On the evening of 2nd November 1952, a shot fired from a makeshift weapon on a warehouse roof in Croydon killed PC Sidney Miles. Next morning the newspaper headlines proclaimed a Chicago gun-battle in London, gangsters machine-gunning armed police over the rooftops.
But the trial of Bentley and Craig affronted common sense and alienated a generation raised in the post-war suburbia of cinemas, coffee bars and drab streets. How could Derek Bentley, nineteen and with learning difficulties, be hanged for a murder committed a quarter of an hour after he was arrested? Lord Chief Justice Goddard and the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, found a way. The nation was split into those determined to teach young thugs a lesson and those dismayed by an act of judicial murder. The execution of Bentley, wrote Kenneth Allsop in Picture Post, caused an emotional upset in England comparable only to Dunkirk and the death of George VI.
Originally published in 1988, Gangland evokes the high drama of those weeks in the autumn of 1952. The moral authoritarianism of the Churchill government was backed by Lord Goddard’s zeal for hanging and flogging, by women’s groups demanding tougher sentences and corporal punishment, by a popular press which portrayed society under threat from cosh-boys and teenage gunmen, flick knives and horror comics, violence on the cinema screen and the printed page.
Against this the demonstrators packed Whitehall, chanting ‘Bentley must not die!’ Others pointed out that violent crime was falling rather than rising. Bentley went to his death and thereby perhaps did more to discredit capital punishment than anyone. The facts of the case, including hysteria over sex and violence in the media and the clamour over rising crime which helped to ensure his execution, have a relevance to all periods of history – not least our own.