The Reckoning

by Patrick Bishop

  In 1947 Palestine was no place for a British policeman to be, even one with a Jewish wife. He quit in November, still a sergeant, and the couple moved to his native Hull, where Bernard worked for the Post Office. They lived a frugal, decent life, bringing up a daughter, Iris, and a son, Robert Daniel, known as Dan. Neither parent spoke much about his time in the Palestine Police. ‘You could always sense with my mother that there was something about those days they didn’t want to talk about,’ said Dan. ‘I realised over time that they were frightened of retaliation.’ Then, ‘little bits were revealed to me and in later years it became more of a story’.

  In June 1982, under his son’s persistent prompting, he wrote down his recollections of the day Stern was killed, as a private record for the family. Three years later he had a stroke. After his recovery he remembered his conversation with his niece at the bar mitzvah party. According to Ilana, ‘Fay wanted him to talk. She wrote to my mother to say that he was ill and I should come before it was too late.’

  Ilana took her tape recorder and flew to London, then took a train to Hull. The interview she recorded lasted more than an hour. Although Bernard Stamp was recovering from a stroke and close to the end of his life, his voice sounds strong and confident as at last, in his niece’s words, ‘he unloaded his heart’. This is what he remembered.

  In February 1942, every detective at Jaffa police HQ was preoccupied with the hunt for Yair. ‘The work we were on at the time was solely connected with looking for Stern,’ he recalled. ‘It was an obsession with the CID.’3 On the morning of the 12th he was working in his office when Tom Wilkin came in and asked if he would join him on a search. The plainclothes detectives picked up a car and a driver and set off on the short journey to Mizrachi Bet Street, less than a mile away. It was a nice morning. A bright sun was drying the puddles from the overnight rain. They climbed the stairs to the rooftop flat and knocked on the door. A woman answered. It was Tova Svorai, though Stamp does not mention her by name. She seemed familiar. Tova, too, appeared to know him from a previous encounter. She asked them their business and they replied simply that they ‘wanted to have a look round’. She ‘saw there was no point in objecting’ and let them in. It struck Stamp that ‘she seemed a bit alarmed … edgy’. He asked her whether she lived alone and she replied that she did. The pair then had a ‘quick, basic look around’. Neither had much expectation of finding anything. They rarely did when they set off on raids that had been prompted by tip-offs.

  Wilkin turned up some papers which seemed to interest him, but apart from that there was nothing suspicious. Then, just as they were coming to the conclusion that they had been sent on yet another wild goose chase, their eyes fell on something that ‘was not exactly right’.

  ‘We came across this shaving brush,’ Stamp said, laughing as he recalled the moment. ‘It was damp. I said: “She’s been having a shave!”’ The woman had just told them that she lived alone. The detectives’ casual mood evaporated. ‘That triggered the whole thing,’ he said. ‘If it hadn’t been for that it would have just been “Oh damn, there’s no one here, let’s be off.”’

  They now set about searching the place thoroughly. In the living room was ‘a sort of home-made wardrobe … a makeshift device for holding clothes’. It was covered by a curtain.

  The two detectives paused. They pulled back the curtain and reached in among the hanging clothes. They ‘pulled these aside – they parted quite easily’. Then they saw him, ‘a man, crouching on the ground. A man helpless, unarmed, barefoot. He was in his underwear. I saw he had a pair of pants on and he had a vest on. That was all. He had nothing else on him.’

  More than forty years on, Stamp’s voice still rang with the drama of the event. ‘There we were and there he was. And what could he do? There was this poor fella crouching there, terrified out of his wits. Two policemen standing over him. They were armed … he’s crouching down. He can’t do anything. He’s not in a position to do anything even if he wanted to. To us he was harmless.’

  Tsur asked Stamp if he recognized the crouching man. He replied that he did, and ‘for a very good reason … I was one of only about two or three men in the police who had ever seen him before.’ He had come across him one or two years before in Jaffa in the course of a round-up of Jewish extremists under the emergency regulations. They were questioned, details noted, and their homes searched before they were eventually released. Stamp himself had ‘supplied his description’ – presumably the one used on the subsequent wanted posters.

