The Second World War created heroes and scoundrels in good measure. Few men shifted from role to role with the insolent ease of Neville Heath. Exchanging one alias for another, he was at various times Lord ‘Jimmy’ Dudley, Captain Bruce Lockhart, ‘The Cambridge Blue’, Group-Captain Rupert Brooke, and Lieutenant-Colonel James Rupert Cadogan Armstrong, DFC, AFC. In reality Neville Heath was the product of public school and Borstal, an officer and a gentleman dismissed by three armed services and four times convicted in the civilian courts. His final conviction in 1946 was for the most notorious murder of the post-war world.
Originally published in 1988, Rotten to the Core? asks who was the real Neville Heath? As Francis Selwyn describes him, the masks he adopted corresponded to a distorted truth. He had been a pilot on active service, but his deeds of heroism were accomplished by log-book forgeries. Yet he was a daredevil, a driver of fast and stolen cars, a would-be cat-burglar, apparently impervious to fear. He lived on the edge of discovery and disgrace, as if exhilarated by the tension. But the escapism of the daydreamer and pilot was allied to a deep inner corruption. With some women who fell for his matinée-idol good looks and debonair charm, he was the perfect gentleman. To some he proved a cold-hearted swindler. With others, he was a sadist who delighted in causing pain. His moral aberration drove him to murder. Neville Heath ended his life on the gallows, playing the officer and gentleman to the last.
Francis Selwyn’s tense and vividly written book was a fine successor to Hitler’s Englishman, his biography of William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), another misfit from the pre-war world. Rotten to the Core? deals with Heath the psychopath, but it also depicts the curious post-war society which allowed him to take root and to flourish, showing that Heath the confidence trickster – and murderer – was a man of his time.