Born on the 13th day of the month, Leonard Trevallion always considered 13 to be his lucky number. It certainly didn’t seem to bring him any misfortune during the Second World War, when he served unscathed as a bomber pilot with XIII Squadron for 13 months with a crew who, bizarrely, all had 13 letters in their names.
After the war, however, it was the number ten that came to define him. He returned to his job with the Metropolitan Police and worked on one of the 20th century’s most notorious criminal cases — the murderous saga of 10 Rillington Place — and spoke to both Timothy Evans and John Christie before they went to the gallows.
Although he was no doubt capable of giving colourful accounts of his exploits, the manner in which his life became enmeshed with significant events and people was extraordinary. He not only got to know Winston Churchill a little while guarding his home — 28 Hyde Park Gate — but also the first man in space, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, whom he looked after on a visit to London in 1961.
He was born in 1914 in Walthamstow, the first child of Leonard Trevallion, a builder, and his wife, Bertha. His earliest memory was of being carried out in his father’s arms to see the zeppelins flying across London’s night sky.
After finishing his education at Sir George Monoux Grammar School he went into the family’s building business. When it went bankrupt in 1935 he joined the V Division of the Metropolitan Police as officer No 662.
Advertisement
Based in Putney, on his second day on the beat he saved the life of a newborn baby whose mother rushed into the street begging him to help the infant, who was not breathing. He cleared the baby’s face of mucus and gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
After being selected for the police athletics team he attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where he saw Jesse Owens win gold. That same tumultuous year brought the death of George V, the Abdication crisis of Edward VIII and the accession of George VI. The morning after George VI’s Coronation in May 1937 Trevallion met Evelyn, the young Scotswoman who would go on to become his bride. They married at St Columba’s Church of Scotland church in Chelsea in 1939 on the day before Britain declared war on Germany.
The couple survived the London Blitz, though not without a few close shaves — including a near-miss on their home. Trevallion’s duties included recording bomb falls and unexploded devices, conducted alongside Philip Kirby-Green, later of MI5. In 1941 Trevallion, who was by then a police driver, joined the RAF. He trained in the US, and then in Britain on aircraft including the Bristol Blenheim bomber. He served with XIII Squadron in north Africa and Italy from 1943 to 1944, and spent the final year of the war in Britain as a flying instructor.
He was reunited with Kirby-Green during one daredevil wartime exploit when he almost ran out of fuel while flying a replacement aircraft to a base in Africa. Atrocious weather forced him to attempt an unscheduled landing on Gibraltar, unaware that minutes earlier another pilot had gone straight over the Rock’s edge. Conditions were so dangerous that ground crew fired flares to warn Trevallion not to touch down — a futile effort as his engines cut out on approach. Had he flown another 50 yards he would have crashed into the sea. Against the odds he made it down safely and bumped into Kirby-Green, then working for the security service, who ensured that he was refuelled and sent on his way. Small wonder that Trevallion’s memoir was titled Policeman, Pilot and Guardian Angel.
A superstitious man, he credited his good fortune to a lucky gene and the number 13, explaining that he had flown two tours of operations — one of 52 missions, which equated to four times 13 — the other of 26, or twice 13.
“He credited his good fortune to a lucky gene and the number 13
Advertisement
He continued to need that luck after he returned to the Metropolitan Police in 1945. He claimed to have dodged six bullets aimed at him by gangsters, one of whom he managed to capture. By far the most notorious case he was involved with was that surrounding 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, home of the serial killer John Christie, where eight murders were committed and the bodies concealed. Among those to die were the wife and baby daughter of Timothy Evans, Christie’s upstairs neighbour. In 1949 Evans was taken to Notting Hill police station, where Trevallion was serving, and charged with murder. Under coercion Evans confessed to the killings, but the young man, who was later convicted only of the murder of his daughter, went to the gallows in 1950 maintaining that Christie was the culprit.
Although Evans received a posthumous royal pardon, Trevallion, in an oral history interview for the Imperial War Museum, recalled talking to him in his cell after he had been charged. “I said to him, ‘I can understand you doing away with your wife because she was unfaithful or because she’d had another man’s baby, but I can’t understand you killing your daughter.’ He said, ‘Well, without its mother, Geraldine’s crying got too much — crying, crying, crying incessantly — and I just put my hands round its throat and strangled it.’ ” Three years later, as a result of a petty theft, Trevallion found himself at 10 Rillington Place. Having spotted a man stealing a tin of biscuits he gave chase, and ended at the infamous address. Trevallion went in to warn Christie of a thief in the building, and later wrote: “As I was telling him about the tenant I noticed an appalling smell.”
It would later transpire that six other women, including Christie’s wife, Ethel, had been strangled and their bodies hidden in the garden, behind an alcove and under the floorboards. Trevallion, who said he found a tin of pubic hair clippings during the exhumations in the garden, saw Christie at Putney Police station. On telling him about the discovery of his wife’s body under the floor, he said Christie told him: “Yes, now perhaps you realise what that smell was that you were talking about.”
Featuring in a programme about the case made by Fred Dinenage, Trevallion talked of his theory that Christie — “a monster” — and his wife had been performing illegal abortions on the women and that he killed her after she found him interfering with the victims. Christie was tried only for the murder of Ethel and hanged in 1953, although he is said to have confessed to killing six other women over the previous decade.
Trevallion, who was by then an inspector, retired from the Met in 1965 and later worked as a security officer at the Royal Garden Hotel in London, where he looked after the Bolshoi Ballet and, continuing his strange pattern of rubbing shoulders with the famous, was involved with the banquet for the 1966 World Cup- winning England football team.
Advertisement
After retiring fully he lived in Kingston upon Thames and, several years after being widowed, moved to Scotland at the age of 88. He settled in Crieff, Perthshire — living close to his daughter Julia, who survives him with her sister Ann — where he relished not obeying any rules and throwing parties for his 90th, 95th and 100th birthdays.
Leonard Trevallion, policeman and RAF pilot, was born on November 13, 1914. He died on December 22, 2016, aged 102