Frankie Fraser

Frankie Fraser was a south London gangster who knew no language but violence and spent half his life behind bars

Frankie Fraser at Repton Boxing Club in 2005

Frankie Fraser, who has died aged 90, was a notorious torturer and hitman for the Richardson gang of south London criminals in the 1960s; he spent 42 years behind bars before achieving a certain cult status in later life as an author, after-dinner speaker, television pundit and tour guide.

His enduring nickname “Mad Frank” derived from his violent temperament which caused him to attempt to hang the governor of Wandsworth prison (and the governor’s dog) from a tree, and to be certified insane on three separate occasions.

At least two home secretaries considered Fraser the most dangerous man in Britain, an image which, in old age, he only half-heartedly sought to dispel. Although he was never convicted of murder, police reportedly held him responsible for 40 killings, but the bluster and bravado of a media-savvy gangland relic almost certainly inflated this tally, the actual scale of which remains unfathomable.

Physically slight at only 5ft 4in, and invariably wearing a smile and – in retirement – a sharp Savile Row suit, Frankie Fraser was nevertheless a ferocious and brutal hatchet man. His gangster “boss” Charles Richardson remembered him as “one of the most polite, mild-mannered men I’ve met but he has a bad temper on him sometimes”. Tony Lambrianou, a one-time henchman of the rival Kray brothers, was also a fan. Fraser, he recalled, “was more than capable of doing what he threatened”.

What Fraser invariably threatened was violence. Indeed, his criminality was closely bound up with what one criminologist described as an overt – almost Samurai – vindication of violent action in pursuit of inverted honour. He shot, slashed, stabbed and axed. An early nickname –“Razor Fraser” – reflected his penchant for “shivving” his enemies’ faces with a cut-throat blade.

An unregenerate villain of the deepest dye, Fraser satisfied the public appetite for vicarious thrill-seeking with a series of self-exculpatory memoirs in the 1990s that launched him on a twilight career as a celebrity criminal. But his greatest moment of national notoriety came a quarter of a century earlier, during what the media billed as the Torture Trial (in fact a series of trials) in 1967 that became one of the longest in British criminal history.

The two Richardson brothers were convicted, and the elder, Charles, sentenced to 25 years. Fraser, tried separately, was jailed for 10.

Charles Richardson was a criminal businessman who reputedly specialised in various tortures administered at secret “courts” at which he presided, sometimes robed like a judge, a knife or a gun to hand. Those who had incurred Richardson’s displeasure were wired up to a sinister black box with a wind-up handle that administered severe electric shocks to the genitals. Then they were turned over to Fraser.

So it was in January 1965, when a club owner called Benny Coulston was hauled before Richardson for swindling him out of £600 over a consignment of cigarettes. The Old Bailey jury heard, in grisly detail that still resonates 50 years on, how Frankie Fraser tried to pull Coulston’s teeth out one by one with a pair of pliers.

Shortly afterwards, Fraser kidnapped Eric Mason, a Kray gang member, outside the Astor Club in Berkeley Square, with even direr consequences. When Mason demurred, Fraser buried a hatchet in his skull, pinning his hand to his head. Mason was found, barely alive, wearing only his underpants and wrapped in a blanket, on the steps of the London Hospital in Whitechapel. “Eric wasn’t a bad fellow,” Fraser later explained, “but that particular night he was bang out of order.”

Fraser spent practically half his life behind bars. He was moved from prison to prison more than 100 times because he was virtually impossible to control. In 1945, when he was 21, he assaulted the governor at Shrewsbury prison with an ebony ruler snatched from the governor’s desk, for which he received 18 strokes of the “cat”.

On the morning of Derek Bentley’s execution at Wandsworth in 1953, he spat at the executioner Albert Pierrepoint and tried to attack him. Fraser spent a lot of time in solitary confinement, tormented by prison officers who would spit in his food. Because of Fraser’s behaviour in jail over the years, he forfeited almost every day of his remission.

He saw himself as an innovator, claiming to have invented the “Friday gang”, robbing wages clerks carrying money from banks; he would use a starting handle to beat his victims and to deter any watching “have-a-go heroes” in the street. He also claimed to have been the first bandit to wear a stocking mask. He was so attired when, in 1951, he attacked the governor of Wandsworth prison, William Lawton, as he walked his pet terrier on Wandsworth Common.

Fraser considered that Lawton had meted out cruel and vindictive punishment to him at Pentonville in 1948, and to avenge himself Fraser assumed the role of hangman. “I just waited, caught up with him, knocked him about and strung him up with his dog,” Fraser remembered. “What saved him I think was the branch; it was supple and it bent.” Although Lawton survived, the dog died.

Francis Davidson Fraser was born on December 13 1923 in Cornwall Road, a slum area of south London on the site of what is now the Royal Festival Hall. The youngest of five children, he grew up in poverty in the Elephant and Castle and Borough, areas teeming with moneylenders, prostitutes and backstreet abortionists. There was American Indian blood in him; his grandfather had emigrated to Canada in the late 19th century and married a full-blooded American Indian woman.

His parents were honest and hard-working, but Frankie and his big sister Eva, to whom he was closest, soon turned to crime. When he was 10, the pair stole a cigarette machine from a local pub, hauled it to some waste ground and jemmied it open. As a young woman, Eva became an accomplished hoister (shoplifter).

Young Frankie attended local schools, captained the football team, and acted as bookie’s runner to one of the teachers. As a reward, he was shown his examination answers, “and that’s how I come top”, he later boasted.

Fraser was just 13 when he was sent to an approved school for stealing 40 cigarettes. While still a teenager, in the spring of 1943, he took part in a daring raid to free an Army deserter from a squad sent to collect him from Wandsworth Prison. Two people were left dead.