  Stern did not know for sure that he had been recognized. They now saw that in his hands he ‘had an identity card … he was in the process of tearing it up and putting some of it in his mouth’. Stamp took it from him and handed it to Wilkin.

  They had their man. Wilkin took the next step. ‘[He] said, “We’d better get Morton.” So he went to the door and shouted out [to the] the driver there. He said, “Will you go to tell Geoff that we’ve got him, or we think it’s him.”’

  Tova Svorai was in the room with them. She did not seem to want to leave the man she had been harbouring. Stamp reassured her: ‘I said, “Nothing’s going to happen to him.”’ At this point a female neighbour was fetched, in keeping with the practice of having a witness present when a woman was first taken into custody to prevent subsequent allegations of improper behaviour.

  Stamp dealt with Stern. ‘I ran my hands over him … “Put your hands up.” Searched him. Nothing. “Open your legs.” Nothing there. He’d no weapon on him. I said, “Well you can sit down now.”’ Tsur asked him, ‘Did you tie his hands?’ Stamp laughed. ‘What for?’ he replied. ‘There were two of us there … he was afraid, I could see that. He’d been caught you see, and he was afraid.’ Even if they had wanted to restrain him they couldn’t as they had not brought any handcuffs with them.

  Stamp does not say how long it took between Wilkin sending the message back to CID headquarters and the arrival of Morton. But when he entered the flat ‘the atmosphere changed straight away’.

  ‘He came in and he said, “Just a minute Stamp.” He called me over. We were down at the exit to the flat … and he said, “You missed a chance, didn’t you?” So I just said, “Well, what do you mean?” He just laughed, that’s all. Ha! That’s it you see. He didn’t refer to it again.’

  Tsur asked: ‘What did he mean?’ Stamp replied, ‘Well, to my mind, he meant that I’d missed a chance of not [sic] disposing of this fellow everyone was looking for, because he was a wanted man. He was believed to be associated with the death of several policemen and that in Morton’s opinion I should have shot him.’

  ‘On the spot?’ pressed Tsur. ‘Well, very soon thereafter,’ Stamp replied. ‘I’d have to identify him first. But … I’d missed the chance of not shooting him, not getting a medal, not getting promotion, not getting anything you see … that was the interpretation I put on his remark.’

  Stamp declared that he ‘knew from that moment that there was going to be a bad end to the business, a violent end’. It was not long in coming. Morton had arrived with ‘five or six other policemen’. He ‘had his men around him and they sort of withdrew to the corner of the room … and talked in general … [then] they all came back in and regrouped’. Stamp ‘thought at first that they were going to just drag him away’.

  But then Morton dismissed Wilkin, leaving ‘four or five’ others with him. As well as Stamp they included Alec Stuart and Alec Ternent. They all ‘just stood there, in a bunch … then Morton said something – “that’s it” or something, I can’t recall the words … he went over to Stern who was sitting [down], as far as I remember. [He] pulled him to his feet, dragged him towards the exit of the room … where there was a door leading to a window … and sort of pushed him and spun, he spun him round. And Morton shot him. Morton, revolver in his hand, shot him. Once. He went down. After the first shot, Stern went to the ground. From the force of the explosion he was knocked to the ground. Stuart, revolver in hand, fired a shot. I don’t know
whether it hit the victim or not. I can’t remember. But Morton said, “Don’t be a bloody fool Stuart, that’s enough.” He didn’t fire any more rounds.’

  ‘Had Stern made any attempt to escape?’ asked Tsur. Stamp replied: ‘No. I don’t see how he could have escaped … there were at least three, four or more policemen there. We were all armed and I don’t see what point he had in trying to escape. He was just pulled to his feet, spun round, and Morton shot him.’

  He went on: ‘The supposition was that he was going to be shot. Out of hand, there and then. In my opinion the fellow was doomed from the time the police came in there and saw that they had the right man in their possession, so that he was never going to get out [of] that room alive. I thought so and I think everyone in the room thought so.’

