News of the World, 17th August 1975
See also Don Hale’s recent Mirror article, which alleges that former Home Secretary Leon Brittan “ran Special Branch as his own personal ‘Gestapo’, who monitored fellow MPs.”
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The Australian, 31st January 2015
by Jaquelin Magnay
EVERY Saturday in the school holidays two English brothers, Kevin and Martin Allen, would make their way to Canberra House, just down from the Australia House embassy on London’s Strand to wash the cars of the Australian high commissioner’s fleet.
For five quid each the teenagers would wash and polish, and occasionally squirt each other with a blast of the hose. Kevin Allen remembers how Martin, 18 months his junior, would often break out of his quiet shell and spontaneously grin as they removed the grime of London’s streets from the specially imported Ford Fairlanes in the underground basement.
Those memories are particularly poignant because 35 years ago, on Guy Fawkes night in 1979, Martin Allen vanished without trace. The 15-year-old was last seen at Kings Cross tube station en route to visit his older brother Bob, who had a new baby.
The mystery of what happened to Martin, the son of the Australian high commissioner’s head chauffeur, Tom Allen, has been reignited in recent months after a man, identified only as Nick, says he was the victim of a VIP pedophile ring that included high-ranking politicians, business leaders, intelligence agents and even a royal connection. Nick has linked this pedophile ring directly to the murders of three boys.
Kevin Allen, and the London Metropolitan police, believe Nick’s account that Martin may have been one of three boys killed in the late 1970s and early 80s. One boy is claimed to have been strangled by a sitting Conservative MP; another boy was murdered at an orgy at which a Conservative MP was present; and another abuser struck a boy aged about 10 with his car as a way to intimidate other victims.
No bodies have been found.
The police are taking the claims of Nick, now a middle-aged man, so seriously they have launched an appeal for anyone with knowledge to come forward. The murders are linked to the notorious pedophile hangouts in London at the time: in Elm House, Barnes, another in Dolphin Square, Pimlico — just a short walk from Westminster — and a little-publicised address in Kensington.
For Kevin, who was 16 at the time, the fresh link between his brother’s abduction and an Establishment network has raised questions about how Martin was identified and groomed. Kevin believes he may have been targeted by members of the VIP gang, perhaps after being spotted at his house inside the elegant grounds of the Australian high commissioner’s residence, Stoke Lodge in Kensington, or when cleaning the cars at Canberra House.
The police are now reconsidering the long-held view that it was a chance encounter on London’s transport system that led to Martin’s disappearance, presumably at the hands of a pedophile gang involved in trafficking and the production of pornographic videos.
Diplomats, royals, government ministers, business executives and Margaret Thatcher were frequent visitors to Stoke Lodge in the late 1970s when the former Liberal politician Gordon Freeth was the Australian high commissioner. The Allen family lived in the caretaker’s five-bedroom cottage in the grounds, separated from Stoke Lodge by just a few metres across a wrought-iron low-level fence about one metre high.
“It was quite secluded where we were; people didn’t have any reason to come down there unless they lived there, really,’’ Kevin tells Inquirer. The well-heeled jewellery family, the De Beers, were neighbours, so, too, the Showerings, who owned Allied Breweries, and there was an Arab king to the right. The street, Hyde Park Gate, is particularly famed as Sir Winston Churchill lived and died there.
“We would often go into the garden and speak to visitors at Stoke Lodge,” says Kevin. “My mum and I even stood at the fence and chatted to Prince Charles and Princess Diana once when they visited.” Martin took a photograph of Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis when they were leaving one of the receptions at Stoke Lodge.
Tom Allen, had been promoted to head chauffeur in about 1974 and with the position came the privileged address near Hyde Park, not far from the West End. Kevin’s bedroom was at the far end of the cottage, but Martin’s was halfway along the hallway, directly overlooking the ambassadorial residence.
Since November last year, when police started fresh inquiries into the historical abuse of children by the VIP pedophile gang, Kevin has started his own digging.
What has shocked him, apart from what he believes is an apparent disinterest of the police in re-examining Martin’s disappearance, are the staggering links the Australian high commission had to men who would later be revealed as some of the country’s most vile pedophiles.
