The Reckoning

by Patrick Bishop

  Bernard Stamp’s evidence is undoubtedly powerful. It is not, however, conclusive. Two other men were said to be in the room with Stern and Morton that day. To corroborate – or dismiss – Stamp’s charge, their testimony is needed. One of those present was Sergeant Alec Stuart. He was among the PPF veterans the ex-Lehi man Binyamin Gepner talked to in the late 1970s. Gepner sat down with him in the Central Hotel in Cardiff and probed his memories of the day Stern was shot. On the recording you hear him asking eagerly: ‘Now what happened in Mizrachi number eight?’ Stuart’s response is a dry chuckle. ‘If you want to tell me something off the record,’ coaxes Gepner, ‘I’ll switch the thing off.’1 Stuart agrees: ‘I think you’d better switch it off, actually.’ His words are followed by an electronic click.

  The next thing on the tape is a voice memo in Hebrew in which Gepner reports what Stuart allegedly said. The details add yet another layer of complexity to the episode and contradict elements of Stamp’s story. In this version, Stuart was with Wilkin and Stamp when they went to the flat along with a dozen or so other policemen who formed a cordon around the building. He helped with the search and when it produced nothing went downstairs. When he returned after a few minutes he learned that Stern had been found. Wilkin told him to go to the office and bring back some handcuffs. He was not to inform Morton that they had arrested Stern. When he reached CID headquarters, though, he passed on the news immediately. He and Morton rode back together and entered the flat. When asked what happened next, Stuart allegedly replied: ‘You know exactly what happened. He fired on him immediately from in front. He didn’t shoot him from behind. He shot him with four bullets I believe. He was the only one who fired.’2

  Why did he shoot, Gepner wanted to know? Stuart is reported to have replied: ‘You know why. There is an official statement of his [Morton’s]. That he [Stern] wanted to escape.’ When Gepner pressed him on how this would have been possible when he was surrounded by policemen, Stuart would not be drawn. ‘Over and over we discussed the killing of Yair,’ he said, ‘and he kept telling me: “You know exactly what happened.”’ Gepner was also curious as to why Wilkin told Stuart not to tell Morton that Stern had been arrested. Stuart is said to have replied that if he hadn’t told him, then ‘maybe they would have arrested Stern and not killed him’.

  This second-hand testimony clashes at several points with Stamp’s story. In Stamp’s account there were only three in the original police party – himself, Wilkin and a driver. There is no mention of a dozen extra men, enough to throw a cordon around the building. He also says that, far from wanting to keep the fact of Stern’s arrest away from Morton, Wilkin ordered the driver to go and tell him the news. Stamp also has Stuart opening fire on Stern as he lay on the ground, causing Morton to snap, ‘don’t be a bloody fool … that’s enough’.

  According to Gepner, Stuart said that only he and Stamp were with Morton when the shots were fired. What, then, of the sergeant mentioned in Morton’s initial, nearly contemporaneous, report, ‘B/Con. Hancock, S.N.’? Neither Stamp nor Stuart mentions him at all. Yet according to Morton he was not only there but fired ‘practically simultaneously’ with him.3

  This is the only appearance of Hancock in the story. In all subsequent accounts Morton took sole responsibility for killing Stern. There is no mention of Hancock or Stuart firing his gun. An investigator might think this a curious omission. The fact that another policeman opened fire could be taken as confirmation that it was not only Morton who saw Stern making a sudden and apparently threatening movement, and reacted accordingly. This, surely, would reinforce the conclusion that the shooting was justified. Why in that case remove Hancock from the story? One explanation is that Morton did not welcome the airing of another narrative that might contradict his version. Another is that he wished to shield a colleague from the wrath of Stern’s followers.

