The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  In May of the following year, after a high-profile criminal trial, nine men from Rochdale and Oldham were convicted of multiple sex offences against five local girls. They were jailed for a total of 77 years.

  The furore unleashed by those January 2011 articles features briefly in Three Girls, a drama that will be screened on BBC One over three consecutive nights from next Tuesday (May 16, 17 and 18). It tells the story of Rochdale through the lives of three young teenagers at the heart of the case.

  Had it been a work of fiction, the events it portrays might have seemed barely credible, such is the scale of the blunders by statutory agencies that are laid bare. The tragedy for so many young girls and their families is that the truth breathes through every scene.

  When I first heard that the BBC had commissioned a docudrama, my initial shock that the corporation would choose to tackle such a controversial subject was swiftly replaced by wariness. I feared that innate squeamishness would result in a sanitised exercise that shied away from uncomfortable realities. More fool me. Three Girls pulls no punches. It tells a raw, harrowing story in a way that makes for searingly compelling drama.

  Central to it is the girl who became the star prosecution witness in the 11-week trial that opened at Liverpool crown court in February 2012. Four years earlier, aged 15, she was arrested after a disturbance inside a kebab shop. A day later, she was interviewed by a bored male detective from Rochdale CID. That filmed interview, and a second eight days later, were shown to the jury on the second day of the trial.

  Before and after Rochdale, I sat in courts up and down the land to hear weeks and months of evidence from the child victims of similar crimes in towns and cities including Oxford, Birmingham, Telford and Rotherham. Some witnesses had a lasting impact. Five years after I first gazed at a Liverpool courtroom video monitor and saw the girl who is called Holly in the BBC drama, the memory has not left me. At the time, The Times reported that “the slim teenager sat hunched forward, arms crossed protectively in front of her body”. She barely looked her age and her voice was “at times only a whisper”.

  What so disturbingly hit home was the incongruity between the softly spoken child on the screen and the vile events she was describing. Holly was a rebellious teenager who had left home after a series of arguments with her parents. Other girls introduced her to a world of free alcohol and food in the back rooms of local fast-food outlets.

  The gifts came at a price. In those police interviews, Holly told the officer of seven occasions in the preceding three weeks when 59-year-old Shabir Ahmed had persuaded or forced her to have sex with him and other Pakistani men.

  She described being raped on a bare mattress in a grubby room above the takeaway, of being delivered for encounters with men in taxis, houses and flats. When she protested that she was below the age of consent, Ahmed told her that in his country “you’re allowed to have sex with girls from the age of 11”.

  Ahmed, she said, “kept bringing people, making me have sex with them and then giving me money to keep quiet”. He told her that sex was part of the deal: “I bought you vodka. You have to give me something.”

  Holly told the police: “I didn’t think I had a choice. At first I was scared. After a while, it was like I didn’t care any more about anything. It was like it wasn’t me. Most of the time I was just dead drunk so that when it happened it wouldn’t feel as bad.” The interviewing officer made little effort to hide his incredulity that she had returned to her abuser after the first sexual assault. At one point he yawned, loudly.

  A criminal inquiry was launched in August 2008 and Rochdale’s safeguarding children board was informed of Holly’s claims, but for the next four months no action was taken to remove her from the house where she had stayed since leaving her parents. In those four months, the court heard, she was used for sex by at least 21 more adults.

  Of the 2008 investigation, jurors were merely told by the prosecution that “regrettably, the police officers who looked into the matter didn’t take the investigation further at that stage”. That was not entirely accurate. Ahmed was one of two men arrested and released on bail but in 2009 the case was dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service ruled there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

  A fuller truth emerged after a four-year investigation by the force’s professional standards branch that found that the entire case had been left in the hands of a junior officer who had “no specific training on dealing with sexual offences”. He was single-handedly trying to investigate matters that, when the case was reopened two years later, required a full-time team of more than 50 detectives.

  The lack of support for the initial inquiry was partly explained by a target-driven culture in which the sexual abuse of working-class teenagers was a lower policing priority than burglary and car crime. A police community impact assessment seemed more concerned about the potential stigmatisation of “residents of south Asian heritage” than the “threat and risk of harm” posed by the men to so many young girls.

