Suffer Little Children: The Moors Murders in Memory & Song
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Kali the Destroyer in union with Bhairava — the “terrible” form of Shiva (Nepalese, 18th century) (LACMA; Wikipedia)
No sane person would contest that infanticide and the sexual assault of children are monstrous crimes. But the inevitable transformation of Brady and Hindley into monsters by the public and media – subhuman loci for the venting of collective rage and terror – diminished any chance of truly understanding what molded and motivated them. Howls for Hammurabi-style retribution were legion during and after the trial with Hindley, especially, pilloried in print as “the most evil woman in Britain.” Women who kill children violate primal psychological and entrenched societal taboos that can force normally repressed misogynistic vitriol to the surface. Hindley’s union with Brady – illicit at best and likely non-consensual – led not to childbirth but child murder. Like the Hindu goddess Kali, whose procreative powers are inseparable from destructiveness and death, Hindley, though childless, became an archetypal anti-mother – outside the safety-net of myth, in a dualistic culture with little tolerance for Eastern yin-yang.
God save Myra Hindley
God save Ian Brady
Even though he’s horrible
And she ain’t what you’d call a lady
— Paul Cook, Steve Jones & “Great Train Robber” Ronnie Biggs: “No One Is Innocent (A Punk Prayer)” (1978)
Jamie Reid: “God Save Myra Hindley” (screen-print, 1979) (jamiereid.org)
Painting Brady and Hindley with so broad a brush of revulsion guaranteed an eventual backlash from less reverent corners of the pop world. By the late-‘70s, Britain’s punk subculture was especially given to rattling the cages of the self-righteous with intentionally offensive evocations of the murders and the Hindley-as-anti-mother motif. “God Save Myra Hindley” read one of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and future fashion maven Vivienne Westwood’s iconoclastic t-shirts – complete with stark, Warhol-esque image (designed by Situationist artist Jamie Reid) and sold at their outré London boutique, “Sex” (one of punk’s formative stomping grounds). Indeed, McLaren seemed semi-obsessed with Hindley: as dark pop icon, S&M figure, and harbinger of another mythic anti-mother, rising right-wing stalwart Margaret Thatcher – the Iron Lady whose social Darwinist policies transformed the British welfare state into a bastion of neoliberal economics. In McLaren’s self-serving but entertaining film, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (released in 1980, a year after Thatcher became prime minister), the subversive impresario dances classic Hollywood-style with punk mascot (and little person) Helen Wellington-Lloyd, warbling British M.O.R. singer Max Bygraves’ maternal-themed “You Need Hands” while cheerily pasting Hindley posters on the facades of burnt-out buildings.
Malcolm McLaren: “You Need Hands” (1980)
Marcus Harvey: “Maggie” (2009) (imageobjecttext.com)
Hated by leftists (including McLaren and most punks), Thatcher foddered a generation of artistic upstarts who caricatured the polarizing pol as a dominatrix, at times explicitly linking her with Hindley. This confluence peaked, perhaps, with a pair of high-profile portraits by punk-inspired artist Marcus Harvey. Large-scale and confrontational, each created photo-derived, mosaic-like images from myriad small marks or objects in the style of Chuck Close. The first, Myra (1995), eerily recreates Hindley’s mugshot with innumerable children’s palm prints; the second, Maggie (2009), portrays the ex-prime minister with cast sculptural objects, including vegetables, skulls, and dildos. Both artworks caused entirely predictable scandals du jour in Britain’s tabloid press.
A brief tempest in a teapot formed around “Suffer Little Children” after its release. With post-punk iconoclasm in the air, some journalists – who seemed either to have not listened to or completely misunderstood the song – derided it as ghoulish and profit-driven, resulting in negative publicity and some chain store bans. Morrissey passionately defended the song as a respectful rumination on evil and grief, inspired by his childhood memories. Later he befriended Ann West, mother of Moors victim Lesley Ann Downey. Despite The Smiths’ punk roots (and their singer’s later reputation for combative press relations and controversial quotes), a single listen reveals the song’s utter sincerity: unsettling it may be, disrespectful it’s not. In the case of “Suffer,” Morrissey was just another born-in-the-‘50s Manc, still haunted by the pall that settled over his birthplace when Ian Brady’s spade first struck dirt on that “sullen, misty” moor.