by C. J. Driver
“We don’t have much freedom in court; there are set ways of doing things. Acting is involved in it, of course; but the play’s there already.”
With a shrug he dismissed what I said for the half-hearted nonsense it was. “Well, I’ll be having the chance to see you in action before long.”
We were at the doors of the warehouse now; there was more I wanted to ask him. How the Free People had got hold of the warehouse? Whether the police left them alone when they were off the streets? How many Free People there were altogether, and how many lived in the warehouse? How they managed for money?—and I thought I would have a chance outside. But John did not come through the doors with me.
“I thought you were coming for some fresh air,” I said.
“No,” he said from the doorway. “I’ve changed my mind. I’ve got things to do here. I’ll see you in court on the 2nd.”
“About 9.45,” I reminded him.
“O.K.” Without saying good-bye, or offering to shake hands, he turned away from the door, closed it, and I walked back to the gate, down Factory Lane and into Read Street.
5
There were three charges against Buckleson, Lester, Meikle, Durdon and Murchland: first they had ‘conspired with others unnamed to make an affray’; second, that they had ‘unlawfully fought and made an affray’; third, though Buckleson was excluded from this charge, that they had been in possession of offensive weapons.
I had prosecuted and defended offences ‘against the Public Peace’, of which making an affray is one, but this was the first time I had come across it in association with conspiracy; What it meant was that Buckleson and the others had plotted before the event to turn the demonstration into a battle-ground, that with malice aforethought they had planned to fight unlawfully and to make an affray. The first was of course the most serious charge, given the situation; though there is no limit set to fine or period of imprisonment after conviction on a charge of affray, Archbold—the lawyer’s guide to the law—says the fine and/or imprisonment should not be ‘inordinate’. If the first charge were proved, I had little doubt Buckleson, as leader, would get anything up to five years, especially if the judge cared to make an example of him. If the first were not proved, but only the second and third, they might escape with fines only or with fairly short sentences.
*
According to the police there had been about ten thousand people at the demonstration, representing both themselves and various organisations and groups—anarchists, socialists, communists, Liberals (young and middle-aged), various trade unions, Black Power groups, Women’s Lib, and so on and so on, in all their disparate and splintered left-wing glory. The Free People numbered then—it was before the young flocked to their banners—about three or four hundred; they were probably neither the most militant and certainly not the best organised group, but they had the one advantage (or disadvantage) of being recognisably a group, simply because of their white peasant uniforms. Where more radical and militant groups like the Young Socialist League and the Anti-Imperialist Alliance were dissipated in strength by the very fact of their looking more or less like everyone else, the Free People were a visibly organised group, even though in objective terms they were perhaps one of the least organised.
The other large group, of course organised and uniformed, was the police. According to various eye-witness accounts which Peale had collected, the police had divided into three sections: one had been doing the usual job of police in demonstrations, mixing with the crowds more to make their presence known and felt than to do anything. Another section had gathered in a mass close to the Free People. Another, including a number of mounted policemen, had been held in reserve near the Arch, though from all accounts not out of sight there.
During the third speech, before Buckleson had spoken, the police near the Free People had moved into the crowd to arrest someone for ‘creating a public nuisance’—their term; one of my affidavits said one of the Free People had been peeing against a statue—and because they suspected ‘various persons in that locality were in possession of and possibly using dangerous drugs’—in other words, someone may have been having a puff of pot. They had arrested the weak-bladdered man—he had already pleaded guilty in a magistrate’s court and had been fined—had searched a couple more, and then had arrested another two of the Free People for ‘obstructing the police in the execution of their duty’, then two more for ‘insulting behaviour’. Either their arresting technique had been rough or the people arrested had fought back; one policeman had used a truncheon with vigour—one of my affidavits said ‘brutally’. Then, and this was the crucial point, the police asserted that a pre-arranged signal had been given, and the Free People had produced a variety of offensive weapons—pepper, marbles, razor-blades slipped into the sides of match-boxes, a couple of home-made smoke bombs and (funny but effective) dozens of polythene bags, some filled with red paint and some with strawberry jam. It was perfectly obvious that, with TV cameras there and lots of nice liberals, a scattering of strawberry jam in a fight might be an easier way of making it seem the streets were running with blood than actually having to shed some.
With these weapons, the Free People had attacked the police near them. Indeed, the police might have been in some trouble if the various individual policemen scattered through the rest of the demonstration hadn’t come hurrying back, and the reserve section come out, horses and all, from behind the Arch to rescue their beleagured colleagues.
About thirty of the Free People had been arrested; twenty of them had been charged with a variety of offences, ranging from public indecency to the charges against Buckleson. The less serious charges—under the Public Order Act mainly—had been dealt with in magistrates’ court, mainly by fines, though a couple of the younger Free People had been remanded for probationary reports and one had been sent to Borstal. Those who had pleaded not guilty had been remanded and were later charged on indictment with conspiracy and so on; they were fairly obviously the ringleaders. I didn’t have to bother with the other four; three were represented by another barrister, Archie Ames, whom I knew well, and one was represented by a barrister briefed at the request of his parents.
