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I wanted to be a policeman as far back as I can
remember. Even as a child I had an ambition to be a part of Scotland Yard
which everyone (except criminals) then regarded as a glorious and
incorruptible institution,. My standard reading wasn’t tales of derange-do
in faraway outposts of Empire like Biggles but stories of true-life
detectives, biographies of great advocates and that long-running series of
books on Great Trials. My fathers library.!
I had inherited this premature desire to be a
crime-buster from my father who had tried to join the Metropolitan Police in
the 1930s. Unfortunately he had a hammer toe and was rejected. In those days
there were so few jobs about that everyone wanted a secure job for life like
being a copper, so police forces could pick and choose. Naturally they
valued brawn over brain, so they only took men who were one hundred percent
fit. If you had a hammer toe, no chance, even if you had just won the Army
'open' mile and half mile races.
Even so, my father had many good friends in the
police, and during my childhood I had plenty of contact with these pillars
of society. But before I could apply to be one of them, I had to do national
service. With a strong military background in my family and a grammar school
education I was able to get a short service commission. I became an officer
in the Royal Artillery and was promoted to first lieutenant. At first I
thought it could be a great career. I was an excellent shot and I
distinguished myself as a troop commander but I served with increasing
dissatisfaction because I never saw action., and so I left after serving the
minimum three years. This was early in 1956. Had I stayed on a wee bit
longer, I would probably have been sent to Egypt to play my part in that
ignominious episode known as the Suez crisis. Instead I joined the
Metropolitan Police. I was 21 years old and now at last I felt my real life
was just beginning.
It didn’t take long for disillusion to hit me
again. For a start, the wages were dreadful. It wasn’t much good as a
soldier but at least the army had been paying for everything else. Back in
Civvy Street I suddenly realised that I had to cover my own rent, food and
transport which I couldn’t manage on a basic five pounds a week, or even
with another two pounds when I worked a rest day once a fortnight. Outside
the police, people of my age with similar experience were earning two or
three times as much. There were some perks - as I was single my
accommodation in a section house was supplied for next-to-nothing. Even so,
the pay was rotten.
I’m not saying this to win pity. Most people had
it tough in those days and coppers had it relatively easy but, for the
institution of Scotland Yard, low pay had two disastrous and predictable
consequences: a poor standard of recruit and a high level of corruption.
This struck me right at the start of my service
when I attended the Metropolitan Police training school at Peel House. I
found myself among people who were more or less illiterate, thuggish young
men whom even the regular army would have rejected. A lot were rough,
cockney types and there were others from the north and Scotland. I wasn't
impressed with the standard and yet none of them failed the entrance tests
because the Met was desperate to maintain numbers. Everyone had to be pushed
through. One obvious way to recruit a better calibre of officer would have
been to put up the pay and improve the conditions but instead the Met just
lowered its standards on intake.
I had barely crossed the threshold of Peel House
when I was astonished to hear some of my fellow recruits referring to
‘bungs’ and ‘drops’ -London slang terms for corruption. These were people
from places like the East End or parts of south London, whose own dads used
to ‘bung’ the local copper on the beat, so even as children they had
witnessed police being paid off. At the time I though this was just foolish
talk, bravado, to impress naïve bumpkins like me, so I tried to ignore it.
All I wanted was to get on and do the two years on the beat that every
recruit had to complete before becoming a regular constable.
So off I went to my first posting, in the heart
of London’s theatreland at Bow Street police station. I then realised that
everything those cockney boys in training school had been saying wasn't just
foolish talk. It was all true because Bow Street in 1956 was an absolute den
of corruption. It seemed that everyone was on the take. One of the main
sources of corruption was Covent Garden Market, a mass of porters pushing
barrows full of fruit and vegetables, with lorries trying to get in and out,
and all the while private cars and taxis weaving their way through to
theatres, shops and offices, depending on the time of day.
Bow Street itself was only a few feet away from a
one-way system of tiny narrow streets so that, if these Covent Garden
porters followed the traffic signs according to the law, they would have to
push their barrows half a mile to deliver their loads, rather than just
fifty yards. So instead they used to push their barrows the wrong way down
these one-way streets, without a care.
No-one had told me why this illegal behaviour was
being tolerated when I first took up my duties on the traffic point at the
Strand entrance to Bow Street by the Lyceum Theatre. The traffic was very
heavy and I was trying to be fair by allowing two minutes for each flow of
traffic. At this point I was approached by several porters who told me,
‘Never mind the rest, let the lorries in’. I ignored them, because I had not
long learned my constable’s oath which told me to serve everyone alike.
This didn’t go down too well in the Market so a
deputation of porters went straight round to Bow Street police station and
complained about this officious traffic cop who was ruining their business.
