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A
minority of the members of the Royal Commission had called for fully
external, non-police investigations of complaints alleging criminal
misconduct. The key principle of law which the special position of policemen
investigating policemen was seen to offend is that no man shall be his own
judge. One Royal Commissioner, Professor A. L. Goodhart, put the point
finely in his dissenting memorandum:
Unfortunately, even though the chief constable may be scrupulously fair,
this will not answer the major criticism against the present system, which
is that it violates the basic principle that no man shall be a judge in his
own cause. It is inevitable that some complainants will feel that it is in
the interest of the chief constable that as few as possible of his police
officers should be found guilty of wrong doing and that this has influenced
his judgement. The fact that the interest is indirect does not affect the
point for, as Lord Campbell said in Dines v Grand Junction Canal Co., ‘It is
of the last importance that the maxim that no man is to be a judge in his
own cause should be held sacred. And that is not to be confined to a cause
in which he is a party, but applies to a cause in which he has an interest.’
There
were, and are, people who would push this view to its logical conclusion and
say that no such investigation should ever be carried out by a policeman,
whatever his force. But not even the 1976 Police Act, which at last
incorporated an independent, non-police element in the complaints procedure,
was to go anywhere near taking the dominant role in such investigations away
from the police, or from their chief constables in particular.
But
the most extraordinary anomaly in the Met’s handling of complaints was that
ever since its reorganization in 1879 any serious allegation of criminal
behaviour could be investigated only by the CID. As most situations of
potentially serious corruption, such as those described in the Times
reports, were bound to involve detectives rather than uniformed officers,
this placed the plain-clothes branch in a position of extraordinary
privilege. Its entire manpower was little over 3,000 (out of a total force
of some 21,000), of whom less than 1,000 were at Scotland Yard. It was thus
almost inevitable that any senior officers appointed to investigate the
Times allegations would have had at least some working or social contact
with either Robson or Harris. This most incestuous of Metropolitan
privileges, the right of the CID to investigate criminal complaints against
its own members, was to be eliminated only through the Mark reforms of 1972.
The
Metropolitan Commissioner himself had, and still retains, another unique
legal privilege. Alone among chief constables he answers directly to the
Home Secretary, who is the police authority for London. Since its
establishment in 1829 the Metropolitan Police has never been answerable to
anyone else, except Parliament through the Home Secretary. This has been a
point of some grievance to London ratepayers, who contribute massive sums
each year to the upkeep of the force. Elsewhere in Britain police forces are
subject to the disciplinary control of local police authorities, formerly
known as ‘watch committees’ and composed of local worthies.
While
it has been shown that these bodies are not immune to corruption themselves,
they nevertheless provide a theoretical control over an otherwise unpoliced
police force. Certainly the Home Office maintains its own supervision over
all the police forces of England and Wales through its Inspectorate of
Constabulary, but here again the Met is excepted. Not only is the Met’s lone
disciplinary watchdog the Home Office Police Department itself - a group of
civil servants who were shown in the late sixties to be quite inadequate to
the task of making up for Scotland Yard’s own disciplinary deficiencies -
but its force of Inspectors has no authority over the Met whatsoever. The
Inspectorate had been set up in 1856, but the Met had always been outside
its jurisdiction. In its 1962 report the Royal Commission was particularly
disturbed about this anomaly and, in recommending substantial
reorganization, it advised that ‘Arrangements should be made to ensure that
the Metropolitan force, as well as other forces, receives the advantages of
the reorganized inspectorate and the benefits of research and planning.’ The
1964 Police Act, however, made the Met no more answerable to the Inspectors
than before. The bad habits of over a century were to remain unchallenged.
In the
days following the Times revelations the incumbent Home Secretary, James
Callaghan, had to consider what to do about them. He may have been surprised
by the impact of the newspaper report on public opinion, especially the
widespread call for an independent inquiry. Yet he was probably more
familiar with police problems than any other member of Parliament. For nine
of his long years in opposition, Callaghan had been Parliamentary spokesman
for the Police Federation, the ‘trade union’ for most of Britain’s police
officers. Indeed, he had given evidence to the Royal Commission on its
behalf. Particularly, he appreciated the importance of maintaining police
morale and the need not to undermine gratuitously the standing of the police
in the eyes of the public. However, he could not ignore the anomalous legal
role of the police in general, and the Met above all, as judge in its own
case.
