Day the King Died

Jim Morris

Description

There was a quaint British convention under which executions were stopped and sentence commuted if scheduled to take place on the day the sovereign died. Alfred Moore was doubly unfortunate: still protesting his innocence he was on the scaffold an hour before the death of King George VI was announced.

Sujets

• Condado de Yorkshire (Reino Unido)
• True crime
• Yorkshire

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908162861
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Day the King Died
A Terrible Miscarriage of Justice
Jim Morris
With a Foreword by Glyn Maddocks
Copyright and publication details
The Day the King Died
A Terrible Miscarriage of Justice
ISBN 978-1-909976-13-9 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-908162-86-1 (Epub ebook)
ISBN 978-1-908162-87-8 (Adobe ebook)
Copyright © 2015 This work is the copyright of Jim Morris. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by him in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned. The Foreword is the copyright of Glyn Maddocks.
Cover design © 2015 Waterside Press. Design by www.gibgob.com . Main cover photograph reproduced by kind permission of the National Archives.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail]
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
Printed by CPI Group, Chippenham, UK.
e-book The Day the King Died is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Myilibrary, Dawsonera, ebrary, and Ebscohost.
Published 2014 by
Waterside Press
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield-on-Loddon
Hook, Hampshire
United Kingdom RG27 0JG
Telephone [phone]
E-mail [e-mail]
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Contents
Copyright and publication details ii
Acknowledgements iv
About the Author v
The Author of the Foreword v
Foreword vii
Introduction 9 Beginning 15 The Burglar 23 Police 31 Shooting 37 Police Constable Jagger 45 Arrest 49 Hospital 57 Identification 65 Police Evidence 69 Consistency 75 Family 81 Evidence 97 The Farm 107 Mistakes 111 Misdeeds 119 Doubt 125 Saturday Night 129 On Remand 139 The Trial 149 Defence Evidence 175 The Prosecution 193 The Defence 203 Withheld or Ignored Evidence 211 Some Thoughts on the Summing-up 217 The Run Up to the Appeal and its Aftermath 223
Epilogue: The Rest of February 1952 and On 231
Index 233
Acknowledgements
I’ve often felt that ‘Thank you’ on a page loses it’s vitality because you can’t look the person in the eye. That said, it needn’t be any the less sincere. Some folk have helped me greatly in the writing of this book, and, even though I kept it back for a good five years before I sent it to Waterside Press I will always feel a special warmth for it.
When I first went to Huddersfield to see the site of the tragedy I was enthused by Steve Lawson and the late Colin Van Bellen who turned out to meet me and were my guides for the day. When I returned Steve was ever eager and willing to help. These two men deserve a very special thank you.
Also Patrick Robertshaw joined us and like Steve has corresponded with me on and off ever since. Steve, an ex-policeman and Patrick a former barrister and judge both gave me little insights into the story that brought us all together.
As ever when starting the task of basic research it’s all about the relevant documents and finding them — the staff at the National Archives in Kew are a bit special!
I also felt a bit in awe of Campbell Malone when I met him to discuss the case but when he’d read the book he was convinced by my points. That helped me team up with Glyn Maddocks and I felt just by Campbell reading the book that it gave me some credit.
But it’s Bryan and Alex Gibson at Waterside Press who have made the publication a possibility and their hard work in editing and correcting the manuscript has been encouraging.
Thank you too to Jon Robins at the Justice Gap.
And the family. Not only mine but some of Alfred’s too, ‘we’ won’t give up until Alfred Moore can rest in peace.
About the Author
Jim Morris has taken a close interest in crime and punishment for many years, having written on subjects as diverse as unsolved murders, true crime and the Great Train Robbery. He lives and works in Ireland. His previous writings include Unsolved Murders of the North (2011); More Unsolved Murders (2012) The Great Train Robbery: A New History (2013) (all Amberley Publishing).
The Author of the Foreword
Glyn Maddocks is a consultant with Gabb and Co in South Wales and Scott Moncrieff in London and has been dealing with miscarriage of justice cases for over 25 years. In 2005 he was named Welsh Lawyer of the Year having dealt with the successful appeal of Paul Blackburn. He has almost unprecedented experience of appeal cases and making applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission and has written widely on these subjects.
Foreword
