Constable Through the Meadow Read online

  By the middle ages, reforms were gradually reducing the barbarity of our penal system, although as late as the seventeenth century a woman was drowned in Loch Spynie in Scotland for committing theft, and across the Channel in France the infamous guillotine was utilised against thieves.

  After many tests, France’s wonderful new death-dealing machine was perfected by Tobias Schmidt and fitted with a slanting blade on the advice of Louis XVI. In fact, he was later to die by that very blade. However, after being installed on 15th April 1792 as the official method of execution, the guillotine’s very first victim was a thief. He was Nicholas-Jacques Pelletier who was guillotined at 3.30pm on 25th April 1792 by the Executioner of Criminal Sentences, Charles-Henri Sanson. The machine was thoughtfully painted red and white, and Pelletier’s execution had been delayed so that he could have the honour of being the first to be executed by the guillotine.

  Even by the early years of last century, some forms of theft in this country carried the death penalty. In 1810, the reformer Samuel Romilly was horrified by the number of offences which did carry the death penalty, and he tried to introduce bills in Parliament to change these laws. At first, he failed; he tried, for example to remove the death penalty which had been reinstated for stealing objects up to the value of five shillings (25p), and also for stealing objects to the value of £2 from houses and for stealing from ships in navigable waters.

  He achieved partial success when Parliament abolished the death penalty for stealing from bleaching-grounds. In spite of his efforts, in 1819 there were still over two hundred capital offences on the statute book, one of which was impersonation of a Chelsea Pensioner!

  Examples of the contempt in which theft was held occurred in 1827, when a man called Moses Snook was awarded ten years transportation for stealing a plank of wood, and another man was sentenced to death for stealing 2s 6d (12½p). But the spirit of change was moving, and Robert Peel, founder of the modern police service, made a tremendous impact upon legal reform. His influence reduced three hundred Acts of Parliament to only four, and drastically reduced the number of capital offences. The death penalty continued to exist however, even for some crimes of theft such as stealing goods to the value of £2 or more from a dwelling-house.

  But the juries hated the death penalty for such crimes and they would deliberately undervalue the stolen goods to save a criminal from death. One jury valued a £10 note at £1 19s 0d (£1.95) to save a criminal from death; other examples involved sheep-stealing and horse-stealing, both of which carried the death penalty. A jury found a thief guilty of stealing only the fleece of a sheep instead of the whole beast, and guilty of stealing only the hair of a horse instead of the entire animal.

  By 1956, when I joined the Force, theft, in its many and varied forms, carried penalties which ranged from a maximum of five years’ imprisonment up to and including life imprisonment, although fines were often imposed in the less serious cases. It was then called larceny, a term which still creeps into some publications.

  Stealing from one’s employer, for example, carried a maximum penalty of fourteen years’ imprisonment; an officer of the Bank of England who stole securities or money from the bank could get life imprisonment. The stealing of horses, cattle or sheep carried up to fourteen years, while stealing postal packets carried life imprisonment. In 1957, a murder committed during the course of or in the furtherance of theft carried the death penalty, and on 13th August 1964, Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen, two Lancastrians in their early twenties, were hanged for murdering a van-driver during the course of theft. These were England’s last judicial hangings.

  In 1968, the law of theft was completely overhauled. The definition of the crime was both altered and simplified, and from that time it has carried a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment, with associated offences such as burglary and robbery carrying a maximum of life imprisonment in some cases. Those penalties still apply, for theft is still regarded by some as a sin, by others as a major crime and by yet more as a normal part of life.

  People help themselves to ‘souvenirs’ from hotels, restaurants and cafes; they take stuff home from work and fiddle expense accounts. They ‘borrow’ with no intention of returning, lift plants from garden centres, purloin precious objects from stately homes and have expeditions to our cities for shop-lifting. And it is all theft with a ten-year maximum jail sentence.

  In our modern society, the scope for theft is infinite; hundreds of thousands of such crimes are committed daily but massive numbers go unreported because they are accepted as ‘normal’, and so the true incidence of theft in this country can never be known nor even estimated. But taken as a whole, and supported by most police officers, this will suggest that we live in a very dishonest society.

  A statement of this kind, taken from knowledge but unsupported by statistics, will anger politicians who are to the left of centre, but such a claim will be agreed by most business and professional people. They know that thefts occur from their premises and many are dealt with internally, so why report those for which there is no chance of detection? A cafe-owning friend of mine cheerfully told me that he had about a hundred and twenty teaspoons and thirty-six ashtrays stolen every week, but he never reported any of these crimes to the police. The incidence of unreported theft would make a marvellous study for a university student …

  But while the Church continues to denounce theft as a sin, and socialists continue to regard it as a symptom of a society deprived of its basic needs, police officers continue to regard it as a crime committed not by those in need, but by those who like to get their hands on something for nothing and don’t mind who suffers in the process. I must confess that I know few, if any, thieves who genuinely had to steal in order to survive; they stole out of pure greed. And that is why thieves are so despicable.

