‘The significance of what the briber had told me was: “There’s a multi-million pound city centre development scheme coming off. They’re going to demolish the old Victorian covered market, right in the middle, and they’re going to redevelop it. It’ll be in the millions. Poulson is at the back of this, he’s going to get the core work controlling that.” And I said: “How do you know?” And he said: “Because I’ve been talking to one of his staff. I met him at a building exhibition and he was on Poulson’s stand. Poulson has a building company.” I said: “That’s unusual. He’s an architect. If you’re an architect you’re not allowed to control a building company.” And he said: “Nobody knows he controls it. There’s a reference to his wife in it.” I said: “Well that’s very interesting!” And we were off, as it were. We had a tangible evidential lead.’
He paused for a sip of tea. I was on the edge of my seat.
‘I went to Companies House in London, looked up the building company and it was like opening a treasure trove. It had been registered by a man whose name was illegible. Because I couldn’t read it properly I left that and went on, and going through the file was absolutely amazing. I found Reginald Maudling [the former Conservative Home Secretary] was a director of the company. This was a seemingly small operation based in West Yorkshire! I found Maudling’s son. I found the clerk to the county council. The clerk to the county council was the chairman of a building company! I found William Sales, who was the director of the National Coal Board for the north-east. An amazing array of names, and I thought, this is a very strange company. It was called Open Systems Building – and it was a building company that didn’t own a wheelbarrow. I began tracing Poulson people and asking them all sorts of things. And everyone I talked to on his staff who knew about it talked about bribery one way or another. And then I went back to this name that was at the beginning of the file, and I recognised the address rather than the name. It was very unusual, it was Spital Tongues, Newcastle – and that’s Dan Smith’s address. And at the other end of the file I find Mrs Poulson, who’s a director, and the offices were Poulson’s offices, so we had the two of them tied together and Maudling in between. It was an absolutely amazing thing!’
How had ‘Mr Newcastle’, T. Dan Smith, the hero of Cruddas Park, become mixed up in all this? If Poulson was an outsider, his name or business rarely if ever cropping up on the national stage, Smith was a master communicator, a man who ran his own public relations firm, and who revelled in being seen to be at the centre of things. By the early sixties he had been named Man of the Year by the Architects’ Journal; been chosen by Colin Buchanan to sit on his Traffic in Towns government committee; and was close friends with that formidable champion of local government, Dame Evelyn Sharp of the Ministry of Housing. In the midst of all this high flying and good work, Dan Smith met John Poulson in 1962. They immediately clicked.
‘When I first came across the Poulson outfit, as a housing man it looked like manna from heaven,’ said Smith.4 The architect was quick to put Smith’s Town Planning Advisory Organisation on a retainer. ‘Dan Smith mesmerised me,’ he wrote in his autobiography, while he in turn tried to impress Mr Newcastle with his snow-white dreams of ‘rescuing our city centres’.5
From what, it is not quite clear,’ remarked Ray.
Letters were written between Smith and Poulson, as they worked out who would work which levers in which council. Smith later wrote that he was taken with the idea of building up a regional power base, using local firms such as Poulson’s to increase the independence of his beloved Newcastle. Whatever the justification, by the late sixties Smith’s companies had received £155,000 from Poulson, while the architect was reckoned to have made a cool £1 million from Smith’s contacts.
Poulson was not the only dodgy customer with whom Smith would deal. In 1963 he told Bovis offshoot Leslie and Co. that he could put work their way if they paid him as an advisor. He made good on the deal, omitting to mention this particular conflict of interest when Leslie and Co. were awarded the tenders for the building of new flats in Newcastle. Then there was Crudens, the Scottish construction firm. Smith represented them through his PR company with one hand, and awarded them big contracts with the other: as chairman of Peterlee new town development corporation, for instance, he had presided over the building of 1,000 houses built with the system used by Crudens. Dan Smith shrugged off the ever more frequent accusations of corruption. ‘I had many temptations from prominent people in Newcastle,’ he told the Evening Chronicle many years later. ‘I resisted and rejected them all. I didn’t get my son a job in the town hall. I didn’t get a house. I got nothing.’6 After all, he told the Guardian, ‘getting things done is not synonymous with pulling a fast one.’7
By the mid-sixties Smith’s influence had spread far beyond Newcastle. There was Wandsworth councillor Sidney Sporle, for example, a kind of south London chip off the old block, whose work included redeveloping the area where my parents had grown up. ‘Mr Newcastle’ wangled Sporle a lucrative place on the board of Poulson’s construction company Open Systems Building in 1966; shortly afterwards, Sporle hired Smith’s PR company to represent the council. A local councillor got wind of the affair, and soon the pair of them found themselves in court.
