A6 Rebooted

[Natalie Severn]

Ofcourse I have addressed your points Graham.I am talking about a man who was not in regular work,did not have any reason to clock watch and was ,as I put it, in the business of "ducking an diving".You appear to want to see us all as punctilious clock watchers and regular time keepers.People have different mind sets-not everybody checks their watches regularly by any means.
Also I wasn't attempting to address every point---others on here can take some of them up.I spoke about other witnesses such as Barbara Ford and Linda Walton remembering they had definitely been in the sweetshop=on the Tuesday 22nd August 1961=between 4pm and 5pm=with Linda distinctly remembering that Barbara had gone behind the counter and served lollyices.They remembered she was busy serving when they were there and Mrs Dinwoodieherself said in her testimony that the LIverpool Echo had arrived.
Barbara Ford identified Hanratty too.


Re Slough and Alphon ---I will double check this but I am pretty sure both Foot and Woffinden refer to him having lived in or near Slough.He certainly went regularly to Slough dog racing .I personally am not very interested in Alphon.I think its possible from things he said about Southend that he may have had something to do with the gun---I am not too sure I want to revisit all that stuff myself as it has little to do with the
complete lack of evidence that Hanratty was down South at the time which given the huge public interest in the case at that time it is really, really ,astonishing----- the only sightings of him were in Rhyl ,Liverpool and Da Costa's Euston Station sighting.
Given his Soho haunts -the Rehearsal club etc and his girl friends down South its really astonishing nobody ever once came forward . then or since, to say they had seen Hanratty in or near London on 22nd pm/or 23/or 24 August 1961!

[Natalie Severn]

Mrs Dinwoodie distinctly remembered taking the young man to the door and pointing to the bus stop .she told him that he needed to go back to central Liverpool as there was a Tarleton street there.

[OneRound]

Graham - thank you for such a thorough and masterly post concerning Mrs D and the sweetshop.

That certainly demonstrates why I cannot conclude that Hanratty was ''definitely'' in the sweetshop at the time Louisa believes he was.

Louisa criticised Sherrard in an earlier post for not hammering home more to the jury about this incident. Your post shows the difficulty for Sherrard and peril for Hanratty at the time of doing so.

Best regards,

OneRound

[louisa]

# 1095 - Good post Graham and you could well be correct. I have rather an open mind about Alphon being the murderer but I am more inclined to think that he was. He fits the bill to a 'T' of the kind of person who would have done it - far more so than Hanratty.

[caz]

A couple of comments regarding JH's Liverpool Alibi:

1] He said he, for whatever reason, wrongly went to Paddington station instead of Euston yet by his own admission had travelled by train from London to Liverpool a number of times previously. Is it just coincidence that Paddington is the station which connects London with places like Maidenhead and Slough?

2] JH said he caught either the 10.55 or 11.55 train. No trains left Euston for Liverpool at those times. There was a train leaving at 10.35am arriving Liverpool at 3.25pm. But JH said he arrived at Liverpool between 4.00 and 5.00 pm. Mrs Dinwoodie said the man who asked for directions came into her shop at about 4.00pm but on the Monday.

3] JH said there was a 'clerky gent' on the train to Liverpool, wearing gold cufflinks initialled with the letter 'E'. Is it (again) a coincidence that he burgled a house in Harrow on 12 August and nicked six sets of gold cufflinks initialled with the letter 'E'?

4] Peter Usher, one of the men on duty at Lime Street Station left-luggage, was doing the 6.00am to 2.00pm shift on the day JH claimed he was there - see above the times he gave for his arrival at Lime Street. Usher claimed to remember a man whose name he thought was 'Ratty', but JH himself said he used a false name. Sherrard did not call Usher as a witness because his evidence would not 'fit' JH's claimed arrival time, and also because Sherrard thought that Usher was showing an unhealthy need to "get in on the act".