  Ahmed’s DNA was found on Holly’s underwear. Other girls had linked him to similar offences at the same kebab shop. Yet when the file reached the CPS, a specialist rape prosecutor decided that she would make an unreliable witness. “It is a tragic case that one so young has fallen into this lifestyle and has been taken advantage of in this way. However, we would have to convince a jury that all of the acts were without her consent and I do not believe that we could do that.”

  The prosecutor’s stance mirrored attitudes within social services. In 2007, a year before Holly fell into Ahmed’s clutches, Rochdale council had identified 50 local girls with “clear links to takeaway food businesses and to associated taxi companies”. Opportunities to protect them were missed because damaged children were dismissed as wilful teenagers consenting to their abuse.

  A serious case review concluded that child-protection workers seemed disinclined to ask why socially disadvantaged young white girls were spending so much time with “middle-aged Asian men”. Ahmed and others were belatedly held to account for what they did to Holly and another four girls because a specialist police team and a new chief crown prosecutor, Nazir Afzal, looked at the case with fresh eyes.

  For far too many years in Rochdale, barely a shaft of sunlight pierced a grey, fractured world of troubled children routinely betrayed by adults — kebab shop workers, taxi drivers, police officers, lawyers, social workers — who treated them with varying levels of contempt.

  To turn such bleak misery into three hours of gripping television drama was no small challenge. In the hands of a brilliant writer, Nicole Taylor, and the production team behind the BBC’s widely acclaimed drama Five Daughters, about the 2006 serial murders of young women in Ipswich, Three Girls succeeds admirably.

  A strong cast helps. Maxine Peake, as the NHS sexual health worker who tries to warn the authorities that an organised grooming network is trafficking children across three counties, was born to do feisty. Her frustration seethes.

  As Holly’s father, Paul Kaye captures the swirl of emotions — bewilderment, anger, grief — felt by so many parents in the same situation. Seemingly overnight, a loved daughter becomes a stranger. Powerless to protect her, your world falls apart.

  However, it is the girls who are the real stars of this work. The decision to tell the Rochdale story largely through their eyes brings it viscerally to life. Molly Windsor brings a haunting quality to Holly that draws your eyes to her in every scene. The viewer follows her into what seems at first, for a young teenager pushing at boundaries, a world of adult adventure. Then comes the moment it all starts to go wrong. The swiftness of her ensuing descent is brutal.

  In a fleeting scene from the third episode, as the case finally reaches court, a Times journalist called Andrew Norfolk is challenged by a reporter from a rival newspaper. He suggests that The Times’s numerous articles on grooming — “innocent white victims, dark-skinned abusers” — have been a gift to racists and the far-right.

  My reply is
brief: “It’s uncomfortable, isn’t it?”

  Would that in real life I were capable of such concision. The Times spent four years exploring the underworld of such sex crimes. The climax was our exposure of a scandal in a town 40 miles from Rochdale.

  In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, the authorities sat back, sighed and twiddled their thumbs for 16 years as, an independent inquiry later found, at least 1,400 Hollys were groomed, trafficked and sold for sex by groups of predatory abusers who were “almost all” of Pakistani origin.

  That story generated headlines worldwide and took child sexual exploitation to the top of the public agenda. Three Girls will hopefully ensure that it stays there.

  QUEER CITY: GAY LONDON FROM THE ROMANS TO THE PRESENT DAY BY PETER ACKROYD

  Review by Robbie Millen

  MAY 13 2017

  RUMP RIDERS. The rubsters. Bring on the dancing boys. Soft and slippery. Continually wet.

  If there was a prize for the most evocative or salacious chapter headings, then Peter Ackroyd’s new book, Queer City, would be the undisputed victor. They capture the rudery and naughtiness, although not the erudition, of this entertaining history of the “queer” experience in London from Roman times onwards.

  Ackroyd introduces us to a polymorphously perverse cast of characters from the shadowy world of past homosexuality. Historical records, for instance, show that in 1394 John Rykener, a prostitute who called himself Eleanor, was “detected in women’s clothing” while “committing that detestable, unmentionable and ignominious vice” with a client.