On
Monday, 1 December, the Metropolitan Commissioner Sir John Waldron duly
received DCS Lambert’s preliminary report. He then visited the Home Office
to talk with Sir Phillip Allen, the permanent secretary representing the
Home Secretary.
Two
days later Lambert made his interim report to Assistant Commissioner Brodie,
who instructed him to continue with a full investigation. On Thursday, 4
December, the first sign of practical action was made public. Robson, Harris
and Symonds were suspended. In the evening Commander R. C. ‘Dick’ Chitty,
the head of Cl Department, took charge of some of the Times tapes and on the
Friday he received the remainder. (Scotland Yard had had access to the tapes
since the original meeting with the Times representatives a week earlier,
but now the newspaper was surrendering them.)
Meantime James Callaghan had given a written Parliamentary answer to the
effect that the investigation would be pursued with the utmost rigour.
Several days passed, with no indication of any further action from the Home
Office, but on Tuesday, 9 December, came the announcement which signalled
the beginning of Scotland Yard’s fall from grace. The Home Office issued the
following statement: ‘The Home Secretary, at the request of the Commissioner
of Police of the Metropolis, has agreed that in view of the wide public
interest someone independent should be associated with the investigation, of
allegations recently published in The Times about the conduct of police
officers.’
Thus,
without setting aside the legal favours bestowed on the Met, the Home
Secretary appeared to be ensuring that for the first time ever Metropolitan
officers suspected of criminal conduct were to be investigated by an
outsider. That outsider was Frank Williamson, Her Majesty’s Inspector of
Constabulary (Crime). Williamson was fifty-two, formerly detective chief
superintendent in the Manchester CID. He had gone on to be Chief Constable
of Carlisle in 1961, and then of Cumberland, Westmorland and Carlisle in
1964, seeing them through into their amalgamation into one force, Cumbria.
That year, l967, he was appointed to the Home Office Inspectorate, largely
because of the way in which in 1965 he had carried out the inquiry into the
conduct of William McConnach, the Chief Constable of Southend. This was seen
by the Home Office as a model investigation,(2) conducted with ruthless
efficiency and a lack of sentimentality. McConnach was subsequently tried
for stealing as a servant of the Crown and for false pretences. He was found
guilty on thirty-two out of thirty-three counts and sentenced to two years’
imprisonment.
With
his status, his unimpeachable reputation and his availability - as an
Inspector of Constabulary he was not a serving police officer - Williamson
was the obvious man for the job. He felt that the only way the Times
allegations could be dealt with satisfactorily was through the appointment
of a whole team of outside officers to serve directly under him, and it was
on this understanding that he accepted the appointment. His terms of
reference were, however, discreetly but ominously circumscribed: ‘To advise
as to the nature, scope and direction of the inquiry into allegations made
by The Times newspaper.’ The key word is ‘advise’, for Williamson’s role as
defined by these terms, and as limited by law, was to remain advisory. He
was not taking charge of the inquiry. The Met’s jealously protected
independence was still being maintained in fact, although the ‘wide public
interest’ cited in the Home Office announcement as the reason for
Williamson’s involvement would hardly have been appeased had it realized
just how circumscribed Williamson’s role was to be. This sleight-of-hand by
the Home Office, wise and expedient though it may have seemed at the time,
was to prove sadly self-defeating.
The
involvement of any outside officer was, in itself, a slap in the face for
the Yard hierarchy, but the injection of Frank Williamson was explosive. It
placed the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) in an embarrassing personal
position. Peter Brodie was a man of unquestioned integrity and some
reputation for routing out corruption. As Chief Constable, first of Stirling
and Clackmannan and then of Warwickshire, Brodie had pursued corruption when
it became apparent with a zeal which some had thought excessive. He had also
had the task, as an Inspector of Constabulary himself from 1964 to 1966, of
overseeing Williamson’s involvement in the Southend inquiry, on which he had
given Williamson strong backing.