5] Re: the sweetshop. There were 29 sweetshops in Scotland Road. JH claimed the one he went into was opposite a cinema. Years ago on this thread a poster (Steve) took some photos of the site upon which Mrs Dinwoodie's shop, now demolished, had stood. This was 408 Scotland Road, a much altered thoroughfare since 1961. However, Steve suggested (if my memory is reliable) there was no sign that this shop stood opposite a cinema.

6] Mrs Dinwoodie was shown only one photo, that of JH, by DC Pugh who interviewed her, against all acceptable police procedure.

7] Mrs Dinwoodie said that she thought the man who asked about 'Tarleton Avenue' had a Scots or Welsh accent - JH spoke with a cockney accent. (OK, I concede that Mrs D may not have met too many cockneys in Liverpool, but she almost certainly had spoken to Scots and Welsh people).

8] Mrs Dinwoodie's grand-daughter helped out in the shop at times. JH said that a 'little girl' was in the shop when he called in. Mrs D said it was 'definitely the Monday, because I was alone on the Tuesday, and my grand-daughter was with me only on the Monday'.

9] Mrs Dinwoodie said the man called in her shop at about 4.00pm. Getting back to timing, if JH had caught the 10.35 train from Euston which arrived Liverpool at 3.25pm, he could not have been in Mrs D's shop at 4.00pm as according to his own statement he had a wash and a cup of tea at Lime Street Station before catching a bus to Scotland Road.

10] Mrs Dinwoodie said she was unwell on the day the man asking for Tarleton Road came into the shop; the next day she was very ill.

11] Finally, Mrs D's statement that the man was asking for 'Tarleton Road or Avenue' was actually derived from second-hand evidence. The shop's owner, Mrs Cowley, was interviewed by DC Pugh who told her that the police were 'looking for a man who came into a sweetshop on Scotland Road asking for directions to Tarleton Road or Avenue. Mrs Cowley passed on this information to Mrs D before she, Mrs D, was interviewed by DC Pugh on his return to the shop. That was the occasion when he showed her just the one photo, that of James Hanratty. In other words, Mrs D's recollection that 'the man' was asking for Tarleton Road or Avenue came indirectly, via the police, from JH himself. I wonder if DC Pugh got the bollocking he deserved?

I simply cannot accept that James Hanratty was in a Liverpool sweetshop on the afternoon of 22 August 1961 as he claimed.

Sorry for the length of this post.

Graham

Hi Graham,

No apologies for quoting you in full here. It saddens me, but doesn't surprise me, that nobody has had any comment to make about your point 3] above, which I have highlighted.

It reads just like the kind of lie a child tells when he is in trouble with teacher. He will use something he has experienced very recently to form the basis of the lie, and here is an absolute classic. He didn't even have the wit to change the initial to a more common one than E.

Come on people, can't you see what's staring you in the face? This was a desperate man clutching at all the wrong straws, and if proper procedures had been adhered to by the police at the time (in particular, not giving potential witnesses any help with what Hanratty had claimed, and showing them a range of mug shots and not just his - these two mistakes really do beggar belief), I strongly suspect the sweetshop 'alibi' would not have been worth two ounces of sherbert lemons.

Hanratty needed only one unwavering witness to confirm - unprompted - just one part of his own account regarding place and time, his appearance and the circumstances. The point Nats makes about nobody down south claiming to have seen him may be a fair one, except that it was a question the prosecution didn't need to ask in the end. The question the defence needed to answer was how a drifter like Hanratty could have been in teeming Liverpool and busy Rhyl all that time without being able to prove it beyond all doubt, one way or another, when his very life would depend on it.

A hundred weak witnesses do not make up for the lack of a single sound one.

Love,

Caz
X

[Natalie Severn]

Graham - thank you for such a thorough and masterly post concerning Mrs D and the sweetshop.

That certainly demonstrates why I cannot conclude that Hanratty was ''definitely'' in the sweetshop at the time Louisa believes he was.