Me! Like a shot the posting sergeant ran out of the station and came down to
relieve me from duty. He took me off the point and started directing the
traffic himself. He was furious with me but I couldn’t understand why, until
a colleague told me the reason: the market traders were paying the posting
sergeant a lot of money for just this service.
I still could not understand why a fairly
low-ranking and nondescript copper like the posting sergeant should be the
recipient of such largesse until it was explained to me that his job - to
‘post’ or assign every beat constable such as myself to a particular point
of duty - gave him the power to ensure that where someone wanted a blind eye
turned to infringements of the law, be it ignoring one-way signs or worse,
only a one-eyed cop would be on patrol.
As the weeks went by, I realised that this
posting sergeant was a spider at the heart of a vast web of corruption. He
was getting money in lump sums from practically every trader and lorry
contractor in Covent Garden because he was the man who kept the Market
alive. Without his co-operation - positioning PCs who were ‘in on’ the
racket at key points to make sure all the lorries got in and out and the
barrow-boys could ignore the signs - it would have collapsed in chaos. But
this never quite happened because usually he would rely on older and more
experienced officers who were sure to put the traders’ welfare before anyone
else’s.
The benefits to these officers were brazenly
displayed, most obviously in their means of transport. On five pounds a
week, I counted myself lucky to have a bicycle, which was our standard means
of getting about, other than bus or tube. Well-to-do older officers might
have motor cycles, but it was very rare to see a policeman driving a modern
car. And yet our humble posting sergeant had a modern car. He had a new car
every year. No wonder his job was sought after. Indeed, it was bought and
sold. If you wanted to become a posting sergeant, the job was so lucrative
that people paid for it. They paid cash for it outright or they would take
it on with a kind of mortgage, paying off their retired predecessors in
instalments, giving them an illicit pension. This kind of graft must have
been going on ever since the Met was founded in 1829, and probably even
before that, in the days of the Bow Street Runners.
A lot of traders would top up their bribes with
gifts of fruit and vegetables. On many days you could barely get into Bow
Street station because the police entrance was piled up with boxes of
tomatoes, bananas and pineapples. But usually the currency of corruption was
hard cash, and it wasn’t restricted to the posting sergeant. For example,
the porters used to leave half-crowns on their barrow handles for ordinary
constables to pick up. And so, some time after I had sorted out my original
misunderstanding with those porters, I too picked up half-a-crown. It was my
first corrupt act in the Metropolitan Police.
I always remember that first half-crown, which I
pocketed against all my background, the way I was brought up, my values,
morals, everything my family stood for. But I think I picked it up so that
my colleagues wouldn't think less of me. I had realised early on, that if I
did not pick it up, I would be ‘out of it’, as far as the others were
concerned. The second reason was that the half-crown came in very useful for
me, on five pounds a week. Towards the end of every week I would begin to
wonder whether I could afford an egg and chips with a mug of tea in the
canteen. But I'll always remember that first half-crown, the feeling of
guilt and disgust with myself that seemed to burn a hole in my pocket. You
see, I had crossed the great divide. I think that taking bribes must be like
taking your first puff of a reefer or your first drug. After that, I’m told,
it's easy to have another reefer and then go on to other drugs and eventual
total ruination.
That first step is the most difficult, or so it
was for me, with my steadfast Christian upbringing. After all those years in
the church, as a choirboy, in the scouts and in the army, I had a very good
idea about what was right and what was wrong. But after that first
half-crown, it was no problem picking up another half-crown, and after that
it was no problem at all having a ten shilling note or a pound note. I was
now soiled goods. I was corrupt. I was bent. I had passed my first real test
as a Metropolitan Police officer. I had been initiated. Forget everything I
had been formally taught at training school. I had now entered the unholy
circle of those who pervert the course of justice while purporting to fulfil
the office of constable. At last I was a real copper. In short, I had joined
the Firm.
The notes did not come from Covent Garden
porters. Those came later when I was on ticket tout duty, though abuse of
duty would be a more accurate description of what we did to the guys selling
black market tickets to shows and theatres. That was just a matter of going
around finding touts, not to arrest them or confiscate their tickets but to
be paid off. The touts used to run when they saw you coming, but if they
couldn't run, they used to hand over a ten bob note or a pound. And in those
days, when five pounds was a week's wages, one pound amounted to a whole
day’s pay, and worth having.
But it got better and better, or worse and worse.
