Alpha Mummy: coping with the death of a child

The Sussex Downs undulate greenly to the horizon, while in front the English Channel curves out for mile after hazy mile, an expanse of glowing blue broken only by the odd speedboat wake. Dividing the green and the blue is the white of the sheer, vertiginous cliffs. Beachy Head was at its most seductively beautiful yesterday afternoon, and the clifftop was dotted with walkers out in force to revel in one of the most mesmerising sights Britain has to offer.

Some did stop briefly to look at the small white crosses and bundles of flowers that are the only explicit acknowledgement of this promontory’s centuries-old status as the nation’s most popular suicide spot. “It breaks your heart to think of it,” said one man who did not want to be named (“My boss would kill me!”) but who wanted to know if there had been any developments in the latest suicides here. On Sunday Neil and Kazumi Puttick threw themselves off Beachy Head with the dead body of their five-year-old son Samuel in a rucksack. Their case is only the most recent example of the fatal attraction that has been drawing Britons to Beachy Head since the 7th century, when St Wilfred reported a rash of self-inflicted deaths during a drought. It is a 535ft fall and since 1965 more than 500 people have killed themselves here, and the average is almost 20 deaths annually. By comparison the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol has an average of around four a year. So far there have been ten suicides at Beachy Head in 2009, five last month.

This year the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, a charity funded Christian organisation that patrols the cliffs in the hope of intercepting and dissuading potential jumpers, has reported 248 “incidents”. According to Pastor Ross Hardy, 35, the founder and director of the team, these incidents might include leaving their headquarters — a small barn-like building at the edge of the Beachy Head pub car park — to search for missing people that the local police believe are vulnerable enough to strike out for the cliffs. Sometimes staff from the pub — which was once nicknamed The Last Stop — tip them off about customers behaving suspiciously, yet more often the 15-strong group of volunteers working with Hardy encounter the depressed and distressed while on patrol. Last year the team helped 217 people who were depressed or suicidal; this year, so far, the tally is 70. “We couldn’t say that all of those people would have gone on to commit suicide — it is very unlikely that they would — but certainly some would have done had we not intervened.” Hardy is guarded about talking to the press, because in his experience the more coverage that Beachy Head receives, the more people that travel here to consider suicide.

Dr John Surtees, who worked as a pathologist for Eastbourne NHS for 30 years, has had to contemplate many of the Beachy Head suicides during his career. He says the first real mention of Beachy Head as a suicide-spot was by the Medical Officer of Health during the 1890s: “He said it would be better if there was less reporting of deaths because it encourages others. Up until the 1950s there were about five or seven in a year, but sometimes only one or two, according to the coastguard records. Numbers began to climb in the 1960s.”

According to Dr Surtees press coverage was not the sole catalyst for the increased death toll. The drive up to the promontory takes 15 minutes or so, uphill most of the way, and is a stiff prospect by foot. “Before, if people had to walk to Beachy Head and they were coming from outside Sussex, that was enough to put them off. Now it’s easy to drive there.” This is why it has become more and more a general source of suicides from people all round Britain and even from America and around the world. It’s not just local. Only about 25 per cent of the people jumping there are from Eastbourne and the surrounding area, most people come from outside Sussex.

Trevor Slater, 56, a local taxi driver who took me up to the cliffs, says that spotting potential suicides goes with the job. “I’ve taken a couple of people who you are pretty confident that you know what they are going up there for. What we do is call the office and say something silly. Something like ‘I’m just on my way up to Beachy Head. Put the kettle on will you?’ There’s no code, you just say something silly like that. Then the office will call the coastguard.”

A few years ago, in mid-winter, Slater took up one woman who seemed set on suicide. “She was crying her eyes out in the back all the way. When we got there she gave me £40 — it was only about a £5 fare — and said ‘If I give you a large tip, will you not tell anybody where I’ve gone?’. Slater took the money, so as not to startle her into rushing to the cliff edge, and then he immediately contacted the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team. He is not sure what happened to her. “Once you go off that edge there is no way you can change your mind.”

Miraculously, not everyone who jumps or accidentally falls (and some do) from Beachy Head is killed. In 2003, a woman suffered severe back injuries after her fall was cut short when she hit a ledge 150 feet below the cliff top; a month earlier a disabled driver survived a drop of 250 feet in his vehicle, the fall broken by another ledge covered in tangled trees and bushes.

There is no fence on the cliff’s edge, except where it’s too dangerous to walk. Apart from the Hardy’s patrols the only overt suicide prevention is a large Samaritans sign next to a phone box. Dave Leworthy, of the Eastbourne Samaritans, says: “It’s impossible to know how many calls we receive from Beachy Head because most people don’t tell us their names or where they are. But sometimes you hear seagulls. I think it’s is a very scary place.”

Those who call the Samaritans are brought to Eastbourne for counselling. “If they feel the world would be better without them, they close their mind to other options. We can help them open up. It could be sexuality, family problems, illness or bullying. One volunteer said that when the local paper comes and she sees a suicide, she wonders if it’s someone we’ve spoken to. She thinks, ‘have we failed?’ But I don’t think so. We are there for the darkest period of their lives.”

Ross Hardy does not know how to break Beachy Head’s spell. “We would love the suicides to come down to zero. But we don’t have an answer. Even if you put up a fence, people would climb over. And there are a lot of cliffs.”