We Are Not Manslaughterers

Martin Knight

Description

In genteel Epsom, Surrey in the summer of 1919 a score of semi-rural police officers fought a rioting mob of 400 Canadian soldiers in a battle of Rorke's Drift proportions. At the end of it the dependable Station Sergeant Thomas Green lay dead, bludgeoned by a bar torn from the police cells.Green is the only policeman to be murdered in his own police station on the mainland ever and was one of only two killed by rioters in the 20th century - the other being PC Blakelock.Yet media coverage was subdued and the path to justice tightly managed. Indeed no person was charged with murder. A handful of Canadians were quietly convicted of riot and were back home for Christmas.We Are Not Manslaughterers lifts the lid on why the case is practically unknown and how political and international considerations deprived Thomas Green of justice. David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill were personally involved in engineering their desired outcomes. Fraying colonial bonds necessitated a manipulation of the system nationally and a backdrop of STDs among the convalescent soldiers triggered a cover-up locally.Martin Knight is the author of George Best's final autobiography as well as several other sports, culture and fiction books.

Sujets

• True crime

Informations

• Publié par: London Books
• Date de parution: 12 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909270701
• Langue: English

Extrait

We Are Not Manslaughterers
The Epsom Riot and the Murder of Station Sergeant Thomas Green
Martin Knight
www.tontobooks.co.uk
This book is dedicated to Thomas Green and Frederick Bruns – casualties of peace.
Published in 2010 by Tonto Books Limited
Copyright © Martin Knight All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
First published in eBook format in 2012. ISBN: 978-1-909270-70-1
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
Cover design & photo section by Elliot Thomson at www.preamptive.com
Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were taught the ancient code of the jungle law, to track down human beasts in No Man's Land, to jump upon their bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly, silently, in a raid, to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours in a shell-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, to bludgeon their enemy to death or spit him on a bit of steel, to get at his throat if need be with nails and teeth. The code of the ape-man is bad for some temperaments. It is apt to become a habit of mind. It may surge up again when there are no Germans present, but some old woman behind an open till, or some policeman with a bull's-eye lantern and a truncheon, or in a street riot where fellow-citizens are for the time being ‘the enemy’.
Death, their own or other people’s, does not mean very much to some who, in the trenches, sat within a few yards of stinking corpses, knowing that the next shell might make such of them. Life was cheap in war. Is it not cheap in peace?
Now It Can Be Told , Sir Philip Gibbs, 1920
Contents
Foreword
Leading Characters
Introduction
1 The Build-Up
2 The Riot
3 The Day After
4 The Reaction
5 The Arrests
6 The Statement
7 The Men
8 The Funeral
9 The Committal
10 The Inquest
11 The Trial
12 The Fall Out
13 Finding Death
14 The Confession
15 The Other Man
16 The Cover-Up
Epilogue
Afterword
Interview with Tim Richardson
Postscript
Timeline
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photographs
Foreword
In We Are Not Manslaughterers Martin Knight describes the events surrounding the death of Station Sergeant Thomas Green at Epsom Police Station in 1919. He writes with passion, with great attention to detail and with a determination that the story of Green and the small group of officers who courageously confronted 400 furious Canadian soldiers should never be forgotten.
There is a common, often unspoken, assumption that the end of a war brings an end to the social, political and economic upheavals wrought by the conflict. A cursory glance at the evidence proves this to be wishful thinking. Restructuring an economy for peace time can be as traumatic and troublesome as restructuring for war. When Nelson’s seamen returned from the Napoleonic Wars they found merchant ship owners who wanted to continue with the skeleton crews they had been forced to employ during wartime. Jack Tar promptly went on strike and brought coastal shipping to a standstill. Men have always returned to hear gossip about their wives or sweethearts flirting, and worse, with others in their absence. And since the early modern period at least, there were fears that men trained in the use of arms and brutalised by the violence of the battlefield would return home and, unable to find work or unable to settle back in to their peacetime trades, would engage in violent crime. The end of the First World War was no different.
