Rufus Isaacs and Marshall Hall, defending the two blackmailers, put their heads together and achieved something that Rumpole of the Bailey would have been proud of: they made it seem right that their two clients pleaded to lesser charges rather than plead not guilty. The outcome would then, if Goudie were guilty (and that was certain) be a short sentence, much less than the anticipated ten year one. They were right. Goudie was guilty, and F E Smith’s speech did indeed move the jury. Smith painted a picture a pathetic little man who had been duped by ruthless hard men and leeches who bled him dry. What the jury were asked to see in the dock was not a nasty, unscrupulous conman, but a wreck, a man broken by the harrowing experience of meeting with this tough gang. There was the added factor that Goudie had three sisters, and these ladies had been working hard for their brother, to find some kind of legal aid for him.

Even Justice Bigham could not ignore all this; he passed a sentence of ten years, rather than the expected one of fifteen years. There was a story that F E Smith was so talented and persuasive in this speech that Sir Richard Muir passed him a note which said: ‘You will be the master of all of us. No one I have ever heard has impressed me in so hopeless a case.’

But there is a sad irony in the outcome, for Goudie died six years later, in gaol of course. But this incredible story has all kinds of interesting sidelights: the villain Burge, who served in effect only three years, partially redeemed himself by saving the life of a prison warder showing ‘conspicuous gallantry.’ F E Smith, who launched his career on the case, and it emerges that his wonderful speech was in fact practised and rehearsed to perfection and the whole piece memorised word for word.

As F W Ashley has commented, the Goudie case attracted as much attention at the time ‘as a front-page murder.’ For a man who had first yielded to the temptations of gambling on the horses, with £1 bets being typical of his risk, to rise to the level of major and notorious national crook was an unmissable story for the journalists. In Mitchell and Kenyon’s film, the actor playing Goudie, escorted to the cell by two plain clothes detectives, comes across as someone as dangerous as Baby Face Nelson or Al Capone. Ironically, in a twisted way, his dreams of success and fame, well away from his dull life of pen pushing, came true. The quiet, regular clerk had become the dramatic subject of the sensational Police News and the penny dreadful comics. When he had first run away and lain low for a while, the central police office in Liverpool had issued posters with an image of him and a £250 reward. The Times gave the story massive column space; they told the tale of Mrs Harding, Goudie’s landlady, shopping him to the Bootle police. Her husband, Charles who was a crane-man on the docks, advised his wife to go to the police.

From the moment Mrs Harding stepped into the central police station, the man staying with her, under the name of Johnson, was about to become a celebrity.

It hardly seems the material of gangland or of high tension crime – a quiet little penpusher escorted to gaol by two police officers, taken from a redbrick terrace house in Bootle just over a few streets to the station. But in some ways, the fraud involved in one crook taking on a huge national bank has a media interest perhaps more sensational than a daylight robbery or even a mundane domestic murder.