The Guttridge Files – World War 2 & Santa

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My recent involvement with the TV series, Murder, Mystery and My Family, reminded me of my unforgettable former colleague, the late Harry Ashley. Episode one focused on the arsenic poisoning of Frederick Bryant of Sherborne by his wife, Charlotte, in December 1935. She was hanged at Exeter the following July and I remember Harry telling me that the case was one of his first assignments after joining the Dorset County Chronicle as an 18-year-old photographer in 1936.
It was the first of many murders he was to cover during a 48-year career, most of which was spent as chief photographer of the Bournemouth Evening Echo. In 1946 he was among the first on the scene after the discovery of Doreen Marshall’s body in undergrowth at Branksome Dene Chine. The second victim of the sadistic Neville Heath had been convalescing at the Norfolk Hotel opposite the Echo building in Richmond Hill. Her mutilated body was not found for several days, as the Bournemouth police searches had stopped at the borough boundary and this chine was a few yards into Poole. Harry never walked that path again.
But the murder picture Harry was most proud of involved the less well-known killing of businessman Walter Dinnivan at Branksome in 1939. Police arrested Dinnivan’s long-term friend, Joseph Williams, and as the fishmonger emerged from Poole police station, he smiled at waiting photographers, gave a casual salute and told them: ‘Take it well, lads.’ Harry’s picture, which I used in my book, Dorset Murders, in 1986, showed Williams holding up his cuffed hands for the camera. Williams was later acquitted.
Harry, born in Weymouth in 1917, was an RAF photographer during World War 2 and captured the first images of the fall of Mandalay and Singapore. He was shot down twice, once by friendly fire after a Spitfire pilot of 17 Squadron mistook his Harvard for a Japanese fighter. Harry, who was hit in the arm, told me: ‘When we were hit, I knew I was going to die. I had no parachute and my pilot, Flying Officer Jackson, was unconscious with his helmet torn off and blood streaming down his face. On the way down I was laughing as I remembered I owed my driver 100 rupees. Then Jacko revived enough to pull back the stick and we landed in pampas grass.’ Harry climbed out to photograph the Harvard.
I benefited slightly from Harry’s war experience. In 1980, before I joined the Devon and Dorset Regiment for Exercise Crusader in Germany, where I was expected to take pictures as well as write stories, the Echo’s chief photographer gave me a crash course in war photography. Leading me onto a flat roof atop the Echo building, this larger-than-life 63-year-old cavorted around, adopting military poses so that I could practise my action shots.
One event Harry was unable to photograph for many years was the annual arrival of Father Christmas in Bournemouth. This involved a carnival-style parade from Bournemouth station to Beales, the first department store in the world to have a resident Santa. Thousands turned out to see Father Christmas in his horse-drawn carriage before cheering him on to Beales’ balcony. Harry’s jollity and ample girth made him a perfect choice for the role, which he fulfilled for fifteen years until 1964. Another photographer had to take the Echo pictures. After each balcony appearance, Harry would hand over to the in-store Santa and secretly slip away.
Another Ashley guise was that of a cutlass-wielding pirate whose exuberant antics enlivened the Beatings of the Bounds of Poole Harbour. He was also a year-round sea swimmer with Bournemouth Spartans, taking part in their high-profile Christmas Day and New Year dips. Sailing was another interest and Harry was the man behind the pen-name Leo, author of the Echo’s yachting notes for many years, and the Poole Harbour correspondent for Yachting Monthly. One of his favourite pictures was what he called his ‘Cavalcade of the Sea’ – a 1960 shot from the clifftop showing the battleship HMS Vanguard, a Bournemouth paddle steamer and a pre-war racing cruiser, the Latifa, in the same frame. He was there to snap the Vanguard, which was about to be scrapped, when he saw the other vessels approaching. ‘It was a chance in a million that all three would line up, but fortunately it worked out,’ he said.
Harry was also known as ‘Mr Dorset’ and as the ‘Ale Knight’ due to his love affair with the country pub, a relationship that culminated in Dorset Inns, one of several books he wrote in later life.
Harry’s earliest forays into books were in the Southern Newspapers publications, What’s In a Name? and In the Steps of William Barnes, based on 1960s and 1970s Echo series of the same titles. The latter fulfilled an ambition for its author, a long-term member of the William Barnes Society. In the introduction, he owned up to the inauspicious start to this interest. As a young snapper in Dorchester, reading the dialect verse in the County Chronicle’s columns, he asked: ‘Who was William Barnes?’ The question was greeted with a ‘cool silence’. Then an ‘elderly compositor, his drooping white moustache stained with snuff’, took him by the arm, led him to the corner of Trinity Street and pointed out the bronze statue outside St Peter’s Church. ‘There is William Barnes – and I remember him well,’ the comp said proudly.