Meanwhile Ray Fitzwalter, investigating Poulson in Bradford, realised he had to get up to speed on the Newcastle councillor’s shady past too. ‘Dan Smith had already been prosecuted in Wandsworth, and acquitted in what can only be described as disgraceful circumstances,’ he told me, disgust still evident in his voice. ‘He ought to have been prosecuted successfully. He wasn’t because the trial was fixed. It was as bad as that. He was tried by a judge who knew him. They were old political colleagues in the Labour party. Dan Smith had campaigned for him, can you believe it? I also know for a fact that Dan Smith was tipped before the trial that he would be acquitted.’
The discovery of so much corruption had been a shock to the reporters on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. ‘You can imagine,’ said Ray, ‘we’re a small local paper, with a local solicitor giving us advice … you didn’t do things like this.’ And yet they decided to push on. ‘The thing that I was also aware of,’ he added, ‘was that Poulson’s empire was extremely shaky. He was in deep financial trouble.’ To keep the wheels oiled in this complex machine, Poulson had need of a great deal of ready cash to bribe potential contacts, but despite all of the business the practice was winning, cash was short. ‘He’d not gone over the edge,’ said Ray, ‘but he was vibrating.’ At this point Lord King, Poulson’s brother-in-law, stepped in to prop up the business with some much-needed capital. But the situation remained fragile.
With the evidence piling up, the paper decided this was the moment to take a risk. They published a profile of Poulson under the ironic headline ‘The Master Builder’, including a series of coded nudge-nudge hints about the nature of Poulson’s business. Then they waited to see if he’d sue – or if anyone else with more clout would take up the story. To their dismay something worse happened – the story sank like a stone. Even when Private Eye took it up, printing an article entitled ‘The Slicker of Wakefield’ in April 1970, none of the national press was interested. More than a couple of articles, it seemed, were needed to clear the miasma of complacency from the upper echelons of Britain’s establishment.
Two years later Ray was working for ITV’s investigative programme World in Action when Poulson filed for bankruptcy. The reporter immediately grasped the significance of this development for his dormant story: the architect’s financial papers would be released by the courts. Soon he was drawing up a master chart of the complex affair that covered a whole desktop in his office at Granada’s studios in Manchester.
‘It was almost unravelable … all the people who were connected with it, and all the different layers, starting with small county councils and then the Coal Board and the nationalised industries, and big county councils. Sir Bernard Kenyon [Chief Executive of West Riding county council] was right in the frame, an
d right up to politicans, and right at the top – Maudling. I said, “That is what we want to put on the screen. It looks complicated, but we need interviewees who can explain it.” By that stage this was a bang-bang national scandal that everyone knew about but nobody understood.’
Unfortunately for Ray and the World in Action team, the Independent Broadcasting Authority banned their film. Ray was in no doubt as to why. ‘Four members of the IBA had connections with people who were right in the middle of the frame!’ His indignation was still much in evidence. ‘One of them was outrageous, and that was Dame Evelyn Sharp. She was the principal civil servant at the Ministry of Housing. She’d appeared as the only witness at Dan Smith’s Wandsworth’s trial.’ She also had 2,000 shares in Bovis, Keith Joseph’s construction firm. A subtly re-edited version was finally broadcast some months later, after a stormy IBA meeting. ‘Dame Evelyn Sharp said in direct hearing: “If this comes out it’ll ruin Dan.” Completely partisan!’