Now
however, back at the Met as one of its most senior officers and its top
detective, Brodie was unable to give Williamson the same degree of support,
partly because Williamson’s terms of reference, as well as his writ as an
Inspector of Constabulary, did not allow him the carte blanche he wanted,
but also because Brodie had immense loyalty to his Scotland Yard team. He
had joined the Met in 1934 and was the first Assistant Commissioner (Crime)
to have risen from the ranks of the CID. He was an old Harrovian, and to
that extent one of the old-style gentleman class of Yard chiefs, but he felt
he knew the everyday problems of the lowly detective. He cared about his
men’s anxieties, both professional and personal, and he worried particularly
about the way a detective’s family suffers should the officer be accused of
corruption. But Brodie also assumed that 99 per cent of all policemen were
straight. He simply did not believe that corruption among his 13,250
detectives was a serious problem. His trust in them was unquestioning and he
only very reluctantly did anything which might impugn their integrity or
disrupt their morale.
Nevertheless, within these legal and personal restraints Brodie was formally
to ensure that Williamson received all necessary co-operation. On the day
his appointment was announced Williamson went to Scotland Yard and met
Brodie and other senior officers in the line of command. If Williamson had
not guessed beforehand that his reception was unlikely to be friendly, this
preliminary gathering indicated the scale of his difficulties. Williamson
let these high-ranking detectives know that he was willing to act in the
advisory role to which he was limited, but only if he was kept informed of
all developments in the inquiry as they happened and, secondly, that his
advice was always very seriously considered.
The
first of these stipulations should have been willingly embraced, for it need
not have caused any delay or dislocation in the pursuit of the
investigation. But the second, that his advice should always be seriously
considered, indicated to the Yard men that, even though legally Williamson
was tied down, he still intended to take control of the inquiry. That they
could not accept. However, they also knew that he had one line of action
they could not control. The Home Office had made it publicly clear that
Williamson at any time could go direct to the Commissioner, Sir John
Waldron, and equally directly to the Home Secretary himself, to keep them
‘constantly informed of any developments’. So if anything appeared to be
going wrong with the conduct of the inquiry, or more bluntly, if he did not
have his way, Williamson could by-pass the lot of them.
It was
predictable that Williamson would find himself in this hostile atmosphere so
soon, for his difficulties arose from those very qualities and principles
which had recommended him to the Home Office. At police conferences and
conventions over many years he had made no secret of his suspicion of the
ability and the behaviour of metropolitan detectives. Both as a provincial
officer and as an Inspector of Constabulary he had long experience of a
disabling lack of constructive co-operation and liaison between the Met and
their country cousins. He voiced a widespread and deeply felt anxiety that,
on many occasions, information considered valuable enough by senior
provincial detectives to be handed on to Scotland Yard failed to result in
any action. Metropolitan detectives often held the view expressed by
Sergeant Symonds that country coppers were swedes - not because they were
too stupid to take bribes but because they were not very good detectives.
Before the amalgamation in the mid-sixties of many small town and country
forces into more sizable units, it had often been necessary to call in the
Yard to take over investigations of major crimes which the tiny
constabularies could not handle. But Williamson had made his reputation in
the Manchester force, which had no such deficiency, and he detested what he
saw as the Met’s arrogant and unjustified contempt for provincial
detectives. On the contrary, he held a fundamentally low opinion of the
standard of metropolitan detection, which he seems to have inherited from
his father, who had been Chief Constable of Northampton.(3) As an Inspector of
Constabulary he raised these opinions almost to axioms of policy. He felt
the time had come when the Metropolitan CID would benefit from the
introduction of senior officers from outside police forces to change some of
its traditional thinking.
Many
senior Yard men chose to interpret Williamson’s views as a mania to clean up
the Met, a crusade which was distorted and ill-judged, a symptom of his
Plymouth Brethren upbringing and an extreme case of the typical swede’s
inferiority complex. They thought that Williamson’s suspicion of
Metropolitan mores was simply wrong, a prejudice which poisoned his mind. He
failed to win the co-operation he sought from the CID because he refused to
take into account the special loyalties and codes of a closed and
introverted society. Some felt he deliberately set out to antagonize that
fraternity. There is, however, an alternative interpretation of Williamson’s
views and the reactions they provoked: that he was absolutely correct, that
the Met did need to be cleaned out and that those who least welcomed his
involvement in the Times inquiry were those who knew best how right he was.
To
give a clear account of Williamson’s views on the specific issue of police
corruption, it is worth quoting at length from an interview he gave to Peter
Harvey in the Guardian, in January 1973, one year after his premature
resignation from the Inspectorate of Constabulary and indeed from the police
service as a whole.