  Rykener confessed that in Oxford he had “practised the abominable vice often” with eager scholars; at the Swann Inn in Burford he had sex with two Franciscans, one Carmelite and six “foreign men”; on his return to London he admitted to intercourse with three chaplains in the lanes behind St Katharine’s by the Tower. Naturally, he also enjoyed the pleasures of numerous nuns. Busy chap.

  The Church has always been a bit suspect. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) Richard Burton mentions that in 1538, when officials inspected the cloisters and dormitories of monasteries they found “gelded youths, debaucheries, catamites, boy-things, pederasts, sodomites, Gannymedes”. More than 400 years later, cousin Jasper in Brideshead Revisited proffers some useful advice: “Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.”

  In 1822 the Bishop of Clogher, a prominent member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, was caught in full clerical garb with a guardsman, the latter’s breeches round his ankles, in the back parlour of the Lion Tavern in Haymarket. Wisely, he fled to Paris, but henceforth was known in the popular prints as “the Arse-Bishop”. This ditty circulated: “The Devil to prove the Church was a farce/ Went out to fish for a Bugger/ He bated the hook with a Frenchman’s arse/ And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.”

  Ackroyd has a good ear for doggerel and popular ballads. He notes a song of 1727, Two Kissing Girls of Spitalfields: “She kisses all, but Jenny is her dear/ She feels her bubbies, and she bites her ear.” The Affectionate Shepherd (1594), a poem about a man’s love for “a lovely lad” is similarly relaxed about the love that dares not speak its name: “Of that fair boy that my heart entangled/ Cursing the time, the place, the sense, the sin/ I came, I saw, I viewed, I slipped in.”

  Ackroyd, who has written bestselling biographies of Dickens and Shakespeare, as well as London, is strongest on how homosexuals were seen in literature. Chaucer, says Ackroyd, gives us one of the earliest sketches of a queeny, unmanly Englishman. The narrator of The Canterbury Tales says of the Pardoner — who has long blond hair, clean-shaven cheeks and a voice as high as a nanny goat — that “I believe he was a gelding or a mare”.

  The Pardoner is recognisable as Mr Fribble, created by David Garrick for a 1747 farce. Mr Fribble wibbles away in this affected manner: “But my dear creature, who put on your cap to-day? They have made a fright of you … Where’s my cambric handkerchief, and my salts? I shall certainly have my hysterics!” The lady-averse Waterloo Sedley in Vanity Fair described himself as a “dressy man” (the first words heard by the 11-year-old Thackeray entering his school dorm were “come and frig me”). Captain Whiffle, a character in Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), had long hair “in ringlets, tied behind with a ribbon”.

  Whiffle and Fribble would have loved the Macaronis, a set of late 18th-century fashionistas who teased their hair into beehives and acted in an extravagantly fastidious way. In 1770 The Oxford Magazine described them as “neither male or female, a thing of the neuter gender lately started among us … it talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion”. (Homosexuality was clearly an Italian vice. Dryden, in his 1668 play, An Evening’s Love, had this interchange between two characters: “I imagined them to be Italians.” “Not unlikely, for they played most furiously at our backsides.” If not Italian, then sodomy was continental. In Dryden’s later play, The Duke of Guise, same-sex coupling is dismissed as “a damned love-trick new brought over from France”.)

  Not all queers were so limp-wristed. The cross-dressing Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, pimp and fortune-teller, was, her biographer affirmed, “very tomrig or rumpscuttle … [as a child she] delighted and sported only in boys’ play and pastime; many a bang or blow this hoiting procured her, but she was not to be tamed”. This pipe-smoking woman died of the dropsy in 1659.

  In the next century a Mary Anne Talbot, calling herself James Talbot, joined the navy as powder monkey and cabin boy. Not just a tomboy, she “made a conquest of the captain’s niece”. The fan-fluttering, frizzed-hair Princess Seraphina, who “takes great delight in balls and masquerades”, was a rough-handed butcher during the day; James Stevens, a waterman on the Thames, caused uproar “by going about in women’s apparel in a very impudent and insolent manner”.

