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. It has yielded not just the usual diet of goggle-eyed – and very readable – books about gangland brutality and serial killing but enduring classics. Sybille Bedford’s account of the 1957 trial of the Eastbourne GP (and alleged mass-murderer) Dr John Bodkin Evans The Best We Can Do and Ludovic Kennedy’s dissections of two infamous miscarriages of justice in 10 Rillington Place and The Trial of Stephen Ward are just two to stand out.
No one doubts that over the last 50 or so years the criminal law has been on a firm trajectory towards greater fairness, both for the prosecution and the defence. The death penalty was finally abolished in 1969. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 introduced mandatory recording of police interviews, putting an end to the practice of police ‘verbals’ – i.e. the invention of confessions. Judicial idiosyncracy has been largely stamped out (remember the notorious remark of crusty old Mr Justice Melford Stevenson that a defendant had been found guilty only of a ‘pretty anaemic kind of rape’). DNA testing and near-ubiquitous CCTV has created greater evidential exactitude. It has also made the rhetorical invocation of the corner of doubt – which the defendant must be accorded the benefit of – a less fruitful furrow for advocates. Nowadays the great defender Marshall Hall’s favourite jury trick – swaying back and forth in counsel’s row as he personified the scales of justice and then dropping one arm as it sunk under the metaphorical weight of the presumption of innocence – would be laughed out of court. Yet it seemed magnificent at the time.
But this path towards transparency and has not been so fruitful for writers and journalists. The droves of crime-reporters permanently stationed at the Old Bailey in the fifties and sixties (motto: ‘If it bleeds, it leads’) are no more. In The Third Man Orson Welles’s Harry Lime famously contrasted Italy in the time of the Borgias (‘they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance’) with the antiseptic democracy of Switzerland, which could only manage the cuckoo clock. The analogy is hardly exact but the preconditions of great trials and, in turn great trial literature – jeopardy, doubt, capriciousness, simply getting it wrong – have undoubtedly been undermined by the reforms of the last half century.
In fact one can trace the golden era of English crime back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Part of the excitement of those genteel poisoning trials which filled the newspapers in the first part of the century (and which George Orwell evoked in his 1946 essay Decline of the English Murder, even then a piece bathed in nostalgia) was the sheer difficulty of proving cause of death (what led to the stomach cramps after the victim ate the gooseberry pie? etc). Scientific advances have meant that that problem – or opportunity – has now been largely closed down, whereas more liberal divorce laws and social attitudes have removed much of the incentive to middle-class murder. Nowadays Dr Crippen would simply set up in a flat with Ethel Le Neve rather than go to the trouble of administering his wife hyoscine before burying her under the basement. And after the death penalty had been abolished one writer wrote, distastefully but accurately, that murder trials ‘had a distinct sense of coitus interruptus, like a bull fight without the kill.’ The queues outside the Bailey grew shorter; the coverage waned. It is part of a wider conundrum: greater systemisation creates more certainty of outcome, the mortal enemy of narrative suspense. Yet it also would have meant that the wretched Timothy Evans, convicted of the crimes of his neighbour John Christie, and Derek Bentley, also convicted of murder by those notoriously equivocal words ‘Let him have it Chris’ – would probably have avoided the gallows.
But all is not lost: having vividly recreated for television the Jeremy Thorpe scandal and trial a couple of years ago, Stephen Frears has turned his attention to a more recent cause celebre. Even in the face of the surveillance state human ingenuity will still find an outlet and succeed in weaving narratives of jeopardy and tension. We all remember Major Charles Ingram, who with the assistance of an associate strategically placed in the audience, and nursing an equally strategic cough, almost managed to lay hands on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire jackpot. Frears’ recreation of the case has to helped relieve some of the tedium of self-isolation. If only Ingram had timed his latter day Ealing-comedy caper a little better that cough might now have been interpreted differently.
Thomas Grant QC is a practising barrister and author of Court Number One: The Old Bailey Trials that Defined Modern Britain
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