‘When
a policeman is doing his job, often difficult and frequently dangerous, he
should be supported to the full by his senior officers and all law-abiding
members of the community. When he breaks the rules, which he knows all too
well, he should be dealt with according to the law. Until he does
transgress, for God’s sake get off his back. He is doing a vital and
responsible job, and he needs your support.’
Williamson went on to say that much of his concern was due to the ‘periodic
but very significant’ failure of police departments to deal effectively with
allegations of corruption.
‘A
high proportion of detectives in this country would be glad to be relieved
of the burden of knowing that a dishonest minority exists, and that that
minority appears to be able to follow its own devices unchecked and with
little fear of detection.’
Williamson was convinced of the ‘absolute integrity’ of most British
policemen, but the warning signs undoubtedly existed. Williamson said that
he believed a high proportion of serving officers agreed with him.
‘But
they don’t declare their concern, for three prime reasons. There is a
misguided sense of loyalty to officers who, by their conduct, damage the
reputation of the police. Then there is, I suppose, an understandable
reluctance to deal with members of one’s own ‘cloth’. And finally,
regrettably, a small proportion of senior officers have grown up in a
tradition of dishonesty. These men are simply incapable of dealing with
these situations.
Only
one set of rules can be applied. Information about police corruption must be
dealt with in precisely the same way as the police deal with information
against other policemen ... speedily, promptly, and with the right amount of
determination to see it through to the end. Until the words ‘except police
officers’ are written into any statute in this land, policemen must be dealt
with in the same way as everyone else.
Obviously, many allegations against policemen come from criminals and for
precisely that reason, senior officers will instinctively treat such charges
with caution. But it must stop there. Information against policemen must be
dealt with promptly and positively.’
These
views which Williamson expressed in 1973 were well formed by the time he was
asked to advise on the Times inquiry, but if he then had any faith left in
the Met’s capacity to clean out its own stable it was soon to be totally'
destroyed.
Williamson joined the inquiry ten days after
The Times published its story.
By this time a certain amount of fact had been established. Much of it was
organizational and common knowledge to any senior Yard detective. Who were
the officers named and unnamed in the article, and what had they been doing
to come into contact with Michael Perry?
In
1967 it had become apparent that several London-based gangs were raiding
shops and stores in London, the Home Counties and occasionally further
afield, with the aid of skeleton or duplicate keys. They were stealing huge
quantities of property, but almost never had to force their entry and very
rarely left any incriminating evidence. So on 24 November 1967, in order to
combat the gangs’ soaring success rate, it was decided to set up ‘Operation
Coathanger’, so named because most of the property stolen was clothing.
Coathanger’s commander was Chief Inspector Irvine of Kent Constabulary, who
was attached to No. 6 Regional Crime Squad and was working from C9
Department - the Metropolitan and Provincial Police Crime Branch at Scotland
Yard. Coathanger operated until 2 July 1968, when it was suspended because
the gangs had become less active. Coathanger may well have driven them into
inactivity, but they seem only to have been taking a well-earned rest, for
by September 1969 they were once again extremely active. In mid-October
Operation Coathanger was revived, again with Chief Inspector Irvine leading
the team of eleven detectives, mostly from provincial forces but already
working in the regional crime squads. Irvine had many other duties and
during his frequent absences Detective Inspector Bernard Robson of C9,
Coathanger’s most senior detective, seems to have assumed the role of
operational commander. In addition to those assigned full-time to
Coathanger, other regional crime squad officers drifted into the Squad. One
such vagrant was Sergeant Gordon Harris, a Metropolitan policeman who was
then attached to No. 6 Regional Crime Squad at Brighton. It is not clear why
Harris became involved, but some regional crime squad officers had a roving,
almost freelance role and on occasions they chose their own assignments.
Harris might have had some useful insights to contribute, since several
Coathanger offences had been committed in the Brighton area, yet he still
had no official appointment when he assumed the leadership of that section
of Coathanger working in South London, especially Peckham.
