The Armistice Day Killing by Colin Brown

Author:Colin Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part 7

Three Weeks in November

The Law Moves Speedily

Readers familiar with the pace at which the legal system operates today will be amazed at the speed with which proceedings were expedited in 1923 and 1924. The three preliminary stages of the process were completed within 18 days from the time of the shooting, while the entire case history, including appeal hearing, was completed in around 14 weeks. As we shall see, speed of process was further emphasised at the Winter Assize when the entire trial, including verdict and sentencing, took only one working day to complete.

There were three obvious reasons for such a speedy timetable. Firstly, assize dates were calendar-fixed and there was always a need to expedite cases in time to be fitted into court schedules and to avoid backlogs of business. Secondly, such expedition ensured that prisoners were not sitting around filling essential cell space at public expense for weeks or months at a time. Thirdly, it was important for the wider public to be shown that the authorities were getting on with things and that justice was being done.

Lacking modern communications technology, the potential downside was the pressure on police, the DPP and the prosecuting and defence counsels to prepare and execute cases to the high standards that justice demanded. You may therefore speculate that the perceived need for speed may have been at the expense of a little care in police investigation, report production and case preparation. You may agree with me that procedures were not designed in the interests of parties likely to be severely emotionally affected by events; in particular, readers cannot fail to have the greatest sympathy with the stresses this timetable placed upon Beatrice Ball.

Press Reporting

Before we come to a rational explanation of the legal process following Tommy Ball’s death, it is worth stressing how tangled the contemporary press reports left the entire process. Most of the dozens of provincial newspapers in existence would not have been represented at any of the courts and instead relied on syndicated accounts of the various legal hearings from the London, Birmingham or Stafford presses. These were then subedited with varying degrees of skill into available space and not necessarily by the following day. The international ‘24/7 information ricochet’ we live with today was the best part of a century away.

Often there was no re-editing of the timescales used by the on-site reporters, so that, for example, a ‘parent’ newspaper’s mention of ‘yesterday in court’ might be left untouched by a provincial newspaper’s editorial team even if their paper, many of which were ‘weeklies’ generally coming out on a Saturday, was printing the piece several days later. The phrase ‘yesterday in court’ was you will understand a recurring research nightmare.

Equally confusing was the practice employed by many newspapers, and presumably for reasons of space, of conflating two or more of the November hearings into one. It was pot luck which of the separate court titles was then chosen by the subeditors, who often slipped into the common convenience of calling any hearing a ‘magistrate’s court’.

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