Foreigners (24 page)

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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 about 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.

The trial concerning the death of David Oluwale took
place in November 1971. It opened on 11 November and
lasted thirteen days, concluding on 24 November. The
judge was Mr Justice Hinchcliffe (seventy-one). Prosecuting
for the Crown was Mr John Cobb (forty-eight) and the
barristers for the two defendants were Mr Gilbert Gray
(forty-three) representing former Inspector Ellerker, and
Mr Basil Widoger (fifty) representing Sergeant Kitching.
The jurors included two women and one coloured man.
The first defendant, Sergeant Kenneth Mark Kitching
(forty-nine) of Blakeney Grove, Hunslet, was born in 1922.
Sergeant Kitching had joined the police force in August
1950. He was married, but without children. He was
described as an 'old time' sergeant who was proud of the
fact that he chose to wear a helmet as opposed to a peaked
cap. He stuck to a regular routine, which usually involved
rising at lunchtime, having a few pints of beer in a 'police'
pub, returning home for a meal and some sleep before
reporting to Millgarth Station for the night shift. He was
known to be Ellerker's right-hand man and confidant. His
co-defendant was former Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker
(thirty-eight) of Church Lane, Horsforth. Born in 1933,
former Inspector Ellerker had joined the police force in
December 1956. He was married with two children, a boy
and a girl. He was made a sergeant in 1964, but in April
1968 he was promoted to uniformed inspector and put in
charge of the night shift at Millgarth Station, overseeing
the south section of the city centre. Between 10 p.m. and
6 a.m. he was the highest-ranking officer on duty, but he
harboured a well-known ambition to be a non-uniform
inspector and was somewhat frustrated in his career. Both
men were, at the time of the alleged crime, serving in the
A Division of the Leeds City Police Force. Both men were
charged with the manslaughter of David Oluwale. At the
time that the charges were brought in April 1971, Geoffrey
Ellerker was in Lincoln jail. In December 1969 a seventytwo-year-old
lady was knocked down and killed by a car
that was driven by a superintendent of police. Ellerker
attempted to cover up for his fellow officer, claiming that
he could smell alcohol on the breath of the victim. It later
transpired that the victim was teetotal. Ellerker was found
guilty of misconduct as an officer of justice and he received
a nine-month prison term. Already discredited as a former
police officer, the David Oluwale case would thrust Ellerker,
together with the middle-aged sergeant, back into the limelight
for it was claimed that the pair of them had 'hounded
and tormented' Oluwale before he drowned in April 1969.
They enjoyed, what they called, 'tickling' the Nigerian
vagrant with their boots, and on one occasion it was alleged
that Oluwale was actually lifted off the ground, within
the confines of Millgarth Station, when Ellerker kicked
him hard between the legs. It was claimed that such incidents
were habitual pastimes for the two officers who made
it their business to terrorise a defenceless man.
The case had come to light because a little over a year
after the death of David Oluwale in April 1969, an eighteen-year-old
police cadet, Gareth Galvin, overheard rumours
of what had
really
happened to the Nigerian vagrant. He
informed his sergeant at the cadet training school, who in
turn passed on young Gareth Galvin's concerns to his own
superiors. Eventually police headquarters at Scotland Yard
in London became involved and the 'Oluwale Squad' was
set up on the third floor of Leeds' Westgate Police Station.
The squad was established with great secrecy, and under
very tight security, with the investigation being led by
Detective Chief Superintendent James Fryer and Detective
Chief Inspector Len Shakeshaft, both of Leeds Criminal
Investigation Department. They set about interviewing
every policeman and woman, and every traffic warden in
Leeds; in the end they interviewed 1,170 men and women,
including Kitching and Ellerker. During interrogation,
Kitching denied giving anything other than the odd slap
to David Oluwale, but he went on and said, 'I can only
describe him [Oluwale] as a wild animal, not a human
being.' As the concerns of the 'Oluwale Squad' deepened
a new post-mortem was ordered. A Home Office pathologist
travelled from London to Leeds, and it was shortly
after he had completed his work that Sergeant Kitching
and former Inspector Ellerker were charged with
manslaughter.