What really mattered to John Buckleson, especially since the police had not charged him with possession of offensive weapons, was the business of the signal. According to the police Buckleson had signalled to his followers from the platform by grabbing the mike from the speaker and shouting, “All right, get those pigs off our backs!” Then he had jumped from the platform and had made his way to the fighting.
One thing was completely clear: the police had to have an informer in the Free People. How could they have come up with the charge of conspiracy unless they had a plant in the group who had told them the Free People were planning violence; and even the positioning of the large body of policemen near the Free People in the crowd seemed to demonstrate that the police had what they call ‘prior information’? But I was fairly sure that if the police did have an informer planted in the Free People, they would not risk blowing his cover, at that time at least; I was certainly going to try to get them to admit they have received information from some source, but I didn’t think I would get them to admit more than that. If they did, they opened themselves to accusations that he had been an agent provocateur; there had been a celebrated case about six months before, involving a group of revolutionary socialists, where the police informer had given damaging evidence in open court; the defence then had made great play of the fact that he had acted as an agent provocateur, and the judge had made it clear he was very displeased with that aspect of the police evidence, though he had sentenced the convicted men to long terms in gaol.
Yet if the police did not produce their informer, they did not seem to have a very strong case. By going for the big charge of conspiracy, they were leaving themselves a great deal to establish. I knew they would be hoping for a chance to cross-examine the accused, because it was there if anywhere they might make a watertight case. S
o one of the things the three defence counsel agreed on was that we would not call our clients to give evidence, unless the police had stronger evidence than appeared from our briefs and notes.
So my only definite plans were not to call John to the witness stand, to try to demolish the case that John had signalled from the platform, to show it might have been an attempt to prevent fighting, and to argue that the anger of John’s words might have been caused by what he thought was police provocation, and that because he had not been in possession of any remotely offensive weapons (not even strawberry jam) it was unlikely to suppose he had planned violence. I had also arranged to call Herford as a witness for the defence; I wasn’t at all sure that in an open court he would take as firm a line as I had heard him take with Wynstanley, but I thought he would lend respectability to the demonstration, and so to John Buckleson and the Free People. I also had in reserve two eye-witnesses of the fighting who had produced affidavits for Peale.
So began the first trial. The judge was one Kinglake, whom I had not come across before. The prosecuting counsel I did know, a Treasury counsel, by name Draper, a sensible middle-aged man with a large stomach and conservative opinions. Backing him was a police solicitor, helped by Inspector Williams; Runicorn, who had been in charge of the police at the demonstration, was of course going to give evidence so was not in court at that stage. The clerk of the court swore the jury in; since they had only come into service that day, the judge took a little time to explain their duties and obligations to them. The various charges were read, the accused were identified, the counsel for the prosecution introduced himself and me, made his opening statement, and then we were into the real work of the trial.
The first witness was Inspector Runicorn. Clearly and competently in reply to Draper’s questions he outlined the events; a great deal of what he said was not in dispute: the purpose of the demonstration, the course of events, the fact that many of those who had been arrested had already been dealt with in a lower court. At the end of his evidence, Draper usefully got the Inspector to stress the vital areas of his evidence. Yes, the Free People came to the demonstration prepared for a fight. Yes, their behaviour had been deliberately provocative. Yes, Buckleson had given a pre-arranged signal from the platform. Yes, the tactics of the Free People had been carefully thought about beforehand. Yes, if the police had not had a substantial body of men in reserve, the fighting might have been much worse. Yes, when Buckleson was arrested, he had cursed the police as ‘fucking bastards’ and had said, ‘One day it will be machine-guns’, which he had taken at the time to mean, and was still of the opinion it did mean, that one day the Free People would attack the police with machine-guns. Yes, a number of policemen had been injured. Yes, he considered his men had behaved with admirable restraint.
I was the first to cross-examine. I made it clear what areas of his evidence I was prepared to accept, and then got going on the crucial points he had made. Because he was not my witness, I was allowed to lead almost as much as I liked, and I took full advantage of it, especially since I did not want to call Buckleson.
“Inspector, you have some experience of policing demonstrations of this kind?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was this a particularly large demonstration?”
“It was large, but not particularly large.”
Sighing, I made him cite figures. One of Peale’s clerks had collected from The Times’s archives some comparative figures of the size of recent demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, and by using these I soon forced Runicorn to admit it wasn’t all that large a demonstration.
“Could you tell us how many policemen were on duty for this demonstration?”
“Six hundred.”
“Is that not a particularly large body of police for a not particularly large demonstration?”
Runicorn hesitated.
