Martin Allen (born 1964) is a British teenager who mysteriously disappeared on 5 November 1979. No trace of Allen has been found and his fate remains unknown.Allen lived with his parents in a cottage in the grounds of the Australian High Commission in London. His father was chauffeur to the Australian High Commissioner, while his mother worked at a London school.
It is not improbable that his disappearance was connected to incidents that occurred within the High Commission grounds. For that reason alone, the incoming Australian High Commissioner to the UK, George Brandis QC is duty bound to re-open investigations into the matter ,using both Australian and UK resources. He is after all a QC and as Attorney General, formerly in
charge of the Australian Security And Intelligence Organisation.
A QC with high level exposure to intelligence methods is just the person for the job.
A missing boy and the Australian high commission in London
JACQUELIN MAGNAY
The Australian
EVERY Saturday in the school holidays two English brothers, Kevin and Martin Allen, would make their way to Canberra House, just down from the Australia House embassy on London’s Strand to wash the cars of the Australian high commissioner’s fleet.
For five quid each the teenagers would wash and polish, and occasionally squirt each other with a blast of the hose. Kevin Allen remembers how Martin, 18 months his junior, would often break out of his quiet shell and spontaneously grin as they removed the grime of London’s streets from the specially imported Ford Fairlanes in the underground basement.
Those memories are particularly poignant because 35 years ago, on Guy Fawkes night in 1979, Martin Allen vanished without trace. The 15-year-old was last seen at Kings Cross tube station en route to visit his older brother Bob, who had a new baby.
The mystery of what happened to Martin, the son of the Australian high commissioner’s head chauffeur, Tom Allen, has been reignited in recent months after a man, identified only as Nick, says he was the victim of a VIP pedophile ring that included high-ranking politicians, business leaders, intelligence agents and even a royal connection. Nick has linked this pedophile ring directly to the murders of three boys.
Kevin Allen, and the London Metropolitan police, believe Nick’s account that Martin may have been one of three boys killed in the late 1970s and early 80s. One boy is claimed to have been strangled by a sitting Conservative MP; another boy was murdered at an orgy at which a Conservative MP was present; and another abuser struck a boy aged about 10 with his car as a way to intimidate other victims.
No bodies have been found.
The police are taking the claims of Nick, now a middle-aged man, so seriously they have launched an appeal for anyone with knowledge to come forward. The murders are linked to the notorious pedophile hangouts in London at the time: in Elm House, Barnes, another in Dolphin Square, Pimlico — just a short walk from Westminster — and a little-publicised address in Kensington.
For Kevin, who was 16 at the time, the fresh link between his brother’s abduction and an Establishment network has raised questions about how Martin was identified and groomed. Kevin believes he may have been targeted by members of the VIP gang, perhaps after being spotted at his house inside the elegant grounds of the Australian high commissioner’s residence, Stoke Lodge in Kensington, or when cleaning the cars at Canberra House.
The police are now reconsidering the long-held view that it was a chance encounter on London’s transport system that led to Martin’s disappearance, presumably at the hands of a pedophile gang involved in trafficking and the production of pornographic videos.
Diplomats, royals, government ministers, business executives and Margaret Thatcher were frequent visitors to Stoke Lodge in the late 1970s when the former Liberal politician Gordon Freeth was the Australian high commissioner. The Allen family lived in the caretaker’s five-bedroom cottage in the grounds, separated from Stoke Lodge by just a few metres across a wrought-iron low-level fence about one metre high.
“It was quite secluded where we were; people didn’t have any reason to come down there unless they lived there, really,’’ Kevin tells Inquirer. The well-heeled jewellery family, the De Beers, were neighbours, so, too, the Showerings, who owned Allied Breweries, and there was an Arab king to the right. The street, Hyde Park Gate, is particularly famed as Sir Winston Churchill lived and died there.
“We would often go into the garden and speak to visitors at Stoke Lodge,” says Kevin. “My mum and I even stood at the fence and chatted to Prince Charles and Princess Diana once when they visited.” Martin took a photograph of Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis when they were leaving one of the receptions at Stoke Lodge.