Robson
and Harris had long been familiar with the area, and with each other, since
their early sixties days together at Brixton CID under Roy Yorke. At their
trial in 1972 Robson and Harris were to receive some glowing testimonials
for their Coathanger work. Ian Forbes, by then Deputy Assistant Commissioner
but in 1969 Commander of C9 Department and national co-ordinator of the
regional crime squads, said that Harris was an outstanding officer while
Robson was held in very high esteem as an energetic, thoughtful
investigator, of whose conduct no one had ever complained. DCS Moody (who
took over the Times inquiry in such unsatisfactory circumstances) said that
Harris had received at least ten commendations for catching thieves, while
DCI Irvine, as head of Coathanger, said that he had always found Robson
‘efficient and conscientious’. He had been responsible for twenty-two
arrests, including that of the key-maker. ‘In most of the events Mr Robson
was present and had led the team.’ Nevertheless, it also came out at the
trial that the skeleton-key gangs had disposed of £600,000 to £750,000 worth
of property from London jobs alone, that not all members of the gang had
been arrested and that even in 1972 similar offences were still being
committed. At one time the gang’s prolific activities, and the proliferation
of duplicate keys, had reached a chaotic climax during which the same
premises were being raided on the same night by different Coathanger teams.
On one occasion one team of robbers was entering a retail store where they
met another on its way out with everything worth taking.
Back
in October 1969 Operation Coathanger had accumulated the names and personal
details of many thieves who were known to be associated with the duplicate
key gangs. Among them was Michael Perry, then twenty-two years old and
living in Nunhead Lane, Peckham. A few weeks earlier, on 24 September,
detectives from the Warwickshire and Coventry force, assisted by
Metropolitan officers, arrested Perry in Peckham. They suspected he had
taken part two days earlier in a duplicate key job at a branch of the
Nuneaton and Atherstone District Co-operative Society when cigarettes were
stolen. Perry was taken to Nuneaton but released on 25 September for lack of
evidence. The following day Perry was picked up again and taken to Tower
Bridge police station for questioning about the theft of a van containing
clothing from a Peckham street. On 27 September Perry was picked out at an
identification parade and later charged. After two weeks he was committed
for trial at Inner London Quarter Sessions but was released on bail. A
further five days passed before Robson, Harris and colleagues called on
Perry and found the stolen whisky. There is no doubt that Perry was worthy
of Operation Coathanger’s attentions. It was said at the Robson-Harris trial
that Perry was ‘at the heart of the skeleton-key offences’. Perry himself
admitted that he ‘knew the people’ who used to do things with the Coathanger
gang ‘but I had never done any myself’. He stated that he would have been
able to give Robson some names - fewer than ten - of people who were doing
the jobs and also the names of some five receivers. This was what Robson, in
theory, was trying to get out of him, ‘but when I would not give him the
names of the receivers he took the money instead’. It was only six days
after this meeting that Perry was in touch with The Times.
When
Yorke and Lambert first went through the Times material on the night of
publication they would have had ready access to the simple organizational
information on Coathanger and the legitimate roles of Robson and Harris. It
was also easy for them to establish similar facts about Symonds, working
from Camberwell. They were also able to identify other officers referred to
in the article but not by name.
It is
at this point, with the Yard in possession of the Times evidence, that its
determination to find out the truth of the allegations already seems to have
sagged. Had such well-founded allegations as were brought by The Times
against members of the CID been made against a private citizen Scotland Yard
would have taken immediate investigative action. Whether the suspect had a
criminal record or not, the police would rapidly have armed themselves with
a warrant to search his home and place of work. His diary and other papers
would have been scrutinized, and his financial details checked. The
suspect’s haunts would have been visited, his spending habits researched and
any sudden extravagances noted. He would have been subjected to a thorough
investigation and protracted questioning before he had any opportunity to
dispose of incriminating material. And how much easier for the Yard to
surprise one of its own employees, whose whereabouts and rate of pay were
known, and who would scarcely have squealed to the National Council for
Civil Liberties if he had felt his citizen’s rights were being trampled on!
But there is reason to doubt that such instant investigations were carried
out over the Times allegations with the zeal considered obligatory on a
normal criminal inquiry.