  Although so many thefts are not notified to the police, considerable numbers are formally reported and investigated before being fed into the nation’s crime statistics. For the operational police officer, however, such academic matters are of little importance; his work involves knowing what constitutes a theft, and how to catch the villain responsible. Statistics are of little interest to him.

  The 1916 definition of larceny was as follows, and this was the wording which we had to learn parrot-fashion. It was the equivalent of learning the Lord’s Prayer or the alphabet, and although I learned this more than thirty years ago I still remember it. Since then, of course, I had to learn the new definition of theft which is contained in the Theft Act 1968, but the old words stick in the memory. The 1916 wording may seem ponderous, but it does have a certain rhythm and indeed one poet wrote it down in verse form.

  The definition is as follows, according to section 1 of the Larceny Act 1916, now repealed. ‘A person steals who, without the consent of the owner, fraudulently and without a claim of right made in good faith, takes and carries away anything capable of being stolen, with intent at the time of such taking permanently to deprive the owner thereof.

  ‘Provided that a person may be guilty of stealing any such thing notwithstanding that he has lawful possession thereof, if, being a bailee or part-owner thereof, he fraudulently converts the same to his own use or to the use of any person other than the owner.’

  I frequently imagine a Shakespearian actor quoting this definition, with due pauses at all the commas and full-stops, but our task was to learn it and understand it, along with all the other variations of larceny such as stealing by finding or by intimidation, stealing by mistake or by trick, larceny from the person, larceny of trees and shrubs, and a whole range of other associated crimes like embezzlement, burglary, housebreaking, robbery, false pretences, frauds by agents and trustees, blackmail, receiving stolen property, taking of motor vehicles, etc.

  It was fascinating stuff and the precise interpretation of that definition has kept lawyers occupied and earning fat fees for years. We had to know it in our heads so that we could instantly implement its provisions in the street, eve
n if our actions did result in appeals to the High Court or House of Lords in the months to come. But in a volume of this nature, there is no space to enlarge upon the wonderful range of legal fiction which resulted from this and similar statutes. But imagine a thief maliciously cutting someone’s grass and leaving the clippings behind on the lawn … would it be larceny? Were the clippings ‘taken and carried away’ or indeed, is grass capable of being stolen? And, how many crimes would be committed? One only? Or one for each blade of grass? Was there intention permanently to deprive the owner of his grass? Or was the whole affair a crime of malicious damage? Such points could keep a class of students occupied for hours and reap rich fees for lawyers.

  But police officers tend to deal more with the ordinary crime than the exotic, and few interesting cases of larceny came my way at Aidensfield. Most of them were very routine, often committed at night by pilferers who sneaked around the village picking up things left lying around. For example, one farmer had a brand-new wire rat-trap stolen from his barn, a householder had a selection of pot plants stolen from his greenhouse, a child’s tricycle was stolen having been left outside all night, and someone managed to steal a full-size horse trough. Coal was occasionally nicked from the coal yard, wood was taken from the timber yard and, as happens in most villages, there was a phantom knicker-pincher who stole ladies’ underwear from clothes-lines. It seems that almost every village, and in towns every housing estate, has a resident phantom knicker-pincher, most of whom are peculiar men who operate under cover of darkness, many of whom are usually caught in the act of satisfying their weird addiction. When their houses are searched, a hoard of illicitly obtained exotic and colourful underwear is usually found. Publicity rarely brings forth claimants because many ladies are too shy to report the initial theft or to admit ownership of some of the magnificent and strikingly sensual underwear thus recovered. The courts are then left with the task of ordering suitable disposal.

  Apart from the mundane thefts, several interesting cases did cross my path and one of them involved a picture hanging in a village pub.

  It was one of those background pictures, some of which are delightful, which adorn the walls of village inns but which are seldom appreciated until someone steals them or mutilates them in some way during a fit of pique or drunkenness. In this instance, however, the picture remained safely in its position above the black cast-iron Yorkist range, enhanced in the colder seasons by the flickering flames of the log fire below and in the warmer seasons by a vase of flowers positioned on the mantelpiece.

  The picture was an oil painting of Winston Churchill as the British Prime Minister and it depicted him with his famous cigar between his lips. It showed him at the height of his powers, a confident and forceful personality who had guided our nation to victory during World War II. In the picture, he was contemplating something across to his left (maybe the Labour party!) and was shown seated in his study with books around him and papers scattered across his desk. It was a fine picture of a widely respected statesman and it had been in the Moon and Compass Inn for several years.

  It was one of those pictures which brighten the bars of our village inns, and many a glass had been raised to Winston, later Sir Winston, in his silent pose above the cosy, welcoming fire of the Moon and Compass. During my official visits to the inn, Sir Winston was still alive and I had admired the picture and complimented David Grayson, the landlord, upon its merits. This pleased him, although he had acquired the painting with the fittings of the pub.

  The possibility that there could be a problem associated with that picture never entered my head until I received a visit from a tourist. He arrived on the stroke of two o’clock one Wednesday afternoon just as I was about to embark upon a tour of duty in the mini-van. I noticed the sleek grey Jaguar 340 glide to a halt outside my house and a smart man in his sixties emerged. He was dressed in light summer clothes of the casual kind, and his wife remained in the car. I met him in the drive to the police house.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I greeted him.