Kevin says it was standard practice for the high commission to supplement its regular drivers with stand-in and casual drivers from a particular chauffeur firm located just across the Thames.
His research has revealed that this chauffeur firm had, at various times, employed Sidney Cooke, whose gang the “Dirty Dozen’’ would later be convicted and jailed for the torture and murder of three young boys in the 80s. Jimmy Savile’s chauffeur, David Smith, who killed himself last year before standing trial on sex charges, is believed to have had links to the same car company in the late 70s. Cooke and his pedophile cohort are understood to have been some of the drivers who would pick up young care-home boys and rent boys in the expensive cars and deliver them to organised orgies in Barnes, Pimlico and Kensington.
“All about at the same time as Martin’s disappearance, all of these pedophiles were linked to the (known pedophile) houses and a couple of them worked for the one car company that Australia House used as subbies if they didn’t have enough drivers,’’ says Kevin, blinking back tears.
“Cooke and a few other infamous multi-murdering people worked for this car company.”
Kevin leans back in his chair in the small canteen of his Middlesex workplace and stresses that such a link could be critical.
“It is more than a link,” he insists. “This was a time when kids were sold and traded; there was one gang selling kids to Amsterdam. These guys were trafficking kids, someone wanted something specific and they found it and if they didn’t fit bill at the end of the day, they abused them and disposed of them.’’
Kevin said Martin could easily have been spotted by one of the stand-in drivers while they were washing the high commissioner’s fleet of cars or outside Stoke Lodge and noted his brother’s quiet nature and young appearance.
“Just thinking about it …’’ Kevin trails off and shakes his head.
Cooke, known as Hissing Sid, would lure young boys from fairgrounds to be gang raped. Police are continuing to look into any links he or his associates may have had with the VIP pedophile network.
Cooke, now serving two life sentences, was certainly in the frame at the very beginning of the police investigation into Martin’s disappearance because they asked Kevin if the boys had been to any fairgrounds.
One now-retired lead detective believes Cooke is behind the disappearance of at least 17 boys and the Dutch police believe he was involved in trafficking young boys for the lucrative young boy trade in Europe.
Kevin says his instinct has always been that Martin was the victim of someone in authority.
“The detective in charge sat in our house one Sunday lunchtime and asked me, ‘What do you think happened, Kev?’. I told him I thought Martin had been taken by a higher or elite person and he sat there, pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You shouldn’t be saying things like that, you could get hurt’.” Kevin still remembers how rattled he was at the response. “At 17 you don’t expect that,’’ he says. “I wasn’t wrong, was I? Thirty-five years down the line and now it is front page.’’
For more than 30 years, the activities of this incredibly well-connected pedophile network was apparently protected from scrutiny through the issuing of government D-notices, which prevent media publication of anything deemed to affect national security. It is believed this stymied police investigations. Hundreds of files relating to the disclosures and evidence about the VIP pedophile ring have since gone missing. Kevin says the files relating to Martin’s disappearance have been destroyed twice.
Only now, under parliamentary privilege, some politicians are speaking about the network to which, incredibly, some serving politicians are linked.
One serving Labour peer is under investigation for sexually assaulting young boys in the 70s. Last week, former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, who was publicly accused of covering up investigations of the pedophile network in the 1980s after being handed an explosive dossier from a fellow politician, died of cancer. Within days of his death evidence emerged that Brittan had been photographed attending a rent boy orgy back in 1986.
London’s Sunday Mirror has reported the young boys were picked up at Kings Cross and dropped off at a north London building to be repeatedly raped, but the day before the planned arrests of Brittan and 16 high-profile figures who had been observed entering the under-age sex den, including another politician, the late Cyril Smith, and some judges, the 1986 investigation was inexplicably disbanded.
One of the boys abused told police before Brittan died that the politician was “nasty, cruel, sadistic and hateful’’. Brittan’s name also appears on lists of visitors to the notorious Elm Guest House in Barnes, southwest London. This was an Edwardian house where well-connected political figures would exploit and abuse orphans from nearby Richmond in the 70s and 80s. It is alleged the partygoers would select boys for the “party’’ from pictorial records of the various care homes.