After the broadcast, the emboldened journalists began to push harder at what suddenly felt like an open door. A sister programme followed, putting Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, in the frame. Maudling had become involved with Poulson in the oddest of cirumstances. His wife Beryl Maudling’s dream had been to build a ballet theatre in East Grinstead, but by 1965 the project had run out of money. Poulson stepped in, offered Maudling a role as a board member of Open Systems Building in 1967, and stumped up £22,000 to keep Mrs Maudling’s dream alive.i Thereafter Maudling found himself ever more deeply involved in Poulson’s expansionist schemes which, helped immeasurably by the backing of a politician of such standing, now reached far beyond Britain’s shores.
‘It was a step-by-step unraveling of the greatest corruption imaginable,’ said Ray of their second documentary. ‘The day after, Maudling got up in the Commons and said, “I’ll sue everyone connected to this programme!” – and he didn’t. That was his way of frightening everybody. We had him banged to rights and he knew it.’ Private Eye ran a cover on 14 July 1972, with the headline ‘Poulson Affair – Govt’s. “Grave Disquiet”’, and a picture of Maudling leaving number 10 to Heath’s cry, ‘All right Reggie, you can look into it,’ and the Home Secretary’s response: ‘I shall leave no stone unturned.’ There was little doubt that the corruption reached the heart of government. ‘He sued everyone in sight apart from us and the Daily Mirror,’ recalled Ray. ‘And then he died, with a liver two and a half times its normal size.’ Poulson was arrested in June 1973 and eight months later was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud. A couple of months after that Dan Smith was tried at the same court and sent to prison for six years. Thanks to the dogged efforts of Raymond Fitzwalter and his peers, an era of institutionalised corruption had been dramatically uncovered.
In the mid-sixties the Guardian had described local government as ‘the biggest and potentially the most important of all big businesses’.8 This, of course, was why companies were so keen to hang onto their contacts – whatever it took. ‘I’ve seen conveners of housing committees almost crawling up the stairs at night, being stroked and patted on the head by builders!’ claimed one onlooker attending the annual Scottish National Housing and Town Planning conference in Peebles.9 The prosecution in Poulson’s case described the method as ‘by the back door – by using a fifth column within the local councils and not openly, but stealthily and secretly and for reward’.10
One of the more notable cases of corruption in the story of Britain’s postwar rebuilding was that of Alan Maudsley, city architect in the mid-sixties in Birmingham, England’s most go-ahead modernised city. As with Poulson, Building Design magazine lauded Maudsley to the skies, hailing this energetic fellow in an article titled ‘Forward with Maudsley’, in which he was quoted as saying that he ‘couldn’t point to any other city where private architects have had a greater opportunity … Architecture is a business. I set out as a businessman and the fact that I’m qualified as an architect is incidental.’11 Birmingham’s industrial revolution had made it a town of engineers, but Maudsley was determined to wrest control of the budget and the glory from the city engineer. ‘Why does Maudsley want to get involved in “more important” schemes like the projected concert hall, the central magistrates courts and an expanded airport?’ asked Building Design. ‘He doesn’t say, but the reasons could be many.’12 As it turned out, one reason was less than noble. At the start of 1973 a story broke in the Birmingham Mail: local architects James Sharp and Evan Ebery were charged with offering Maudsley bribes, the architect with accepting them. All three were sent to jail that Watergate summer.
Smith and Poulson apart, perhaps the most shocking British case was uncovered in ‘the Chicago of the north’ – Dundee. The city had undergone a vigorous postwar rebuilding programme: by 1970 their housing output was a staggering 88 percent higher than even the power-crazed Alan Maudsley had achieved in Birmingham at the height of his regime.13 The standout scheme was Whitfield, a massive estate of 5,000 homes, over half of which were deck-access flats built in hexagonal honeycomb formations, made from Skarne system-built units. Like Newcastle and Birmingham, the city appeared to be a model of postwar modernisation. Then Ray Fitzwalter at World in Action was called in to clean up the town.
