The death in February of one of the titans of the Bar, John Mathew QC, cut another link with the post-war period of ebullient criminality and showy trials. Mathew defended in the Great Train Robbery and Jeremy Thorpe trials and prosecuted the Krays and Harry Roberts. He remembered a period when you could park your car outside the Old Bailey and saunter through its grand main entrance unhindered by the tiresome security apparatus which anyone entering a courthouse – whether lawyer or member of the public – is now subject to. But he also recalled a time when jury nobbling and police perjury were common. The outstanding prosecutor of his generation, he still found the moment a sentence of death was passed on some unfortunate defendant whom he had cross-examined to a conviction too much to bear and would absent himself from the court room.
Any study of the true-crime shelves of Waterstones shows that those years – from say 1945 to perhaps the late 1970s – is a glory period of English crime which, in terms of copy, seems to never stop giving.
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