Abraham Cullen was a 53-year-old Manchester man who since the death of his wife had been, so the newspapers put it, ‘of no settled address’, though he had five married sons and daughters living in the city.
He was working as a night watch man for a firm of contractors who were carrying out extensions to the back of the C&A clothes chain, which had one of its flagship stores on Oldham Street; the extensions were off the parallel Tib Street. Cullen reported for work at 8pm on Friday, October 19, 1956 and at midnight went to a public house in the city centre. Some time in the early hours, to judge by his body, found on the first floor, battered about the head, someone murdered him. Police reckoned that robbers had broken into the extensions, seeking to reach C&A. Before the era of CCTV – its first public uses for traffic and crowd control, besides experiments in catching criminals, were only years away – police had to appeal for witnesses.
On October 30, the Manchester Evening News reported that ‘police women in off duty rig-outs mixed with Piccadilly, Manchester crowds today, hoping to pick up tips that might help in the search for the murderer’. The MEN went on: “These under cover policewomen have become frequent visitors to late night coffee stalls, listening for a slip of the tongue that might let out an underworld secret. Police believe there are several people shielding the killer or killers who battered Cullen to death in the Tib Street, Manchester extension of C&A Modes store a week ago.”
A week earlier, the MEN had reported that police were expecting an arrest within 48 hours. A woman had named another woman ‘off Piccadilly’ (a stone’s throw or two from the murder scene) who was having a coffee with the dead man on the night of the murder. “Throughout Britain police were seeking a dark coloured van with a cream strip – probably obliterating a name – on its side which the gang might have used for a get-away” and seen outside the building on the night of the murder.
Days later meanwhile a 24-year-old woman’s naked body was found on waste ground in Moss Side in Manchester. ‘Irish Pat’, as she was known to her friends, was strangled with her own cardigan. It meant that the city’s detectives had two murder inquiries (not thought to be connected).
Without a trail, whether of friends, or family or workmates, who knew Cullen’s whereabouts and had sought to take advantage, and before modern forensics (at the scene were several pieces of building material such as a plank that the murderers may have picked up to do away with Cullen) police could do little else but hope for someone to give away the secret. Indeed in November 1956 police (before the days of the Crown Prosecution Service) charged a 25-year-old Manchester woman with murder. They had arrested her for being drunk and disorderly; she had told police that she and four men had gone to the store, and one hit Cullen. A fortnight later a stipendiary magistrate discharged the woman, who had since retracted her statement. The magistrate said in court: “I am quite satisfied that no jury would, or should, convict the accused of murder merely because she followed a man, who, in the course of a stealing expedition with reference to the night watchman says: ‘I will shut his — mouth up.’”
Cullen, like ‘Irish Pat’, were poor and unimportant, nor did they have anyone important to mourn them. Their cases went unsolved. Such was site security then; intruder alarms were not yet mass-market, and premises and building site managers hired anyone who was glad of shelter for the night. A night watch would probably not have a telephone (the man might well never have used let alone owned a telephone, nor would premises be glad to leave such a man with a telephone that he might misuse). Nor did a night watch have any other way to call for help. If he was part of what we now call the ‘street population’, that hung around liminal places such as pubs and coffee bars, they might come into contact with criminals, who would know to overhear and pick up any likely ways into premises to rob. Not that Britain had any health and safety law, that would require an employer to carry out a site risk assessment. If robbers were to confront him, a night watch man was on his own.