With every week I served, my more experienced colleagues would reveal
another money-making opportunity. One of these stemmed from the fact that,
to cope with the needs of all the market workers, Covent Garden had a huge
number of public urinals, but at various hours these urinals would be
appropriated by other people with other needs, people associated with
theatreland, right on the patch, and the House of Commons only half a mile
away. In other words these toilets were a meeting place for homosexuals
whose practices were illegal at that time, whether performed in public or
private. So we used to go on what we called Queer Patrol, which was yet
another source of finance. This consisted of lying in wait or spying through
a hole until a couple of men were seen indulging in sodomy or oral sex.
Bang! That was it! They were arrested. And in nine cases out of ten, they
tried to pay off the police who nearly always took the money.
Sometimes it didn't work. For instance, when I
was first on Queer Patrol, I was totally green and - as with my first brush
with the porters - I had this strange idea that my duty was to enforce the
law. Don't forget, at this time I was still a ‘probationer’. I was being
reported on by senior officers whose backing I needed if I was going to be
deemed ‘up to the mark’. Also I now realise that I had a psychological need
for the respect of my peers, along with their comradeship and companionship.
Twenty years later circumstances had turned me into a ‘loner’ but at this
time I was a wholly social animal. I needed continually to be amongst people
whom I could trust and rely on, and who in turn would trust and rely on me.
That was one reason why I wasn't going to stand up and say, ‘No, I won't
take a half-crown’, or ‘No, I refuse your ten shillings’ because I was never
on my own at these times, I was always with somebody else.
But the first time I caught a couple of queers
engaging in sex, my colleague and I had no doubt that we must arrest them
and take them into Bow Street. One of them offered us a five pound bribe,
which, split between us, would have been half a week’s wages, and yet we
turned it down. We thought our job was to prevent the public being horrified
by the sight of men engaging in obscene acts, and this couple were so brazen
that I was sure they were causing discomfort to passers by.
Trust my luck! One was an actor and the other -
the man with the fiver -was an MP, Tom Driberg. So we troop into Bow Street
with these prize fish, only to find our brother officers looking at us in
astonishment and dismay. I ignored this reaction and proceeded to report
what I had seen. The duty sergeant was looking increasingly perturbed and he
told me to go and sit in the canteen. I hung around there for a long time
and when I emerged I found out that another MP had appeared at the station
to sort things out. This was none other than James Callaghan who, at that
time, was the spokesman for the Police Federation in the House of Commons
and would later become Home Secretary and Prime Minister. He was openly paid
a lot of money by the Federation to represent our interests, but at the same
time he was, no doubt, keen to represent the interests of his own Labour
party, of which Driberg was a prominent member. Callaghan also had a lot of
contacts and a lot of pull and when he turned up he had a conference with
Superintendent ‘Bones’ Jones, who was in overall charge of Bow Street and
lived in the flat above. When this conference was over, I was told to forget
the whole thing. To drop it. It would be looked after elsewhere. I was told
to go out and return to my patrol. Both men were released, and no charges
were ever made, I was never asked to give evidence or attend court or to
provide copies of the notes of the incident which I had written in my pocket
book. The whole thing was covered up. And a few months later the bugger
Driberg was elected Labour Party chairman.
Later I was told there had been a huge kerfuffle
over this bust of ours, because the actor was quite famous (though I have
forgotten his name) and till this point Driberg had led a charmed life. It
was an open secret (though not known to me) that he was a rampant inveterate
‘cottager’, whose demand for oral sex - with him performing fellatio on
others, usually ‘rough trade’ - was insatiable. But Driberg had two
unbeatable insurance policies. He was near enough untouchable because he was
a well-known politician in an era when newspapers had not developed the
appetite for destroying politicians which they have now. In fact, they
steered clear of exposing MPs, however disgusting their sex lives. Better
still, Driberg was an informant to the security services, supplying
intelligence on his old Communist chums, like Guy Burgess - or so he
pretended, for even now it’s possible that he was really working for Moscow
all along. But back in the 1950s he was playing footsie with MI5 which, no
doubt, would have swung into action to get him off any charges arising from
his perverse predilictions or from any excess of zeal by new recruit coppers
such as John Symonds.
After this disturbing reverse, my friends told me
that I should have just taken Driberg’s five pound bribe and let him go, as
this was standard procedure with cottagers. After that, whenever I caught
homosexuals I noted they always offered a bribe. They thought it was quite
all right for them to use these toilets in Covent Garden because, if they
were caught, they could always buy their way out. Many were so open in their
actions that they seemed to be inviting us to arrest them. Later one queer
told me that it all added to the excitement, the thought of a huge hairy
copper like me getting an arm lock round him and carting him off to the nick
with his trousers down.