He built a reputation as an enforcer and strongman for various gang leaders, including Billy Hill, self-styled “King of Britain’s Underworld” in the 1940s and 1950s and, in the 1960s, the Richardson brothers. At the same time Fraser was concerned to protect his West End “business interests”, chiefly the installation and operation (on an exclusive basis) in the clubs of Soho of one-armed bandits, or fruit machines, then growing in popularity. Fraser’s partner in this endeavour was Bobby Warren, an uncle of the boxing promoter Frank Warren.

Fraser owed his success in the fruit machine business to Billy Hill, whose patronage Fraser courted when he attacked and almost killed Hill’s gangland rival Jack "Spot" Comer. But Hill was already an admirer: a picture taken at a party to launch Hill’s ghosted autobiography in 1955 shows Fraser draped artistically over a piano.

^{Jack 'Spot' Comer showing the scar on his face left by Frankie Fraser and Alf Warren} 

By 1956, Fraser had racked up 15 convictions and had twice been certified insane. Despite this, or possibly because of it, newspapers of the day were tipping him as Spot’s natural successor. With Warren at his heels, Fraser ambushed Spot in a Paddington street, knocking him to the ground with a shillelagh. Both Fraser and Warren received seven-year sentences. “It sounds like the worst days of Prohibition in Chicago rather than London in 1956,” complained Mr Justice Donovan, but words were wasted on Fraser. “Nothing ever got to Frankie,” wrote Charlie Richardson. “He was a rock.”

On his release, Fraser joined Richardson’s brother Eddie in a company called Atlantic Machines, installing fruit machines at some of Soho’s most profitable sites, with Sir Noel Dryden recruited as the respectable frontman. A machine costing £400 could quickly recoup its cost if well-sited, and Fraser’s company offered club owners 40 per cent of the take rather than the standard 35 per cent as an inducement to install their machines. Fraser had no problem dealing with rival operators whose business was dented as a result.

In August 1963, invited to take part in the Great Train Robbery, Fraser pulled out because he was on the run from the police.

On the night of March 7 1966 Fraser and Eddie Richardson were badly hurt in a brawl at Mr Smith’s club in Catford, the incident that broke the Richardson family’s grip on south London. Fraser was seen kicking Richard Hart, a Kray associate, as he lay on the pavement outside. When the police arrived, they found Hart lying under a lilac tree in a nearby garden. He had been shot in the face.

Hart’s killing was avenged within 24 hours when Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell, the Richardsons’ chief lieutenant, at the Blind Beggar pub deep in Kray territory on the Mile End Road, using a 9mm Mauser semi-automatic pistol at point-blank range.

Frankie Fraser was tried at the Old Bailey for Hart’s murder, while six others, including Eddie Richardson, faced lesser charges. The judge, Mr Justice Griffith-Jones, complained of attempts to nobble one of the jurors, but in the case of Fraser, who was tried separately, he directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. There was no evidence that Fraser had fired the fatal shots, and although he claimed to have been “fitted up” for the killing, he was convicted of affray and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He was still serving his sentence for the Catford affray when he was handed a further 10 years for his part in the Richardson torture case.

In 1969 Fraser led the Parkhurst prison riot on the Isle of Wight and found himself back in court charged with incitement to murder. Although he was acquitted, a further five years were added to his sentence. Fraser was defended by a young solicitor called James Morton, who later became an author and wrote a history of London’s gangland in 1992.

^{Fraser in 1997 with his then girlfriend Marilyn Wisbey, daughter Of Great Train Robber Tom Wisbey}

The book upset some of those mentioned in it, and Morton was dismayed to arrive home one evening to find a message from Fraser on his answering machine, demanding to speak to him urgently. Morton was relieved that, rather than remonstrating, Fraser wanted him to write his life story. Mad Frank: Memoirs of a Life of Crime appeared in 1994, with two further volumes following in 1998 and 2001.

These recollections, while often disordered and jumbled, nevertheless shed light on Fraser’s shameless and unrepentant defiance of the liberal consensus. He appeared on pop records and in television documentaries, toured his one-man show of criminal reminiscences (flexing a pair of gilded pliers), and found himself invited into bookshops to sign copies of his memoirs. He regularly led conducted tours of East End crime scenes, invariably ending up in the Blind Beggar pub where Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell dead.

Fraser treated his various brushes with death as an occupational hazard: his thigh bone was shattered by a bullet fired during the melee in Catford, and part of his mouth was shot away in an incident in May 1991 when someone botched an attempt to assassinate him outside a nightclub in Farringdon. Questioned by police, Fraser reportedly gave his name as Tutankhamen (gangland slang for “shtum”) and asked “What incident?”

^{Fraser in 2009}

In the summer of 2013 it emerged that, at the age of 89, Fraser had been served with an Antisocial Behaviour Order (Asbo) after another “incident”, this time at his care home in Peckham, south London.

He claimed to have no regrets about his criminal life, apart from being caught. “Because of the type of person I am,” he wrote, “in the life I led, you learn to shrug off adversity better than people who’ve worked hard all their lives.”

Frankie Fraser’s wife Doreen, with whom he had four sons, died in 1999. For a time he was engaged to Marilyn Wisbey, daughter of the Great Train Robber Tommy Wisbey, with whom he briefly ran a massage parlour in Islington, in which Fraser made the tea.

Frankie Fraser, born December 13 1923, died November 26 201
4

Jeremy Thorpe

Jeremy Thorpe was a charismatic leader of the Liberal Party who fell from grace in one of the most spectacular political scandals of the 20th century

Thorpe outside the House of Commons after being elected the new leader of the Liberal Party in 1967 

Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of the Liberal Party who has died aged 85, suffered a fall unparalleled in British political history when a long-drawn-out chain of scandal dragged him into the dock at the Old Bailey, charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder.