Police started looking at the possibility of Martin’s abduction and abuse at Elm Guest House soon after he went missing, and it intensified when another boy, Vishal Mehrotra, 8, the son of a magistrate, disappeared less than 3km from Barnes on the night of the 1981 royal wedding. Mehrotra’s body was found a year later, but his murder is still unsolved.
Last year, Home Secretary Theresa May announced a public inquiry into all of the allegations of cover-ups surrounding historic child sexual abuse. Yet there is still no inquiry head after the first two chairmen were revealed to have family and friendship links to some of the people under investigation. Meanwhile, public confidence in the political system to investigate its own has nose-dived.
Scotland Yard would not comment on its investigations. “Detectives from the Child Abuse Investigation Command are working closely with colleagues from the Homicide and Major Crime Command under the name of Operation Midland,’’ a statement from Scotland Yard says.
For Kevin and the extended Allen family, the heartache, now in its fourth decade, continues without resolution.
Martin Allen in 1979, the year he vanished
Kevin and Martin Allen at Tuffnell Park primary school.
Chauffeurs for the Australian high commission in London in the 1970s, including the boys’ father, Thomas Allen, fourth from left, who has since died.
Stoke Lodge, the Australian high commissioner’s residence in London. The Allen family lived in a cottage in the grounds.
Kevin Allen in London
Daily Mirror, 19th December 1986
Daily Mirror, 3rd August 1987
Evening Argus (Brighton), 16th April 1986
More on the 1983 Brighton case here
The Law (The Newspaper of the Essex Police), May 1986
Napier is an evil,calculating, manipulative paedophile
The charges he was found guilty on today were the tip of the iceberg for the scale of abuse he carried out over 40 years
After been found guilty of abuse as early as 1972, Napier was placed on List 99 with the Department of Education and so should not have been allowed to teach again
However Peter Righton, an equally devious and prolific abuser, intervened
As Director of Education at the National Institute for Social Work, Righton had become a prestigious and respected social work professional.
( The National Institute for Social Work – NISW – was a provider of services aimed at achieving excellence in practice and management in social work and social care in the UK and past employees include Sir Peter Barclay – Author with Righton of the Barclay Report – Sir Williiam Utting – Author of the Utting Report – Daphne Statham – Director – Dame Denise Platt – Chair of the Commission for Social Care Inspection – Barbara Hearn OBE Panel member on Independent Inquiry 2014 )
Righton on headed NISW paper wrote to the Department of Education claiming he was a counsellor of convicted paedophiles ( in reality they were his close knit PIE friends ) and that he had counselled Napier to the point he was no longer a risk to children and could return to teaching.
He added in his letter to the D of Ed that to be doubly certain he ( Righton ) had sought a second opinion from a well known child psychiatrist who concurred with his expert opinion
The psychiatrist in question was Dr.Morris Fraser, another convicted paedophile and PIE member who wrote a supporting report on Great Ormond St headed note paper
This allowed Napier to embark on a new teaching career abroad employed by the British Council, founded by the UK Government in 1934
He was able ( by his own admission in a number of letters to Righton over many years ) to abuse countless number of boys in Sweden and Egypt over many years in the late 70’s through the 80’s until 1992 when the arrest of Righton and the discovery of these letters led to his ( Napier’s) immediate dismissal
Napier and Righton ” shared ” a large number of victims, and offences,including rape, during the 80’s but never faced charges on any of the most serious cases of abuse
Many questions remain unanswered including who were Napier’s referees for his employment with the British Council
Why was Righton allowed to reach the very top of the social work profession ( with posts at NISW and the National Children’s Bureau as stepping stones to positions as a Home Office/ Government “expert” on major reports ) despite being caught red handed abusing boys on a large scale in the 1950’s and writing quite openly in NISW and NCB journals, articles etc from 1971 onwards about his views that adult and child sexual relationships were not necessarily harmful
In 1993 I spoke to 3 victims who refused to give evidence
One told me very convincingly that Napier took him to parties ” where he was introduced to the rich and famous ” and that Righton was involved in all these activities as well
In court today Napier’ s Counsel stated that Napier was now full of remorse
I don’t believe he has shown one iota of remorse in an adulthood dedicated to the ruthless pursuit of vulnerable children purely to abuse sexually
As a true test of his new found “remorse ” he can now share with the Police all the names of the ” rich and famous ” who attended the parties his victims referred to
As Treasurer of the Paedophile Information Exchange in its peak period of membership in the mid 70’s Napier holds the key to the identity of hundreds of dangerous abusers who continued to abuse thousands of children over many decades
He can now pass all this information to the Police as testament to his newly found regret and remorse
[1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL CRIMINAL DIVISION
No: 95/5861/Z4
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London WC2
Friday 8th December 1995
Before: Lord Justice Russell Mr Justice Rougier and His Honour Judge Rhys Davies QC (Sitting as a Judge of the Court of Appeal)
Regina
v.