  Toughness was required because punishment could be severe. Thomas Doulton, we learn, was obliged to fill the pillory “for endeavouring to discover the ‘windward passage’ upon one Joseph Yates”. The pillory could be a death sentence because the mob did not just fling rotten fruit, excrement or even dead cats, but would whip and punch its occupant. There was the noose too: sodomy was a capital offence until 1861. In 1835 John Smith and John Pratt, two poor men found in a derelict boarding house on the south bank of the Thames, were the last in England to swing for it.

  The sources Ackroyd has to describe the “queer” experience are a rum mix of court reports, plays, song and usually disapproving pamphlets. That makes it hard to divine what the private and inner lives of these men and women were like: did they think of themselves as being wildly different from the run of society? It’s not Ackroyd’s fault, but they remain elusive, just as the everyday life of a modern gay would be if a future historian had to rely on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Christian Institute screeds or prison records.

  And while throughout there is plenty of Ackroydian wit — medieval “schoolmasters paid as much attention to the buttocks as the brains of their little pupils”; the Renaissance appeal of young men was that “there were fewer unfortunate consequences in the nursery way” — it feels as if he loses some of his vim when he enters the 20th century. That a gay woman became president of Unison is less interesting than Mother Clap’s molly house.

  Then there is that vexed word “queer”, with its connotations of radicalism, which ought to be sent back to cultural theory departments. Ackroyd notes a 1619 memorial in Caius College, Cambridge that celebrates the union between Thomas Legge and John Gostlin — a heart in flames has a Latin inscription that reads: “Love joined them living. So may the earth join them in their burial. O Legge, Gostlin’s heart you have still with you.” That’s not so much queer as touchingly normal and domestic.

  Still, what is in a name? The men spotted at a molly house, near St Paul’s, by a prodnose witness, “calling one another ‘my dear’ and hugging, kissing and tickling one another”, probably did not bother conside
ring whether they were queer, gay or — as the Victorian euphemism had it — temperamental.

  WATCH OUT — HERE COME THE BRIDEZILLAS

  David Emanuel interviewed by Hilary Rose

  MAY 18 2017

  IT IS FAIR TO say that the Confetti & Lace bridal shop at Lakeside in Thurrock, Essex, is out of my comfort zone. So far out, in fact, that you could keep heading due east until you get to Moscow and even then I would be no more of a fish out of water than I already am.

  I have never worn a wedding dress. I have never given any thought as to what mine might look like, which is frankly just as well. So when I hear Danielle, a sales assistant in a fly-on-the-wall TV programme, filmed at Confetti & Lace, say to a customer, “So tell me about your bridal gown journey”, and the woman knows what she’s talking about because she actually has a bridal gown journey, my head starts to spin. Bridal gown journeys? Who knew?

  I am here because of Say Yes to the Dress, an American TV import that has become a global phenomenon thanks to its simple premise: brides try on various dresses in front of assorted family members — at the end they’re asked, “Will you say yes to the dress?” and everyone bursts into tears.

  “You’re trying to find the dress of their dreams, to fulfil their fantasies,” says the fashion designer David Emanuel, the show’s host, who is renowned as the man who designed Princess Diana’s wedding dress. “A lot of girls want the big crinolines, but not many can get into them. I say, ‘Darling, we’ll have a go.’ Or bigger girls come in thinking they can get into that,” he says, pointing at a size 6 strapless, figure-hugging sheath dress. “I say, ‘Darling, there’s not enough support. You can’t wear a skimpy little thing if you’ve got big bosoms.’”

  Indeed not. Emanuel is a charming man, who looks like a cross between Barry Manilow and the Queen Mother. He’s honest but not judgmental, encouraging but realistic. He won’t let someone leave with a dress that he thinks looks awful on them: “Not on my watch. I’ve got a reputation.” Instead, his standard line is “It’s a contender” before nudging the bride towards something more appropriate. His task is not helped by the grannies, sisters, aunts, bridesmaids, matrons of honour and, in some instances, future mothers-in-law who are brought along to give their two penn’orth.