My experience at Bow Street completely
disillusioned me. The whole station was corrupt, rotten to the core, where
everything was twisted into yet another means for policemen to slip sums of
money, however small, into their pockets. Taking money from barrow boys was
shameful, they probably earned less than we did. As for taking money from
pathetic queers or ticket touts, that was a criminal disgrace. But all this
was passive corruption - we did not really tout for bribes, they were
readily offered - but once I was adjudged to be one of the inner circle, I
realised that my more predatory colleagues were criminals on an active
scale.
This emerged when we went on patrol checking
doorlocks and padlocks on shops and warehouses, a duty which some of my
colleagues exploited to become shop-breakers themselves. For them, checking
the locks on front doors wasn't sufficient. They would climb over walls and
fences, to check all the doors and windows at the back of buildings. And if
they found something open - and sometimes they helped things to open - they
would go in and loot the place. They would call up their colleagues to bring
round a police van, a J van or Black Maria, and it would be driven to the
alleyway at the back where policemen would fill it with stolen goods. The
van would then be driven back to Bow Street, where everything were shared
out. So now I found myself in amongst a bunch of not only pathetically
corrupt men, but criminals in uniform.
And then there was the sickening, unnecessary,
cowardly violence. In my view - and I was an amateur boxer, a regimental
heavyweight champion with ISBA fights to my credit - if you want to beat
someone up, you should be prepared to beat him up there and then on the
street. But in the police I was taught to con people into the station, in a
friendly soothing fashion, saying, ‘Come on along, never mind’, knowing full
well that as soon as they were inside, half a dozen other people were going
to beat the hell out of them. This happened many times. Gratuitous violence.
A lot of my colleagues were classic school bully types. Out on their own
they weren’t brave but put them with a pack, or put them in a position of
power over a smaller and weaker person, and they would hand out some
terrible hidings.
Most of the victims of this brutality were
pathetic hulks who couldn’t defend themselves if they had been sober, but
nearly all were perpetually drunk. We covered the Embankment, down by the
river, where in those days a lot of tramps used to hang around , sleeping on
the benches by the underground station. You would always find dossers and
half-crazy people there, muttering to themselves, paralytic on bottles of
cheap wine and falling about. Those guys were always an easy nick. Quite
often they were filthy and verminous, which was bad enough, but, rather than
do anything to help them out of this awful state, certain officers would
give them a serious beating. But we never received any complaints from them,
because who's going to believe a verminous old tramp claiming he’s been
knocked about by a couple of bright-eyed smart young Anglo-Saxon uniformed
PCs?
I was taught another game, if you can call it
that, by a senior colleague. As a recruit probationer PC, I was told to
follow along behind him, even though he had only two years’ experience of
the job himself, and to do what he did. So this chap’s idea of fun, was to
creep up on the tramps as they were lying down with their feet up, take up
his truncheon and give them a tremendous whack on the bottom of their shoes.
This would cause each tramp to leap up, and when his feet touched the
ground, he used to do a sort of dance, as his foot vibrated with pain. This
was my partner’s little amusement. Instead of just waking these tramps and
saying, ‘Come along, move on’, he would give them a brutal whack on their
soles. In Turkey that’s torture, in London it was just a laugh.
And then there was the racism. There weren't many
black people in London at that time, but any stray blacks, or ‘niggers’ as
we used to call them, were pulled in and given a bad time. Anti-semitism was
another thing. I only ever met one police officer with a Jewish surname, and
so he was called ‘The Jew’. I don't believe he was a Jew, he just had a name
like Cohen because his great-great-grandfather had married out and ever
since then the family had been exclusively Christian. Don't forget that the
coppers who were calling this man a Jew were very poor ignorant types who
were a bit mixed up anyway. They had to be half-Fascists to want to go into
the police force in those days, to be dressed up in a uniform, subjected to
discipline, paid a pittance to work unsocial hours, three shifts a day,
night duty, early turn, late turn. What's in it for them, if not the
opportunity to be licensed thieves, thugs and racists?
After about a year, I decided this wasn't for me.
I could be led only so far along the path of depravity, and now it was time
to get out. I'd made a mistake. I should have stayed in the army. And yet I
was a lot wiser than before, I was no longer quite so green, I'd seen the
underside of life, and so I thought, well, this is an experience, I've
learnt something. And one of the things I thought I'd learned was... Never,
never have anything to do with the police because they were a bad lot. And
so I left.
I wasn’t the only person to come to this
conclusion. In those days, 1956, there were two Metropolitan Police training
schools, Peel House and Hendon, which every fortnight or so used to churn
out thirty new recruits. And every two weeks they would be shown in police
orders, joining the force, alongside the divisions to which they had been
posted. But on the same orders you would always find more than thirty people
resigning. So a lot of my fellow recruits were affected the same way as I
was. Once they were posted to division they found that things weren't as
they had imagined, and they just left, so there was stupendous turnover.