  Tsur then went, line by line, through the passage in Morton’s book dealing with the shooting. She started with his description of how, while bending down to do up his shoelaces, Stern ‘made a mad rush towards the open window, leading on to the flat roof’. This brought an emphatic response. ‘Ridiculous! Ridiculous! Honestly, it’s nothing like the truth.’

  Morton’s assertion, offered in justification of his actions so many times down the years, that Stern had delivered an ‘oft repeated threat to blow up himself and his captors at the same time if he were ever cornered’ was ‘hogwash … I bet he can’t produce one word of evidence that that was ever said except from his own mouth …’

  When it came to Morton’s claim that he believed Stern ‘had some infernal machine rigged up and he was making a desperate attempt to reach it’, Stamp sighed. ‘I’ve never heard of such rubbish in my life,’ he said. ‘If that was the case you’ve got the man in there, Stern, you’ve got Wilkin there, you’ve got me there before the main body of the police arrived. Wasn’t that the time to spring a trap? Why wait until a lot more police came?’

  Tsur went on to quote Morton’s justification that ‘the elaborate arrangements made at 8 Yael Street were an example of what they were capable of doing in this direction’. Stamp seemed bewildered. ‘Where street?’ Tsur explained that it was the place Schiff and three other policemen were killed by a remote-controlled bomb. ‘I never heard this story before about … a sophisticated booby trap,’ he said. ‘I really know nothing about it … I wasn’t on that job. [This is] the first I’ve heard of anything like this.’

  At one point it appears that there is an understanding between Stamp and his niece that the testimony would not be made public until after his death. Ilana Tsur can no longer remember if this was the case. In any event, her documentary was eventually broadcast on Israeli state radio in November 1986, more than a year before Bernard Stamp passed away. The contents of it were repeated in a long news feature in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper, under thick black type declaring, ‘Yair did not try and escape – he was murdered in cold blood’. This was not a headline writer’s hyperbole. At one point Tsur had asked Stamp bluntly, ‘Did Morton murder in cold blood?’ Stamp replied: ‘I just can’t think of any [other] way of describing it.’

  Stamp’s decision to come out with these charges after nearly half a century of silence must have been devastating to Morton. Until now the claim that he had killed Stern in cold blood had been made by participants in the struggle against the British, men such as Menachem Begin, or writers who either sympathized with the Jewish underground cause or who had repeated information from secondary sources as fact. Yet now the accusation came from the mouth of one of his own – a man who claimed to have been standing next to him when he pulled the trigger.

  Morton seems only to have heard about it eight months after the event, when he was contacted by a London-based Israeli writer called Saul Zadka who sent him a translation of the Yedioth article and asked for his comments. There is no record of his response. He could take some comfort from the fact that Stamp’s testimony was thus far confined to Israel. If it spread any further, he knew what to do. A few days after the communication he wrote to Alec Ternent, apart from Alice perhaps his closest confidant, telling him the news. The tone of his letter sounds cheerful and confident. He had no intention of replying in writing, he said, ‘but if Mr Zadka or anyone else proposes to publish this article in this country they should be sure that they have a long pocket’.4

  But time went by and nothing appeared in the English-language press. The spectral figure of Bernard Stamp flickered and faded and disappeared again into the mists of the past. Then, in August 1991, Morton received a letter from a journalist named Ian Black. Black was the Guardian newspaper’s Jerusalem correspondent, a historian and an authority on the politics of the region. He quoted Stamp’s interview with Tsur and pointed out the glaring discrepancies between his version of events and that presented in Morton’s book and statements in court. It seemed, he wrote, ‘only fair to seek your response to it’.5

  He soon got it. As far as Morton was concerned, the incident was closed. ‘A full investigation was carried out,’ he wrote. ‘An inquest was held by the Coroner for the district and a verdict of justifiable homicide was returned.’ The account Black had outlined was ‘inaccurate in practically every detail’ but he ‘had no intention of enumerating those inaccuracies for your benefit’. He closed by asking him to ‘kindly refrain from communicating with me again, either by telephone or in writing’.