  ‘Ah, I’ve obviously just caught you, Constable. Are you in a hurry? You can spare a minute or two?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ and I offered to take him into my office but he said he could tell me his business where we stood in the front garden.

  ‘You know the Moon and Compass Inn, at Craydale?’ he put to me.

  ‘Yes, it’s on my beat,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, well, there is a problem. A delicate one, I might add,’ he began. ‘I hate to make accusations which I cannot substantiate, but I feel you ought to be aware of this …’

  I wondered what was coming next, but waited as he gathered his words together.

  ‘It’s the picture of Winston Churchill,’ he said eventually. ‘You know it?’

  ‘It hangs over the fireplace in the bar,’ I informed him. ‘A nice picture, very realistic. I know it well.’

  ‘And so you should!’ His voice increased in pitch. ‘It was commissioned from a special sitting – Churchill actually posed for that picture, Constable. It’s not a copy, not a print but the original by Christopher Tawney. It’s the only one in the world, Constable.’

  ‘It must be valuable, then?’ I said inanely.

  ‘I have no idea of its value,’ he said shortly. ‘No idea at all; it’s not an old master so we’re not talking in huge sums, but I’d guess it can be measured in thousands, if not tens of thousands. And this is why I’ve called, Constable. That painting has been stolen. It should not be there; that pub has no right to that picture, no right at all.’

  ‘Stolen? But it’s been in that pub for years,’ I told him. ‘Long before I came here. Eight or ten years even. Are you sure it’s the one you think it is?’

  ‘I’ve never been so sure in my life, Constable. You see, I had it done, I was the person who commissioned the artist and persuaded Winston to undertake that sitting. I know that picture like I know my own belongings. If you care to examine it, you’ll see Tawney’s signature in the bottom left-hand corner too.’

  ‘You’d better come into the office,’ I said.

  I asked Mary to make a cup of tea, and to include the gentleman’s wife who waited in the car. She was persuaded to come into the lounge where Mary and the children entertained her as I discussed this matter with her husband.

  His name was Simon Cornell and he was a retired director of one of Britain’s largest and most famous manufacturers of cigars.

  ‘I retired about six years ago,’ he said. ‘And now Jennie and I spend a lot of time touring England, seeing places we’ve never been able to visit until now. Always too busy, you know, leading the hectic life of a businessman.’

  ‘So what about the painting?’ I was taking notes. ‘What’s your involvement with that?’

  ‘It was done for an advertisement series,’ he said. ‘Winston was happy enough for us to use that picture in our adverts – restrictions weren’t so rigid then, although he did ask for us to give the equivalent of his fee to a charity of his choice. So we had the oil painting executed by Christopher Tawney; several prints were run off it and you might have seen copies of them on cigar-box lids, adverts in the papers and magazines and so on.’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I thought I’d seen that picture before. To be honest, Mr Cornell, I didn’t pay a great deal of close attention to it …’

  ‘Exactly, because there are so many copies still around, a lot of them hanging in pubs, by the way, like this one. They’re the same size too. But the one in the Moon and Compass is the original. I can vouch for that.’

  I took a long handwritten statement from him which confirmed what he had told me, and then noted his address and telephone number for future use.

  I did extract from him that he was not acting in any official capacity on behalf of the company for whom he had worked; he was merely drawing police attention to a theft which had occurred many years ago. He did inform me that, so far as he could recall, the picture had been hanging in the boardroom and it had been pai
nted soon after Churchill had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Some time around 1956, it had disappeared.

  ‘Company records will give the exact date of its disappearance,’ Mr Cornell informed me. ‘But that’s roughly the sequence of events.’

  ‘So it might have been here at least ten years?’ I said. ‘And I do know the present landlord has been here only four years. He bought the picture with the inn, by the way; he told me that when I was admiring it some time ago. He did not bring it with him – it was part of the fittings.’

  ‘So who does it belong to now, eh?’ smiled Cornell.

  ‘I think that’s a matter between the company and the landlord of the Moon and Compass,’ I said. ‘But clearly, you’d be interested in tracing the thief?’

  ‘I think that would be impossible now,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you will contact the company and inform them of my discovery, and perhaps warn Mr Grayson, your landlord, of this conversation?’

  ‘Yes, of course. And I’ll let you know what progress I make.’

  And so Mr Cornell left me with this problem.

  As he drove away, his wife chirping with delight at her warm reception by our little brood of four children and I was left with the thought that David Grayson had no idea he was in possession of stolen property. I was equally aware that the matter could not be ignored, but knew that if I mentioned the affair to Sergeant Blaketon, he would charge into action like the proverbial bull in a china shop. His heavy-handed, rule-bound methods would wreak havoc every inch of the way as he had me arresting everyone in sight for theft or for receiving stolen property. It was my belief that this allegation, for it was nothing more than an allegation at this stage, required some rather delicate handling.