What
immediate steps were taken? How much serious investigation was carried out
from the moment the Times representatives visited the Yard on the evening of
28 November to the suspension of Robson, Harris and Symonds on 4 December?
For
these six days the main effort of the police investigation had gone into
discussing the affair and obtaining statements from Perry and the Times
team. There seems to have been little effort to take investigatory action in
the direction of the officers against whom the allegations had been made, if
only to enable them promptly to clear their names. The normal conduct of a
criminal inquiry - searching the suspects’ homes, desks, lockers - seems to
have been totally neglected. On the night of publication the inquiry
officers incarcerated themselves with the Times men, for the apparent
purpose of acquiring very lengthy statements of evidence on paper. Meanwhile
precious minutes and hours slipped by, during which the Yard might have
gathered a lot of evidence of its own. The distrust manifested by The Times
in not taking its suspicions to the Yard before going into print was already
being justified. The will of the CID to act promptly and firmly against ‘the
firm in a firm’ did not seem to exist.
Even
by 3 December the Yard inquiry team was still taking formal written
statements from the Times reporters. These were essential, but not to the
exclusion of all fundamental criminal investigation. The inquirers must have
been furious at the way in which The Times had gathered its evidence, and
also angry at the way the information in its possession had been withheld
until there was no way of stopping publication. That decision to publish had
probably made all normal ‘action’ quite futile. But, however aggrieved
senior Yard men may have felt about The Times’ behaviour, their paramount
aim should have been immediate action against the suspect detectives,
irrespective of any affection for them as long-standing colleagues or humane
concern for the feelings of their families. The reputation of the Yard
itself was at stake. But instead, the guiding principles of a large section
of the inquiry team, in those early days and later on, would appear to have
been: investigate the investigators - those press men must be telling lies.
Both
Lloyd and Mounter were to find that this Yard attitude was practised in a
particularly offensive way on them. At The Times a suite of offices on the
top floor was made available to the investigating detectives. They repaid
the hospitality by interrogating Lloyd and Mounter in separate rooms for
eight hours a day over three weeks. The reporters felt they were being
treated as criminal conspirators. In succeeding weeks and months they
received anonymous phone calls, containing sentiments such as ‘We’ll get you
for this.’ On one occasion Mounter was trailed on and off tube trains right
across London. Meanwhile it seemed that the tapes were being investigated on
the assumption that they must have been forgeries. Every effort was being
made to prove them so. They were being tested repeatedly and at substantial
expense in ways which went well beyond the basic requirements of the
investigation at this stage. When the bill came in for the services of one
expert it was for £1,500, and in 1972 at the trial of Robson and Harris it
is significant that he was called as a witness for the defence.
Lloyd
and Mounter became even more suspicious when, not long after their original
report was published, a long-running British television police series
featured a fictional story about a couple of journalists who set out to
prove that some quite innocent policemen were corrupt. The journalists were
portrayed as seedy and scruffy and themselves verging on corrupt. Although
this broadcast was no doubt coincidental, Mounter and Lloyd felt that they
were the victims of an unremitting campaign to show they were prepared to
connive in perjury. Had that campaign succeeded the two reporters would have
been ruined professionally and might well have been sent to prison
themselves.
Another strange aspect of the Metropolitan Police inquiry in its early days
was the fact that only limited disciplinary action was being taken. By this
time a very thorough study of the transcripts and the recordings themselves
must have been made. From this it would have been immediately apparent who
one of the other officers, referred to in The Times, though not by name,
really was. According to the article he was ‘a senior police officer ...
said to have operated for years a sophisticated system using two scrap-metal
dealers as middlemen. The alleged activities of this officer are well known
to South London’s petty thieves.’ Though he was later to be demoted, he was
not even suspended during this crucial stage of the inquiry. Indeed, he was
left in a position of authority at his station when it was bound to be an
information-gathering centre for the whole inquiry.
It was
into an operation of this calibre that Frank Williamson came when he took up
his ‘advisory’ role. Soon after his meeting on 9 December with the CID
hierarchy he was provided with an office on the fourth floor of New Scotland
Yard, and the services of a sergeant for general office duties. The Yard’s
inquiry team, headed by DCS Lambert, had its offices on the second floor, in
the midst of the very department - Cl - which, as was later to emerge, had
most to cover up. The distance between these two ends of the inquiry and the
curiosity of neighbours were bound to lead to the interception of crucial
papers, for already the investigation was touching on the activities of many
more detectives than those who had been suspended. Important documents had
already gone missing. Others, including the diaries and notebooks of the
suspect officers, had not even been gathered. Williamson himself instigated
their seizure on 11 December - almost two weeks after The Times published
its story. But Williamson had arrived too late, for some important personal
documents were never found.