Louisa criticised Sherrard in an earlier post for not hammering home more to the jury about this incident. Your post shows the difficulty for Sherrard and peril for Hanratty at the time of doing so.

Best regards,

OneRound

Hi One Round,
just to illustrate that Mr Sherrard made a very fine job of sorting the situation out and did not seek to avoid the matter in anyway:

[Graham]

Hang on - if I understand this correctly (and I haven't got my books with me at the moment) is Mr Harding saying that he encountered Hanratty at about 6.00pm or later? If so, then as there was only one bus from Liverpool to Rhyl, which left Liverpool at 6.00pm, this can't be right as Hanratty must've been on that bus if, as he claimed, he was in Rhyl on the evening of the 22nd.

No-one is disputing that Mr Sherrard didn't do as fine a job as he possibly could under the difficult circumstances, but he couldn't make bricks without straw, and when it came to vagueness Hanratty was a past master.

Graham

[Natalie Severn]

I am posting some pages dealing with the Liverpool alibi.from Paul Foot's book,'Who Killed Hanratty?'
Paul bought the entire trial transcript ,it is still in the family and all his work undertaken over 5 years in the late 60's and 70's was meticulously researched. The quote I posted above includes a direct quote from the trial.
I do not have a scanner that works so have had to digitise photos of the pages I have copied onto a camera.I hope they may help here.There are a lot more dealing with LIverpool.I think they can be read-though I am sorry about their presentation .But they illustrate the kind of speculation,doubt and uncertainty that pervaded everything that went on in that trial which taken against the backdrop of the changed identification details by Valerie from dark eyes to blue etc , her mistaken identifation of Michael Clark, the changed statements of Nudds and Galves ,the other fatal and corrupt evidence of yet another notorious prison informer [as if Nudds was not enough] [B]Roy Langdale. His nonsense---for that was what it was according to those who knew Hanratty and according to Paul Foot who said everything Langdale claimed he was 'privy to' had been spread across every media.Nevertheless it led to the denial of a reprieve for Hanratty [by Butler then Home Secretary] .In all an outrageously skewed trial and quite disgusting to read as soon as you read about it in any depth.

[Natalie Severn]

Hang on - if I understand this correctly (and I haven't got my books with me at the moment) is Mr Harding saying that he encountered Hanratty at about 6.00pm or later? If so, then as there was only one bus from Liverpool to Rhyl, which left Liverpool at 6.00pm, this can't be right as Hanratty must've been on that bus if, as he claimed, he was in Rhyl on the evening of the 22nd.

No-one is disputing that Mr Sherrard didn't do as fine a job as he possibly could under the difficult circumstances, but he couldn't make bricks without straw, and when it came to vagueness Hanratty was a past master.

Graham

Hi
I am doing my best to post the transcripts about it from Paul Foot's book.They cover a number of pages........talk about cross purposes---Foot is illustrating how imprecise Harding's memory of time is---and Mr Harding,like Hanratty states he was not a clock watcher---but reading the follow on page Foot tackles your point and has got Mr Harding to admit that going by his own log book he could have got back earlier on the Tuesday-around 5 pm it appears

[louisa]

Caz. I had also noticed the fact that Hanratty stole cufflinks with the letter 'E' on them and then told the court that he saw a gent with the letter 'E' on his gold cufflinks on the train to Liverpool. I remember thinking this was very coincidental - and odd - and wondered why the prosecution did not pick up on this.

However, would Hanratty really have been so naive to have mentioned the gold 'E' cufflinks as part of his alibi if it wasn't true? If he was going to make it up then surely he would have used another letter of the alphabet, rather than risking the prosecution picking up on this 'coincidence'? Just a thought.

There were a number of strange coincidences in this case and maybe, just maybe, this is one more?

Also.....I reckon that if I took a train to Liverpool and stayed all day, wandering about, I doubt very much if anyone would remember me - not even the day afterwards, not even if I'd got on a bus to Rhyll. Somebody may remember me if I'd asked for directions though, especially with my London accent.


