D is for Dinah

Part 4 of Uncle Len, Wife-Killer

I started out on this research journey because I wanted to honour my Aunt Dinah Julia Hall (1932-2009) as one of 31 women during Women’s History Month in March of this year. While going through the records, I discovered that she had married the same man twice: Samuel Leonard Thomas Ashworth, better known as Len, once in 1966 and again in 1981.

Dinah Julia Ashworth (1932-2009)

Not long before this, I had made a contact with a first cousin who knew Dinah and Len and asked her about it. Yes, she said, they were married twice, but she didn’t know why. Now in our family this is not unheard of. Our grandfather, Alf Hall married four times. The second and fourth wives were the same woman: my grandmother, Barbara. But that is another story.

So, I started looking to see if Len’s first marriage to Dinah in 1966 was his first one, as they were both already older. Len was 44, Dinah 34. That is how I discovered that Dinah was the fourth wife. Before her was Irene Elsie Munton (divorced), Irene Patricia Pettitt, known as Pat (died), and Lisbeth (murdered).

I paused in astonishment. Murdered? Could it be that I had a murderer in the family?

I then went about trying to verify if Samuel Leonard Thomas was the same man as Uncle Len. I sent off to the UK General Register Office for the marriage certificate to see if Dinah’s father was Alfred Hall, my grandfather. I am still waiting for that certificate to arrive in Berlin. So the question was: how could I find out if the murderer was really Len, Dinah’s husband? Everyone else in her immediate family was no longer living: her brothers Chris and Roland, her parents Alf and Barbara. All dead. Possibly Len and Dinah’s son was still living, but I couldn’t find him (NB: not naming names for potentially living people).

Then it occurred to me that my father, Roland Hall, had told his second wife just about everything. She was still very much alive and so I wrote to her and she said yes, she “knew about Len”, and could not add to what I had already found out. I again asked if this amounted to a confirmation that Len was in fact the same man, and she answered, yes. More than that she didn’t know, except that when she met the couple at Barbara’s funeral, she got on well with Dinah. “She was a realistic, down-to-earth person who had had to make the best of things, as she knew she was far from being favoured by her parents”. Len was an “easy-going, cheerful chap”. More than that she did not know.

What she said doesn’t surprise me, as the family was extremely dyfunctional. I never met anyone in the family other than my grandfather, and that only once when I was a little girl. He gave me a wind-up koala bear that played Waltzing Matilda and said it was from Australia. I think it was covered with real kangaroo or rabbit fur and I loved it. But I never loved him, he was a stranger. My father cut off all contact with his mother before I was born, so I never knew her at all. Again: another story.

So, back to Dinah. She was born on April 9, 1932, the middle child of three. Her father, Alf, had a coach company and her mother, Barbara, was a housewife. Apart from these bare facts, I have found very little that I can reliably say are definitely true. I know she became a schoolteacher but not where she trained, what or where she taught, though my stepmother mentions Fulham. Dinah Julia Hall is not an uncommon name, and can also be mispelt Dina, given as Dinah J. or just Dinah Hall. One Dinah could be her, who lived in Muswell Hill from 1958 to 1965, and was a schoolteacher. (In a letter to the newspaper in 1959, she expressed her approval of a teacher who embarked on a world tour because of the value of his experiences to the teaching profession).

Since Pat, Len’s second wife, died in London, it is possible that Dinah and Len also met in London, after he got out of prison, presumably no later than 1965. They were married in Westminster.

So how might a single school teacher in her thirties meet a convict in his forties and then get married? There are multiple possibilities of which one might be that she was actively looking for a husband, and did the same as Lisbeth before her, using a marriage bureau to advertise in the paper. Dinah was not deemed to be pretty and it would seem that her mother, who was quite a looker, let her unloved daughter know that she didn’t have a chance of finding a husband. After the war, men were in short supply.

