posted 01-18-2002 05:43            

Tamima Gray was a hard, proud woman who wished to hide from her Bible-bound neighbours the awkward fact of her daughter Violet’s illegitimate children. She is said to have snatched the four babies at their moment of birth, drowned them in a rusty bucket before their mother’s eyes, and buried their tiny remains under the kitchen floor. The children are said to have measured their lives in minutes.

But a fifth child survived and yesterday his son claimed that his great grandmother had indeed been responsible for the four brutal deaths. If the suggestions are true, St Olaf’s cottage at Grimeston could rank alongside Crom- well Street, Gloucester, and Saddleworth Moor as a grisly memorial to a serial killer.

Michael Gray, a 26-year-old Orkney fisherman, is Tamima’s great-grandson. He claims to owe his existence to the fact that medical complications arose when his grandmother was pregnant outside wedlock with his father, Gordon, and a doctor had to be called to assist a breech birth.

“The doctor witnessed dad’s birth and there was no way Tamia could have murdered him,” Mr Gray said. “But my grandmother was so frightened of Tamima that she hid my dad away where he couldn’t be found.” Gordon Gray was kept in an attic for three years.

Violet, who died unmarried in the 1950s, told her surviving son on her deathbed the story of her murdered children, and that it was her own mother who had drowned them at birth to save her reputation as a well-to-do Orkney woman who had married a wealthy gold prospector.

The fathers of the illegitimate children were assumed to be servicemen stationed in Orkney during the First World War.

Mr Gray said: “Violet told dad she got pregnant five times between 1900 and the 1920s. Every time she was about to give birth she moved next door to her mother’s place, St Olaf’s. Because she wasn’t married and the babies would have been illegitimate, it was a huge slur on the family name.

“As a result, her mother had a bucket of water in the room and drowned the babies in front of her before they could draw their first breath.”

Infant deaths were so common in those days that the absence of the results of Violet’s pregnancies went largely unremarked. The local community closed ranks, and Tamima lived the life of a respectable Orcadian, dying of natural causes in the 1930s.

Mr Gray’s father committed suicide in 1995, but his widow Margaret Gray, now 61, said yesterday that the killing of illegitmate babies was not unheard of in Orkney at the start of the last century.

“Having an illegitimate child was a terrible thing at that time,” she said. “Violet’s children would never have been allowed to breathe. Her mother would have killed them as they were born before they took their first breath.

“I don’t suppose she even thought she was doing anything wrong. It would have been a bigger disgrace for Violet to have had an illegitimate child. She thought she was doing her best for the family. There was no abortion or contaception, so what were people to do when they fell pregnant if they weren’t married?” Mr Gray said that he had been brought up near St Olaf’s. “But I never went there, even though it was only a few hundred yards away. The place had a bit of an atmosphere. I didn’t really enjoy playing around it.”

He was left the house when his father died in 1995, and sold it to Rob Hill, the manager of a local brewery. The house gave up its terrible secret when Mr Hill called workmen in to renovate the kitchen.

Officers from the Northern Constabulary were yesterday trying to peel away decades of rumour and folklore to discover the truth behind the deaths. They have called in forensic experts who have identified the bones as those of human infants. There has been no decision yet on what should happen to them: police say that their disposal is a matter for the procurator fiscal. They insisted that they were not pursuing a murder inquiry.

Inspector Paul Eddington, of the Northern Constabulary, said last night that there had been “rumours and folklore” surrounding St Olaf’s for a number of years, but that the bones had not been postively identified despite inquiries among local people and inspections of police and parish records.

“These bones cannot be proved to have come from any particular member of a family as they are too small and fragmented, and to suggest ownership would be insensitive,” Inspector Eddington said. “There are some distant members of the family who originally lived in the house who are still alive, and these people should be protected from the current myths, gossip and tall-tales that are circulating.”