Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

Photo courtesy of David Rowland
Billy Howard would ‘cut ya tongue out and then
chop you into little bits’.
She still testified, as did many others. There was the
burlesque club owner who accused Hammersley of
saying that incriminating evidence could be ‘thrown
in the sea’ for £250; the illegal abortionist, and an
accomplice, who both said they paid bribes; a junior
policeman who claimed Heath had offered him
a £10-a-week protection-money deal with a local
club owner; James Swaby, a man with 13 convictions,
who said Heath solicited bribes from him; a
detective-constable who backed up part of Swaby’s
story; a man who claimed to have seen Bennett give
money in an envelope to Heath, and, on another
occasion, money hidden in a newspaper, to someone
who looked like Ridge.
Then there was Ernest Waite, described by the
Solicitor General as ‘a greengrocer, a fruiterer, an
undischarged bankrupt, a receiver of stolen goods,
and obviously a scoundrel’. He claimed that Hammersley
and Heath let him deal in stolen goods, as
long as they came from outside Brighton. Waite
said he had a ‘sort of freedom of the town’, adding
that ‘it was through Mr Hammersley’s contact that I
got the stolen goods’. In return, Waite said, he gave
money to both policemen, who also used to visit his
shop regularly, take ‘two or three pounds worth of
stuff, give me a ten-shilling note and wait for the
change.’
One defence solicitor described the prosecution
evidence as ‘rotten’. Another said that if a TV show
had this plot ‘you would switch the set off as you
would not believe it.’
The trial closed at the end of February 1958. Lyons
was acquitted, while the other civilian defendant got
three years in prison. Ridge heard his verdict ‘white
faced, with beads of sweat on his forehead,’ the
Gazette reported. Found not guilty, he left the court
‘looking dazed’.
Hammersley and Heath were sentenced to five
years’ imprisonment each. Months earlier, they
had been photographed smiling on the way to the
magistrates’ court (see above), perhaps confident
that, though they were guilty, they could not be
convicted on the evidence of such dubious characters
as Waite, Swaby and Alan Roy Bennett.
Steve Ramsey
Further reading: Bent Cops by David Rowland
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