owners to enjoy the pleasures of the countryside, yet still be within striking distance of bustling London, six miles away.
But the Victorian era brought an end to all that, as the rural idyll disappeared altogether with the expansion of the railways. The introduction of cheap workmen's fares on the trains in the 1870s meant the upper- and middle-class homes were soon swamped by road after road of cheaper houses for the less prosperous, who could now get into London at minimal cost. So it was that 'modern', recognisable and definitely very working-class Tottenham was born. Each decade, the population of the area doubled – an astonishing rate of increase – and by 1891, it stood at almost 100,000.
Some of the first bombs that were to fall on London during World War II landed on Tottenham and Hitler's last roll of the dice, the V1 and V2 pilotless bombs, also hit the area. The district achieved further notoriety in 1985, when PC Keith Blakelock, a 40-year-old father of three, was killed by a mob during a riot on the area's massive Broadwater Farm estate when he was surrounded by masked and balaclava-wearing rioters armed with sticks, knives and machetes, who mercilessly hacked him to death.
Throughout its more recent history there has also been an automatic, and far less violent, link with another name synonymous with the area: Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. For more than a century, the team has played at the famous White Hart Lane on the High Street, the successor to the old Roman road.
In the mid-1960s came a change far less dramatic than wars or riots, far less joyful than the triumphs of the area's beloved Spurs, at that time enjoying the most successful spell in their history. It was an occurrence that the majority of those affected by it probably cared little for, or showed scant interest in.
The London Borough of Haringey was formed in 1965 by the amalgamation of the Borough Councils of Hornsey, Tottenham and Wood Green, under the London Local Government Act of 1963, which was aimed at reducing the number of local government areas in the capital. The Act meant that affluent Highgate, Muswell Hill and Crouch End with their elegant houses – soon to experience ever-increasing prices, bringing with it the essential gentrification accessories of smart restaurants and articulate, upwardly-mobile young professionals, in the west of the new area were under the same administration as the far less prosperous and by now run-down Tottenham and Wood Green districts to the east.
'Local Government Reorganisation' is hardly a topic to set pulses racing. Most people simply want their household waste to be regularly collected, their streets constantly cleaned, good schools for their children and a wide range of civic amenities to enjoy, so the name or the structure of the organisation providing them is almost irrelevant – until, of course, something goes wrong.
But that dull, administrative change in the midst of all the social upheaval and excitement that was the sixties was to have an effect on the events that were to unfold around Baby P and those involved with him.
By the time he was born, in 2006, Haringey's 11 square miles was home to a population that, at a conservative estimate, numbered almost a quarter of a million. Over a third of those living there came from ethnic minority backgrounds. Indeed, part of Tottenham was considered the most ethnically diverse area in Western Europe.
According to the 2001 Census, the largest groups were: Caribbean 11%; African 10%; Asian (Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) 8%; Eastern European, Turkish and Kurdish 5% and Irish 4%. No doubt those figures will have changed in the years since the Census was conducted as more people from Eastern Europe and virtually every country in the world flooded in on a daily basis. Many would be known to what is still somewhat quaintly referred to as, 'the authorities' – a great many more, meanwhile, would remain unknown.
Almost half the pupils in Haringey schools still regard English as their second language and one estimate is that almost 200 languages are spoken every day in the area. Many of the businesses are family-run or small by today's standards, but local unemployment remains far higher than the national average. The Borough of Haringey has a population and budget far larger than some nations and in today's Britain that means a massive bureaucratic administration is needed to run the area.
This was the crowded, chaotic society that Baby P was born into.
When he first saw the light of day in 2006, no one could predict that Peter Connelly would eventually take his place in the list of a lost generation of children whose lives would tragically end in brutality and hate although, as we will later see, the omens were depressingly bad given the background of the adults who were to surround him in the coming months.
Peter was born on Wednesday, 1 March 2006, and as if to fulfil the prophecy in the traditional children's nursery rhyme, this Wednesday's child certainly was 'full of woe'. He came into the world at the North Middlesex University Hospital, an institution whose very name conjures up an image of academics, leafy lanes and green fields, although the reality is far from some intellectual, country idyll. Caring for the inhabitants in the surrounding Haringey and Enfield, it is a massive structure along the southern side of the North Circular Road, where drivers stuck in the inevitable traffic-jams, both east and west, have for decades gazed disinterestedly at its post-war ugliness.