Throughout the war, as well as at its end, men had come back from the Western Front to hear stories or to find evidence that their womenfolk had been unfaithful. Some men took violent action, usually against the woman, but sometimes against the man, and the courts often dealt leniently with them. If a man made a pass at someone’s girl or wife, or simply appeared a rival, it could be the cue for a fight. If the offender was from a different national army, or even from a different regiment, the violence might spread to supporters. In the estaminets and streets behind the lines in France and Belgium, as well as in the pubs and streets of Blighty, English Tommies were fully prepared to take on Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Scots and Irish, and vice versa: infantry fought cavalry, sappers fought gunners – and the police, sometimes military, sometimes civilian, endeavoured to sort things out. At times the interfering police officer found himself rounded on by both sides, and sometimes by civilians too.
A punch-up in or outside a pub involving soldiers, or sailors, was generally seen by the participants as having some justifying cause. Justifying causes also commonly underpinned what the army called ‘mutiny’ and the other forms of noisy demonstration that could slip into violence, and what the civilian authorities defined as ‘riot’. Occasionally the civic celebrations of peace in 1919 became violent when veterans believed that they were being ostracised from the junketing arranged by, and for, the great and the good. In Luton the trouble resulted in the destruction of the Town Hall. Earlier in the year soldiers, who could not understand why they remained in khaki and subject to harsh military discipline when the war was over, mutinied on both sides of the English Channel. Some among the mutineers ran up red flags and the authorities, nervously eyeing events in disintegrating Russia and defeated Germany, were concerned about the likelihood of Bolsheviks in the British ranks.
The violent events at Epsom were thus part of a much wider context. In Epsom Tommies resented Canadians and anyone else who had turned their womenfolk’s heads while they were away. The Canadians wanted to go home: after all, the war had been over for six months when the initial trouble flared in The Rifleman pub on 17 June 1919.
Both historians and police detectives have to sift their evidence carefully, construct their narratives to the best of their abilities, and to persuade their audiences to accept their version of events as the most plausible account. Unlike the police in 1919, Martin Knight has what appears to be the confession of Sergeant Green’s murderer. He moves also to make a forceful argument about an official cover-up designed to keep the lid on further trouble both between the British populace, especially that of Epsom, and Canadian soldiers, but also on the potential for diplomatic and political friction between Britain and her North American Dominion. Lloyd George was certainly Machiavellian. The police did a poor job in investigating the death of one of their own, and the coroner’s enquiry into the death of Private Bruns was conducted with unseemly haste. But coroners’ courts were not as efficient and well-regulated at the beginning of the twentieth century as they are today. Even today the police can make major mistakes in serious investigations, and in spite of the aura that often surrounded them, at the beginning of the twentieth century detection by English police forces seems to have rated poorly in comparison with that of their contemporaries elsewhere. And if, having had time to think, a policeman decides that he cannot make a positive identification, does that not fit with the work of contemporary forensic psychologists who have shown the problems of what people can actually remember in a moment or dim light and high adrenalin?
Today we are much more prepared to accept and to look for conspiracies. They are more satisfying than mere cock-up or confusion. Moreover, modern politicians have given us good cause. At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century the British public saw a prime minister forced to admit that an enemy warship was attacked and sunk as it was leaving the area where it could have been a threat, it has seen its young men sent to war on the strength of a ‘dodgy dossier’ and another prime minister investigated for selling honours. Martin Knight marshals his evidence impressively and presents his case forcefully.
Clive Emsley May 2010
Leading Characters
The Green Family
Thomas Lilian Lily Nellie
The Canadian Defendants
James Connors, identified as assaulting Sergeant Green Alphonse Masse Robert McAllan, military policeman Allan MacMaster, the murderer Gervase Poirier Herbert Tait Robert Todd, the bugler David Wilkie David Yerex
The Other Canadian Soldiers
Private Frederick Bruns, soldier found dead Eddie Lapointe William Lloyd Private John McDonald, imprisoned in Epsom Police Station Major James Ross, the officer who tried to quell the riot Sir Richard Turner, head of Canadian forces in the UK Driver Alexander Veinot, imprisoned in Epsom Police Station
The Epsom Policemen
PC Harry Hinton Sergeant Bill Kersey Inspector Pawley, head of Epsom’s police force PC James Rose, identified James Connors as assailant PC Joe Weeding Sergeant Fred Blaydon
The Medics
Gilbert White, the coroner Dr Thornely, the police doctor
The Legals
Edward Abinger, defence counsel Harold Benjamin, defence counsel Justice Darling, the judge Sir Richard Muir, prosecution counsel Sir Ernest Wild, prosecution counsel Cecil Whiteley, prosecution counsel
The Politicians
Sir Rowland Blades, MP for Epsom Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War James Chuter Ede, foreman of inquest jury David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister
The Royals
Edward, Prince of Wales, heir and oldest son of George V and Queen