Page 28 Daily Mail, Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Jack’s execution, ordered by then
Home Secretary Winston Churchill,
marked the beginning of a blight on
my family, which was inextricably
bound up with World War I, the
Depression of the 1920s and the
‘hungry’ 1930s, which saw millions
of working-class families struggling
to survive.
Only now, more than a century later
and after years of painstaking
research, can the full truth about my
family be told.
The story began at Newcastle
Central Station on March 18, 1910.
Jack Dickman had been a colliery
clerk but, after coming into an
inheritance from his late mother’s
family in France, set himself up as a
speculator to wealthy coal merchants
in the city, helping identify where new
pit shafts could be sunk.
He also ran an illegal bookies,
placing bets for rich clients, as he
travelled to races up and down
the country.
The world depicted in TV’s Peaky
Blinders was real to Jack. If he had a
big win, he’d roll home drunk. If he
lost, his wife Annie, a teacher, fretted
about how she’d pay the bills.
That fateful Friday, Jack was
travelling to a colliery on business.
Several colliery clerks were also on
board because it was payday.
As the train pulled into its final
destination at Alnmouth, a porter
saw blood on the floor of one of the
carriages. It didn’t take him long to
find a body under a seat.
More than £370 was missing from
the victim’s briefcase — equivalent
to more than £40,000 today.
Newspaper headlines screamed
‘Murder’ and a manhunt
was launched.
Two wages’ clerks who’d been on
the train gave police a description of
a man they had seen entering a
carriage at Newcastle with the
victim, John Innes Nisbet. It
matched Jack.
Then an artist who had known my
great-grandfather since he was a boy
came forward to say he had seen him
walking alongside the victim and
boarding the train with him.J
ACk was arrested. He went
willingly with police, telling
his wife: ‘Don’t worry, it’s
all a misunderstanding. I’ll
be home in time for tea.’ He never
came home again.
At his trial, it emerged that he had
bought a handgun. Although it had
been returned to the gunsmith and it
wasn’t illegal to own a firearm, it
raised troubling questions about the
murky world in which my great-
grandfather was operating.
It was certainly at odds with his
middle-class background, as the son
of a master butcher, and coming from
a long line of gentlemen farmers from
Alnwick, Northumberland.
His son and daughter — my grand-
father Harry and his sister kitty —
were privately educated and grew
up in the middle-class Newcastle
suburb of Jesmond. Following Jack’s
arrest, however, they became socialpariahs overnight, shunned in shops
and spat at in the street. Eggs were
thrown at the windows of the family
home and threatening letters
rammed through the letterbox.
Harry was pinned to the floor by
lads who painted his face black, like
the hood that was to be placed on his
father’s head for execution, while
kitty was jeered and jostled on
prison visits to her father.
Disquiet about the evidence used
to convict Jack emerged almost
immediately. There was nothing to
link him to the crime other than the
statements of the two wages clerks
and the artist.
Jack’s story was that he had not
travelled in a carriage with the
murder victim, whom he knew by
sight, but had travelled alone,
engrossed in the sporting pages of
a newspaper.N
O TrACE of the stolen
money was ever found or
linked to Jack or his family,
who had four bank accounts
with more than £4 in total in them —
the equivalent of around £460 today.
The family was not hard up.
Most troubling was evidence which
emerged after the trial.
Prior to an identity parade, and
while Jack was still being interviewed
by police, he had been pointed out to
the two witnesses (the wages clerks)
through an open door. He was
wearing a distinctive light-coloured
coat and wore the same coat in the
identity parade. It suggested that
police wanted to ensure the clerks
singled him out as the guilty man.
After an investigation, the Chief
Constable of Newcastle wrote to the
Home Office but this new evidence
in Jack’s defence was dismissed on
appeal. The only hope of reprieve
rested with Home Secretary Winston
Churchill. He could commute Jack’s
sentence to life.
Churchill studied the case but ruled
Jack should hang.
Even today, the case remains
controversial and is studied by law
students because it led to the
introduction of police procedures
preventing officers from pointing out
suspects to witnesses before or
during identity parades. Such a
change was a huge step forward in
the legal process.
For Jack’s grieving family, there
was no comfort. They believed he
had died an innocent man but could
not prove it.
The only way forward was to get
on with life and that is what Jack’s
daughter kitty did. She became a
fierce advocate for women’s rights, a
Suffragette, and a journalist on a
local shipping publication at a time
when there were few women in
the workplace.
At 18, Harry joined up to fight in
France and Belgium as a driver in
the 55th Lancashire Division of the
royal Field Artillery, riding the
horses which dragged the 18-
pounders to the front. Even as aby Beezy
Marsh
pay local miners. But now the deed was done,
a murmur of approval rippled through the
crowd and one or two muted cheers were
heard. It was over.
But for my grandfather, Harry, just 13, and
his sister kitty, 17 — the shamed offspring of
a thief and murderer — the nightmare had
just begun.
More than 70 years after that grey August
morning in 1910, my mother was watching a
BBC programme about possible historic
miscarriages of justice. Suddenly, when a court
artist’s impression of an Edwardian gentleman
flashed up on the screen, she recognised him
as her grandfather, John Alexander Dickman,
better known as Jack.
As a child, she had spent time in Newcastle
at her Aunt kitty’s house and was fascinatedT
HE chaplain, clad head to
foot in black, strode across
the courtyard of Newcastle
Gaol intoning the words of
the burial service as thecondemned man followed, with
the executioner close behind him.
The prisoner did not flinch as he mounted
the scaffold, staring blankly ahead as he was
asked for his last words.
A thousand-strong crowd had been milling
outside the prison since daybreak, and cries of
‘Hang him!’ and ‘Murderer!’ could be heard as
the appointed hour drew near.
As bells in the prison and nearby cathedral
began to strike eight o’clock, a hood was
placed over his head, and then a noose around
his neck. Just after the final gong sounded, the
executioner pulled a lever and the prisoner fell
through a trap door, a drop of seven feet. He
died instantly.
Some felt that hanging was too good for such
a blackguard; especially after the poor wages
clerk he was accused of shooting five times had
bled to death on the floor of a train, having
been slain for the cash he’d been carrying to
by old photos of a well-to-do man on the
mantelpiece. My mother was only ever told
that Jack had died ‘suddenly and young’ before
the subject was hurriedly changed.
Back then, I was a typical 1980s teenager,
with posters of popstars on my bedroom
wall, but after that TV show I became
fascinated by my great-grandfather, his fate
and possible scandal that had been hushed
up for generations.
It sparked a desire to find out the truth,
which in turn led me to become a writer.
Indeed, I worked as a cub reporter on one of
the local papers, The Northern Echo,
which had interviewed my great-grandmother
in Newcastle the night before her husband
was hanged.
And when I read what were reported to be
Jack’s final words to his wife — that one day
‘someone will clear my name’ — it sent a shiver
down my spine. I became even more determined
to establish the truth.
In doing so, I discovered that my great grand-
father’s execution had been a catalyst for a
web of deceit entangling three generations and
two families who were never supposed to find
out about each other’s existence. That secrecy
had led only to sadness and betrayal.life
Rejected a reprieve: Then Home
Secretary Winston Churchill