For once the cliché “trial of the century” did not seem misplaced. Thorpe had been a sparkling and successful politician who had come tantalisingly close to realising the Liberals’ dream of holding the balance of power. In 1974, indeed, he was invited by the prime minister, Edward Heath — whom he had once described as “a plum pudding around whom no one knew how to light the brandy” — to lead his party into coalition with the Conservatives; he himself was offered the post of foreign secretary.

It was understandable, therefore, that five years later, at Thorpe’s trial, even prosecuting counsel should have spoken of a “tragedy of truly Greek and Shakespearean proportions”. Tragedy, however, is a large word, implying the destruction, if not necessarily of virtue, at least of some outstanding merit. Only in the context of a man’s entire life can its just application be decided.

John Jeremy Thorpe was born on April 29 1929 into a highly political family. He would claim descent from Sir Robert de Thorpe, who was Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1356 and Chancellor in 1371.

More to the point, both of Thorpe’s parents were staunch Conservatives. His father John Thorpe, born in Cork, was a KC and, for a few years after the First World War, MP for Rusholme in Manchester. His mother was the daughter of Sir John Norton-Griffiths, 1st Bt, another Conservative MP and one who gloried in the epithet “Empire Jack” — even if he owed his baronetcy to Lloyd George.

Jeremy Thorpe, however, thought of himself as “three-quarters Celt”; and in keeping with this bias, it was from his mother’s friend Lady Megan Lloyd George that, rather to Mrs Thorpe’s disapproval, he imbibed a romantic attachment to Liberalism.

The boy had two sisters, both older; he was brought up as the cynosure of his parents’ eyes. “It never occurred to him,” his mother remarked of his early days in Kensington, “that anybody might not be glad to see him.”

Young Jeremy adored his father, but it was his mother who exerted the most powerful influence. A formidable woman, who affected an eyeglass, Ursula Thorpe nursed the highest ambitions for her son. “That monocle!” Thorpe recalled in later life. “We were all frightened of her. I have overcome the domination, and I am damn well not going to be dominated again.”

Thorpe was only six when tubercular glands were diagnosed in his stomach. For seven months he had to lie on his back in a spinal carriage; he suffered back pains for the rest of his life.

The Second World War caused a hiatus in what promised to be a conventional English education. In 1940 Thorpe and the younger of his sisters were sent to stay with an aunt in America, where he attended the Rectory School in Connecticut, by contemporary English standards a decidedly easy-going establishment.

Thorpe loved it. His histrionic gifts — and in particular his talent for mimicry — began to flourish. He played Miranda in The Tempest, became an accomplished violinist, and showed precocious assurance as a public speaker.

In 1943 he returned to England to go to Eton, where the more rigorous discipline proved less agreeable. He was also greatly upset by the death of his father, after a stroke, in 1944. This misfortune left the family in dire financial straits, so that an uncle had to stump up the funds to keep the boy at Eton. It also, inevitably, increased the sway of Mrs Thorpe.

After Eton, Thorpe joined the Rifle Brigade for his National Service, only to be invalided out of the Army after six weeks as “psychologically unsuitable”. It has been alleged that he became a bed-wetter to prove the point.

At Trinity College, Oxford, by contrast, the military reject flourished outrageously. His flamboyant dress — frock coats, stove-pipe trousers, brocade waistcoats, buckled shoes, and even spats — received all the attention they demanded; his penchant for Chinese vases suggested aesthetic sensibility; his witty persiflage kept the mockers at a distance.

Theoretically, Thorpe was reading Law; in reality he was laying the foundations of his political career. But though he became in turn president of the Liberal Club, the Law Society and the Union, he attracted criticism from contemporaries for the ruthlessness he showed in the pursuit of these offices.

Thorpe scraped a Third in his Finals. Afterwards, in 1954, he was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple, and built up a modest practice on the Western Circuit. He also, later in the 1950s, worked for commercial television, appearing regularly on current affairs programmes such as This Week, and sending back reports from Africa and the Middle East.

But politics was always his master passion. In 1952, with the help of Dingle Foot, whom he had befriended when at Oxford, he was adopted as Liberal candidate at North Devon which, though it had been a Liberal seat in the early 1930s, had a 12,000 Tory majority in the 1951 General Election.

Thorpe, at his very best on the stump, had no rival as a vote-gatherer. He could put any argument with skill and panache; his astonishing memory for faces persuaded voters that they were intimate friends; his brilliant gifts as a mimic kept the audience in stitches; his resourceful mind afforded quips and stunts for every occasion.

At the same time he built up a formidable organisation in the constituency, and drove it with unflagging energy. In the 1955 general election the Tory majority was slashed to 5,226, and four years later he captured the seat by 362 votes. Thorpe would hold North Devon for 20 years, narrowly at first, but in February 1974 with a thumping 11,082 majority. Yet he was never tempted to appeal to wavering Tory voters by trimming his Liberal views on issues such as South Africa or capital punishment.

In the House of Commons he made an immediate impression. A sketch-writer remarked of his maiden speech that “it seemed as though Mr Thorpe had been addressing the House for the past 10 years, and got rather tired of the exercise”. But the young MP knew how to draw blood, as with his jibe after Harold Macmillan sacked several of his Cabinet in 1962: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his own life.”

Thorpe appeared somewhat to the Left of the party, a mouthpiece for impeccable Liberal sentiments, especially on African affairs. He received the distinction of being banned from Franco’s Spain.

In 1966 he advocated that Britain should cut off the oil supplies to Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime by bombing that country’s railway system. The Liberal conference enthusiastically applauded the idea, but Harold Wilson inflicted permanent damage by coining the phrase “Bomber Thorpe”.

^{Thorpe flanked by Edward Heath and Harold Wilson at Westminster Abbey in 1970} 

Meanwhile, though, the young MP had been working energetically to fill the organisational void left by Jo Grimond’s leadership. Thorpe’s charm made him especially effective as a fund-raiser, and in 1965 he captured the party treasuryship.