Charles Scott Napier
MISS Z SMITH appeared on behalf of the Appellant
MR B KELLY appeared on behalf of the Crown
(Computer Aided Transcript of the Stenograph Notes of John Larking, Chancery House, Chancery Lane, London WC2 Telephone No: 071 404 7464 Official Shorthand Writers to the Court)
JUDGMENT
(As Approved by the Court)
Transcript [1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8 2
Friday 8th December 1995
JUDGMENT
MR JUSTICE ROUGIER: On 14th August 1995 at Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court, the applicant was convicted on two counts of indecent assault upon a male person, and was sentenced to 9 months’ imprisonment concurrent on each.
His application for leave to appeal against that conviction has been referred to the Full Court by the learned Single Judge.
The principal ground of proposed appeal centres around a television programme which was made on the subject of paedophiles in general, and a man called Righton in particular, sometime before the trial of the applicant. It is necessary to set out the dates in some detail. At some stage, we are not told exactly when, but it is in all probability in 1994, the police raided the house of Righton, and they discovered a whole lot of photographs of naked boys, together with letters written by the applicant, which indicated that he too shared Righton’s proclivities and therefore he came under suspicion. At about the same time a documentary was being made by the BBC on the subject of Righton and child abuse, called “Children at Risk”.
The complainant in the applicant’s case, whom we shall refer to as D, made a statement under the Criminal Justice Act implicating the applicant in March 1994. The film was shown on relatively prime time at 8.00 p.m. on 1st June 1994, but it was not until 10th January 1995 that the applicant was arrested and, as already stated, his trial took place in August.
Transcript [1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8 3
By the first two grounds of proposed appeal the complaint is made, baldly, that in the light of that television film a fair trial was not possible, it had been gravely prejudiced, and that the learned judge was wrong in failing to stay the proceedings on the grounds that publicity had rendered a fair trial impossible, all the more so because the prosecution, in the form of the police, had assisted in the adverse publicity. That reference was to the fact that while the film was being made and researches were being done, the Hereford, Worcester and West Midlands police co-operated by passing relevant information to the maker of the film.
In relation to that the learned judge was faced with a problem of some difficulty. There undoubtedly had been a film which had identified the applicant on three occasions. This Court has had the benefit of seeing the relevant extracts. They occupy approximately 9 minutes in all, in a transmission totalling some 55 minutes and undoubtedly the applicant is portrayed as a paedophile. He is indeed referred to as somebody who had been convicted of a paedophilic offence, if there is such a word, which was quite true. There also were photographs of him in the company of young boys in Sweden and there are some extracts from letters which he had written to Righton, describing with almost gloating pederasty the physical appearance and availability of young boys either under his charge or within his influence.
Transcript [1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8 4
The learned judge, in a very careful ruling, marshalled the pros and cons, and having referred to the relevant authorities he noted that the prosecution were not seeking, as part of their case, to adduce evidence concerning the applicant’s involvement in paedophile organisations, it having been alleged in the transmission that at some time he was the treasurer of something called the Paedophile Information Exchange. He noted, as we too have been able to note, that D did not appear on the television programme, he was not named and he made no specific allegation of indecent assault against the applicant. The learned judge correctly squared up to the problem in these words:
“The question I have to resolve is whether there is a real prospect that one or more jurors may have seen and remembered the television programme so far as it relates to the defendant and if so whether, in those circumstances, the defendant could possibly receive a fair trial.”