  As Morton knew himself, the Sternists had long memories and he may have decided that, even many years after the event, it was unwise to expose a comrade unnecessarily. It was obvious that anyone who was present at the showdown was now in danger from the organization, and according to one story Wilkin had taken immediate steps to put himself in the clear. Yitzhak Berman, an Irgun intelligence chief and an intimate of Wilkin’s, claimed the detective rushed straight from Mizrachi Street to see him, in order to have a witness who could vouch that he was not there at the time of the shooting.4

  Stanley Neville Hancock remains a shadowy figure. There is no other mention of him in Morton’s writings. The records show he joined the Palestine Police aged twenty in May 1939 and left six months after the date of the shooting to join the RAF. He was still in the air force in 1946, by which time he had been promoted to flight lieutenant. At some point between 1941 and 1945 he married in Jaffa, a woman called Else Schweikher, known as ‘Peta’. She died in 1974. Hancock was last known to be living at an address in Edgbaston, Birmingham, but is no longer there and no further records are available.5

  Rarely can a single act have produced so many differing versions of events. The confusion is not just restricted to the facts. In many ways, Morton’s actions during the period ran counter to form. He appeared to revere the rule of law, as he demonstrated with his clashes with his superiors when he thought that, due to political considerations, it was being selectively applied. He was proud of his preference for guile and cunning over brute force.

  He loved to tell a story of how, once, during the Arab revolt, he had persuaded a village in the ‘triangle of terror’ to hand over its weapons by the use of an elaborate trick. He first assembled the population and appealed to them to surrender their arms. When that had no effect, his men dragged one of the young rebels behind a house. Shots were heard and the party re-emerged carting away an apparently lifeless body. The men of the village promptly fetched their rifles, whereupon the young man appeared from the back of the police truck. ‘There was an incredulous gasp from the villagers at this apparent resurrection from the dead, which turned first into a titter and then into a wave of hearty laughter at the realisation that they had been completely hoaxed,’ Morton wrote.6

  Morton was not, as even Bernard Stamp confirmed, someone who habitually ‘went around shooting people’. Yet in Dizengoff Street and Mizrachi Street he had done just that.

  These were tense days and anger was in the air. There is evidence suggesting that, following the killings of Schiff, Goldman and Turton, the police were operating in an atmosphere of greater licence. It is implicit in the special meeting of the District Security Committee in Jaffa on 27 January, at which Morton was present, when Alan Saunders talked of ‘liquidating’ Stern. Some policemen would later claim that it was assumed that, once caught, Stern was a dead man. Bernard Stamp told Ilana Tsur ‘it was generally held that if that fella was caught he would probably get shot. It was sort of an opinion. There was nothing laid down in writing.’7 This was echoed by Daniel Day, a sergeant who had been on the Dizengoff Street raid, when, during a visit to Israel in 1963, he told the newspaper Maariv: ‘There was no other way of getting rid of him and solving the terror problem … Stern would have been innocent for lack of evidence in a criminal trial or would have been held in a detention camp and soon run away.’8 If it was true that there was an implicit understanding abroad that Stern was not to be taken alive, it would explain the failure of the authorities to carry out an internal inquiry into the circumstances of what was a very high-profile police killing.

  An unwritten decision by the police to shoot Stern out of hand would not only have been criminal; it would also have been very stupid. It was true that, unless one of his men turned against him, there was little solid evidence to convict him. But locking him up in a detention camp would surely have meant he was effectively neutralized. By the time he was cornered Stern had become an embarrassment and a nuisance to both his former comrades and the Yishuv in general. He had repeatedly demonstrated an inability to compromise, towering vanity and a quarrelsome nature that would surely have led to his marginalizati
on and possibly his death in some internal underground feud.

  If events did unfold in the way that Stamp claimed, then Morton would have been well advised to keep quiet when passing references were made to a story that, anyway, was being constantly overlaid by bigger events. Instead, defending his reputation became close to an obsession as he issued repeated legal challenges, which, if the verdicts had gone against him, would have resulted in his financial ruin. As it was, he won quite handsomely. By some accounts some former colleagues were irked by his success and felt there was something improper in the fact that he had made money out of libel actions. The notion that Morton was financially motivated does not sit easily with a man who lived modestly and seemed to have little interest in material possessions.