Natalie - thanks for posting those attachments, I'll be reading them later.

[Natalie Severn]

I would very much like a source link over this letter E engraved gold cuff links story .I have several sources for the man on the train with e engraved ones but nothing anywhere about what Graham writes of" E engraved gold cuff links from a burglary.
I have searched throughout the books I have and found nothing at all remotely like it.Can you post the source Graham? Thankyou.N

[Graham]

I would very much like a source link over this letter E engraved gold cuff links story .I have several sources for the man on the train with e engraved ones but nothing anywhere about what Graham writes of" E engraved gold cuff links from a burglary.
I have searched throughout the books I have and found nothing at all remotely like it.Can you post the source Graham? Thankyou.N

With pleasure. Bob Woffinden - "Hanratty The Final Verdict", 1999 paperback edition, page 97.

Graham

[Natalie Severn]

Hang on - if I understand this correctly (and I haven't got my books with me at the moment) is Mr Harding saying that he encountered Hanratty at about 6.00pm or later? If so, then as there was only one bus from Liverpool to Rhyl, which left Liverpool at 6.00pm, this can't be right as Hanratty must've been on that bus if, as he claimed, he was in Rhyl on the evening of the 22nd.

No-one is disputing that Mr Sherrard didn't do as fine a job as he possibly could under the difficult circumstances, but he couldn't make bricks without straw, and when it came to vagueness Hanratty was a past master.

Graham

Thanks for the info on the cuff links---I no longer have the Woffinden book-I took it back to the library at long last after umpteen renewals!

Itrust you have read Paul Foot's follow up explaining the Mr Hammond matter .If you need anymore on this I can post it tomorrow.

Something which I did when I used to visit my relatives,several of whom lived in Birkenhead as I once did,was catch the Rhyl Bus which was waiting
outside Lime Street Station,directly opposite St George's PLace where Mr Kempt stood outside his billiard Hall.It was usually waiting for a long time in Skelhorne St ,in full view of the square with RHYL written in large letters across the front.It was like that until relatively recently-2006 approx -in fact there is still the bus stop there for other buses but the Rhyl bus now leaves from behind Lime Street Station.It went through the Mersey Tunnel and Birkenhead and then onto Rhyl.It was a bus you could put your hand out for and it would stop because there were only two or three a day.But once National Express took over from Crosville about 18 years ago and then time was of the essence---they could get you to London nearly as quickly as a train--well in 5 hours,not bad.

[Graham]

I just re-read Paul Foot with reference to Mr Harding's evidence, and I don't find it convincing at all. Both he and Mrs Dinwoodie said initially that the man came into the shop on the Monday, and nothing that either Mr Harding or Paul Foot says or infers alters this for me. One other point - Hanratty said that there was a little girl in the shop when he called. If this 'little girl' was Barbara Ford, then according to her own testimony she was actually accompanied by her friend Linda. Paul Foot in my view just confuses matters even further. I'll see what Woffinden has to say when I've got a minute.

By the way - if an accused person suddenly changes his alibi, as Hanratty did, would the jury be obliged to immediately forget everything he said concerning his original alibi, or would both alibis be considered by the jury when debating their verdict? Something that's always puzzled me, and if anything was ever said about this in the books I've read, then I've missed it.

Graham

[louisa]

Anyone that claims to have seen Hanratty in Liverpool on the 21st is clearly mistaken Because, as everybody knows, he was in London all day and spent the night at the Vienna Hotel.

I would think that the jury would have to take everything on board. The original alibi, then the admission of the lie, and then the new Rhyll alibi.

I have to say that if I was on a jury and was told that the defendant had lied about his alibi, then I would start to think that nothing he said could be trusted. I suspect that the jury in the Hanratty trial thought so too. Even before the Rhyll alibi was introduced, I reckon they must have been quite befuddled by all of the conflicting and complicated evidence.

Also, in those days the public had the highest regard for the police.