Justice Denied
erek Hall is now in his eighties, but his handshake is firm and he is extremely alert. He has lost the sight of one eye but there is very little that he misses. When he left the Metropolitan Police, he not only took with him a lot of memories and commendations, he also took his courage; it would stand him in good stead.
Born in 1929, Derek Arnsby Hall left school at the age of fourteen and enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1947 for seven years. In 1954 he joined the Huntingdonshire Constabulary (to become known as the Mid-Anglia Constabulary in 1965, having amalgamated with Cambridge City Police, Peterborough Combined Police and the Isle of Ely and Cambridge County Constabularies); within a year of joining, he distinguished himself by being commended by the Chairman of the Bench at Huntingdon Divisional Magistrates’ Court and also the Chief Constable for displaying courage and devotion to duty in dealing with four men who attacked him and who were later convicted and imprisoned for causing him grievous bodily harm. It would be the first commendation of many.
Hall joined the Criminal Investigation Department in 1962 where his successes continued; he was twice more commended, firstly for his ability in apprehending a mean thief who targeted offertory boxes and altar furniture in churches, and secondly for the detection of three men for a series of office- and storebreakings. Promotion to detective sergeant in 1964 also brought a posting to No. 5 Regional Crime Squad (RCS), specialising in major, cross-border crime; he was again commended for his work in bringing about the arrest of a man wanted for van theft offences and then received a surprising commendation from both the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Chief Constable. He had been directed by the Assistant Chief Constable of Hertfordshire (and also No. 5 Regional Crime Squad Co-ordinator) Gerald McArthur MBE (“one of the finest police officers, ever,” says Hall) to carry out surveillance work against the Richardson brothers’ ‘Torture Gang’. At five feet nine and looking nothing like the public’s – or Torture Gang members’ – perception of a police officer, Hall carried out his work so well that his position was not compromised, and the commendation praised his ‘outstanding assistance’.
Hall had enjoyed his time working with the Metropolitan Police and at the instigation of Detective Superintendent Don Adams (a highly respected investigator with the Richardson enquiry) he decided to transfer to the Met. Within three weeks of his application being submitted in 1970, he was accepted, still retaining his rank of detective sergeant, and spent four and a half years as a divisional officer working in the East End of London. Promotion to detective inspector eluded him, since he failed the examination on four occasions, but his skills were put to better use – a posting in 1975 to No. 9 Regional Crime Squad, based at Horns Road, Barkingside.
In 1978 alone he was commended on three occasions for courage and ability in effecting arrests involving firearms, armed robbers and conspiracy to rob, and the following year he received another commendation for detective ability in a case involving ‘numerous’ armed robberies. But his time on the RCS was coming to a close, and he resigned from the Force in 1980.
Former CID Commander Ferguson Walker was in charge of security at Scaffolding Great Britain (SGB), and he provided Hall with a job in the company. Formed in 1922, SGB grew rapidly nationwide to become the country’s biggest supplier of scaffolding and plant hire, and by 1984 had an annual turnover in excess of over £177 million. Hall’s job as senior security officer was to cover part of London and the South East of England, visiting sites, maintaining staff discipline, recovering stolen property and liaising with police.
At eleven o’clock in the morning on 13 September 1984, Securicor had just delivered the wages for the depot at Gallions Close, Barking, East London, and Hall was in his office speaking on the telephone to a former Detective Chief Superintendent, the late Bob Chalk, who was employed at the company’s head office at Mitcham. Suddenly he heard the sound of loud voices.”Hang on Bob, I’ll quieten this lot down,” said Hall. He turned to see a large black man wearing a ski-mask and boiler suit, carrying an axe and holding a bag containing stolen wage packets; looking through the office window, Hall saw a white man wearing similar apparel but carrying a sawn-off shotgun and threatening Kim Wallington, a typist, Don Ormiston from stock security, Lil Dayer a cleaner and Robyn Groom, a clerk. At fifty-five years of age, Hall’s courage and fitness as a policeman had not deserted him; he charged the black suspect, and together with a colleague, Henry ‘Lofty’ Harrison, they made him drop the wage packets. Hall and the black robber crashed to the floor, where Hall was savagely hit in the face, head and arms with the axe. The axeman got to his feet and together with the man with the shotgun ran to the reception area. Although badly shaken up and injured – his face had already swollen up from the axe blows – Hall pursued the two robbers out of the reception area and into the yard, where he cornered the black man. “You’re not going anywhere,” Hall told him with difficulty through his swollen lips, but as he went to seize him the other man, who had pulled off his ski-mask and was about to crawl through a hole in the perimeter wire fence, stopped and turned. Hall saw the suspect full-face; the man then raised the shotgun and, from a distance of six yards, he fired. The blast hit Hall full on the left side of his face and he fell to the ground. Both men then escaped through the hole in the fence, jumped into a stolen blue Ford Cortina and roared off into Thames Road; the car was later found abandoned in Charlton Crescent. From there, it was thought that the men ran through a tunnel underneath the busy A13 trunk road. Although Detective Sergeant Jim O’Connell of the Flying Squad asked readers of the Barking and Dagenham Independent for sightings of two men running into Alfreds Gardens or Suttons Close, north of the A13, none was forthcoming.
