Fifty years ago George Brinham died at the hands of a 16 year-old boy; a version of the story forms part of my personal memories, & I wrote a
blog post about it four years ago when something (which it now annoys me to see that I did not record) reminded me of it.
I have been thinking about it off & on since then, pondering what my reactions would be if I were hearing the story for the first time today, when so many of our attitudes & assumptions have changed.
There is now more about the story available on the (free-to-public) web & I have also been looking at how it was reported by
The Times – my public library ticket provides free access to the
digital archive.
The first surprise was that all this happened in 1962 – later than I had remembered it &, crucially, after we had already moved away from the boy’s home town.
I am left wondering how I heard the news: national newspapers, certainly; maybe tv news (if the BBC thought it fit to broadcast), & possibly letters from, or visits to, friends still living in the town. My parents may also still have been getting a copy of the local town newspaper – I am pretty sure that this was the source of my idea that he came home to a sympathetic welcome.
I also have a distinct memory of a grainy newspaper photograph taken inside the dead man’s flat – dark, heavy old fashioned furniture, fireplace & mantelpiece, armchair, standard lamp & a small occasional table bearing whisky bottle & decanter.
But only local gossip could have told me who the boy was, if I knew before it was all over, since his name was not published until he appeared for trial at the Old Bailey.
The second surprise is how quickly it
was all over: Brinham died on 17 November; the trial at the Old Bailey took place 2 months later on 21 January 1963.
But the third surprise was that Larry had run back home after the killing &, reading between the lines, it was his mother who decided he should tell his story to the local police. This meant that Larry was already at Kensington police station on the evening of Thursday 22 November, the day the body was discovered; when the prosecution case was presented to the Marylebone juvenile court on 10 December a detective constable from the Derbyshire police gave evidence of a statement the boy had made to them.
The story was the subject of just 6 reports in
The Times, a total of some 1700 words, nearly 5% of which are accounted for by repetitions of “Mr George Ivor Brinham, aged 46, a former chairman of the Labour Party”
The general attitude towards the boy was one of sympathy & concern, partly because of his age & vulnerability, & also because of his confessions, made, it seems, without benefit of any legal advice or representation. When the chairman of the juvenile court asked about legal aid at his first appearance, the detective superintendent replied that ‘
the matter would receive attention.’
And concern also, of course, because he had been subject to an illegal sexual advance – all homosexual activity was illegal in those days.
Nevertheless the lack of sympathy, not to mention the open disdain or distaste shown for the dead man, is shocking.
When the prosecution case was outlined in court for the first time on 10 December the pathologist reported that he had found ‘
features which indicated the practice of homosexuality or of a perversion’ & that it appeared that ‘
the practice had been going on over a long period’. He had also found that Brinham’s skull was thin so that ‘
less force would be needed to fracture this skull than that of a normal man.’
At the Old Bailey trial the judge, Mr Justice Paull, instructed the jury to ignore the charge of murder; when the prosecution said that they would nevertheless proceed with the charge of manslaughter Mr Edward Clarke, QC*, for the defence, said there would still be a plea of Not Guilty to this & that he would submit that ‘
one is entitled to kill if a man commits a forcible & atrocious crime against you.’
When shown some documents produced in evidence the pathologist agreed they were ‘
the literature of a male pervert.’
At the end of the prosecution’s evidence the judge opined that ‘
I cannot see how any jury properly directed on the evidence can fail to find there was provocation’. The trial duly stopped & the prisoner was discharged.
The problem with this is that there was nothing in the evidence about a forcible assault by Brinham; the boy’s own statement described what happened as ‘
He kept on at me to stay the night with him’, ‘
He put his arms round me’, & he said ‘
Give us a kiss’.
The prosecuting lawyer described this merely as an ‘
improper suggestion’ & even the judge referred only to
an attempt to make homosexual advances.
The boy’s account was never challenged in court, & although forensic science was less advanced in those days, if there was any evidence to cast doubt on his version (which included the claim that he made a mess of the flat
after Brinham was dead in order to make it look like a burglary) then that evidence was not used.
This case has been used, in academic or campaigning works, as evidence of unfairnesses in the way that the police & the judicial system dealt with deaths involving sexual motives, whether homo- or heterosexual.
Women who killed a long term abuser were, almost invariably, found guilty of murder, with no reduction from the mandatory life sentence because of provocation; the alternative manslaughter verdict was not available because such women usually employed a degree of forethought or planning, to attack the man when he was drunk or asleep.
And the police were seen as not investigating murders of homosexual men or prostitute women with the same vigour & determination as they did cases involving a victim who didn’t ‘
deserve it’.
As George Cant says in
Radical Records George Brinham paid a high price for ‘
a kiss & a cuddle.’
But could he expect a very different reaction today? In a climate where child abusers are reviled, & grooming is practically a crime in itself.
What these days is described as ‘street grooming’ was in those days described, even by the victim, as 'a pick-up', which in this case took place in the Strand. The case would be made even more sensational today by the fact that it took place as the boy was standing admiring the display in the window of a gunsmith, & the would-be seducer’s first move was to offer the boy a cigarette, before treating him to tea & cake, a trip to the cinema to see a Tarzan film, interspersed with & followed by what seems to have been a fair quantity of alcohol.
In fact for today’s reader the most shocking aspect of this report comes in the very last sentence published in
The Times:
Answering Mr Clarke, Detective Superintendent Francis Davies agreed that for some time there had been complaints by various boys concerning Mr Brinham’s behaviour.
There was nothing to suggest that any of these complaints had ever been followed up.
In the, perhaps unlikely, event that George Brinham had survived long enough he might have found himself facing retrospective charges of child abuse & be sent to join the increasing numbers of elderly sex offenders whose care imposes an unfamiliar challenge to our prisons.
And if one of those girl victims of on-street grooming we are hearing about today should happen to kill one of her abusers by cracking him over his thin skull with a handy decanter, the Crown Prosecution Service might, conceivably, decide that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute.
And the court of public opinion would cheer.
*There is nothing in The Times report to suggest that there was a QC leading for the prosecution
