The Murder Gang by Neil Root

Author:Neil Root
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Stanley Setty had gone to visit Brian Donald Hume, aged 29, at his flat in the Finchley Road. Like Setty, Hume was a shady character involved in many illegal activities. He was born out of wedlock on 20 December 1919 in Swanage, Dorset in the West Country, not far from where the Daily Express’s Percy Hoskins was born. After having spent a lonely time in an orphanage and living with his grandmother – a common experience for illegitimate children, who were seen as socially embarrassing at that time – Hume was finally brought up by his mother, a teacher, as she had now married his father. But, confusingly for the young Hume, his mother posed as his aunt. He went to Heriard School, in a village near Basingstoke, Hampshire, where his mother taught, and then to Queen Mary’s School in Basingstoke itself. But he left school in 1933, aged 14, as his ‘conduct and progress’ were thought ‘unsatisfactory’.

Hume was then taken on as an apprentice electrician by F.G. Fox Estates Ltd in Paddington, west London, and after finishing his training he continued working for the owner Mr Fox, who became a kind of mentor to Hume, and also paid for the young man’s food and lodgings. However, on 11 November 1937, Fox fired Hume, as Hume hadn’t been attending night school to gain his formal electrician qualifications as had been the agreed arrangement. Just five days later, Hume became a polisher with the British Metal Engraving Co. Ltd, remaining there until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939; Hume enlisted in the RAF on 7 September.

Hume trained as a pilot and then an air-gunner, but failed all of his exams, and didn’t qualify as either. This would always rankle with Hume, who would later tell tales about his exploits as a pilot in the war, all of them untrue. Officially discharged from the RAF on 7 September 1941 after two years, Hume was described in his discharge papers as ‘physically unfit for Air Force service, although fit for employment in civil life’. Hume suffered from cerebro-spinal meningitis. A specialist who assessed him at the Clifton Hospital in York said of him, ‘having suffered from meningitis he has developed a degree of organically determined psychopathy’. Basically, Hume had psychopathic tendencies, brought on or worsened by the meningitis, in the opinion of the doctor. His RAF report did evaluate Hume’s character as ‘very good’, but those with psychopathic tendencies can be very efficient at masking their mental deviancies, of course.

Until 6 October 1941, Hume worked as a roof-spotter in Acton, west London. His job was to spot and raise the alert for approaching German bombers, but he was fired from that post for missing three consecutive night shifts, and for having ‘a quarrelsome nature’. Hume also stole some knives and forks while working on those premises. He next worked as an aero-fitter, but left there on 22 January 1942, presenting a medical certificate to his boss claiming that he was unfit to work.

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