When Grimond retired in 1967, the 12 Liberal MPs elected Thorpe in his place. The new leader immediately gave a foretaste of his style by holding a rally in the Albert Hall, at which he promised “a great crusade that will set Britain alight for the vision of a Liberal society” — a performance relayed by closed circuit television to three other city centres.

Nevertheless, in his first years at the helm the showman for once misjudged his act. “He felt he had to move away from the image of the sharp and witty debater to being grave,” David Steel remembered. “It was disastrous.”

Yet Thorpe did not altogether abandon frivolity. Colleagues found, to their frustration and fury, that important policy discussions had to wait upon the leader’s gossipy anecdotes about the prime minister or royalty. Nor did Thorpe’s continuing addiction to outmoded dress and eccentric headgear — notably the brown bowler hat he wore when electioneering — do anything to allay the growing suspicion that he was all style and precious little substance.

His critics acknowledged that he loved the game of politics — indeed he took a fiendish delight in its Machiavellian plots and manoeuvres — but they wondered if he knew why he was playing it.

Thorpe’s Liberalism was essentially romantic and emotional. He reacted strongly against bone-headed Establishment snobbery, arrogant management or racial injustice, but showed scant interest in formulating any coherent political philosphy.

On the other hand there was no doubting Thorpe’s quick mind or his keen antennae. He was to the fore in predicting the 1967 devaluation crisis and in identifying the mounting crisis in Ulster; he also showed himself a consistent supporter of Britain’s entry into the Common Market.

Thorpe did not suffer fools gladly. Erring subordinates were treated to the sharp rebuke or the snappish aside; and in the face of any challenge to his authority the mask of the jester quickly gave way to a fixed, distant and icy stare. He was at his most formidable under pressure, as the Young Liberals discovered when they attempted to mount a coup in 1968.

The unsatisfactory opening years of his leadership culminated in the 1970 general election. Thorpe campaigned with his accustomed zeal, sweeping about the country in helicopters and cutting an impressive figure on television, but the results were disastrous.

The Liberals polled only 2.1 million votes and retained only six seats. And then, less than a fortnight after the election, Thorpe’s wife Caroline was killed in a car crash.

For a while Thorpe appeared to lose interest in politics. But in 1972 and 1973 the widespread dissatisfaction with the Heath government found expression in a remarkable series of Liberal successes in municipal and by-elections.

Thorpe’s style was undoubtedly a factor in attracting discontented Tory voters. But his animadversions against the “bloody-mindedness” of British life were undermined, at the end of 1973, by his involvement in a shoddy financial disaster.

Thorpe had become a director of Gerald Caplan’s London & County Securities to boost his meagre parliamentary salary; in his delight at the sudden flush of income, however, he failed to heed numerous and reiterated warnings about the company’s viability.

In 1972 the Liberals, and Thorpe himself, put on a notable display of piety over Reginald Maudling’s involvement with the Poulson affair. It was therefore more than a shade embarrassing when it transpired that the leader was involved in a company that was charging 280 per cent on second mortgages, and when, at the end of 1973, the collapse of London & County revealed a tangled skein of financial misdemeanour.

British voters, far from being concerned, were apparently impressed by Liberal promises to tackle the national crisis with increased public spending and state control of incomes. At the February 1974 general election Thorpe, though largely confined in his marginal North Devon constituency, reached his political apotheosis. The Liberals nearly trebled their vote to six million; the only fly in the ointment was that this total translated itself into but 14 seats.

Rumour had it that Thorpe was responsive to Heath’s offer of a coalition, with the promise of a Speaker’s conference to consider electoral reform. His colleagues, however, have gone on record that the decision to reject these terms was “unanimous”.

The ensuing months exposed the flaws in the Liberal revival. The party activists were radicals; many of its new-found supporters were dissatisfied Tories. Moreover, the exquisite Thorpe seemed far removed from the community politics advocated by Trevor Jones (“Jones the Vote”) and his chums.

In the October 1974 general election, the Liberal leader left his North Devon constituency to its own devices and once more whisked about the country in helicopters and hovercraft. All to no avail: the Liberal vote fell by 700,000.

Thorpe was severely disillusioned. But the most remarkable thing about his political career was not that he ultimately failed to storm the heights, but that he managed to retain the sang-froid to lead the Liberals when, all the while, a large part of his energies was concentrated on repressing a significant element of his personality.

That Thorpe, in his youth, had homosexual tendencies was admitted at his trial. Nor was it in dispute — though he always emphatically denied any physical relationship — that in 1961 he had befriended a young man named Norman Josiffe, who later changed his name to Norman Scott.

Though Mr Justice Cantley’s conduct of the trial was widely criticised, no one argued about his description of Norman Scott. “He is a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite.” Scott claimed to have had an affair with Thorpe between 1961 and 1964, and there can be no question whatever that, as their meetings dwindled and finally ceased, he conceived a grievance that nothing but the ruin of Thorpe could assuage. (It should be remembered that homosexual acts between consenting adults were not legalised until 1967.)

In pursuit of his vendetta Scott seized every possible occasion, public and private, to advertise his sexual connection with Thorpe. As early as December 1962 he blurted out the story to the Chelsea police, and gave them two letters he had received from the MP, one of which contained the phrase — “Bunnies can (and will) go to France” — that would become notorious when, 14 years later, it finally reached the public domain.

During that time Scott bore the menace of a time-bomb ticking away in the shadows of Thorpe’s career. The fuse was unpredictable, but intermittent splutters constantly portended some vast explosion.

Thus in 1965 Scott took it upon himself to write to Thorpe’s mother setting out the details of his homosexual relations with her son. This missive prompted Thorpe to make the cardinal error of confiding in Peter Bessell, a fellow Liberal MP.