Things were obviously wrong but there was no enquiry, no wage rises, and no
one made any attempt to staunch this haemorrhage, even though those who were
leaving were among the best. The worst, those who found the thieving,
bullying atmosphere to their liking, tended to stay on.
The quality of leadership in the force was very,
very poor. Before the war Lord Trenchard, founder of the Royal Air Force,
had been brought in as Commissioner to clean up the Met. He had founded
Hendon College to try and train a leader class of policeman, but when World
War Two began, most of those left to join the armed forces. They didn't have
to join, as the police service was deemed a reserved occupation, like the
miners, essential workers who were needed back home. But many joined up
anyway and only a few came back. Some were killed or seriously injured on
active service, others just decided not to rejoin after the war. But during
their absence a lot of lesser men had decided they wanted to join the police
precisely because it was a way out of getting out of being compelled to
fight for their country and risk their lives. So in the mid-fifties when I
joined, our leadership consisted largely of long-serving sergeants and
inspectors who had ducked out of active service all through the war and were
very low calibre indeed.
After a year’s service I’d had enough of these
people and I was off. I took a job in the City as a sales trainee for a firm
of food importers. My first task was delivering valuable Christmas presents
to buyers with the salesman who was training me. I soon realised that
corruption wasn't confined to the police because in this job we got orders
by ‘seeing’ the buyer ‘alright’. That involved kickbacks - altering the cost
of materials, overcharging him on paper - so he could tell his company he
had paid a hundred pounds for a delivery of rice or coconut when in fact he
had paid far less. That was how I discovered it wasn't just the police who
were corrupt, so was the whole of the society. After a year or so of this,
with similar City experiences in another job, I decided that perhaps
corruption in the police wasn't such a bad thing after all. Two years
earlier I had been horrified and ashamed and worried about picking up a
half-crown off a barrow, yet here was I enabling a buyer to cheat his
company out of two or three hundred pounds so I could get his order. Whoever
was prepared to grease his palm got the order, and this was vital for our
company because umpteen people were trying to sell imported goods very
similar to ours.
Another factor weighing on my mind was that
recently I had got married and my wife was expecting a baby. There was one
very good thing about the police force: as a married man, you could get very
good accommodation. As a bachelor I had been living in that ghastly
barracks-type place known as a section house: with a tiny bunk, a lot of
noise, no lock on the door, and rampant theft. It’s funny but the worst
crime rate I have ever experienced was in a police section house: my radio
was pinched, people helped themselves to my uniform, even my underclothes
were stolen. It was like going back to being a recruit in the army, where
you get issued with new shirts, socks and underwear but, if you're not very
careful, you're going to end up wearing someone else's holey socks and a
rotten old shirt, because someone's done an exchange. In the police it was
even worse, and so out of my five pounds a week, I rented myself a private
flat because I couldn't take the life in the 'Wapping' section house in
'East End' of the city. But now as a married man, I would get a nice flat in
a nice part of London. Pay and conditions had also been considerably
improved during my absence, and so I applied to re-join.
I was accepted immediately which proves my point
that, with such a high wastage rate, the force was desperate to maintain
numbers. And now the job was a lot more palatable. I was awarded that nice
flat in a leafy area of outer south London in a purpose-built block
overlooking Beckenham golf course. And I was posted to the local station,
Catford, just five minutes’ walk away. All part of the package for a married
man. So that was it. I was back in the police, partly because I was
guaranteed this very comfortable flat but also because I was now prepared to
accept corruption. I had come to the realisation that we weren't living in
heaven, where everyone was an angel. On the contrary, here on earth man is a
fallen creature, he is corrupt, so is all human society, as are all the
institutions within it, including the police force.
But I still had several further degrees of
disillusionment to pass through. At first I was relieved that in Catford I
was not required to extort money from homosexuals in urinals or beat up
tramps, until I appreciated that this was only because tramps and
homosexuals were never seen in this genteel suburb. Yet there was still
corruption. There were still crooked uniform police breaking into shops,
there were still shareouts of loot in the station, and there were other
rackets too, like leeching off illegal bookmakers and their runners as they
went round collecting bets. And so, for all the change of air, the trees and
parks, and the neat houses oozing respectability, Catford police station
might just as well have been Bow Street because many of the people there had
been through the mill in central London and had been baptised into the real
world of policing just like me, with a half-crown off a barrow.
Yet even now I was an idealist. I still wanted to
live my childhood dreams and become a great detective so, after a few months
in uniform in Catford, I seized the earliest opportunity to become a trainee
detective: an ‘aid to CID’. I then found myself in a world where everything
was turned upside down. The only policemen most people knew were the actors
on the television series, Dixon of Dock Green where plot-lines about
corruption were rare, but if the series had been true-to-life almost every
criminal investigation in Dixon would have been ‘bent’ from start to
finish. For what I found in the CID was a kind of corruption completely new
to me, and much, much worse than anything I had known in the uniform branch.