“Come now, Inspector, you are a specialist in controlling demonstrations of this kind. You have admitted this was not a particularly big demonstration. Yet you had six hundred policemen there, including mounted policemen. Is this not more, substantially more, than you usually have?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Draper tried to rescue his witness. “My Lord,” he said, “I fail to see the relevance of this questioning of my witness.”
“My Lord, my line is quite simple: the group of young people on whose behalf my client was speaking at the demonstration have been accused by Inspector Runicorn of ‘deliberately provocative behaviour’. I am trying to establish what provoked them.”
“Go on, Mr. Grace,” Kinglake said, and Draper sat down.
“I asked you, Inspector, why you sent so many police to the demonstration.”
“We were expecting trouble, sir.”
“Why?”
Runicorn had the standard answer ready.
“We were acting on information received, sir.”
“May I ask from whom, Inspector?”
“I am not at liberty to divulge that.”
John Buckleson was whispering something urgently from behind me, but I could not hear. Had Runicorn been hoping I would not disturb that area? “Why?” I asked.
But the judge wouldn’t let me get away with that. “Mr. Grace,” he said judicially, “the police have a right to protect their sources of information.”
“Of course, My Lord,” I answered. Damn him under my breath. I cannot stand the way judges back up police witnesses. “All right, Inspector, can you tell us what information you received?”
“Information that trouble was being planned for the demonstration.”
“Was that all, Inspector?”
“I don’t understand what you mean, Mr. Grace sir.”
“I mean was your information as unspecific as that? Or did it mention the trouble would come from one particular quarter of the demonstration, one particular group of demonstrators?”
Runicorn was not giving an inch. “Our information was simply that the police should expect trouble.” That’s fine by me, I thought; so you are going to keep your source and the extent of your information to yourself. While the jury might now be thinking, ‘Aha, the police knew this lot were planning trouble’, I knew that the judge in his summing up would have to say that the very lack of evidence about the information received would mean it had to be more or less disregarded. In other terms, the police were not prepared to sacrifice their informer even for the sake of ensuring the conviction of John Buckleson.
So I changed direction and dealt with the business of the signal. How could it have been a signal? Was it not a spontaneous outburst as a result of the police’s ‘vigorous’ action in making arrests among the Free People? Could not John’s rushing through the crowd to the fighting have been an attempt to prevent fighting? Could not his words from the platform have been a reaction to vigorous—and perhaps even provocative—behaviour by the police? Runicorn’s answers were firm: the police had simply been carrying out their duties and had in no sense been provocative, therefore Buckleson’s cry from the platform could not have been in reaction to the police provocation. It had obviously been a signal, because the moment it was given the Free People had produced their weapons and had attacked the police; before, they had simply been behaving badly—obstructing the police, insulting them, but not actually fighting. Buckleson had in effect been giving a pre-arranged order.
“I don’t dispute, you see Inspector, that Buckleson said, ‘Get those pigs off our backs.’ Nor do I dispute that soon afterwards there was fighting. What I am disputing is that John Buckleson’s words from the platform started the fighting, in other words that there was a necessary connection between his admitted and angry words and the actual physical events. Do you see the purpose of my questioning?”
“Buckleson’s words were a signal for the group which calls itself the Free People to start an attack against the police,” Runicorn said stubbornly.
“In your opinion,” I said gently.
Runicorn stood silent.
I started yet another line of questioning, going back to something Inspector Runicorn might have thought I had overlooked. “Inspector, you have said you ordered a large contingent of police to the demonstration. How did you deploy them?”
“I held a number of men in reserve—some two hundred—and the rest I dispersed at various points among the demonstrators.”
“Why did you hold men in reserve?”
“I was hoping it would not be necessary to use them.”
“Is there not an implication you did not entirely trust the information you had received, Inspector?”
“I don’t follow, sir.” Of course he did; he wanted time to think.
“Inspector, you have said you received information trouble was expected; you therefore took an exceptionally large contingent of policemen, both on foot and mounted, to the demonstration; yet you held a large body of men in reserve. Why was this?”
“So I could send them wherever they seemed to be needed most, when the trouble started.”
“When the trouble started, Inspector? Or if?”
“Both, sir.”
I left that line in the air. “The police you dispersed—that is the word you used, is it not? …”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where did you disperse them? I mean, on what principle did you organise this?”
“I gave them instructions to mingle with the demonstrators.”
“Did you not instruct a large group of police to stay together as a group near to the Free People?”
“No, sir.”
“Yet there was a large group of policemen near the locality of the Free People.”
“There must have been, sir.”
“You were in charge of the police at this demonstration, were you not, Inspector?” Runicorn was getting angry, I could see; poor man, unless he was prepared to come forward with more specific evidence about the ‘prior information’, he was walking on quicksand, and he knew it. But angry witnesses make mistakes, and I could not feel sorry for his anger.