^{Thorpe in his office at the Houses of Parliament, 1970} 

One of the most striking features of the affair was that Thorpe, for all his public glamour, seemed to have no upright friend to whom he was prepared to turn for counsel. Bessell was a Methodist lay preacher; he was also, as he himself would all too willingly confirm under cross-examination, amoral, hypocritical and untruthful.

Bessell tried to contain the danger to Thorpe by going to see Scott, by purloining compromising letters, and subsequently by paying Scott small weekly sums which Thorpe refunded. He also sought, and appeared to receive, assurances from the home secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, that the police were not interested in pursuing Scott’s allegations.

But Thorpe’s anxiety could not be assuaged as long as the possibility remained that Scott would one day succeed in finding a newspaper to print his story. And after the Liberal leader had married Caroline Allpass in 1968, he had even more to lose — though the best man, David Holmes, wrote that Caroline Thorpe “knew about Scott” before they were married.

In May 1969 Scott himself married; and his son was born that November. The marriage soon broke up, but not before the experience of connubial penury in a Dorset cottage had lent a hysterical edge to Scott’s importuning of Bessell. Worse, there was the threat — never, in fact, realised — that Scott would use the divorce proceedings as an opportunity to blurt out his accusations about Thorpe under the protection of court privilege.

Another crisis developed in 1971. Scott, now living in North Wales, became the lover of a widow, Mrs Gwen Parry-Jones, who, treated to the usual accounts of Thorpe’s iniquities, duly reported them to another Liberal MP, Emlyn Hooson. A Liberal Party inquiry into the affair ensued.

Thorpe fought like a tiger, denying the allegations point blank and enlisting the help of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, to confirm a somewhat misleading summary of police dealings with Scott. It was Thorpe’s word against that of his tormentor, and the Liberals chose to believe their leader.

Next year, 1972, Mrs Parry-Jones died, and at the inquest on her death Scott at last had the opportunity to tell his story in court. But no editor cared to print his wild ravings; nor did a South African journalist, Gordon Winter, find any takers when he gathered material from Scott.

It might have seemed that Scott had done his worst, and been repelled. In 1973 Thorpe announced his engagement to Marion, Countess of Harewood, previously married to the Queen’s cousin.

About the same time Scott moved to Thorpe’s North Devon constituency, where he proceeded to inflict the history of his relations with the local MP upon bemused rustics in pubs. He also told his tale to the Tory candidate, who decided not to touch it.

Just before the first general election of 1974, David Holmes succeeded in purchasing some letters from Scott for £2,500. Nevertheless, Scott the persecutor now appeared in the role of victim.

In February 1975 he was beaten up by two men in Barnstaple market. And in October, when an AA patrolman discovered him weeping beside the corpse of his great dane, Rinka, he claimed that only a jammed pistol had prevented the assailant from shooting him as well as the dog.

In January 1976 Scott, charged with defrauding the DHSS, declared under the privilege of court that he was being “hounded by people” because of his affair with Jeremy Thorpe. This time, at last, the press did take notice. Thereafter rumour blew so loud that by March Thorpe felt compelled to defend himself in The Sunday Times, specifically denying both that he had hired a gunman to kill Scott, and that he had had any knowledge of Holmes’s purchase of the letters in 1974.

Despite support from the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who appeared to believe that the accusations had been fabricated by the South African secret service, Thorpe was unable to hold the line. After the “Bunnies” letter was published in The Sunday Times in May 1976, he resigned the Liberal leadership.

^{Thorpe leaving the Liberal Club in 1977} 

There could scarcely have been any criminal charges against him, however, if Bessell, who had long been exiled in California, had not decided to turn Queen’s evidence. He believed, with good reason, that Thorpe would not hesitate to throw him to the wolves in order to save his own skin.

Bessell alleged that in 1968 and 1969 Thorpe had incited Holmes and himself to murder Scott, helpfully suggesting that the body might be chucked down a Cornish mine shaft, or cemented into a motorway bridge. “It’s no worse than killing a sick dog,” Thorpe is supposed to have remarked, before recommending research into slow-acting poisons.

The second charge associated Thorpe with Holmes and two others on a charge of conspiracy to murder in the years 1974 and 1975; this also depended partly on Bessell’s evidence, though in this case the diversion of Liberal funds through Holmes’s hands to the hitman, Andrew Newton, was also germane.

Thorpe behaved with marked courage in the face of the cataclysm, observing with his accustomed brio that a man who had the prime minister, Lord Goodman and MI5 on his side could hardly lose.

Even after his committal to trial at the Old Bailey Thorpe insisted on contesting North Devon at the 1979 election, where his opponents included Auberon Waugh, standing for the Dog Lovers’ Party. Though Thorpe lost the seat (he remarked laconically to a television interviewer that Scott’s allegations had “hardly helped” his campaign), his vote fell by less than 5,000 compared with October 1974.

^{Norman Scott in 1979}

At the Old Bailey the charges failed after the defence, with the help of Mr Justice Cantley, had annihilated Bessell’s character. Thorpe opted not to give evidence in his own defence, thus avoiding cross-examination.

Even so, his reputation was badly damaged by the exhibition of the financial sleight of hand which he had shown in directing funds given to the Liberal Party by the millionaire “Union Jack” Hayward towards David Holmes. He was also revealed as a blustering bully in his attempt to dissuade his friend Nadir Dinshaw, the Pakistani financier, from telling the truth.

Dinshaw, acting on Thorpe’s command, had innocently passed on money to Holmes. Before the trial Thorpe told him that if he reported the fact, “It will be curtains for me, and you will be asked to move on.”

In short, the trial bore out the impression created by Thorpe’s political career, that he was essentially a fixer and an operator. Far from being a tragic hero — a noble nature ruined by a single mole of nature — he appeared, whether innocent or guilty, amply provisioned with common human flaws, cast by his gifts and ambition into most uncommon relief.

Yet this man, who spent so many years trying to avoid imputations of homosexuality, won devoted loyalty from both his wives. “I saw an emotional cripple take up his bed and walk,” someone remarked of his first marriage.