Tom Allen, had been promoted to head chauffeur in about 1974 and with the position came the privileged address near Hyde Park, not far from the West End. Kevin’s bedroom was at the far end of the cottage, but Martin’s was halfway along the hallway, directly overlooking the ambassadorial residence.
Since November last year, when police started fresh inquiries into the historical abuse of children by the VIP pedophile gang, Kevin has started his own digging.
What has shocked him, apart from what he believes is an apparent disinterest of the police in re-examining Martin’s disappearance, are the staggering links the Australian high commission had to men who would later be revealed as some of the country’s most vile pedophiles.
Kevin says it was standard practice for the high commission to supplement its regular drivers with stand-in and casual drivers from a particular chauffeur firm located just across the Thames.
His research has revealed that this chauffeur firm had, at various times, employed Sidney Cooke, whose gang the “Dirty Dozen’’ would later be convicted and jailed for the torture and murder of three young boys in the 80s. Jimmy Savile’s chauffeur, David Smith, who killed himself last year before standing trial on sex charges, is believed to have had links to the same car company in the late 70s. Cooke and his pedophile cohort are understood to have been some of the drivers who would pick up young care-home boys and rent boys in the expensive cars and deliver them to organised orgies in Barnes, Pimlico and Kensington.
“All about at the same time as Martin’s disappearance, all of these pedophiles were linked to the (known pedophile) houses and a couple of them worked for the one car company that Australia House used as subbies if they didn’t have enough drivers,’’ says Kevin, blinking back tears.
“Cooke and a few other infamous multi-murdering people worked for this car company.”
Kevin leans back in his chair in the small canteen of his Middlesex workplace and stresses that such a link could be critical.
“It is more than a link,” he insists. “This was a time when kids were sold and traded; there was one gang selling kids to Amsterdam. These guys were trafficking kids, someone wanted something specific and they found it and if they didn’t fit bill at the end of the day, they abused them and disposed of them.’’
Kevin said Martin could easily have been spotted by one of the stand-in drivers while they were washing the high commissioner’s fleet of cars or outside Stoke Lodge and noted his brother’s quiet nature and young appearance.
“Just thinking about it ...’’ Kevin trails off and shakes his head.
Cooke, known as Hissing Sid, would lure young boys from fairgrounds to be gang raped. Police are continuing to look into any links he or his associates may have had with the VIP pedophile network.
Cooke, now serving two life sentences, was certainly in the frame at the very beginning of the police investigation into Martin’s disappearance because they asked Kevin if the boys had been to any fairgrounds.
One now-retired lead detective believes Cooke is behind the disappearance of at least 17 boys and the Dutch police believe he was involved in trafficking young boys for the lucrative young boy trade in Europe.
Kevin says his instinct has always been that Martin was the victim of someone in authority.
“The detective in charge sat in our house one Sunday lunchtime and asked me, ‘What do you think happened, Kev?’. I told him I thought Martin had been taken by a higher or elite person and he sat there, pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You shouldn’t be saying things like that, you could get hurt’.” Kevin still remembers how rattled he was at the response. “At 17 you don’t expect that,’’ he says. “I wasn’t wrong, was I? Thirty-five years down the line and now it is front page.’’
For more than 30 years, the activities of this incredibly well-connected pedophile network was apparently protected from scrutiny through the issuing of government D-notices, which prevent media publication of anything deemed to affect national security. It is believed this stymied police investigations. Hundreds of files relating to the disclosures and evidence about the VIP pedophile ring have since gone missing. Kevin says the files relating to Martin’s disappearance have been destroyed twice.
Only now, under parliamentary privilege, some politicians are speaking about the network to which, incredibly, some serving politicians are linked.
One serving Labour peer is under investigation for sexually assaulting young boys in the 70s. Last week, former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, who was publicly accused of covering up investigations of the pedophile network in the 1980s after being handed an explosive dossier from a fellow politician, died of cancer. Within days of his death evidence emerged that Brittan had been photographed attending a rent boy orgy back in 1986.
London’s Sunday Mirror has reported the young boys were picked up at Kings Cross and dropped off at a north London building to be repeatedly raped, but the day before the planned arrests of Brittan and 16 high-profile figures who had been observed entering the under-age sex den, including another politician, the late Cyril Smith, and some judges, the 1986 investigation was inexplicably disbanded.