Back at the depot, the staff had rushed out to render assistance, and an ambulance took Hall initially to Newham hospital, then to Whipps Cross, which had an ophthalmology unit; there he stayed for three weeks. Hall was immensely popular with his former police colleagues and also the workers at SGB, who all crowded around his bedside. Prior to the shooting, he had castigated two young employees at SGB for sloppy practices; to his surprise, they were amongst the first to visit him and wish him well. He received the best of care from the consultant, Mr Beveridge (“A wonderful man,” says Hall, “who took time to come and visit me on Sunday mornings”), but Hall had experienced enormous damage and trauma to his left eye and the left side of his face. Two shotgun pellets had lodged in his eye, three more behind it, and another dozen pellets were embedded in his face and neck. Surgeons battled to save the sight of his left eye, without success; it would have to be removed. Hall’s wife Joan told the press, “Derek has been in terrible pain and I’ve had to bathe the eye every day. We were worried that his right eye might begin to be affected.” Hall said, “It’s got to the stage now where losing the eye will mean good riddance to all the pain I’ve suffered.”
In January 1985 the damaged eye was removed. But two months before that happened, there was another appointment which Hall had to keep. Although Detective Sergeant Jim O’Connell’s newspaper appeal had not resulted in any assistance from the residents of Barking or Dagenham regarding the robbery, their reluctance was not shared by the investigating team’s underworld informants. O’Connell picked Derek Hall up at home and drove him to Barking police station; he was going to attend an identification parade.
Although the Flying Squad had been in existence since 1919, in 1978 it had been mainly devolved from Scotland Yard, to four offices sited at different points in the capital, there to investigate and arrest those who participated in armed robberies, to the exclusion of any other type of offence. This left four squads at the Yard, but in 1983 two offences took place which stretched the Squad to its absolute limits. The first was the robbery at the Security Express vaults at Shoreditch where £5,961,097 was stolen; the other occurred seven months later, when gold bullion valued at £26,000,000 was stolen from Brink’s-Mat warehouse in West London. The four squads at the Yard were mobilised to assist in these two massive investigations, which would continue for years. In order to investigate the other robberies reported at the area offices, the commander of the Flying Squad utilised the services of the RCS, who were also under his control. Therefore, the Flying Squad officers based at Walthamstow and the RCS officers based at Barkingside (where Hall had previously worked) formed an amalgamated team.
They had concentrated their efforts on identifying, then tracing, a gang who were running riot in the Barking and Dagenham areas. The gang had carried out an armed robbery at the Post Office in Becontree Avenue on 13 June 1984 and had got away with £17,256; on 21 August there had been an attempted armed robbery at a sub-Post Office in Goresbrook Road; and three days later Violet Atkins, the sub-Post Mistress at Green Lane, was robbed of £6,029 at gunpoint by six men.
Seven people were arrested and appeared at Barking Magistrates’ Court; there was uproar in the public gallery when four men were remanded in custody, and the Chairman of the Bench, Leonard Wright, threatened to have the court cleared. Two days later, two more men appeared charged with similar offences, and the Chairman, Dorothy Revington JP, made it quite clear she would not tolerate any nonsense. She ordered the doors of the court to be locked, saying, “No one must come in or out of this room whilst this matter is being heard.” It did not take long at all; she summarily dismissed applications from a defence solicitor that his client should be granted bail and that he should not be handcuffed to a police officer in the dock, and she had the prisoner remanded in custody.
The man who was the subject of the applications was accused of the three robberies whilst armed with a sawn-off shotgun and his name was Timothy Sullivan, aged twenty-two from Dagenham. Without the slightest hesitation, Derek Hall picked him out on the identification parade as being the man who had shot him in the face.
Although the identity of the masked, axe-wielding black man who had attacked Derek Hall was known as an absolute certainty to the investigating team who arrested him, there was insufficient evidence with which to charge him.