Even by hospital standards, it is a depressing building, much of it a combination of concrete and glass that at first glance almost exudes an air of Eastern-Bloc harshness. Perhaps it is no coincidence that its history dates back to the establishment on the site of a workhouse in the early days of Queen Victoria's reign, which gradually evolved – by 1910 – into a hospital that, by the time Peter Connelly was born, treated over 46,000 inpatients and about 200,000 outpatients, as well as 157,000 people in the Accident and Emergency and Walk-in Centres, annually. With 420 beds and over 2,000 staff it was, and remains, a major provider of healthcare in the area. One of those cared for by the hospital was Tracey Connelly, Peter's mother.
Like doomed Peter himself, for a large period of the horror story about to unfold, her name could not be made public. Indeed, it wasn't until over two years after her son's death and the lifting of the legal restrictions that had been put in place, that the world at large knew full details – not just of her name, but the life she had led. Her anonymity, and that of her son, was both a legal and moral necessity to protect the innocent who had become involved through no wish of their own in her life and the lives of the two men to share her shame. That secrecy was only superficial, however, as those connected with Peter's death, including the boy himself, had already been named in a variety of places, ranging from foreign newspapers to countless internet references, including MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. Over one million joined social networking pages which identified them and their names were sent by viral text to thousands of mobile phone users at a time when legally, they should not have been identified.
Not all the 'naming and shaming' was so hi-tech, though – there were even posters with their photographs taped onto trees and lamp-posts in Tottenham within days of the arrests, like some throwback to the 'wanted' posters once hammered in place on wooden walls in the Wild West. Under the headline, JUSTICE FOR BABY P, the posters described Tracey Connelly as 'a vile woman' and named the men involved with her, proclaiming, THEY DESERVE TO DIE! But it must be pointed out that even now, with her identity known, there are still other innocent parties or victims involved, directly or indirectly with the events in that terrible household, who cannot be named or identified, who must remain anonymous in this book.
Bearing those restrictions in mind, it is still possible to examine the background of Tracey Connelly, the very antithesis of the image that the word 'mother' conjures up, a woman who spent the time that she should have been caring for Peter and his sisters drinking heavily, chain-smoking and constantly watching porn and television poker.
So what had turned Tracey Connelly into a monster seemingly devoid of any virtues whatsoever, whose image and name will be forever synonymous with cruelty and amorality?
The details of the case to subsequently emerge in no way justify her actions – or indeed lack of them – towards her son, nothing can do that, but they go a long way towards explaining her character and subsequent attitude to life, her behaviour and how all this would impact on her handsome young son. The facts paint a depressing picture of an underclass automatically passing on an inheritance of low-expectation, total reliance on the State for both financial and moral support and an inevitability of failure, hopelessness and dysfunction that is hard to deny. With it goes an unspoken 'taken' that the State – in the form of 'Social Services' or 'the Council' – will also act in a parental role, taking over the responsibilities that in other, more caring sectors of society belong to parents.
Tracey Connelly's own mother is a perfect illustration of how this baton of despair can be handed from one generation to the other. Mary O'Connor – 'Nula' to those who know her – is the first to admit, in a masterpiece of understatement, that she has had, 'a hard, hard life.' Born in Ireland, she was just four days old when her mother died and although her father remarried, her stepmother died when she was only five. O'Connor once admitted that she and her father, a former army man who had been raised in an orphanage, 'never connected' apart from when he was drunk. As a young girl, she was so frightened of him that she frequently wet herself in fear and he would regularly beat her.
At the age of nine she became the victim of sexual molestation by a relative and at 13, she stabbed a girl with a pair of scissors. O'Connor was then placed in a convent home, remarking later that it was either that or prostitution, and in her early 20s she came to Britain, where she briefly married a fork-lift truck driver before separating and marrying Football Pools salesman Garry Cox in Leicester.