‘I got a telephone call from a councillor,’ he recalled. ‘“We have terrible trouble in Dundee. Terrible. It’s as corrupt a city as you’ll find and we can’t solve it. Will you come and have a look?”’ Ray was not one to turn up the chance of a good story. ‘The police had had a significant go at it. The local villains had a party in the town hall the night the police investigation was written off. They were that strong. Nobody seemed to be able to touch them.’ Ray and team descended on Dundee and it didn’t take them long to uncover some leads. ‘We very quickly identified that there were three people in the frame. One was the Lord Provost, one was the chair of the planning committee and the other was the leader of the Labour group. What we found in essence was the most explicit, overt corruption I’ve seen in Britain. I don’t know how they thought they were getting away with it.’ It transpired that each of these three key figures owned companies such as electricians or demolition specialists, and ‘each one of them was taking contracts from committees that they controlled. It was straightforward!’
In the course of his investigation, Ray ploughed through seventeen years’ worth of council minutes, checking them against property records and Companies House, but some of the team’s research methods were not quite as above board. At one point Ray decided to set a thief to catch a fraudster. ‘A very valuable contact I found burgled a safe for me. He knew what I was doing and he knew what I was looking for, and he had a safe of one of these villains – not the three I’ve mentioned, but an integral associate – opened and he had the documents inside photographed, and he gave me pictures.’ The safe contained a series of invoices for sums up to £20,000 from developers who’d seemingly had no connection to the projects. Vast sums of money were being siphoned away to line the pockets of corrupt businessmen.
The ensuing 1980 trial was the longest criminal trial in Scottish legal history up that point. It was known as the ‘Dundee Dossier’ affair, after the World in Action film. ‘And the police got only one of the three.’ Ray still looked crushed by this turn of events. ‘They got the leader of the council; he went to jail. We tried to interview him and he jumped up halfway through screaming, “You’re trying to suggest I’m a Scottish T. Dan Smith!”’ Ray laughed now, but it had been a frightening case to work on. ‘Dundee was a mafia town … They set fire to businesses if they didn’t get what they wanted – not the three councillors, others. There were people there on the council who robbed the poor box. There was a terrible incident where the Lord Mayor, who was the innocent party, in his robes, had a fight in public with another councillor. This guy assaulted him because he knew the Lord Mayor had been helping us. He grabbed him by the testicles! The Lord Mayor turned round and got the car door open and jammed the guy between the car frame and the
door. Literally there they were, brawling in public. It symbolises what Dundee was like.’
‘T. Dan Smith: Saint or Devil?’ asked the Newcastle Journal in 1970 in the wake of one of his court cases.14
Perhaps it was a little more complicated than that. Like many others, ex-planner Jo Meredith didn’t see these scandals in black-or-white terms. ‘I know there was a lot of controversy around bribery and corruption,’ she said. I mentioned T. Dan Smith and she interrupted at once: ‘Did a huge amount of good! You can see the good of it and the bad of it. T. Dan Smith in Newcastle, he was doing something, he was changing the face, he was doing what people wanted to be done.’ She went on: ‘I don’t think people in those days were cynical like they are now. I mean, now we assume that everyone is corrupt!’ Wasn’t that partly because of all these scandals back in the seventies, I suggested. As we spoke, the Murdochs were being quizzed about their media empire by a committee of MPs; the spirit of T. Dan Smith seemed to be in the air again. ‘Fifty years ago, we were so naïve. We still believed in social good.’ She checked herself. ‘Some of us still do!’
The corruption scandals that broke in the postwar decades characterise the era as vividly as the Profumo scandal, the Suez crisis, or Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. These were crimes committed by people so arrogant they thought they could never be caught, because this was the way the whole world worked for people with power. Poulson’s words at his trial showed the power-crazed tendencies beneath the surface of this deeply unpleasant north Yorkshire businessman, and others like him: ‘I have been a fool surrounded by a pack of leeches,’ he declared. ‘I took on the world on its own terms, and no one can deny that I once had it in my fist.’15
Notes
1 Richard Crossman in Clive Borrel and Brian Cashinella, Crime in Britain Today, Routledge, 1975, p90
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