The story of Alfred Moore, a Huddersfield poultry farmer and small time burglar, who was convicted of the murder of two Yorkshire police officers and hanged in Armley Prison, Leeds in early 1952, is one more sad if minor footnote in the long, dismal and inglorious history of the British criminal justice system.
Jim Morris tells the story of Alfred impressively, vividly, in forensic detail and in doing so he demolishes, brick by brick, the prosecution case, which the jury, no doubt, found so persuasive and, which inevitably led to an innocent man being sent to the gallows for a crime that he did not commit.
Following the meticulous path laid out chapter-by-chapter by Jim and looking at the evidence that was deployed against Alfred, it becomes immediately obvious that there was in this case no agnostic search for the truth; from the beginning there was one narrative and only one narrative, and that was the ‘guilt’ of Alfred Moore.
Jim makes it clear that the police decided even before the night of the murder was over that Alfred was the person responsible for shooting Police Constable Jagger and Detective Inspector Fraser, and every piece of evidence available was constructed, marshalled and manipulated to ensure that at Alfred’s trial the jury were compelled to find him guilty of this heinous crime, and they did so.
In those immediate post-war days, which now seem so far away from our world, the legal system was used easily and effectively to despatch its failures and errors by means of the hangman’s noose. From 1949 until February 1961 some one-hundred-and-twenty-three other men and women met the same fate as Alfred in consequence of their direct exposure to the full might and glory of the British criminal justice system — that is one execution on average every thirty seven days!
Fortunately, but not without protest we have, since the mid-1960s, not sent any more innocent men or women to the gallows. But the errors and mistakes still continue with depressing regularity and we should all pause for thought when anyone suggests that we should return to the very dark days of what used to be called, rather euphemistically, capital punishment.
There is nothing more barbaric than when a state executes one or more of its subjects, particularly when there are so many examples of it doing so on the basis of inaccurate or mistaken facts or of errors or omissions deliberate or innocent, and where it has been subsequently established that the evidence relied upon was incorrect or untrue.
The most chilling and haunting detail in Jim’s book about the Alfred Moore case is at the end. Alfred’s last letter — written a few hours before his execution — is quoted verbatim and in it Alfred impressively and with articulation protests his innocence. Cogently and persuasively he makes his case and sets down on paper, and for the future, the facts and the arguments that would and should have led to him being acquitted.
One can only speculate about what Alfred thought about how the British justice system had treated him. Although thankfully we no longer hang people in this country, I have to say that I would find it hard to argue that things have improved much in the last sixty or so years and that avoidable mistakes don’t still occur too frequently and too regularly, and that the innocent are not still convicted day in and day out in our courts.
Glyn Maddocks
6 November 2014
Introduction
King George VI died on 6 th February 1952. Alfred Moore also died that day. Both left grieving families. The king died peacefully in his sleep; Moore’s death had been scheduled.
Alfred Moore was a thirty-six-year-old, married, father of four. The family lived at Whinney Close Farm, a smallholding in the parish of Kirkheaton, to the north-east of Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was a poultry farmer, and his farm occupied just over eight acres — he also had a growing number of pigs. The Moore family had only been at the farm for a few months but he was a hard worker and had previous experience in poultry farming.
Up until the middle of February 1951, Moore supplemented his income as a ‘part-time’ burglar. At this he excelled, but the police were more than suspicious, and enquiries were being followed up. There had been a spate of burglaries where he’d previously lived, in Honley, on the other side of Huddersfield, but these stopped when the family moved.
Whinney Close Farmhouse had nice furniture and building work, that the previous owner had started, was re-commenced. The children were in a private school and taxis were often seen coming and going, and Alice Moore, Alfred’s wife, liked to dress well. There are a few vague ideas recorded as to his criminal associates but he was always said to work alone. The local CID, under the leadership of Detective Inspector Duncan Alexander Fraser, had intensified the quest to catch Moore, and a group of policemen had been ‘ observing’ him.
It was in the early hours of Sunday 15 th July 1951, when a cordon of t