One of the boys abused told police before Brittan died that the politician was “nasty, cruel, sadistic and hateful’’. Brittan’s name also appears on lists of visitors to the notorious Elm Guest House in Barnes, southwest London. This was an Edwardian house where well-connected political figures would exploit and abuse orphans from nearby Richmond in the 70s and 80s. It is alleged the partygoers would select boys for the “party’’ from pictorial records of the various care homes.
Police started looking at the possibility of Martin’s abduction and abuse at Elm Guest House soon after he went missing, and it intensified when another boy, Vishal Mehrotra, 8, the son of a magistrate, disappeared less than 3km from Barnes on the night of the 1981 royal wedding. Mehrotra’s body was found a year later, but his murder is still unsolved.
Last year, Home Secretary Theresa May announced a public inquiry into all of the allegations of cover-ups surrounding historic child sexual abuse. Yet there is still no inquiry head after the first two chairmen were revealed to have family and friendship links to some of the people under investigation. Meanwhile, public confidence in the political system to investigate its own has nose-dived.
Scotland Yard would not comment on its investigations. “Detectives from the Child Abuse Investigation Command are working closely with colleagues from the Homicide and Major Crime Command under the name of Operation Midland,’’ a statement from Scotland Yard says.
For Kevin and the extended Allen family, the heartache, now in its fourth decade, continues without resolution.
Martin Allen mystery: how case of London teenager missing for 35 years could be linked to the Elm House paedophile ring
The mystery of London teenager Martin Allen, missing for 35 years, could now be linked to the Elm House paedophile ring. His brother Kevin tells Susannah Butter about this new twist in the tale
Kevin Allen was at work when he received a phone call from a stranger asking him what he knew about Elm House. The man, a newspaper reporter, proceeded to give an account of the paedophile ring of powerful men allegedly operating out of the Barnes guesthouse, and suggested links between them and the disappearance of Allen’s brother, Martin, 35 years ago.
“As far as I had known my brother had been lost in the black hole of Earl’s Court station since he was 15 and his body has never been found,” says Allen, aged 51, of his younger brother, who he describes as “my shadow”. “But a boy of 15 cannot vanish into thin air and be missing for 35 years.”
After that call last November, Allen discovered that a man known only as Nick had come forward with information about Martin to the police. According to Nick, Martin was abducted by a paedophile ring operated by a group including politicians, business people and a royal connection. The police are investigating whether Martin was one of three boys said to have been killed by that group in the late Seventies and early Eighties. One is claimed to have been strangled, another murdered at an orgy and a third hit by a car.
Allen, who works as a camera technician, has kept his discoveries from his mother, who is 86 and has Alzheimer’s. “She had previously said that she knew that Martin was dead but she would like confirmation, to be able to close the door and know what happened. But with everything that came out we decided she wouldn’t want to know. I couldn’t bear to know that about my own child.”
The brothers grew up in a council flat in Hornsey, where their mother was a secretary at Tufnell Park Primary School. They spent weekends ice skating at Alexandra Palace. When Allen was 14 and Martin 12, their father started working as chauffeur to the Australian High Commissioner and they moved to Kensington, where neighbours included Winston Churchill and the De Beers jewellery family. Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath were regular visitors to the street. “It was quite a change from our council flat,” says Allen. “There were garden parties over the fence from us; Thatcher knew my Dad to say hello to.”
The longest journey Martin would take was on the Tube to the Central Foundation Grammar School in Old Street. “Martin was a clever kid,” says Allen. “He was good at French, loved maths and drawing. He always had a pen in his hand drawing cars. I still have a couple of his old exercise books upstairs.”
On November 5, 1979, Allen was at home making dinner after a day’s work as a goldsmith’s apprentice. Martin came home around 5pm but went straight out again to see their brother, Bob, who lived near Holloway Road, with a bag of baby clothes their mother had knitted for Bob’s son. “He came home to collect a pound, of all things, to take to my sister-in-law. He had bought a red LED digital watch from her catalogue company.”