Hall returned to work and in October 1985 he went to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, where further surgery was carried out, this time by a different surgeon, Mr Collin, to strengthen and support the structure of bone and flesh around the left eye; this operation was a success. After ten days the area around his right eye and the socket of his left were level. He was also invited, together with ‘Lofty’ Harrison, to the head office of SGB at Mitcham for a small ‘thank-you’ ceremony hosted by the Group Chairman, Neville Clifford-Jones.
At the Old Bailey in January 1986 Hall gave evidence at the trial of Sullivan. Mr Beveridge was also called to give evidence and was subjected to rather bad-tempered cross-examination from Sullivan’s barrister, who suggested that Hall could not have given a reliable identification of his client because of his injuries. “Nonsense,” replied Beveridge. “There was nothing wrong with his right eye, nor,” he added, “his memory, either!”
The jury deliberated for three hours before returning a verdict of not guilty in respect of the robbery at SGB and the injury to Derek Hall. In the public gallery Sullivan’s family and supporters clapped and wept with gratitude as the verdicts were delivered, and why not? A totally innocent man had been vindicated and cleared.
Well, perhaps not entirely innocent. What the jury had not known was that another jury had already found Sullivan guilty of the other three armed robberies; and as His Honour Judge Neil Dennison QC jailed Sullivan for a total of twelve years, the joyful family’s emotions changed to screaming abuse of everything to do with the British legal system, and the judge ordered the public gallery to be cleared. So Sullivan went off to join three of his associates who had been jailed for a total of twenty years, and the judge complimented Hall, saying, “It is a privilege to meet someone of such conspicuous bravery.”
On 16 April 1986 Hall was awarded a cheque for £100 and a certificate to commemorate his bravery by Giles Shepherd, the High Sheriff of Greater London; also present was a commander representing the commissioner. Three months later came a rather belated letter of congratulations from an assistant commissioner at the Yard.
But in February 1987 Hall received the thrilling news that the Queen was going to honour his bravery by awarding him the Queen’s Gallantry Medal. The medal had been struck in 1974, replacing the British Empire Medal for Gallantry, and like the other gallantry medals it is 36mm in diameter with the crowned effigy of the monarch on the obverse. On the reverse is the image of St Edward’s Crown, and flanked with laurel sprigs are the words, ‘The Queen’s Gallantry Medal’. The ribbon is of three equal stripes of dark blue, pearl grey and dark blue, with a narrow rose pink stripe running down the centre. The recipient is permitted to use the letters QGM after his name, and at the time of writing fewer than 600 of the medals have been awarded. On the day of the investiture, 3 October 1987, Derek Hall, impressively decked out in a grey topper and a cutaway, was waiting for the transport to convey him to Buckingham Palace. He was so pleased with his apparel that he refused to sit down, in case the knife-edge in his striped trousers should become creased. There was a knock at the door; Hall answered it to discover a police constable standing there, who had just alighted from a very small police car. “Come to take yer to the Palace, ain’t I?” he said. “Derek’s face was a picture; you’d have gone miles to see it!” was the verdict of the chief prankster, former Detective Superintendent Alan Goodman, who then let Hall off the hook with the arrival of a beautiful, gleaming maroon Rolls- Royce, the property of the relative of an RCS officer. And so, Derek Hall, his wife Joan and daughter Christine went to the Palace, where Her Majesty the Queen presented him with a very well deserved medal. The day was made complete by a well-attended party at the Bury Club in Ilford, that evening.
Hall returned to work, but the area which he covered was actually extended and the consequent driving caused such a strain on his right eye that further treatment was required by Mr Beveridge, who immediately wrote to the company insisting that SGB medically retire him, and so they did; they also paid him two-thirds of his salary until state retirement age.
But the list of Hall’s awards had not quite come to an end; he had received a shoal of congratulatory letters, including one from the Recorder of London, Sir James Miskin, and several from his Member of Parliament, Vivian Bendall, and in October 1987 he was invited to attend the annual dinner given by the Association of the ex-CID Officers of the Metropolitan Police, as the guest of honour. Within days, he received a letter inviting him to attend the Goldsmiths’ Hall, to receive a Binney award. On 10 December Hall, together with Henry Harrison, was awarded a certificate of merit by the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Greville Spratt GBE, DL, for the bravest act carried out by someone not a member of a Police Force.
Derek Hall’s wife sadly died in 2002, but despite her death and his disability, Hall’s spirit, as ever, is indomitable. His courage had accompanied him into his retirement, illustrating – if any demonstration was necessary – that Derek Hall is among the bravest of the brave and an inspiration to young coppers everywhere.