  Undoubtedly, Morton came to believe sincerely in his version of events. If the story was as he described, then it is not an implausible one. There may be no hard evidence to back up Morton’s claim that Stern had warned publicly that, if captured, he would blow himself up, taking as many of his enemies with him as possible. His utterances and writings, though, were steeped in images of suicidal sacrifice. If his legend was to live on, he could not possibly come quietly when the knock on the door finally sounded. The massacre in Yael Street proved his organization was quite capable of rigging a bomb that could blow an arrest party to pieces. If Stern had made a desperate dash for the window it was not unreasonable to conclude that it might well have been that he was bent on detonating an infernal machine. But did he make that move? In the end we have the word of one proud man against another and the truth will, in all likelihood, remain enigmatic and elusive.

  For Morton, 12 February 1942 was the day when the path of his professional life began to slope away, in a direction he had not anticipated. He was ambitious and ending his police career in a pleasant but inconsequential colonial backwater like Nyasaland cannot have been in his plan. Back in England he lived quietly, working and watching his children grow up. His job at the engineering company in Gloucestershire and later at the match company Bryant and May must have been dull after the excitements of his early life. Like his father he poured his extra energy into voluntary work, serving as a comprehensive school governor and on local committees. According to his daughter, Penny, ‘there was always some lame duck in tow that he was supporting or helping financially’.9

  From time to time, Palestine would force itself into his thoughts. The men he had fought were the masters now and a former ‘gangster’ a national hero. Twenty-five years after Stern’s death, in 1967, the anniversary was marked by a wave of publicity and events hailing him as a patriot and one of the founding fathers of the state. Roads were named after him in Jerusalem and Beersheba, and, in Tel Aviv, Mizrachi Bet Street would come to bear his name. Postage stamps bearing his image were issued and in 1981 a town in central Israel was named Kochav Yair – ‘Yair’s Star’ – in his memory. In 1980 the Israeli Defence Forces instituted the ‘Lehi ribbon’ honouring its members and their struggle to establish the state. Three years later Yitzhak Shamir became Prime Minister (a post that had already been occupied by Menachem Begin), going on to become the second-longest-serving premier after David Ben-Gurion.

  If Stern had lived it seems unlikely he would have been thus garlanded. His self-destructive tendencies and inability to work with others as equals would have shunted him sooner or later to the sidelines or to oblivion. In death, though, he achieved the status of prophet and martyr he had yearned for when alive and his spiritual presence shaped events in a way that his physical one never could have. Yair’s analysis – that British defeat was essential if the Jews were to have a state – became the prevailing wisdom.

  Morton and his colleagues watched the triumphant march of Stern’s disciples, some with dismay, some with acceptance and some with alarm. Even after many years the long arm of Lehi was still something to be feared. In January 1989, the Spectator carried extracts from an interview that the historian Nicholas Bethell had conducted with Yitzhak Shamir twelve years before. The Israeli Prime Minister had been remarkably frank about Lehi’s programme of targeting Mandate officials. He said that Tom Wilkin had been killed because he ‘was very dangerous for us … he fought against us zealously, he was a fanatic.’ Geoffrey Morton though was ‘quite different. He escaped and he’s still alive, but now it doesn’t interest us. We’re not going to kill him now.’10

  ‘Jolly decent of him!’ wrote Morton in a wry letter to the magazine. ‘If only I’d known of this at the time of the interview I could have been spared twelve years quaking in my metaphorical shoes.’11 But he remained on his guard. In 1992 he wrote to the chief constable of Gloucestershire following the publication of Ian Black’s Guardian article which summoned Stern once again from his unquiet grave. The letter has not survived but the reply from the chief’s deputy, Barry Shaw, has, noting Morton’s concerns and reassuring him that a detective inspector has been put on the case.12

  Geoffrey Morton died on 11 December 1996, aged eighty-nine. At Alice’s insistence the cremation was a low-key event and not announced in advance. ‘My mother was terrified that they were going to blow up the funeral – even then,’ Penny remembered.13

