Malcolm Saville and the death of Dennis O'Neill

The death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in the Shropshire hills in 1945 created a national scandal and led to the reform of the law on the fostering of children.

It was also the genesis of Agatha Christie's famous play The Mousetrap and of No Room at the Inn, a play and film I recently came across.

But did the boy's death make a mark on the work of Malcolm Saville, my favourite author as a child, who set many of his books in just this part of the world?

I discussed this question in an article in the latest issue of the newsletter of the Malcolm Saville Society.

"You have shocked the world and shocked England"

Jonathan Calder

The older I get, the more I think Seven White Gates is my favourite Lone Pine book. It is set in the Stiperstones, the Malcolm Saville landscape I like best, and benefits from the prominence given to Peter. Saville generally wrote better about girls than boys, and here he gives us a heroine who is good but not in the slightest dull. As a child I probably found it disappointing there was no crime for the Line Piners to fight, but today I find this story of family reconciliation appealing.

Though I have grown to love the book over the years, I have also become haunted by a real event that took place in the Stiperstones at just the same time.

Seven White Gates was published in September 1944. Earlier that summer two young brothers in the care of the local authority in Newport, Monmouthshire – Dennis O’Neill, aged 12, and Terry, who was 9 – had been fostered at a farm in the Stiperstones.

By September things were becoming difficult for them as they were made to do farm work before and after school and punished for the most trivial offences. As the winter closed in their lives became impossible: they were barely fed, inadequately clothed and beaten every day. A doctor called to the farm on 9 January 1945 found Dennis dead, refused to sign a death certificate and called in the police.

The farmer Reginald Gough and his wife Esther were both charged. The committal proceedings focused the nation’s attention on the tiny court at Pontesbury. News about the progress of the war shared the front pages with reports like this:

Women in tears as Terence sobs out story of beatings

There was an awed silence in the tiny police court at Pontesbury, near Shrewsbury, yesterday when Mr H.H. Maddocks, prosecuting counsel, said: “I call the witness Terence O’Neill.”

A small fair haired child of ten was then led through the crowd of villagers who packed the court.

For two days they have listened to the case against Esther Gough, a former child’s nurse, and Reginald Gough, farmer, accused of killing Dennis O’Neill by negligence and violence.

This was the dead boy’s brother and the most important witness for the crown – a child so small that he could not even peep over the witness box. He had to sit on a bench in front of the court.

Slowly and often in a tearful whisper he told of life at Bank Farm, Hope Valley.

The Goughs were committed for trial, which took place in Stafford because feeling in Shropshire was running so high. Terry again gave evidence and both defendants were convicted. Reginald Gough was sentenced to six years imprisonment and Esther Gough to six months.

Passing sentence, the judge told Reginald Gough: “You have shown beastly cruelty and your behaviour has, I think rightly, shocked the world and shocked England.”

******

It’s a terrible story, but what does it have to do with Malcolm Saville beyond the coincidences of time and place with Seven White Gates? After all, children’s books were pretty cosy in the 1940s weren’t they?

But there was nothing cosy about the early Lone Pine books. For all we know, Mrs Thurston was hanged as a traitor after the end of Mystery at Witchend and it is certain that the Ballinger was happy to leave Penny and the Twins to drown in The Gay Dolphin Adventure. 

And think of the readers of those books. Bombed, evacuated, orphaned… they are the last generation of children we should patronise.

Besides, I believe Dennis O’Neill’s death did find its way into a Malcolm Saville book, though it was not one set in Shropshire and not in the Lone Pine series.

******

Strangers at Snowfell, the third of the Jillies books, was published in 1949 and, like many good thrillers, is set on a train. Our young heroes, having just foiled kidnappers in Two Fair Plaits, are on their way to Scotland to see in the new year, but heavy snow means they are delayed at Shap on the Cumbrian fells.

By helping his son evade an obvious villain on the train, the Jillies, Guy and Mark have become caught up in the affairs of a Professor Thornton, who is carrying out scientific research of extraordinary importance at a farm near Shap.

Desperate to telephone London and finding the lines from the village out of action, the professor calls at a half-ruined house nearby. There he encounters a girl called Mary:

She was leaning against the broken-down gate, and could not have been much more than eleven, although her face looked older than her thin, shabbily-dressed little body.  … She was a lonely and pathetic little figure, and her lips trembled as she said, “Hallo! Are you kind?”

I remember finding this an unexpectedly bleak passage when I first read it as an adult. Now when Thornton notices that Mary’s hands are “chapped and blue with cold” I think of the O’Neill brothers and suspect that Saville was thinking of them too. Among their torments in the bitter winter of 1945 were chilblains and chapped legs.

Sure enough, Mary soon tells Thornton:

“All the time she’s at me for something or other, shouting and arguing, and then she hits me if I run away – she’ll hit me now ‘cos I’ve come up here.”

Though we are told she is thin, there is no mention of Mary being starved, but that motif soon makes an appearance. The house turns out to be the base of the villains who are after Thornton’s research, and when he refuses to sell it to them he is locked up without food or water to encourage him to change his mind.

All ends happily, with the abused child carried away from the house on the shoulders of a policeman. There was no such rescue for Dennis O’Neill.

******

I first came across the story of Dennis and Terry O’Neill from a passing reference in a book on the history of the care system. The mention of ‘a lonely farm in Shropshire’ intrigued me and I looked up some contemporary press reports.

In 2005 I was asked to write a chapter on the history of concern about child abuse. I used the fact that the death of Dennis O’Neill had been largely forgotten to argue that this history is one of forgetting and rediscovery, not one of steady progress.

Dennis’s death is no longer forgotten. Today you will find it in all the social work textbooks. A major reason for this is that in 2010 Terry O’Neill published a book about his and his brother’s ordeal at Bank Farm. 

I am not usually one for trigger warnings, but Someone to Love Us is harrowing. The same is true of The Mousetrap and Me, an award-winning documentary about Terry and his childhood experiences that can be found on the BBC website.

If you are wondering about its title, Agatha Christie wrote The Mousetrap after reading of events at Bank Farm. The murders in the play soon turn out to be connected with the death of a child at a farm and its first audiences in 1952 would have been familiar with the story of the O’Neill brothers.

So Malcolm Saville was not the only author moved by the death of Dennis O’Neill.

*****

The O’Neill brothers should never have been at Bank Farm. They were to be fostered by a family in Pentervin, a hamlet on the other side of the Hope Valley near Bromlow Callow. When they arrived, however, the family was already looking after a girl for Shropshire County Council, so other arrangements had to be made by the official accompanying them.

He tried a farm nearby, but the woman there was expecting a baby and could not take the boys, so he placed them with the Goughs at Bank Farm.

The name of the farm near Pentervin where they could not stay? 

White Gates.

Jonathan Calder is a former editor of Acksherley!

This article first appeared in issue 75 (Winter 2021) of Acksherley!, the newsletter of the Malcolm Saville Society.