For a while after the trial Thorpe seemed to nurse the dream of rebuilding his career. In 1981 he applied unsuccessfully for the job of race relations adviser to the BBC, and the next year he was actually appointed director of Amnesty, only to resign the post after complaints from within the organisation.

^{Thorpe with his wife, Marion, in 1999} 

Thorpe remained chairman of the political committee of the United Nations Association until 1985, but in the world of the haut monde that he loved to adorn there would be no redemption. By the middle of the 1980s, moreover, he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease.

The North Devon Liberals, however, remained faithful to the last, electing him as their president in 1987.

Jeremy Thorpe’s second wife died in March of this year; he is survived by his son, Rupert, from his first marriage.

Jeremy Thorpe, born April 29 1929, died December 4 201
4

Jeremy Lloyd

Jeremy Lloyd was a comedy writer and actor who created popular, bawdy television series such as ’Allo ’Allo!

Jeremy Lloyd, creator of 'Allo 'Allo and Are You Being Served?

Jeremy Lloyd, who has died aged 84, was an actor who became one of Britain’s most successful comedy writers; his sitcoms were the essence of Britishness.

Are You Being Served? (1972-85) presented life in a department store as a hotbed of sexual intrigue, class tension and high camp. ’Allo ’Allo! (1982-92) was set in France during the Second World War, and reflected enduring British comic stereotypes about the rest of the world: the Germans were kinky, the French sex-obsessed, the Italians all talk and no trousers.

All of this would be regarded by some contemporary comedians as conservative and regressive. But Lloyd’s comedy was democratic in its populism. All the world was on display; every character – from bitter old maids to merrily gay tailors – had dignity and, often, the last laugh. Everybody watching at home could imitate the catchphrases and recycle the gags at work or in the playground the next day: “I’m free!” “Good moaning!”

In 2011, Lloyd wrote: “Friends often tell me how much their grandchildren enjoy Are You Being Served? It doesn’t matter that they were not even born when it was broadcast, or that they belong to a very different world. Laughter crosses boundaries of class and age… Humour is universal.” The fact that ’Allo ’Allo! was eventually broadcast in Germany would seem to prove him right.

As an actor, Jeremy Lloyd tended to be cast as an upper-class twit – thanks to his posh accent, blonde hair and aristocratic charm. In fact, he was the son of an Army colonel and a Tiller girl who had danced with Fred Astaire.

John Jeremy Lloyd was born at Danbury in Essex on July 22 1930 and dispatched to live with an elderly grandmother in Manchester at the age of one and a half. Many years later he told an interviewer: “I occasionally saw my father but he used to introduce me to people as the son of bandleader Joe Loss. 'You’ve heard of Joe Loss? Well, this is my son – dead loss,’ he’d say… And he put me into a home when I was about 13 and a half. A home for elderly people, which was a wonderful experience.”

Living in the home, surrounded by retired colonels and vicars, “improved” Lloyd’s accent: it went from Mancunian to southern middle-class. He remained estranged from his parents: two sisters came along but he was kept away from them. On his father’s death bed, the old man finally told his son that he was proud of what he had accomplished. Lloyd later claimed to be suspicious of his motives: “I think [he said it] because he wanted me to get him a pack of cigarettes.”

To support his grandmother, Lloyd did everything from digging roads to selling paint. One job that would later be turned into fiction was as a salesman at Simpsons department store in Piccadilly, where he observed post-war British society at its most disciplined and repressed. He was sacked for selling soft drinks from a fitting room during a heatwave.

^{A scene from Are You Being Served?} 

Eventually he decided that he would like to have a go at writing comedy and turned up at the door of Pinewood Studios with a script in hand. He was told that the American studio chief, Earl St John, never met anyone. Not one to take “no” for an answer, Lloyd went to a telephone box around the corner, found the mogul’s number and called him directly. St John, amused at being so boldly approached, invited him round for tea. To the surprise of everyone on the studio staff, the script turned out to be perfect. The film, What a Whopper, was released as a vehicle for singer Adam Faith in 1961.

Lloyd’s rise through the world of showbusiness is a story of 1960s meritocracy at its most dizzying. At various times he wrote for Jon Pertwee, Morecambe and Wise, Bruce Forsyth and Lionel Blair. As an actor he turned up in numerous British comic films of the 1960s, usually as a tall gangly fool. He made his debut in Robert Hamer’s School for Scoundrels (1960) and also appeared in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965), Doctor in Clover (1965) with James Robertson Justice, and The Wrong Box (1966) with John Mills, Michael Caine and Peter Cook. As part of the group that hung around with the Beatles, he made an (uncredited) cameo appearance in A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and in Help! (1965) played a restaurant patron. In 1974 he was a British Army officer in Murder on the Orient Express.

^{Jeremy Lloyd (behind James Robertson Justice) as a junior doctor in Doctor in Clover (1966)}

Lloyd was engaged to the actress Charlotte Rampling, flirted with the Avengers star Diana Rigg and claimed to have been invited to Sharon Tate’s house for tea on the night that she was murdered by followers of Charles Manson. Perhaps the pinnacle of his on-screen career was as a performer on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, the fast-paced sketch show that was one of the biggest American television comedy programmes of the late 1960s. It featured Sammy Davis Jr, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and even Richard Nixon. For Lloyd the pay was poor but the perks were great. He estimated that he received 5,000 letters from women each week. He invited many to attend the show: “One day the producer came up to me and he said, 'It’s all very well Jeremy, but you’ve brought 42 girls in today and they’re better looking than what our casting agents have sent.’ ” So Lloyd was given the job of casting the dance section, too.

