REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON
Lionel Watson was already married with four children when he murdered Phyllis Crocker, a woman he had met the previous year at the Hoover Factory in west London, in May 1941. He lied to eighbours that she had moved to Scotland and buried Crocker, along with her young daughter Eileen, under some paving stones in a garden in Greenford. Watson then took up with another girl he had met at the same factory. She was just 17.
Watson’s crime is one of many examined in this new book by Canadian academic Amy Helen Bell, which looks at violence in wartime London. There was certainly no shortage of it. Not only were the Luftwaffe killing thousands of civilians each night during the Blitz, but the murder rate in the capital also shot up. In 1945, the number of annual homicides in England and Wales reached a 75-year high.
There were many reasons for this, as Bell explains. For one, murder was so much easier to get away with. Given the turmoil and displacement caused by the continuous bombing, crime often went undetected. The blackouts made the streets safe for predators, while bomb craters were a perfect place for dumping victim’s remains.
