“Come to lively London and find how to become dead without anyone knowing how”. Under this frightening heading a fortnight ago the satirical magazine Private Eye made the sensational disclosure regarding the disappearance and death of a sixty-year-old painter, Herman Woolf. This time the satirists were dead serious. It did happen here. Other papers immediately took up the matter. Scotland Yard ordered an inquiry and the police were in the dock. The story as known so far reads like a mystery thriller.
No Joke
On November 10 last, Woolf was late for an appointment in a pub with his former wife, still a close friend and executrix of his will, and some friends. According to her, he told her that while he was waiting for a friend outside a betting shop the driver of a flashy car asked him if he had seen any policeman. Woolf replied: “I do not know what you are talking about.” The car returned, and the driver again asked the same question and said: “You should get yourself in a tin hat.”
Woolf treated it as a joke. But the same day he was knocked down by a Jaguar and taken to hospital by the police. He was discharged within a few hours because the injuries were said to be minor – “a slight abrasion on his forehead and abrasions on his legs and shoulders”. The police at once took him into custody on the charge of being in possession of hemp.
At this point the facts need to be established. What is known is that while in police custody his condition seriously deteriorated and he was returned to hospital the next day. His condition was so bad that he was transferred to a better equipped hospital where he died on November 23 of cerebral contusion and fracture of the skull. Two policemen stayed by the bedside all the time.
Woolf’s former wife became anxious when he did not contact her on November 11, 12, 13 and 14. Accompanied by a friend named Cotton, she went to a police station and declared Woolf to be missing. The police were supplied with his photograph which was published in the Police Gazette. The police station in question obviously took no notice. Another police station rang up Cotton on November 24 to say Woolf was seriously ill in hospital. He was then dead.
When the former Mrs. Woolf and Cotton went to the hospital they found Woolf’s face bashed and head fractured. They learned when he seemed to gain consciousness he wanted to give the sister a telephone number. The policemen intercepted the message and instead gave the sister a number which proved to be that of a booth at the local underground station. Even otherwise Woolf had in his possession a notebook which contained names and addresses of his friends to be telephoned “in the event of an accident”. None of them was informed.
The story does not end there. A solicitor, Sydney Silverman, agreed to take up the case. The matter was left to the assistant. Surprisingly the assistant failed to obtain legal representation at the inquest. The documents which had been deposited with him disappeared. Private Eye regards it as entirely irrelevant to Woolf’s death that he was an old friend of one of Christine Keeler’s women friends. On the face of it, it is a reasonable view because the seven shots which led to the subsequent dramatic developments were fired three weeks later on December 14.
Disturbing
Such a disclosure would have disturbed social conscience at any time. Now it has come at a time when the reliability of the police has already become suspect in connection with the Ward trial and related cases.
Recently a retired police officer confessed in a television interview that third degree methods were still in use here. In one police station a rhinoceros whip was found. The police is not the only British sacred cow that has been spattered with the mud dredged up from the underworld in past months. Serious doubt has been cast on British justice and the need for amending the criminal procedure code is being emphasised all round.
The popular disquiet about British justice has been caused by the way the Lord Chief Justice ordered the acquittal of Gordon, the West Indian jazz singer who had earlier been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on the charge of assaulting Christine Keeler. He did not disclose the evidence on which he ordered the acquittal. While the legal experts are still debating the points raised by this procedure, Scotland Yard has completed its inquiry and come up with reports containing allegations of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice at his original trial. The reports have not been made public but the evidence collected by the Yard is known.
New Claims
It now transpires that the injuries which were examined by a doctor were inflicted on Christine Keeler in a quarrel by John Hamilton Marshall, brother of the girl at whose flat she was staying at that time. Two West Indians who were there when Gordon arrived there several hours later have said no assault took place in their presence. The tape-recorded interview of Keeler is said to confirm their statements.
Her former business manager, Robin Drury, has claimed that he was present at a conversation between the police and Keeler during the trial. She was worried about two witnesses Gordon wanted to recall and was assured by the police: “Do not worry. We won’t find them.”
Then there is the complaint, first ever of its kind, filed by Reginald Paget, Labour member of Parliament, against the Attorney General with the Treasurer of the Inner Temple that in the course of the Enahoro case (Chief Enahoro was the Nigerian opposition leader who was deported to Nigeria to face trial on charges of treason) he used in court an affidavit, sworn by the Home Secretary, which he knew to be inaccurate. Were this complaint to succeed, the damage to the Conservative Government would be far more serious than the one inflicted by the Profumo-Ward-Keeler disclosures, which is saying a lot.
Even the popular reaction to this complaint has been best summed up by Private Eye. “Our Attorney General, aware of the accusations made against him, could have had the decent idea of resigning and then fighting the matter out with the Inner Temple. There was an imaginary country in which that kind of quixotic action took place. But, of course, there was no real country and if there was it certainly was not this one,” it said as a reminder of the deterioration in the standards of public life or at least from what the British people believed were the standards.
The Times of India, 25 August 1963