I have to go off on a bit of a tangent here, because my stepmother was the one who told me that Barbara didn’t like Dinah. This was information I found difficult to comprehend, being a mother myself. How could a mother “not like” her daughter?” I asked. She explained to me that, generally speaking, after WW I and again, after the Second World War, girls were not wanted as much as boys. The lack of men made boys more desirable as offspring, especially as girls in middle class families were not sent out to work and often still required a dowry to be married.

Whether this applies to Dinah, I can’t say, because she did work as a schoolteacher, although schoolteachers were always single, childless women at this time, which is why they were always called “Miss”, a practice that continued until I was at school and in some schools to this day, irregardless of whether the female teacher is married or not. The marriage bar for schoolteaching was, however, removed in the UK in 1944, unlike other countries such as Australia (1966) and Ireland (1973). So if Dinah had started teacher-training at 18, it would not have still been in place. Whether the practice continued informally until the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 needs further research. [Reader: if you know more about the continuing practice of the marriage bar, do feel free to comment at the end of this post].

According to my father, my stepmother reports, he had happy memories of their early childhood as brother and sister. He acknowledged that their mother had “little time” for Dinah and he felt a sympathetic protectiveness towards her. When their parents moved from London to Minehead in Somerset, both Roland and Dinah went to the Minehead Convent School. However, Roland was sent off to Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex when he was about 12, as it became clear that he had a bright future because of his high intelligence levels. He went on to study Classics at Oxford and became a university lecturer in Philosophy. But I digress again. That is Roland’s story.

So Dinah became a schoolteacher and met Len somewhere around 1965. The question arises as to whether he told her about his past wives, his prison stay, and killing Lisbeth. The time between the first and second marriage needs some fantasy, as it is not even sure if or when they divorced between the marriages, or why. Applying for a copy of a divorce record in England requires that you know the case number and the court where the divorce is granted, neither of which I have. Dinah and Len disappear completely in the time between 1968 and 1981. The last we know of the couple at that time is that they were living in Millbank Borough, London, at 10 Bessborough Gardens, and their son was born there in 1967. The electoral register has them at that address in 1968. After that, nothing.

One theory is that Len went back to the Army and was posted to Germany. This is based on a very vague memory of my father telling me, when I was still quite young, that his sister lived in Germany. With memories, one can never be absolutely sure of their accuracy, but it is a plausible theory, depending on whether the UK Army employed convicted criminals. As my stepmother commented, “if recruitment was slow, they may have waived a manslaughter charge through”. After all, soldiers are trained to kill, although not their wives. [Note to self: research domestic violence in the Army, also related to trauma].

To find Dinah, we must find Warrant Officer Samuel Leonard Thomas Ashworth, if indeed he was still a Warrant Officer. And if Len went back to the Royal Artillery and was based in Germany say, after 1970, then he would have been based in the British Sector. The sector covered Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Lower Saxony, as well as a part of Berlin. I myself lived in Gatow, in the British sector of Berlin in 1985, when I first arrived in West Berlin, escaping from Thatcher’s unemployed Britain. But by this time Dinah and Len had remarried in Basingstoke. By 1985 Len would have been about my age now and retired.

Another theory is that while he was in Germany, he met and married someone else. After all, he was used to changing his wife every few years. Dinah still used the name Ashworth, so she was not the one to remarry. Back to the drawing board, more research needed.

If I was allowed to give my fantasy full reign, however, I might come up with the following: At some time between 1966 and 1981 Dinah found out about the killing of Lisbeth and left Len, heartbroken. Eventually, after much persuasion from him, she agreed that they should put the past behind them and start again, at least for the sake of their son. How she found out is another story, and a good one, but entirely fictional.

The couple turn up again in the village of Worsthorne, near Burnley, Lancashire, in the 1990s. Anne, a genealogy colleague on Substack sent me some newspaper clippings indicating that they were socially active and integrated in local activities such as the Wine Circle, of which Dinah was the secretary and Len the “biscuits monitor”. Since Len was born in Lancashire, it is likely that he wanted to return there in the latter part of his life, as many often do.

Dinah died in Worsthorne on the last day of 2009, and was buried in St John the Evangelist’s churchyard. As yet, I have not found a record for Len’s death.