George Davis wasn’t as innocent as all that

Presumably we will read more in one of the Sunday tabs about George Davis, the man who became the  most popular slogan ever to emerge from London’s gangland. The case dates from those ‘Life on Mars’ days when judges, juries, journalists and the public assumed that if a police officer said something on oath, it must be true.

There is at least one site in East London where you can still see the slogan ‘George Davis is Innocent – ok’ on the wall where it was painted some time in the mid 1970s. By running such a determined campaign in defence of one of their own, London’s criminal fraternity drew attention to the fact that there was something rotten in Scotland Yard’s Robbery Squad.

There are others who emerge well from the story. Yesterday’s hearing was a “nice moment” for David Whitehouse QC. One of the first cases he took as a young barrister, 36 years ago, was defending George Davis. He has now reached retirement age. Yesterday was his last day in court.

Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Moulder, from Hertfordshire police, investigated the case after Davis’s trial in 1975. His report to the Home Office, in 1977, was so damning that for 34 years the Home Office refused to let anyone, including Davis’s lawyers, see it. One of the people who provided Moulder with ammunition was Inspector Brian Reynolds, who led the original investigation into the Essex payroll robbery, before the Robbery Squad moved in. He did not like their methods, but was hauled into Scotland Yard and warned by someone very high up not to do anything that might impede Davis’s conviction. The head of the Robbery Squad in those days was none other than the legendary Jack Slipper, ‘Slipper of the Yard’, the man who rounded up the Great Train Robbers. Frank Goodwin, a Case Review Manager at the Criminal Cases Review Commission also put together evidence that helped bring abotu yesterday’s ruling that davis’s conviction was unsafe.

Davis did not help those who campaigned for him by getting arrested in 1977, a year after he had been released under a Royal Pardon, when the police caught him red handed during an attempted bank robbery. There is a suspicion that they let the plot to rob a bank take fruit just to get Davis. However, by his own actions he demonstrated that he was not as innocent as all that. When Mr Whitehouse was asked outside the courtroom why it had all taken so long he replied, in Davis’s hearing, that “If George Davis had not been so stupid as to rob a bank I might have got the conviction quashed” in 1977.

I asked Davis how he liked  being called stupid. “He can call me what he likes after he’s done for me,” was the answer.

I asked him why he tried to rob that other bank. “I can’t tell you that,” he said.

Maybe whichever tabloid he has sold his story to can prise something more out of him

Recent Posts on McSmith

• Lord Tebbit and the 'lesbian Queen' - funny, but not original
• Gay marriage - bad. Creationism - okay.
• Ian Katz and the great Clark County stunt
• Eleven Labour MPs backed last night's Tory rebel amendment. Another didn't vote
• Ten Labour MPs have signed the EU amendment

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Ron-Broxted/100000542213598 Ron Broxted

  Jesus, Andy. Davis did not do the blag he was fitted up for. Like Silcott he was framed. Both may (or may not) have been doing other things. 

• OBONE

  He obviously did something prior to the wrongful conviction that hacked some copper off and left himself open to the frame which was duly fitted. Shame he didn’t have the sense to not then try on a bank job for which he was sent down bang to rights as they say.  

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Martin-Boyle/1470666276 Martin Boyle

  at least his mates saved us from an unexpected hiding in the 1977 Headingly test match

• mickthebish

  Gone far to much the other way now, the banks have had more than their fair share of robbing their customers. Bring back the good old days of banks being robbed I say.

• Harveyeight

  A small corrrection to your first paragraph: lots and lots of lawyers, some judges, lots of magistrates and many journalists knew for years the extent of the corruption but did nothing to fight it. Straight police officers had no idea where to turn.

  When I was revising for my sergeant’s exam I was part of an armed escort of a fried of G. Davis to magistrates court for a remand hearing. The prisoner boasted to us that his’ brief (lawyer) had seen’ someone and that he would get bail. Which he did. He then fled to Spain. I pointed out the contradiction between Moriatry’s Police Law and the magistrates’ and clerk’s (mostly the latter) interpretation of the relevant procedures. My sergeant just snorted in disgust.

  Times have changed to a great extent and at the time I retired from the police judges, magistrates, journalists and the police had by and large got their act together. There is still corruption but it is by no means as bad as the firm-within-a-firm days of the 70s.

  The corruption in the police could not have reached the levels it did without collusion with the judiciary and the press. It was the Countryman Enquiry, which forced many of the bent ones to resign which started the changes. I am unaware of any lawyers, judges magistrates or journos who were similarly forced to retire/resign. Yet the evidence was there to prove how bent they were as well.

  Different times and, thankfully, different people.

• BrianLuxury

  1975 Headingley, 3rd test, Martin. England – 288 & 291: Australia – 135 & 220/3, McCosker 95 not out. Australia needed a further 225 to win on the final day, but the pitch was dug up and oil spilled on it, at the Rugby Stand End. Australia won the series 1-0 after winning by an innings at Edgbaston in the 1st test a month earlier, a game in which Graham Gooch made his debut. He scored 0 in both innings. The 1977 Headingley test against the Australians was memorable for Geoff Boycott scoring 191, his 100th first-class century, and England winning by an innings to regain the Ashes.

• http://www.facebook.com/icswatson Ian Watson

  Got to agree there, I remember a time when if the old bill were out to get you, then it was not a matter of if but when, PACE changed a lot of that when the duty sergeant could empty his unsolved’s onto some hapless bloke.

  Then you had little chance of proving your innocence when the cards were against you, at least now, there is a lot more chance to be able to prove you aren’t guilty if you are innocent but far too many people still get caught by the system.