In a sensational trial in 1957, a 52 year old man was prosecuted for shooting a 22 year old woman with intent to murder in Gellatly Road SE14 (described in contemporary press reports as being in Peckham, not sure many people living there now would describe it thus).


The accused, Denys Eyre Bower (b.1905), was the owner of Chiddingstone Castle near Edenbridge in Kent. He had been in a relationship with Anna Lena White, a dentist receptionist and daughter of a bus driver who lived in Gellatly Road where she cared for her widowed mother. In court she stated that she had agreed to marry Bower but had called it off  due to 'disparity in ages'.


A couple of weeks later, Bower arrived at her house in his sports car. White told the court that she had 'noticed the budgerigar perch was down' and turned to fix it before hearing a bang as Bower shot her and then shot himself. A policeman who lived opposite, Roger Harris, heard the shots and rushed to the scene. Both survived, with White having a bullet removed at the Miller Hospital in Greenwich and later being treated at the Brook Hospital in Woolwich.


Bower, who had been married twice before, seems to have been something of a fantasist. A former bank clerk and antique dealer, he had only bought Chiddingstone in 1955 using a £6000 bank loan. The court heard he had given White a 'completely fictitious' 'foreign name and a Continental ancestry'.  He had told police that she was 'the daughter of the Marquis of Grimaldi and was born in Monaco' and that 'her real name was Anna Lena Bagrielle Suzanne Grimaldi'. White was no Countess though and had in fact been born in Camberwell on 6 April 1935;  her parents David White and Marion Clasper were married in Deptford in 1930.


Bower was sentenced to life in  prison but was released in 1961 following a campaign by his family who claimed he had shot White by accident. Back at Chiddingstone he continued to build his collection of Japanese, Egyptian and Jacobite antiquities until his death in 1977, which can be viewed at the castle to this day. Not sure what became of White, hope she went on to have a good life.