Hilda Murrell (1906-1984) was a distinguished British rose-grower, environmentalist and anti-nuclear campaigner, whose bizarre murder remains a famous unsolved crime in the United Kingdom .

After retiring in 1970, her passionate patriotism – especially her love for Britain's landscapes, wildlife and historical heritage – led her to campaign against both nuclear energy and weapons. She correctly saw radioactive waste as the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry, and that nuclear electricity generation in its current form was unsafe and could not be sustained without massive government subsidies. In the early 1980s she supported the Greenham Common women's resistance to stationing of US Cruise missiles, and challenged the Thatcher government on the loss of sovereignty and independence in British foreign policy associated with dependence on the US for nuclear weapons, and building at Sizewell in Suffolk a US reactor design which had failed at Three Mile Island in 1979.

Her Murder. On 21 March 1984, she was preparing to present her paper An Ordinary Citizen's View of Radioactive Waste Management as one of very few independent objectors at the first public inquiry into a new nuclear power plant in Britain, at Sizewell. At about midday, following a break-in at her home where it seems only a little cash was found to be missing, she was apparently abducted in her own car, which a man was seen driving erratically by many witnesses. A farmer quickly reported it abandoned on the side of a lane through his land just outside Shrewsbury; but the West Mercia Police took nearly three days to find her mutilated body in a poplar copse nearly half a mile across fields from the car.

Despite one of the biggest British police investigations in the 20th century, public criticisms of the police theory that it had been simply a “bungled burglary” grew as the police made no progress, and responded defensively to several bizarre developments in the case, including the emergence of two political motives.

The Belgrano Connection. This centred on the controversial torpedoing of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano by the nuclear attack submarine HMS Conqueror during the Falklands War in 1982. Hilda's nephew Commander Robert Green, Royal Navy (Retired), came under suspicion for leaking classified information to a very persistent and well-informed Labour politician, Tam Dalyell, who also happened to be pro-nuclear energy. (Mr Dalyell is now the “Father of the House of Commons”, as its longest serving legislator.) In a sensational trial in 1985, a Ministry of Defence official, Clive Ponting, was acquitted for whistle-blowing to Dalyell that Michael Heseltine, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Secretary of State for Defence, had ordered him to write two versions of the Belgrano sinking: a factual one for the Cabinet, and a sanitised one for Parliament.

During that war, Commander Green was in the command bunker in Northwood outside London working as Staff Officer (Intelligence) to the Commander-in-Chief Fleet, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse. For career reasons he had applied for redundancy from the Navy before the war, and left at the end of 1982. In a late-night debate in the House of Commons just before Christmas 1984, Tam Dalyell stated under Parliamentary privilege that, although Cdr Green was not his source of secret information, he had “sent the order to sink the General Belgrano”. This was quite wrong, because attack orders are sent by operations not intelligence officers; besides, Green was off-duty at the time. Dalyell went on to allege that British intelligence agents had been ordered to search Hilda's house for secret documents relating to the sinking which Green might have given to her for safekeeping, and Hilda had returned home unexpectedly leading to the need to silence her.

Nuclear Motive. Allegations emerged that objectors at the Sizewell Inquiry, and leading anti-nuclear weapon and environmental campaigners, were under surveillance from State security agents. In addition to radioactive waste management, Hilda was researching its genetic effects, had criticised the finances of the nuclear energy industry, and was opposed to nuclear weapons. She was also taking advice from several more radical anti-nuclear activists, including a retired British radio-chemist, Don Arnott, who dropped out of the Sizewell Inquiry after a mysterious heart attack in April 1983. He had been preparing to testify about a design fault in the control rod system of the Three Mile Island reactor which could have been a major contributory cause of its meltdown in 1979, and which was replicated in the UK version under scrutiny at the Inquiry. No-one else raised the issue; but Hilda met him at his first public lecture after recovering from his heart attack six weeks before she was murdered. Robert Green read Hilda's paper into the record at the Inquiry in September 1984.

Current Situation. Her case received wide and persistent media coverage for over ten years, and to date has inspired seven books, three plays and several TV documentaries. UK national media interest revived in June 2003 following a two-year cold case review by the West Mercia Police which led to 35 year-old Andrew George being charged with her abduction and murder, nearly 20 years after her death. The trial begins on 6 April 2005.

Hilda's Life. Hitherto, almost everything published has been about Hilda's murder and the investigation into it. The sole exception was her edited Nature Diaries 1961-1983, which successfully captured and celebrated her passion for natural history and the British landscape, her descriptive writing powers and brilliant botanical sketches. However, it touched only briefly on her family history, education, and how she became a leading British rose-grower. In recognition of this, David Austin named one of his new English Roses after her shortly before she died.

Very little has been written about her personality and the influences on her development – nor how she came to inspire her nephew Robert Green to support her radical views on the environment, nuclear energy and eventually weapons, despite his 20-year naval career (1962-82) during which he operated nuclear weapons in carrier-borne strike jets and anti-submarine helicopters.

Robert was more than just Hilda's nephew and next of kin. After his mother Betty, Hilda's younger sister, died in 1964 when he was a 19 year-old Midshipman, he developed a close friendship with Hilda. She became his mentor, and conferred with him about her work opposing nuclear energy (see interview in the on-line journal NZIne at www.nzine.co.nz).

He is writing a book about her life, and how her murder changed his life – see www.disarmsecure.org for more.

© 2005 Robert Green