He noted that it was unsatisfactory that publicity adverse to the defendant was made at a time when there were reasonable grounds to believe that a prosecution was pending or contemplated but that, as my Lord has pointed out, is a disciplinary matter and had nothing to do with the problem which the learned judge had to resolve. He went on to say this:
Transcript [1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8 5
“I have to bear in mind also that the television programme and reports took place some fourteen months ago. I have to consider the likelihood of whether they were seen or remembered by members of the jury and I also have to consider what safeguards or precautions might usefully be taken in respect of the jury.
At the end of the day I have come to the conclusion that, provided jurors confirm that they neither have any knowledge of this defendant nor any other prosecution witness and provided they are given an appropriate warning in the summing-up in accordance with the state of the evidence as it develops to the effect that they must consider only the evidence heard in Court and nothing extraneous should be taken into consideration, then in my view a fair trial of this defendant is possible and it follows that I am therefore not persuaded, as matters stand, that he cannot have a fair trial…”
He thereupon rejected the submission.
As a matter of later history, it should be said that no possible criticism could be or has been made as to the way in which the learned judge dealt with the matter in his summing-up.
It is a strongly held, which has been the subject of a good deal of research notably from the Legal Faculty of Sheffield University, that the capacity for retaining material either heard on the wireless or seen on the television, on the part of the avid viewer, is remarkably short. The jury were asked the appropriate questions and all denied any recollection or knowledge of the matters which had so worried Miss Smith, acting for the applicant. They were duly empannelled.
Transcript [1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8 6
We think that it is very difficult to see that the learned judge could have done other than he did, and we cannot see that any possible criticism can be levelled at the decision to which he came.
There is no conceivable suspicion that he failed to take into account all the relevant matters and, in particular, possibly the most telling feature supporting his decision was the fact that the transmission had taken place no fewer than 14 months before the trial. If it is to be said that whenever, during a subject of great public concern, an investigative team of journalists of one sort or another do make public matters which certainly indicate that serious crimes have been committed, that they are thereby insulating the perpetrators of those crimes from prosecution, that is not something with which this Court can possibly agree. Accordingly we find there is no substance in those first two grounds.
The third ground is really an adjunct of the first two, because after the complainant had completed his evidence, it was noted that there had been a number of occasions when he had been referred to as being interviewed by a television producer and it is feared that that might have reminded any member of the jury who had seen the programme and had forgotten about it about the adverse publicity. By the same token, we are of the view that it is extremely unlikely that this would have had any effect, and the learned judge cannot be criticised at that stage for thinking that the trial could still be conducted fairly and that any possible prejudice could be cured by an accurate summing-up.
Transcript [1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8 7
Finally, Miss Smith relies on part of a letter which was written by the defendant to a friend of his called Bloomfield when these matters were being investigated. There is a reference to ‘witch hunting’ in the letter and an Evening Standard article. It is complained that by reason of the fact that the learned judge allowed that letter to be exhibited, the defendant had been effectively precluded from giving evidence in his own defence because he would have to explain what the witch hunt was all about and thereby again remind the jury of the previous highly adverse television programme.
The prosecution in seeking to adduce that part of the letter submitted to the learned judge that it was capable of being an admission relating to the very crimes which were alleged in the case, and the learned judge took the view that it was entirely a matter for the jury to consider whether it did amount to some sort of admission or whether, on the other hand, they took the view that it did not, in which case they would disregard it. In our judgment, he was perfectly correct in that ruling, and since the prosecution had already announced that they did not intend to rely on any of this applicant’s paedophile associations as part of their case, the fear that he would have to explain what was meant by “witch hunt” seems to us more imaginary than real.
Transcript [1995] EWCA Crim J1208-8 8
In those circumstances we think that the learned judge’s ruling was perfectly correct. There is no merit in this application and it must be refused.
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