  It was another six months before Black’s article appeared, the cover story in the weekend section of 15−16 February 1992, almost fifty years to the day since the killing. It was titled ‘The Stern Solution’ and it gave a detailed and well-documented account of the circumstances around the event. Stamp’s testimony provided an important source. But, on the advice of the paper’s legal team, the accusation that Morton had killed Stern in cold blood was not repeated. There was nothing for Morton’s lawyers to get their teeth into and no further libel action.

  Bernard Stamp had nonetheless caused Geoffrey Morton a great deal of unhappiness. Why, after all that time, had he spoken out against his old boss? Ilana Tsur had probed her uncle’s motivations. She mentioned the fact that Morton had made ‘quite a lot of money’ out of litigation.6 ‘I wouldn’t go along with that,’ he replied. ‘Morton … in his way was a good police officer. He had commendations and medals and except in this incident where in my opinion he overstepped the mark, he was a good police officer. He wasn’t an out-and-out villain who went around shooting people …’

  When Morton considered the question his tone was sorrowful rather than angry. He laid out his response in yet another justification of his actions, written, it seems, for posterity. ‘I had a high regard for Bernard Stamp,’ he wrote.7 ‘He was a good Hebrew speaker and had a sound knowledge of Jewish affairs.’ He mused that ‘it was, I suppose, inevitable’ that his marriage to a Jewish woman would have affected his career and ‘no doubt he was bitter because of this’.

  Nonetheless, he went, on ‘it is inconceivable to me that he should come out with this story after nearly fifty years – in fact only after he had suffered a severe stroke. I fear that his mental as well as his physical faculties were sadly impaired.’ He reflected that ‘memories, for many of us, have become clouded with the passage of years’.

  In fact Stamp had given the fundamentals of his story in the memoir he wrote at his son’s prompting in 1982, three years before his stroke. There are several discrepancies in this account and in the Tsur interview, which in court a lawyer might fix upon to cast doubt on his reliability as a witness. For example, in the memoir he says he was one of the few policemen to have met Stern, a claim he repeated in the interview. He came across Stern after he was arrested in ‘about September’ of 1938 and not released until the outbreak of the war. This is at odds with the facts − Stern was in Poland in September 1938 and was not arrested until a year later. In the interview he says at one point that when Wilkin and he went to Stern’s hideout they were armed, and at another that they were not. The dramatic story of the shaving brush which he mentions in the interview is no
t included in the 1982 account. He maintained that Alec Ternent was present in the room at the fatal moment. Yet Ternent left a written statement before he died emphasizing for the record that he had never set foot in the place.8 In the same account he remembered Stern ‘sitting on the side of the bed, behind him the bedroom window’, whereas Morton places the bed opposite the window. His ignorance of the details of the Yael Street bombing seems curious – unless Morton was right and his recollection was impaired by the stroke.

  When Morton confronted the testimony, though, he raised none of these points. Instead he made a far more devastating assertion, one that, if true, would fatally undermine Stamp’s story. He wrote that ‘in spite of what … Ian Black and Bernard Stamp himself have said – and I cannot stress this too strongly – Stamp was not, repeat not, in the room at the time of the shooting’.9 He went on to explain that ‘he had been there, but he was actually at that moment on the staircase between the ground and the first floor with Inspector Wilkin, trying to deal with the struggling and hysterical Mrs Svorai …’

  This was quite a claim. If true, it would mean that Stamp had decided in his old age to invent, in startling detail, a malicious account of an event he had not witnessed. Unfortunately for Morton, there was counter-evidence that stated that Stamp had been in the room. What is more, it was Morton himself who had supplied it. The freshest account, the one written closest to the events they described, was the official report delivered by Morton within twenty-four hours of the shooting. It stated that while making his dash for the window Stern ‘passed behind Sergeant Stamp who was examining the contents of the buffet’. It seemed that it was not only Bernard Stamp’s memory that had ‘become clouded with the passage of time’.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘The Holy City’