  Most of his old comrades had gone before him: Alec Ternent, Alec Stuart, Alex Shand, Dick Catling and John Fforde were all dead. They had not seen much of each other in the latter years, but occasionally some would gather at a pub in London after an old comrades’ get-together to swap old stories and sing ‘The Holy City’, the anthem of the Palestine Police. It is a wonderful hymn that captures perfectly the nostalgia and affection that seemingly almost every Briton who served there felt for Palestine, despite its dangers and tribulations. The place they had known, still linked physically and spiritually to antiquity, had long gone. But so, too, had the Britain that sent them there in a vain and finally tragic bid to stem the tide of history.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks go first to my mother Kathleen and Sir Paul Beresford MP for their roles in the genesis of this book – an interesting process that would unfortunately take up too much space here to recount. I am especially grateful to Penny Brook for the access she has allowed me to her father Geoffrey’s extensive archive and the unfailing helpfulness and generosity she and her husband Nigel have offered throughout the research and writing. I am frequently taken aback by the kindness people who are usually complete strangers to the author show when approached for help with a book. The response I got to my requests for information from those involved in this one was particularly impressive, particularly given the visceral animosities of the events described. In Israel I would like to thank Yair Stern for his insights into his father’s life and personality and Amira Stern of the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv for her cheerful response to endless demands. Hannah Armoni gave me the run of the Lehi Museum’s holdings and the benefit of her memories of life in the underground. I learned much from pleasant hours spent with Ze’ev Iviansky at his home in the Galilee and Azriel Weiss Livnat in his flat in Tel Aviv. In the course of my researches I was lucky enough to encounter – and, I would like to think, make a friend of – Uri Avnery, the former Irgun man and veteran of the independence war who went on to become one of Israel’s great and eloquent liberal voices.

  The same goes for Ilana Tsur, who as well as sharing her material sometimes shared a lunch table with me during breaks from delving in the Haganah archive files. Without access to these, the book could not have been written. This is a historical goldmine, largely unplundered by British researchers as far as I can tell. Panning and sifting the documents you are able to attain a real intimacy with the workings and thought processes of the Mandate’s security forces. I was helped greatly there by Orly Azulay, Dorit Herman, Shimri Salomon and the former director Neri Arieli. Israeli academics have been busy there for some time, notably Dr Eldad Harouvi of the Palmach Musem in Tel Aviv, whose work has resulted in Palestine Investigated, the fullest account yet of the CID of the Palestine Police Force. It has yet to be published in
English – an omission which cries out to be rectified – but he very generously allowed me access to the translation, for which a sincere ‘toda raba’.

  I would also like to thank Danny Eliav and David Shomron in Jerusalem and Mia Gepner in Tel Aviv for helping me access her extraordinary father’s research material. Ram Oren talked to me about the background to his novel Red Days, a fictionalised account of the romance between Shoshana Borochov and Tom Wilkin. Sami Abu Shedadeh kindly gave me guidance on the geography of Jaffa in the period. Anyone writing about this place and time owes much to previous historians but I would like to express the debt I owe in particular to Ada Amichal-Yevin, James Barr, Zev Golan, Joseph Heller and Tom Segev.

  In Britain, the memory of the Palestine Police is kept alive by the dedication of the indefatigable Edward Horne, author of A Job Well Done, the definitive history of the force, and a PPF veteran himself. Ted was endlessly patient with my inquiries. I hope he thinks the result is worth it.

  The sons and daughters of those who served have been remarkably generous and encouraging. Dan Stamp spoke to me at length about his father Bernard and generously provided invaluable photographs and papers. Alex Stuart’s daughter Linda lent me his annotated copy of Geoffrey Morton’s book, and Anne Shand gave me an insight into the life of her father, Alex.

  In Oxford I was given much valuable assistance by Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre Archive, Saint Antony’s College, and Lucy McCann of Rhodes House Library. The staffs of the National Archives, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum and the London Library were their usual efficient selves. Jane Wells provided a fascinating insight into Geoffrey Morton’s early days by allowing me access to the records of St Olave’s Grammar School.

  During a December 2012 trip to a freezing Suwalki, Avraham Stern’s birthplace in eastern Poland, I was given a warm welcome and good advice by Ewelina Suchocka at the tourist office.