Williamson rapidly set about pulling together his own inquiry team, which he
had been granted in return for agreeing to advise the inquiry as a whole. It
was not just a matter of provincial pride or indeed of his own meticulous
standards. It had become clear to him that by itself his appointment could
achieve nothing. He needed arms and legs. By now it was also clear that many
lines of inquiry were related to events which had taken place outside the
Metropolitan Police district, and therefore the involvement of provincial
officers should have been unchallengeable. The Home Office had given him a
free hand, so he sought the services of officers he knew and trusted from
their work for him in Manchester and Cumbria. By mid-December 1969 he had
been joined at Scotland Yard by Detective Chief Superintendent Charles Naan
(Mid-Anglia), Detective Superintendent Huddart (Cumbria), Detective Chief
Inspector Wright (Manchester and Salford) and Detective Inspector Powell
(Birmingham). In February 1970 Detective Sergeant Sheratt (Manchester and
Falford) was to arrive in support.
They
were all to be caught up in Williamson’s battles with Scotland Yard’s old
guard. Certain Metropolitan officers continued to fight against Williamson’s
zeal. Indeed, one Deputy Assistant Commissioner made it very clear to
Williamson that he would not allow provincial officers to investigate any
members of the Met, or even interview them.
Williamson was forced to counter-attack. He argued that, since the
activities of the entire Coathanger team had to be examined, provincial
officers had to be involved. Only two out of eleven Coathanger officers were
from the Met - and one of those was Robson. The others came from Leicester
and Rutland, Thames Valley, Sussex, Kent, Gloucester and the City of London.
Who was to question these officers, if not other provincial detectives? The
Yard could hardly rebut this argument and reluctantly acquiesced in the
secondment of Williamson’s team - but only on a strictly swede-to-swede
basis. This highly charged demarcation dispute was central to the course of
the inquiry and was to break out time and time again.
The
importance of the provincial dimension had been brought home to Williamson
even before his chosen aides had arrived. Immediately on reading the Times
article a Warwickshire and Coventry detective reported to his Chief
Constable that he had been uneasy about the way in which Michael Perry had
been arrested in Peckham, on suspicion of having taken part in the Nuneaton
Co-op raid, as far back as the 24 September. Perry had not been the only
suspect arrested, but the other had escaped in altogether strange
circumstances, the investigation of which was later also to be handled in an
unusual way. After Perry had been taken to Nuneaton for questioning he made
a series of allegations there against DS Symonds of Camberwell which, the
Warwickshire detective now realized, matched what Symonds himself was quoted
as saying in the Times article more than two months later. Symonds was
offering to get Perry out of his Nuneaton trouble for: £200. Perry thought
this was too much and that £25 would have been quite enough.
Although Perry had spilled this tale to his Nuneaton inquisitors, they had
failed to pass his allegations on to the Metropolitan Commissioner. Why they
did not is a matter for speculation. Perhaps they did not believe Perry.
Perhaps they shared the provincial detective’s traditional wariness of the
Metropolitan CID which was reflected in the attitude of Frank Williamson.
But whether they believed Perry or not, they seem to have assumed that
nothing would be done about what he had said, even had it been handed on to
the Met. As no action had been taken then in September, Perry went ahead and
appears to have paid Symonds £150 of his demand in October and November.
Following the
Times revelations, a report was sent from the Warwickshire
force to Scotland Yard on 6 December. But even then the Yard’s inquiry team
did nothing about it until Williamson stimulated DCS Lambert and DCS Moody,
who had now found his way on to the team, to head down to ‘the sticks’ on 15
December to talk to the Warwickshire men. It was unfortunate that it was
only on that day that the first of Williamson’s aides arrived at the Yard,
for the Nuneaton inquiries should have been handled by provincial officers,
according to the swede-to-swede demarcation line. Had they been handled
properly, the Nuneaton leads would almost certainly have taken the inquiry
well beyond the small world of the Coathanger team, perhaps into the even
more corrupt activities of the Obscene Publications Squad in Soho. That had
to wait, however, for another three years.
