Almost every week in the newspapers, various types of criminal events are called ‘incidents’ a word which starts to appear trivial by overuse. The columns of periodicals from the past often use the word, but by today’s terms, a legal word can be used and suddenly an ‘incident’ changes from minor to serious. This was the case in the story of Kenneth Frow of Ashby and his attack on his wife.
Jean, Frow’s twenty-two-year-old wife, was walking along Ashby High Street with a friend on a night in July, when she saw her husband approaching them. Frow paused for a moment and said something to his spouse; the friend could not make out what that was; then, in a matter of seconds, he stabbed her with some scissors and ran off. He had grabbed her by the lapels of her coat – a confrontational gesture, aggressive and eye-to-eye.
Poor Jean felt a pain in her back, and fell to the ground. She had to be taken to hospital, and it was found that she had two wounds, one severe, entailing stitches. The reason was a mystery, and the explanation was not sound enough to convince Frow’s father and brother to stand and act for him in court. The man stood and had nothing to say except a pointless statement that ‘My conscience is clear; I am innocent.’ How anyone could say that when there was a witness to the attack is beyond belief. He had used the scissors only a few feet from where Jean’s friend stood.
DI Knowler, who was having a busy summer as the violence continued, often in the streets and fuelled by drink, said that Frow had made two other statements asserting his innocence, and a more meaningful account of his state of mind at the time: that amounted to foundless jealousy, a mere suspicion of misconduct on his wife’s part that had fed his anger. In court, only his mother acted for him. His father would say nothing at all. The detectives involved confirmed that it was a serious attack and pointed to the possibility of the man being dangerous to others, so they were not keen on bail being awarded. They insisted on two sureties, and they only had one. Frow’s grandfather’s name was put forward, but he also refused to act.
Then the terminology changed. The local paper had referred to an ‘incident’; it began as malicious wounding, but further evidence and a re-think about the potential risk in the man’s character, changed the charge to ‘malicious wounding with intent to do bodily harm.’
The significance of this case is how representative it was of those years. In the years 1953–54 there was an average of three street crimes a day reported and one of these was a crime against the person; there were burglaries and petty thefts every day in the town. The most sensational crime of the year was a betting shop raid in which scores of men were arrested and four were eventually given custodial sentences. That was merely gambling – a licence problem. But all around the pubs and clubs there was too much drink and too much rage.
It would be hard to tell Mrs Frow that she lived in generous, sociable times when everyone pulled together in a communal spirit, particularly when her husband had a short spell behind bars.