I’m talking about corruption in its most dangerous and invidious form: the
moral corruption where, in order to become a detective, you have to prove
beyond doubt that you are prepared to perjure yourself; where there's no
chance of ever being selected as a detective unless you are prepared to get
together with your brother officers, make up evidence, go to court and carry
off the entire charade; where you swear to tell the truth before God, then
tell a pack of lies, then go one better and withstand a hostile
cross-examination. And your capacity to withstand a barrister trying to
break through your carefully erected wall of lies was one of the most
important yardsticks by which you were measured for acceptance into the CID.
As an aid to CID, and later as a temporary
detective constable, you worked from a CID office in civilian clothes,
learning your trade, but all the while, you were being watched and reported
on. And if it was apparent that you weren't prepared to give false evidence,
or you were shocked at the idea of fitting anybody up, or you refused
absolutely to perjure yourself, or you were horrified at the idea of people
accepting bribes, or you wouldn't accept your part of the shareout, your
share of the stolen goods, then you would never get into the CID.
To get into the CID you had to prove that you
were corrupt. The DI might say, ‘Go out and bring me in a suss’ - a
suspected person - and this was a test. You would go out and pick up
literally the first person you saw, you'd bring him in and then you would
say you caught him trying car door handles or behaving in a suspicious
manner, pulling at shop doors - whatever ‘fanny’ you chose to make up. In
reality it was very rare that you would find a criminal so stupid that he
would try car or shop doors in the presence of anyone who looked remotely
like a policeman, so in nearly every such case that I ever knew of, this had
to be a fit-up. Indeed, the entire exercise was a nonsense because when you
really were a CID officer, you didn't waste your time doing ‘susses’. It was
only when you were a trainee that your DI would put you through this
grotesque stunt, so he could see if you were so keen to get in the CID that
you would go out and snatch an innocent man, bring him into the station,
tell lies to the station officer, take him to court, and lie him into a
conviction.
I did such things. I'm not proud of the fact, but
I did them because I knew that once I got into the CID, I was on board the
ship. I was a CID officer, and they couldn't really take that away from me.
But at least, once I was in, I found it was possible to follow my better
conscience and try and keep straight. In contrast, as soon as some of my
colleagues got in, they were just looking for ‘earners’. I knew certain
officers who used to go into work very early to pour over the night's
happenings, looking for potential money earners. Then they would allocate
those jobs to themselves and go and cream off the proceeds.
Later I realised that, to be accepted into
various specialist ‘glamour’ CID squads, you had to go even worse. That
first half-crown off a barrow merely corrupted me - inasmuch as I could no
longer say honestly that I had never taken a penny - but the thing that
really ruined me, that corrupted my very soul, was having to agree to go and
tell lies in court in what amounted to a continuing conspiracy to pervert
the course of justice. I must say that during my next few years as a
detective I lied practically every day, and so did everybody else. The net
result was that a lot of innocent people were sent to prison. That was the
worst corruption, far worse than any small sums of money that might have
come my way.
So, righteous readers, you may be asking, if I
was so incensed by all this corruption, why didn’t I complain about it to a
superior officer. Well, that was impossible because the corruption came from
the top down. It wasn’t a case of us lowly aids sitting in the canteen
devising new ways to milk villains of their ill-gotten gains. It would
usually be a case of me being called into a room by a detective inspector or
superintendent who would tell me to close the door and hand me a clutch of
notes. And no, in that situation I never refused to take the money because,
the instant I refused, I would be on my way out of the CID. It would be like
resigning from a club by deliberately breaking one of the rules of
membership.
You see, I enjoyed being a detective, I wanted to
stay in the CID and, anyhow, who could I complain to? There was, almost
literally, no-one in the entire detective hierarchy, locally or in the ‘big
house’ itself - Scotland Yard - who was not corrupt, or who wasn’t in
exactly the same squeeze as I was. I’m sure there were people all the way
up, who were not innately corrupt but who had been obliged to turn a blind
eye to corruption just like I had. Complaining to them wouldn’t have done me
any good because probably they believed their own boss was ‘bent’ too. There
was no chance whatever of finding an entire line of command, right the way
through to the top of Scotland Yard, in which no-one was corrupt. I’m sure
that our overall CID boss, Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Peter Brodie, was
not corrupt but he must have been blind to the faults of his ‘men’, like an
army commander in wartime who just wants his boys to ‘go over the top’ at
the enemy and doesn’t really care to inquire into any other aspect of their
characters.