Williamson’s team soon had enough to keep it busy with an equally important
provincial angle. On 6 January DCS Naan and DCI Wright went to Hertfordshire
to interview a certain Douglas Stuart MacDonald, who had been in custody for
ten weeks with two other men named Crouch and Hinch. They were all in their
early or mid-twenties and all came from the Peckham area. On the night of 18
November they had been picked up for a Coathanger offence on Tina’s, a
children’s outfitters in Hemel Hempstead. At 7.55 that evening local
uniformed officers, patrolling in their police car, noticed a white Ford
transit parked near the shop. As they passed, the van was suddenly driven
off, leaving the unfortunate MacDonald stranded. Understandably furious,
MacDonald soon let it out that the van might well be found in a few hours’
time in the area of Peckham High Street in London. And indeed it was there
that Crouch and Hinch chose to park the van and visit a club called The
Westerner. Here they were found by Peckham police officers at 2 a.m. and
held until Hertfordshire officers arrived to take them back to Hemel
Hempstead. But MacDonald had at least managed to shield a fourth man, still
inside the shop when the patrol car had driven up, who was never caught.
Ten
weeks later the trio were still admitting only the offence for which they
had been arrested, which was a classic Coathanger job: 20 trouser suits, 57
skirts, 110 jumpers, 11 scarves, 3 pairs of pants, 64 dresses, 141 coats -
total value £1,879 - and the sum of £7 in cash. There had been no forced
entry, so the natural deduction was that they had used a duplicate key.
Because the job bore so close a resemblance to many recent Coathanger
offences, none other than DI Robson himself had been to interview the
suspects. But all three refused to admit any other offences, so Robson left
empty-handed.
Hinch
was never to budge from this position, but his colleagues were less
resilient. When questioned by Naan and Wright, MacDonald confessed that he
had taken part in many other Coathanger jobs. Two full days’ interviews at
Wandsworth prison (the suspects had all been brought to London) yielded from
MacDonald a written statement in which he admitted not just the Hemel
Hempstead job but thirty-three other offences, mostly retail store thefts
and mostly carried out with duplicate keys. The total value of the property
stolen on this robbery spree, stretching from 1967 to 1969, was over
£47,500. At his trial on 4 March 1970 MacDonald duly admitted all these
offences and received a three-year sentence.
During
his fulsome admissions MacDonald had also told Naan and Wright of corrupt
conduct by eight Metropolitan officers, and he committed some of their names
to paper in his written statement. Williamson naturally wanted his two men
to follow up these devastating allegations, but he rightly guessed that this
would only re-open the demarcation dispute. Lambert and Moody of the Yard
inquiry team were apparently uneasy because this would mean that the
provincial officers would be directly investigating allegations against
Metropolitan officers. It was jointly decided to refer the matter upwards,
and on 9 January Commander Chitty of Cl Department was brought into the
discussion. He felt that the MacDonald allegations should be treated as an
entirely fresh complaint, and possibly should not be dealt with by any of
the officers already engaged in the Times inquiry, be they from the Yard or
the provinces. Williamson countered by saying that the officer who was
involved most often in MacDonald’s allegations was none other than Detective
Sergeant Symonds, the man who was so colourfully prominent in the original
Times allegations. As Williamson and Chitty could not agree, it was decided
to go higher still. Deputy Assistant Commissioner John du Rose stated that
under no circumstances were Naan and Wright to pursue the MacDonald
allegations, as Williamson was suggesting. Williamson then went even higher
to Peter Brodie, the Assistant Commissioner (Crime), and in an exasperated
mood said that there would be no work at all for his senior provincial
officers if they were to be excluded from even these lines of inquiry. It
was only then that Brodie, in the presence of du Rose, agreed to
Williamson’s request, but this was all of five days after he had made his
original request to Lambert and Moody.
(2)
Unlike the inquiry into the Brighton police in the late 1950s, which had
been conducted by Metropolitan officers. The feeling in the Home Office
about the inquiry being mounted over the Times allegations was that the
senior officers did not want ‘another Brighton’.
(3) As a
youngster, Williamson was visiting his father’s office one day when the
Chief Constable was instructing a senior detective on how to handle an
investigation that required a visit to London. Instead of advising the
customary course of enlisting the aid of Metropolitan detectives Williamson
Snr said, ‘You go to London Mr Blake, and take two sergeants with you, and
you make the inquiries yourself. Because if you do not make them yourself,
they won’t be made.’
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