It was when he returned to England, relatively poor and at a loose end, that he decided it was time to write a proper sitcom. The original outline of Are You Being Served?, based in part on his memories of working at Simpsons, was sent to ITV. By chance, Lloyd bumped into David Croft, co-writer of Dad’s Army, who had worked with him on the Billy Cotton Band Show, and told him the plot. Croft begged Lloyd to retrieve the script from ITV and rework it with him, and a brilliant comic pairing was born.

They sold the idea to the BBC, which made a pilot but was not over-impressed. So the show was put into storage. It was only aired in 1972 as a filler when the Munich massacre disrupted programming during the Summer Olympics. The series that followed ran for 13 years, attracting audiences of up to 22 million. Viewers thrilled to Mr Humphries’s cries of “I’m free” and Mrs Slocombe’s epic tails of life with a high maintenance pussy cat.

^{Jeremy Lloyd with his restored Bentley in 1975} 

The actress playing Mrs Slocombe, Mollie Sugden, was given a spin-off part in Lloyd’s space comedy Come Back Mrs Noah. It was a critical failure and was killed off. By contrast, ’Allo ’Allo!, which launched in 1982 and ran for 10 years, was a hit with viewers. Essentially a parody of resistance movies like Casablanca and, principally, the television series Secret Army, it was an exercise in vulgar and puerile, if good-natured, absurdity.

Every character was painted as a stereotype: René Artois, the tubby, cowardly bar owner; Michelle Dubois, the heroic yet pedantic guerrilla (“I shall say zis only once”); Lieutenant Hubert Gruber, the gay German soldier inexplicably in love with René. The English were parodied as strongly as the Continental Europeans, and the sympathy shown towards the occupying Germans was often affecting. All Colonel Kurt Von Strohm and Captain Hans Geering wanted to do was survive the war as rich men, which was why they conspired with René to steal a famous painting by Van Klomp called The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.

^{Guy Siner, Gordon Kaye and Vicki Michelle in a scene from 'Allo 'Allo!} 

Outside television Lloyd scored a notable success with Captain Beaky & His Band (Not Forgetting Hissing Sid!!!), two albums (1977 and 1980) of poetry by Lloyd, set to music by Jim Parker and recited by various British celebrities. The title track, Captain Beaky, reached No 5 in the charts in 1980 and the LPs generated numerous spinoffs, among them two books of poetry, BBC television shows, a West End musical and a pantomime. The Captain Beaky poems were revived in an all-star tribute show at the Royal Albert Hall in 2011.

Latterly Jeremy Lloyd looked back on his career and acknowledged that he had been very lucky to be writing at a time when humour was saucy but not indecent, aimed at ordinary Britons of all ages, and written by people who knew a thing or two about real life. Towards the end of his own life, Lloyd reflected: “You don’t actually get to make a pilot like when they said to David and I, 'Whatever you want to do, just do it.’ Now, they sit round a table and listen to what you want to do and they tell you if they think it’s funny. The people who do this have probably been to Oxford or Cambridge and they don’t really know what’s funny because they’re not the general audience who are going to watch it.”

Lloyd was appointed OBE in 2012.

He was married, first, to the model Dawn Bailey from 1955 to 1962 and, secondly, to the actress Joanna Lumley in 1970; the marriage was dissolved the following year. “He was witty, tall and charming,” said Joanna Lumley. “We should have just had a raging affair.” After many years of warily avoiding a third marriage, he married Lizzie Moberley in October this year. Of his third wife he said: “She is beautiful, clever and sent from heaven on mission impossible.”

Jeremy Lloyd, born July 22 1930, died December 23 201
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Joe Cocker

Joe Cocker was a Sheffield soul singer who electrified Woodstock with his rasping voice and convulsive mannerisms

Joe Cocker

Joe Cocker, who has died aged 70, was a Sheffield-born singer who came to be considered one of the greatest white blues and soul vocalists. With a voice that could rage, bellow, rasp, screech or – if circumstance demanded – be unexpectedly yearning and vulnerable, he was capable of taking any song and making it his own.

Cocker proved this conclusively with his first and biggest hit, a cover of the Beatles’ With a Little Help From My Friends. Replacing the Fab Four’s cheerful, music-hall arrangement with his own tortured reading, Cocker topped the charts and so stunned Woodstock the following year that he established himself as rock’s most incendiary white soul singer.

It was a role for which he was perfectly suited. Honing his voice on a bottle of bourbon and 80 cigarettes a day, Cocker spent much of the Seventies in an alcohol and drug-fuelled haze. He reached the bottom in 1974 when the curtain was lowered on a performance in Los Angeles in which, having appeared in a vomit-encrusted jacket and cast-off jeans, he curled into the foetal position and was unable to continue.

But he was a survivor, for whom hair, sideboards, beard and stomach might come and go while his voice, if occasionally croaky, never let him down. Returning to the charts in 1982 with the Oscar-winning ballad Up Where We Belong, the theme to the hit movie An Officer and a Gentleman, Cocker enjoyed an Indian summer of sell-out tours and renewed chart success.

Cocker lived the stereotypical life of the blues. A wild man who earned – and paid for – his headlines, his career would have ended but for the majesty of his voice. He rarely wrote songs, but had no need. He had his own constituency. As Life magazine observed, he was “the voice of the blind criers and crazy beggars and maimed men who summon up the strength to bawl out their souls in the streets”.

John Robert Cocker was born in Sheffield on May 20 1944. He left Sheffield Central Technical School at 15 to work as a gas fitter and perform as Vance Arnold, in which guise he supported the Rolling Stones and the Hollies at Sheffield City Hall.

As Joe Cocker’s Big Blues he recorded the Beatles’ I’ll Cry Instead, but the record failed to register. After a tour of GI bases in France and another stint with the Gas Board he teamed up with the keyboards player and bass guitarist Chris Stainton, and formed the Grease Band, whose first single, Marjorine, dented the foot of the charts.