At some stages later in my career, I did want to
complain but who can you complain to when you're a sergeant or an inspector
and all the people above you seem corrupt? They had to be corrupt to get
into the CID, except for those who - as I later discovered - were usually
cast into the outer darkness. These people would end their careers working
in some country station, on the edges of the Metropolitan district, because
it was the only place for an honest CID officer. Busy inner London divisions
and the glamour squads at Scotland Yard just didn't want that sort of person
around.
So here was a whole reservoir of able people, who
had done the job by the book and soldiered on. In the main they would retire
twenty or thirty years later still holding the lowest rank of constable.
They had performed their entire service with honesty but they had suffered
for it. They hadn’t joined the CID to be stuck out in ‘the sticks’. They had
joined to ‘feel collars’, to catch major villains and lead interesting
lives, maybe on those glamour squads, but they didn't get on those squads or
gain promotion because it was a corrupt system manned and controlled by
corrupt officers. And even in those stations on London’s remote outer
reaches, the posting system ensured that the senior CID officers had all
been through the mill. They had all attended detective training school,
where jokes about corruption and bungs were so widespread and told so
openly, they seemed to be part of the curriculum.
The shame is that I knew a large number of
first-class men who would have made far better detectives than the ones that
got in. Instead they continued their service in uniform as very disappointed
men or they resigned because they had failed in their ambition to become a
detective. These were intelligent, honest, decent people who had worked as
aids to CID but were inexplicably rejected: told to go and draw a helmet,
return to uniform, go on traffic patrol and walk the beat. Some were very
bitter, and maybe they realised it or maybe they didn't, but they had been
failed because they hadn't passed the corruption test.
There were a few serpentine routes whereby some
officers eventually rose to quite high rank despite being honest. I was
invited to try those routes early in my career and I was tempted. Through a
family friend I was invited to go to Royalty Protection. I was also invited
and advised to go to Special Branch. I didn't take either offer because I
felt the work would not have been exciting. Also promotion in ‘SB’ seemed
slow. I know several officers, good friends of mine, who went to ‘SB’ after
being rejected by the CID despite having passed all the corruption, perjury
and fit-up screening tests. Their faces had just
not fitted and most were quite bitter to have been rejected. If you had a
special talent, you might make an honest career on obscure squads
specialising in art or stamp theft, but there were great opportunities for
corruption there too. One of my friends collected stamps!
I know of only one case ever, where a man who was
not corrupt, and didn't tell lies, did make his mark in the CID and that was
my fault. This was a friend called Michael. He was a male nurse who had
married my wife's best friend, and become a Catholic. He had wanted to be a
doctor but had no family money so he tried it the hard way, working as a
nurse to fund his own studies. When he found he couldn't support his wife
and a rapidly growing family this way, he joined the police, as I had done
the second time, to get a steady job with accommodation.
Then Michael wanted to join the CID so I helped
him get in but it turned out that nobody else would work with him because he
wouldn't accept a halfpenny and wouldn't tell a lie. As I knew him well
already, he could work with me without any need to be corrupt or tell lies,
especially as the two of us were energetic enough to get straightforward
honest arrests. Indeed, as a team, we arrested hundreds of people around
South London and we weren’t letting anyone go because we weren't taking
kickbacks. They were happy days because that's the only time in my police
career that I worked in a corrupt-free atmosphere with an honest man. The
problem was, that, after building this impressive arrest record as a
‘probationer’, Michael went into the CID proper and turned up at some other
station where his new colleagues were horrified to find a man in their midst
who wouldn't take a bribe and wouldn't tell a lie. As a Catholic convert, he
was wholly devout and would not contemplate perpetrating even the slightest
act of dishonesty or tolerate such acts by others. Inevitably, this caused
uproar because he was wrecking the corrupt tradition in that division, so in
the end they packed him off to Interpol where, they felt, he couldn't do any
more harm.
Of course, they would have been quite happy if he
had conformed to the basic code of CID conduct prevailing at the time. On
first arriving as a detective constable at a station, certain things were
understood. You've been through the mill, you've done your training, you've
been assessed, you're corrupt and you're a perjurer, otherwise you wouldn't
have been posted to that station as a DC. And people take you on trust then.
No one knows you when you walk in but you're a DC therefore you must have
been initiated. Straightaway the other detectives can tell you without
embarrassment, ‘We’ve got together and made up your evidence, so write it
down in your notebook and spout it in court’. Imagine what a shock it would
have been when these officers found a completely honest copper in their
midst.
