I have to say that by the later stages I believe some fatalism had begun to creep into David's spirit. He expected to be arrested, so he didn't bother to try and hide. He just kept going back to the heart of the city centre and staying there where he knew that he would be very visible. It was as though he was challenging them to remove him from the city. They would beat him and arrest him, but his attitude was clear: 'I'll just do what I want to do and I won't disappear. I won't be invisible.' It was all very rational to him. He knew the consequences, but he continued to defy people. As I said, he could have slept every night in the back of his Ghanaian friend's warehouse if he'd have wanted to. He could have had a flat, or he could have been safe and invisible in different parts of the city, but he didn't want to disappear. He wanted to be seen, and Leeds was his battleground – his home – and he wasn't going to leave his home. In the later stages he sometimes gave the outward signs of being a shambling, slow-witted, slow-walking man, but he always knew where he was going. He knew Meanwood, Hyde Park, and Chapeltown; he understood the streets. He knew the safe areas, but he also knew that if he took Step A then Step B would follow. He made a rational decision to take Step A, which was to go back into Leeds city centre and claim his right to be in the city. Step B was to be beaten, arrested and then carted off to Armley jail. First Step A and then Step B, but he wouldn't give up. During this time there was, to my memory, no other black person from Africa or the Caribbean who was homeless and on the street. In the sixties, David was the only black man sleeping rough on the streets of Leeds.
My father was a military-minded man. Being an army sergeant, he was dominant in the family and he was difficult. My joining the police force was his idea and he said it would make a man of me. My mother was silent on the matter, as she was on most things. She was ten years younger than my father, and she didn't get a look in when it came to decisions. At the age of nineteen I thought I'd give it a crack and join the Leeds police force and see if I could get my father on my side. Initially I liked Leeds, and I liked the life on The Headrow. I was stationed in the centre of Leeds. Millgarth Station covered a nonresidential area. Issues at Millgarth were mainly to do with crime, vagrancy, revellers in the pubs, drug users, and there was supposed to be a 'problem' with students. I was very friendly with the tradesmen on my patch, but what I didn't do was make friends with anybody in the force. Not one single person. This caused me problems because the police service in Leeds was like a closed club. I remember being told to choose my friends from within the force, and not from outside it, and this was a sticking point for me. I had been seen by someone in a pub in Wetherby with my old school pals and I was on the carpet for that. I was up in front of an inspector and he said, 'Who are you mixing with outside duty hours?' I remember thinking this wasn't actually going to work for me. On duty or off duty, you had to stay within the group of officers, but I didn't really have any friends in the force. But, at least to begin with, I did enjoy working in the centre of Leeds. There were some black people that would turn up in the centre, and they didn't have an easy time. You might find somebody who'd been out drinking and hadn't caught the bus home, or somebody who was trying to get into a hotel, or somebody who was separated from their group of friends. But generally speaking, black people and mixed-race people were rare sights in Leeds city centre at that time in the sixties. I patrolled mainly around the area of Vicar Lane, The Headrow, and then going down towards the river area and around the open market. The business people – café owners, restaurant owners, shop owners – they all regarded the police as people who could do no wrong. And the police were fiercely proud of this and so there was a very strong feeling that the police were there to serve the incumbent business people. I befriended quite a few café owners, you know, people that you could go and chat to, and who made you feel that you were part of the community. Now in the daytime, that was all very nice and it was all very cosy. In the night it was a different place. The streets were deserted, people had gone home, and the police, what were they to do? What was their job then? Well, it was to check property. To scour about and make sure that they didn't find broken windows around entrances at the rear of properties. At night the city centre, instead of being the business people's place, became very much the Leeds of the authorities and of the policemen. And that's really an important thing – the change of the city from day to night. On my patch I befriended quite a few dossers and I used to go and chat to them. There was a tea stall in the open market which may or may not still be operating, and it used to open at about five in the morning, and I would always drop in. And you'd get a mixed bunch of people and they accepted me. I used to take my hat off and chat with them. In fact one officer said that I had the attitude of a social worker to the job, which was not thought to be a good thing. But I did, I used to take my hat off. I was in a very difficult position. Life with my father was greatly improved, but I soon realised that I didn't like some of what was going on in Leeds. I was very concerned because it was becoming obvious that there were some difficulties for a certain individual. I was in a terrible state of moral dilemma. If anybody was still about in Leeds city centre after the late night taxi queue it was very rare. A couple of times I did find a drunk, but it was very rare. In the two years I worked the patch, I can't remember finding a person at say four o'clock in the morning. I never did. Only David. I never found another dosser sleeping out anywhere. The other dossers might have had somewhere they knew they could go; to the crypt or whatever. I can't remember exactly when I first saw David, but I know I saw him on my foot patrol in the Millgarth area. He would go into the deep shops. I know the Bridal House was one that he went into. Yeah. He'd be in there. But he'd be in other ones on Vicar Lane as well. He tried to get into the deep shops. The ones which have got two entrances. He was always alone. I never saw him with anybody, and he wouldn't be at the café in the morning. Some of the other dossers would be at the café, but not him. I used to wonder where he got his food from. I saw him quite a lot, but he never ran away from me. He wouldn't enter into a conversation with a policeman, he just wouldn't talk. But he didn't run away. Whereas, if he saw Inspector Ellerker or Sergeant Kitching he would run, and he would shout. But he wouldn't run from me.