Cox managed to secure them a council flat but he was also the type of man who would not permit his partner to venture from the home without his permission. If his wife went out shopping, he would time her to make sure that she returned home inside what he thought was the proper time and he also subjected her to regular beatings. She was used to that, though – this was, after all, the life she had been born into – and so she regarded his actions as nothing extraordinary. Eventually, she could take no more and so she stabbed her husband – who she classified a sadist – in the stomach with a knife, subsequently receiving two years' probation for her crime. It's hardly surprising that she was unfaithful during the marriage, although she disputes the version of events by which she is said to have conceived her daughter.
O'Connor and Cox had a son and four years later, on 29 June 1981, Tracey Connelly was born in Leicester. She lived there for three years until her mother and Cox – who Tracey had always regarded as her natural father throughout childhood – separated. From the start, Cox took to calling Tracey 'the bastard', for reasons that will soon become clear. Her parents' relationship had been a stormy one and both she and her brother witnessed the domestic violence that took place. Cox would punch his wife with his fists on a daily basis, blaming her for the squalor in which they lived and telling their children that she was 'evil'. On one occasion he hit her so savagely that the pet dog fled the room in terror. The couple eventually split and, in 1988, Garry Cox died unexpectedly from a heart attack.
The family had moved to Islington but Tracey's brother had difficulties settling in and his behaviour was later described as 'challenging'. Alongside all the mayhem, Connelly's childhood – which she herself would later describe as 'shitty' – continued unabated and she frequently wore ripped and dirty clothes (one of her nicknames was 'Tracey the Tramp').
At school in London she would arrive wearing old tracksuit bottoms and ripped trainers. Overweight and dirty, she was the classic kid that no one wanted to play with and as a result of this, she would be beaten up. One visitor to the family home noticed dog excrement on the floor and no sheets on the beds, a squalid image that was to be mirrored in Tracey's adult life. On another occasion a visitor saw the young girl pick up a carpet tile covered in dog excrement from their black mongrel, drop the offending matter in a bin inside the house, then calmly replace the tile.
In later years, Tracey Connelly would also state that she was raped on more than one occasion by a male relative. It all fitted in. Visitors to the flat would often see her emaciated mother in bed with a boyfriend, smoking cannabis. At the tender age of 11, Connelly herself would venture up dark alleyways with older boys.
She was then given the news that no girl on the threshold of womanhood wishes to hear – that Garry Cox was not, contrary to what she had believed for years, her natural father. Instead he had watched while another man had sex with his wife. Convicted rapist Richard Johnson later said that the heavy-drinking Cox, who also smoked cannabis on a regular basis, paid him £5 to sleep with O'Connor as part of a joke. Even Johnson, who would later appear in Baby P's life, was to admit, 'It was the biggest regret of my life.' As well as taking drugs, by her own admission O'Connor admits that she 'liked a good drink when I had money' and although she disputes this version of events, she does say that she had an affair with him.
Exactly what happened may never be known, but Connelly later claimed that the revelation that she was, in fact, Johnson's child, 'drove her wild' for a spell although by then the authorities were already getting involved with her family.
His mother described how she told her son that he was going to go with her to get some new trainers, only for her to march him off to Social Services instead, saying that once they tired of him, they could return him to her. When the boy was eventually returned to his mother, she asked for a new cooker as well in some bizarre form of what she felt in her mind was compensation for allowing her own child back home.
In 1991, the boy's sister was also placed on the Register, this time under the category of 'neglect'. Even at this tender age there were concerns, over both her appearance and her hygiene. Years later, an official report was to state: 'the parenting she received was inconsistent and there is evidence that it was abusive.' Certainly, this was the early part of a cycle of deprivation that would only repeat itself as time went by.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from It Must Never Happen Again by John McShane. Copyright © 2009 John McShane. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Prologue,
1 Wednesday's Child,
2 Evil Arrives,
3 A Catalogue of Neglect,
4 House of Horror,
5 Running From Justice,
6 Failings & Recriminations,
7 The Whistleblower,
8 More Horrors Emerge,
9 The Report,
10 Changes,
11 It Must Never Happen Again,
12 Further Abuse,
13 The Trial,
14 Named & Shamed,
Personnel involved in the Baby P case,
Timetable of events,
Copyright,