They had no such shock with me, I confess. At
this time I was a desperate conformist. I would do anything to be accepted,
to be ‘one of the lads’. ‘Go with the flow’, they say nowadays but then we
were more likely to comfort ourselves with phrases like, ‘When in Rome do as
the Romans do’ - and, with hindsight I can see that I had signed on to an
institution just like Ancient Rome in the period of its most spectacular
decline, with decadence and corruption all around me.
Yet even here, we deluded ourselves into thinking
there was no injustice in committing perjury. Indeed, we came to believe the
reverse was true: only by telling lies could justice be achieved. Our logic
went like this. A crime has been committed. We know that a certain chap's
guilty but we can't prove it, properly, in a straight fashion, and so, to
make sure that he ‘goes down’ - gets convicted - we concoct a case against
him. A lot of it is ‘verbals’, we fabricate a kind of confession from him in
our own statements. We just make it up. ‘It's a fair cop, guv’ sort of
business, but it goes a lot further.
I remember a shop-breaking case when we took a
chap into the cells, removed his shoes and left him there while we went down
to the shop, put his shoes on our own feet and jumped about on the broken
glass from the window. We sent that glass to the forensic laboratory where
the boffins would do a lot of work and say, ‘That's the same glass as the
shop window, it’s got the same paint and putty on it, and - ooh! - in among
all the dust we found distinctive prints matching the shoes of the suspect.
And - ooh! - look at this, the same shoe prints are found all over the floor
too’. ‘Cor’, we said, ‘What a stroke of luck!’, and when we got to court,
the chap had to plead guilty because we had so rigged the evidence against
him that he was bound to be convicted.
I've seen dreadful things, I've seen people
arrested and taken in custody, then taken to the scene of the crime and
having their hands jammed against something that would take a clear print.
If you've got someone's prints at the scene, that's more or less it. They'll
have a job discrediting that evidence at court.
This kind of thing got so bad that it became
amusing, like when we would arrest hard men and, no matter how much we tried
to dominate them or browbeat them or even knock them about, they would only
growl and say nothing. If they dared to hit back, that could have dire
consequences because not only would they get a real beating but we would put
on our creative writing caps and weave wonderful stories in our evidence
against them. This would send us into fits of giggling, especially when we
had a true master of fiction among us. There was one detective whose
capacity to invent evidence was so ingenious, he was so good at making up
fairy tales, that we used to call him Enid Blyton. I've made up many a story
with him which were not only hilarious to compose, we were seeking to raise
laughs in court as well, so we would put some extra humour into it.
Let’s say we have three tough guys under arrest
who won't go along with what we want, who won't confess or - as far as my
corrupt colleague Enid is concerned - won't put up a bribe, won't make an
offer or won't do a deal. When their case comes to court and we're giving
the evidence, we portray the real tough guy among them as, all of a sudden
during his interview with us, putting his head on his arms, sobbing bitterly
and grovelling, then confessing everything and betraying all his friends.
This provokes a wonderful set of reactions between the various hard cases in
the dock, as four or five serious-faced policemen talk about how the
staunchest one among them collapsed and shopped his co-defendants.
We did this not just for entertainment’s sake.
Quite often we did it to protect the real informant, because if among a
group of people you have one informant, you'll do anything to protect him
because you want him to keep him in place. So when you know the evidence may
be pointing at him as the informant, you have to divert the finger of
suspicion to one of the others, because he’s effectively on your strength,
and information from one man on the inside is worth a dozen cops on the
outside.
But now a dreadful fate may await the man whom
you have falsely named as the informer, even if, till then, he has been
regarded by his confederates as the staunchest man among them. He’ll be
beaten up or knifed in prison, meantime his house may be set on fire and his
wife was punched in the face. When someone in the underworld is branded an
informer, coward, weakling and a snivelling wreck, his criminal career is
ruined. We did all that to teach him not to be so tough in future. And who’s
to say that, in some weird perverted way, by sowing distrust and dissension
among these fearsome fellows, we did not take out an entire gang and make
the streets of London a slightly safer place? Our conduct was inexcusable,
by any yardstick, but we were doing society’s dirty work. These were mostly
evil and cunning men, and society was paying us to be even more evil and
cunning, in the name of the state, to lock them up. How we did it was up to
us, but Honest Joe Public and his missus, along with the Home Secretary and
the entire law and order establishment, did not want to know. Instead they
preferred to believe that we lived in the best of all possible worlds, and
Scotland Yard was that world’s greatest police force: incorrupt,
untouchable, and selfless in the pursuit of truth and decency.
The lie to all this was that, while we were only
too happy to knock out one lot of criminals, we were working hand-in-glove
with another lot. In south London, where I spent most of my service, this
meant forming an alliance with a team of villains who later became
notorious: the Richardson gang.
Go to Part 4 |