*
The prison sits on the high ground of Armley, its massive Victorian exterior and castellated towers dominating the horizon like a medieval fortress. Constructed in 1847 of stone from local quarries, its purpose was to both punish and to intimidate. Ninety-three people have been hanged at HMP Leeds, the last in 1961; the gallows were eventually dismantled in 1965. Today, the prison is no less intimidating. I stand in the reception area and look at the noticeboard. On the wall there is a picture of the Race Relations Management Team. Three white faces, including the governor of the prison. 'HMP Leeds is committed to the elimination of harassment and discrimination in all areas of work.' Times appear to have changed. 'No single racial group will be allowed to dominate any activity to the unfair exclusion of others.' I enter the prison itself. The chapel is now the multi-faith centre. On all four wings I see different races, and out in the exercise yard the faces are an advert for multi-racial Britain. The warder smiles at me. 'Today we cater for all different religious foods and practices, except Jewish. Roman Catholic and Muslim are the main ones.' I look again at the prisoners sprawled on the ground trying to soak up the weak rays of the sun. 'Back then they had to walk in circles for an hour. But it's different now.' The warder thinks for a moment. 'Easier for them, I suppose.'
I saw Oluwale on a number of occasions and I note, by looking at the hospital case papers, that when I saw him on 25 October, 1965, he complained to me about the police and I asked him what he was in prison for and he said, 'Fighting with the police.' After further questioning I deduced that he had been fighting with the police in Albion Street on 13 October, 1965, he said, 'A policeman removed his hat and grasped his [sic] throat.' He alleged that this had occurred because he had been sleeping in an empty house in Albion Street and was abo
ut to enter the house at 7:30 p.m. when two policemen accosted him and he added, 'They took me to Leeds Town Hall.' My assessment of Oluwale's intelligence is that he was a 'dullard'.
Denis Power, Senior Medical Officer at HMP Leeds 1962–7
The last time I saw David was a few months before he died. It was dark and wintertime, and my husband and I were coming back from some university dance. David was by the public lavatories at Hyde Park Corner. There were shrubs and bushes there, and a bench. It was the sort of place that was used for 'cottaging'. Well, David was sitting on the bench, and my husband went over to the chip shop and got him a bag of chips, which he took. David said that he didn't want to go home with us. He insisted that he had somewhere to go, and so we left him sitting by himself on the bench. At the dances that David used to come to after he first arrived, he never paired off or chatted up women. He was very solitary. But, as I said, he was a marvellous dancer. And he liked church singing. You know, he used to look in the papers to see if any West Indians had died so that he could go to the funeral, but it had to be in a church that would accept black people. The Anglicans discriminated against the blacks, but the Methodists were cooler. David wasn't a practising Christian, but he was educated by Christian missionaries, that much I do know.
As far as I remember he just called at the hostel and asked for accommodation. [Between 17 April and 4 July, 1968] I do not think he was sent there by any social-work organisation . . . He did not mix with the other men in the hostel and he had no friends that I knew of. As far as I can remember he left the hostel of his own accord. About May, 1969, nearly a year later, the police . . . asked me to identify a body that they had found in the River Aire. I was unable to make a positive identification as the face was badly distorted. As far as I know, Oluwale never attacked anybody in the hostel and certainly never attacked my wife. He did ask my wife to live with him in a room away from the hostel, but she told him not to be stupid and ignored his remark. I never spoke to Oluwale about the suggestion he made to my wife. The type of man we usually get in the hostels are capable of making such suggestions and my wife and I have learned to ignore them.
Raymond Bradbury, officer in charge of Church Army Hostel, 53 The Calls, Leeds
I heard the word on the street that David had drowned. I knew that he had been systematically badly treated by the police over a number of years, but I didn't put two and two together even though I was still running the Chapeltown Commonwealth Citizens Committee. Then, over a year after we lost David, Austin Haywood, who was the new chief constable, took me into his office and said that two of his officers were going to be charged and tried for manslaughter. I nearly fell over, but in my heart I knew that it made some kind of sense. It was almost unbelievable, and it produced a rising tide of anger, not just in me, but in everyone. We all felt that we should have done more, for we did know some things. However, everybody also felt that David had a right to live his life as he pleased, and that he should be able to exercise the dignity of deciding if he needed our help or not. But there was a feeling of responsibility. After all, I'd made many, many complaints against the police. In fact, over 400, but there was no getting away from the fact that it was a nightmare in this city for young black men. The police were out of control. It wasn't just a hard-core minority of people in Leeds who didn't want foreigners, it was also the police. With David's death it became obvious that if things didn't change in Leeds then David was simply going to be the first of many dead black men.