He never came home. “We thought nothing of it that night because we knew if it got to a certain time he would stay at Bob’s. The next day we hadn’t heard anything from him so at 7pm my mum rang Bob. He thought Martin had gone home because it was fireworks night and he might have been going to Battersea Park with me.”
They phoned Martin’s best friend, Robert, who told them Martin had not been at school. “My parents called the police. My brother and I got in the car — what do you do? Where do you drive? We went to King’s Cross, where there was lots of child prostitution.”
An artist’s impression of Martin Allen released by the police at the time
Over the next few days “we sat at home constantly watching the news, hoping that a kid had been found; waiting for the telephone to ring — but it never did”.
The Australian High Commissioner offered a reward for any information but no one came forward, not even “cranks” just trying to get the money, which Allen says is rare.
Allen wonders if he deliberately blocked out any references to paedophilia. He remembers a moment when an inspector came to the house. “He was suave with just the right amount of cuff sticking out of his silver suit. My mum, dad and I sat at our Sunday lunch table and I said I thought Martin had been taken by some high-up people. I don’t know why I said it. I thought, ‘This isn’t normal, it doesn’t happen to us’. The detective said to me, ‘If you keep saying things like that you will be hurt’.”
The police had originally treated Martin’s disappearance as an isolated incident on the London Underground but Allen believes there is another story. “There is an interwoven spider’s web. The people who did it all knew each other, went to the same places, used the cars. I would like them to be arrested.”
He says that the Australian High Commission used a chauffeur firm that had employed the notorious Sidney Cooke, who has been convicted for molesting children. Jimmy Savile’s chauffeur, David Smith, who last year committed suicide before standing trial on sex charges is also believed to have connections to the company. Police say “no update will be made available relating to this case at this time”.
Allen says Martin, “who always had his nose in a book”, and he “felt protective towards” could have been spotted by one of the drivers when they were working their Saturday job washing the High Commissioner’s cars or skating past on a trip to Ladbroke Grove.
The police phoned him after the Daily Telegraph ran a story about Nick’s account last November. “They said, ‘Your brother is 80 per cent one of the three kids who were murdered’, and I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t hear anything else from them for 70 days then we had a meeting. Paul, who was the baby Martin was going to visit and is now in his thirties, came along. Still nothing has happened. The police are never going to get victims or survivors to come forward — these people have no belief in the police or respect for them.”
Allen says the case has wider implications. “Yes, it’s historic but these people were running the country.”
Martin’s brother Kevin today
At the embassy, Martin’s room remained the same. Allen’s father died three years ago, without knowing what happened to his son. “My dad being ex-military, he did everything privately. I don’t know whether he went into the garage, shut the door and bawled his eyes out. My mum didn’t show emotion well. I don’t think any of us broke down until later on. If something came on the television mum and dad would say, Martin would have liked that, if it was about skateboarding or something.”
When his father died Allen found that he had kept cuttings from when Martin went missing as well as whenever another child disappeared or was involved with paedophiles.
The family’s last appeal for information was in 2005. “We applied for a death certificate and it was denied by the coroner on the grounds that they need a body.”
Allen says he “went off the rails” between the ages of 19 and 25. “I drank a lot, it was the rave generation — I took various illegal substances, cocaine and speed. I feel like I’ve had my late teens stolen from me. I thought of Martin a lot. Every time I was out clubbing I’d think Martin would love to be there. I still do. On holiday I think if he had a family with kids they would be running on the beach; building sandcastles with my kids.”
Allen has two children, Seth , 13, and Ruby, 10. They know that they had an uncle who was abducted. “I say I don’t worry more because of Martin but obviously I do. I don’t let them walk home alone or add anyone they haven’t met on Facebook. If they were abducted it would be a big coincidence for it not to have anything to do with what happened to Martin.”
Every year, between October 19, Martin’s birthday, and the day he went missing, Allen says “I am not myself”. Bonfire Night is difficult. “I’ve only been to two fireworks displays in the past 30 years, even with my own kids. I can’t do it.”
He still has the posters from when his brother went missing and says, “I’ve often seen kids in parks who look similar to Martin but I’ve never approached them. I’ve known for 33 years that Martin wasn’t ever going to come back. I just want the people who were responsible to be brought to justice.”
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