crime reporting AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
evidence “by a mighty multinational desperate to save its own skin”. He described News International, as “a copper’s nark – a grass and, like all grasses, gives a mixture of inaccurate and misleading information to the police to save its own skin”. Perhaps the best-known issue of protection of sources – one in which the National Union of Journalists was involved – was in 1963, when Reg Foster, the Daily Sketch’s crime reporter, and Brendan Mulholland of the Daily Mail were jailed for contempt of court. They had refused to reveal their sources for stories about the sexual peccadilloes of civil servant John Vassall, who had been convicted of being a Soviet spy the previous year. Vassall, gay when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain,
had been photographed by Soviet agents in Moscow having sex and was blackmailed into supplying information when he went back to work as an Admiralty clerical officer in London. He was charged with espionage, pleaded guilty and jailed for 18 years. After Vassall’s conviction, Foster and Mulholland wrote that he was known to buy women’s clothes from West End stores and was called “Aunty” by colleagues. The Sketch wanted to know “why did the spy-catchers fail to notice Vassall who sometimes wore women’s clothes on West End trips?” In the wake of the scandal, an inquiry, chaired by Lord Radcliffe, was set up by prime minister Harold Macmillan, whose government had been badly damaged by the case. The inquiry instructed Foster to disclose the identity of the source. Foster told Lord Radcliffe: “My lord, with the greatest respect – and I mean that – you ask me to do something which is beyond my conception of ethics and principles.” He continued: “I have been in journalism for 40 years. From the first, I was taught always to respect sources of information. I have always done that. In that time, most of us have been involved in two world wars. I lost a number of close Fleet Street colleagues in places like Singapore, the Middle East and Europe and I would feel guilty of the greatest possible treachery to them if I were to assist … in this matter.” Mulholland also refused to divulge his sources. Foster was jailed for three months and Mulholland for six. The jailed pair, known as the Silent Men, enjoyed support
from the NUJ and right across Fleet Street. In recent years, it has been queried whether their sources actually existed and whether the men had invented some of the tales but they did take the honourable course in declining to name anyone. Now, with government plans to give the police access to journalistic sources through its investigatory powers bill, it cannot be long before there are yet more reporters in the dock.
Duncan Campbell is a former crime correspondent for the Guardian. His book We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds: the Shocking History of Crime Reporting has just been published by Elliott and Thompson, price £14.99.
The picture we dare not print …
Libel actions have long been used in attempts to suppress tales of criminality. Lord Boothby, Tory peer and
TV personality, hung out with the Krays in the early 1960s – their acolytes knew him as “the Queen Mother” – and he took advantage of Ronnie Kray’s access to rough trade. Norman Lucas, chief crime reporter at the Sunday Mirror, who had impeccable police connections, had learnt that the investigation into the Krays had turned up a relationship involving a peer
in a homosexual vice ring. So, on 12 July 1964, the paper ran a story headlined “Peer and a gangster. Yard inquiry”. Two days later, The Times reported that Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson said he had “asked senior officers for some enlightenment on … allegations of a homosexual relationship between a peer and a man with a criminal record”, concluding helpfully that “none of these statements is true”. Two days later, the Daily
Mirror ran a story about “the picture we dare not print” – a photo of Ronnie Kray and Boothby – but did not name the latter. Boothby wrote to The Times, suggesting the story was “a tissue of atrocious lies … this sort of thing makes a mockery of any decent kind of life, public or private, in what is still supposed to be a civilised country”. He sued the Sunday Mirror and pocketed £50,000. The unfortunate editor of the Sunday Mirror, Reg Payne, was sent off to edit Tit-Bits.
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