To me, David was a fighter for freedom. He was not another victim. You see, his life and death affected a whole generation. His life led to the full emergence of the Black Power movement in this city, and to black and white people finally saying 'enough'. David made it possible for a demonstration to be a thousand people, not just two or three. His death was a warning to all society, including white society. I wanted all the white institutions to wake up and realise that there was danger around them. That there was no such thing as a racist joke. If it's racist then it's not a joke. In the wake of David's death the police invited citizens in to help them with the training of the police in this sensitive area. And I became one of the teachers.
He would always hide in doorways so he was easy to find. I mean, as a young policeman, I knew little back alleyways and ginnels that he could have gone up. But he didn't do that. He just went in the doorways, which left him vulnerable. But I don't remember exactly which ones. They were down Vicar Lane as well as The Headrow. Inspector Ellerker and Sergeant Kitching had a fascination for David. He would always run away from them, and yet he would sleep in those doorways on their patch. Why? God knows. Sometimes he would go away for a while and things would calm down. We would hope, well I would hope, that he wouldn't come back. But then he would come back. Ellerker and Kitching always wanted to find him, but if I saw David I did not report that I'd seen him. This is the only good thing that I did. So I think that in some ways by always coming back he was actually just being courageous and not letting them have what they wanted. Because he never used to plead with them. He would run away but he never pleaded with them. He actually remained a problem for them. It was as if he was pushing them, you know. As if he wasn't going to let them have the satisfaction. I was inside the van when they did have a go at him. And it was terrible, it was just unbelievable. Absolutely dreadful. I was driving the van. They would look for him, and they would find him. Then they would go through the motions of arresting him. And then, when he was inside the van, they would beat him, but he kept his dignity. He never asked them to stop or pleaded with them, or anything. It was as if they were machines, and it was just a job of work. It was like that, and they would beat him. There was one occasion when it was like this, and then there were other occasions when I saw them chasing him, but I actually didn't see the business. Once they beat him with a rubber torch and the torch all fell apart. All the glass – merciless, merciless. I remember when they were hitting him they were very careful not to hit his face, because then there would be no evidence when they went into the court. They had ways of doing stuff, and the ethos of rank was very, very strong. Some of the police officers at that time had come in from the army, and they were what was known as old school. They were people who had been sergeants or privates or whatever. I can't say for definite, but I believe that Kenneth Kitching had been somebody who had come in that way. He was an older man. My experience was that a young PC could not approach a senior officer for any reason. He would only take orders, and that was the job – to take orders and not ask questions.
Personally, I didn't know what Oluwale did. I was a West Indian community leader then, as I am now, but I couldn't say that I knew him that well. However, it did create a very bad feeling in the West Indian community when we found out that he had been killed. You see, the David Oluwale that I remember was a man who used to keep himself to himself, but he was present at most of the functions that we used to have. Social dances and so on at the Astoria Ballroom. Oluwale liked dancing and he used to go to the African Hi Life dances. The music and the singing preserved us, and I think that without it we'd have been wiped out. At that time West Indians had pride in their dress and wore three-piece pinstripe suits, and Oluwale was the same. He liked to dress. But later on I remember seeing him just standing by the side of the road crying. It was very painful when we heard how he was hunted like a fox by the police. Apart from the colour angle, you just couldn't believe what you were hearing in a British courtroom. That kind of treatment of a human being was unacceptable, and the truth was it just made things go worse with the police. We used to tell them right out, if they wanted another Oluwale then they were not going to get one from us. We now knew exactly what we were dealing with when it came to the British policeman.
We heard about it at the station, obviously. And I remember at the time that when the other police officers talked about it they didn't talk about it as a tragedy. It was talked about as 'the balloon's gone up'. You know, it's out now. It was that kind of conversation.
It wasn't talked about from the point of view of David Oluwale's position at all. It was just, you know, 'Oh well, we're in for trouble now' sort of thing. I'd go home. My father and mother must have seen the information about the trial on the television. In fact, I was on the television. I was there and they included remarks that Ellerker had made about me on the tele vision to try and discredit me as a witness. My mother and father would not discuss this matter with me. My father didn't want to know. He would hear nothing said against the police force. So I got no support there. My relationship with my father went back downhill, ice-cold again. I was very confused about the situation. I was feeling isolated, and I was also thinking about David's isolation. I found myself thinking a lot about what had happened to him. And since then I've had these flashbacks about that. The worst feeling of all is that the tragedy was predictable, and no one, including myself, prevented it. Obviously, I left the police force. When I went to the court I met some other officers who had left the force as well, and who'd been giving evidence. So I realised that I wasn't alone. I had a feeling of guilt then and I've got it now. We shouldn't have let it happen. I'd even thought about getting David in my car and driving him away myself. You know, doing something like that, and trying to get him away from it. But I had my own trouble with Ellerker and it was all terrible. I didn't speak to anyone about it, but I hoped that it would be a conviction for manslaughter. I didn't know what had happened on the night David died but I thought that there must have been other police officers around at the time. There wouldn't have been just the two of them, so I wondered about that. And I thought that the evidence given by witnesses to assaults on David must have been powerful, and that my own evidence must have been powerful. So I thought that manslaughter was the best we could get.
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