It was the release of With a Little Help From My Friends that propelled Cocker into the big time. Claiming that he had worked out the arrangement in the outside loo of his father’s house, his trembling, tumultuous performance invested the song with such poignancy that the Beatles took out full-page advertisements in the music press praising his version.

But Cocker’s signature was not confined to his voice. His onstage mannerisms – legs bolted to the floor while his hands, arms and upper body convulsed – caused him to be likened to “a dancer in a wheelchair”. When he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show some members of the audience found it so distasteful that the singer was largely obscured by dancers.

Despite this, America embraced his furnace-like roar. His first album, With a Little Help From My Friends (1969), consisted mainly of covers bent on the anvil of his voice into personal and definitive readings. Throughout 1969 he toured extensively, appearing at all the major rock festivals, including Woodstock, at which he gave a towering performance, cementing his reputation as one of the biggest voices and most compelling acts around.

Joe Cocker! (1969), which included a turbulent rendition of Leon Russell’s Delta Lady, proved the valedictory outing for the Grease Band, who had become little more than a background to his vocals.

But without a band, and with a touring contract to fulfil, Cocker assembled 21 musicians, wives, hangers-on, managers, roadies, children, a film crew, a spotted dog and a bus driver and set out across the States on the chaotic “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour, performing 65 concerts in 57 days.

The experience, in addition to the cavalier range of substances Cocker ingested, so exhausted the singer that he was forced to return to Sheffield to recuperate. As the album Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1970) and its accompanying single, Cry Me a River, stormed the American charts, a desolate Cocker was dividing his time between his parents’ house and the pub, lamenting “the three o’clock break – that’s the endless gap between lunchtime and the pub opening again at six o’clock”.

His only appearance, as he wrestled with his demons and life-threatening addictions to whisky and heroin, was a supposedly triumphant homecoming at Sheffield City Hall. But, singing alongside the Mad Dogs veteran Rita Coolidge, his performance merely confirmed that his recuperation remained incomplete, and 1971 passed in a haze. On one occasion he met Princess Anne in a nightclub and, temporarily confused, thought she was his girlfriend. It took a pair of policemen to convince him otherwise.

He found the strength to resuscitate his career after seeing Ray Charles interviewed on television. When Charles was asked: “Who are the greatest living blues singers?” he answered: “Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Joe Cocker.” Inspired, Cocker returned to the stage. He toured America and Europe, but was forced to leave Australia overnight with six of his band members to avoid 18 charges, including assault, having already been fined A$1,200 for drug offences.

Rarely uninfluenced by hard-core addictions, and suffering memory lapses, Cocker relocated to Los Angeles in 1973 and – when he could make it to the studio – continued to enjoy periodic chart success. By now completely incapable of writing his own songs, he remained such an idiosyncratic interpreter of other songwriters’ material that the omission was scarcely relevant.

Despite his “foetal” performance before the press in LA in early 1974, Cocker’s voice ensured that the curtain never quite came down on his career. The tumult in his life may even have helped, both in the increasingly ravaged grandeur of his singing and in attracting songwriters keen to benefit from such a uniquely rough-edged, wounded instrument. If his behaviour tested the patience of his record companies beyond endurance, a series of albums – I Can Stand A Little Rain (1974), Jamaica Say You Will (1975), Stingray (1976), Luxury You Can Afford (1978), Standing Tall (1981) – performed creditably, as did the singles culled from them.

And for all his troubles Cocker retained the affection of his industry. When he sang the Crusaders’ I’m So Glad I’m Still Standing Here Today – a song specifically written for him – at the 1982 Grammy Awards, he received a standing ovation and renewed record company interest. It proved a turning point. Up Where We Belong, his duet with Leonard Cohen’s long-time backing singer Jennifer Warnes, was propelled by the success of the Richard Gere/Debra Winger film An Officer and a Gentleman to become his first American No 1. It also won the Oscar for Best Film Song.

On the back of this success he filled large arenas in the US and Europe, especially Germany, where his popularity had never waned. He enjoyed a triumphant return to Sheffield almost 10 years to the day after his last drug-fuelled appearance there.

^{Joe Cocker at the London Palladium in 1987}

Attracting higher quality songwriters, such as Jeff Lyne and Bryan Adams, he enjoyed greater success. Civilised Man (1984), Cocker (1986), Unchain My Heart (1987), One Night Of Sin (1989), Night Calls (1992), Have a Little Faith (1994) and his last album, Fire It Up (2012), all achieved platinum sales.

He also recorded songs for movies, including You Can Leave Your Hat On for Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks, in which he turned Randy Newman’s sly voyeurism into a tidal wave of restrained lust. The singer observed: “I suddenly made a lot of friends. They kept coming over and wanting to see the director’s cut of Kim Basinger stripping for Mickey Rourke.”

Renewed success brought a relative harmony to the singer’s personal life. Supported by his new wife, Pam, whom he had met at Jane Fonda’s house while he was living in Santa Barbara, he rejected heroin, forsook spirits for beer and, after a long struggle, overcame his nicotine addiction. He rejoiced in less turbulent times and bought a ranch in Colorado that he rechristened the “Mad Dog Ranch”. There he raised animals, grew his own food, opened a café and indulged his passion for fly-fishing.

By now bearded, balding and portly, the singer was one of the music industry’s most celebrated survivors and was accorded the appropriate respect. He released occasional albums of “new” material, regular “greatest hits” and “live” collections and even covered his own covers. Capable of filling Old Trafford, he also performed for the Prince’s Trust and the usual flotilla of charity fundraisers.

These included such occasions as Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Concert, the Concert for Berlin after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the inauguration of President Bush and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. But however civilised the setting, Cocker’s voice remained defiantly and magnificently un-housetrained, and his movements on stage as pained as ever.

He is survived by his wife Pam, whom he married in 1987, and by a stepdaughter. His brother, Victor, was chief executive of Severn Trent.

Joe Cocker, born May 20 1944, died December 22 201
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