11 July — 60th anniversary of former SAS man Detective Sergeant Harold Challenor arresting a cartoonist, planting half a brick on him, and actually uttering the words “You’re fucking nicked, my beauty” in real life.
In 1943, according to his Telegraph obituary, he and five other men were parachuted in behind enemy lines in Italy, “and four of the six were never seen alive again”. Challenor’s mission was successful…
With Lieutenant Thomas Wedderburn, who was nicknamed “Tojo” for his short stature and thick glasses, Challenor moved across mountainous terrain by night until they found their objective, a tunnel on the La Spezia-Bologna line. As they finished placing their charges, they heard a train approaching on the “down” line and had to sprint for their lives out of the tunnel. Moments after the first explosion, a second train rattled into the tunnel on the “up” line. Both trains were derailed and destroyed amid an almighty cacophony of torn metal and splintered wood, and the line was completely blocked.
They blew up another train a few days later, walked 300 miles to try to get back on the right side of the lines, and took refuge with
a peasant matriarch, Mama Eliseio, took them in until they were finally captured, just after Christmas.
Wedderburn spent the rest of the war in captivity. Challenor walked out of the POW camp “disguised as a washerwoman, and returned to the Eliseio family farm”. Then he was captured again “just short of the front line … made a run for it in bare feet, and got through.”
After the war, he joined CID, and then the Flying Squad, and had an initially impressive record. His Guardian obit describes the early years:
He was “a self-appointed scourge of Soho” (Guardian) “with 600 arrests and 18 commendations to his name” (Times), but his methods and attitudes became increasingly… challenging, let’s say.
“Fighting crime in Soho was like trying to swim against a tide of sewage,” he wrote later. “For every villain put behind bars there were always two more to take their place.”
In response, Challenor’s modus operandi became increasingly violent and unorthodox: in the case of a Barbadian called Padmore, brought in on suspicion of living off immoral earnings, it involved singing “Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo”, while repeatedly punching the suspect.
Well, yes: more like out-and-out racist. His downfall came when cartoonist Donald Rooum and others protested outside Claridge’s at the presence in the country of former Hitler Youth member (and descendant of Queen Victoria) Queen Frederika of Greece.
Rooum had been threatening the peace by, er… carrying a banner, so Challenor slapped him round the head several times and took him in.
Challenor’s… creative way with evidence had always got him results before. Which magistrate, judge or jury in the 1950s and 60s is going to believe a Soho gangster over a decorated war hero? Rooum was a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, though. Back to the Guardian:
Rooum was told that Challenor had found a brick in his pocket and was charged with carrying an offensive weapon. He refused to sign for it as part of his property and, kept in custody overnight, handed over his clothes to his solicitor at the first court hearing the next morning. No brick dust was found in his pocket and he was acquitted by magistrate Edward Robey, who nevertheless refused his costs. Another defendant to appear before Robey called the same scientific evidence as Rooum but was found guilty, although his conviction was later quashed.
Challenor found himself, in 1964, in the Old Bailey himself, charged with corruption. He began to unravel. The Times:
It was only after the failure of the prosecution of Rooum that Challenor’s superior officers understood that his boisterous, eccentric behaviour and habit of shouting were not due merely to a volatile, hyper-energetic temperament combined with growing deafness. The medical diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia. The official report into “the circumstances in which it was possible for Challenor to continue on duty at a time when he appears to have been affected by the onset of mental illness” did not consider the possibility that he might also have been a victim of what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
He told a friend, “When a man is obliged to spend months behind enemy lines and is taught to take a pleasure in killing, it is bound to leave some mark on his personality.” He had also had a “brutal, hard-drinking” father who’d stopped him taking up a grammar school scholarship.
Not that that excuses everything else, but it may go some way to explaining why he worked 100-hour weeks, marched 15 miles home every night from London to Surrey, “arriving with feet that bled” and, apparently, “reliv[ed] his wartime escapes after dark in Hyde Park”.
There were those who were unconvinced, and pleading insanity became known as “doing a Challenor”, according to William Donaldson’s (not always reliable) Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics.
He eventually became a solicitor’s clerk, and the protection gang he’d busted had their convictions quashed. He also inspired the corrupt Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton’s Loot. And his Guardian obituary inexplicably signs off with this:
Anyway, we finish with a magnificently colourful story from Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics (which has a habit of printing the legend, but we shouldn’t allow that to prevent us from enjoying a good yarn):
His policing methods were always unorthodox. Once he persuaded a small-time thief to take him to a criminals’ pub in Soho so that other crooks could be pointed out to him. Since the man was reluctant to be seen drinking with a known policeman, Challenor wore a woman’s wig and borrowed an evening frock, nylon stockings, high-heel shoes and a handbag from his wife, Doris. Dressed like this, and heavily made up, he sat nursing a gin and tonic while his informer identified the villains present. All went well until he almost blew his cover by visiting the gentlemen’s lavatory by mistake. ‘I have recently had a mis-carriage,’ Challenor explained to its occupants, and still feel a little light-headed.’ Later, he was propositioned by one of the men from the lavatory, but was rescued by his companion who maintained the deception by calling him ‘a silly old cow’.
