‘Air Raid Live Tonight! Free Admission for prisoners’

On January 2nd 1943, five Australian men who had been working in the mines at Yala in Southern Thailand, were brought under Japanese guard into the internment camp that had been hastily constructed on the playing fields behind Thammasat University in Bangkok.
The Australians were exhausted. Three of them were still lame from wounds. They'd had a very bad time of it down south, and a number had been killed. They now joined over three hundred Commonwealth internees made up of traders, university teachers, insurance men, lawyers, and their wives and children.
The new experience of confinement soon brought out the best and the worst in people. Those civilian internees who had cruised through their office days in Bangkok in a crapulous haze of dry martinis, were now sober for the first time in years. They lost weight, began to read, and organized drama societies and lecture evenings. A few, who weren't used to picking up anything heavier than money, refused to join in any activity in the camp, and remained aloof, separated by their own arrogance, no doubt feeling that they were too special to have to do anything either for themselves or for others. They were ignored, and withdrew into a spiteful silence. Nothing changes!
Although everyone in the camp believed in the need for freedom, many understood the greater importance for order. In the tight and crowded circumstances one without the other was dangerous. As it was, there were marital affairs, personality clashes, and furious arguments over the hierarchy of command-and children saw adults under stress at close quarters; always a valuable education. With so many people to organize, committees were established to handle the sleeping arrangements, first-aid classes, sporting activities, sewer duties, the cooking, and the complaints. It had all the makings of some insane tropical soap opera.
To those outside of Thailand at the time, Bangkok was a mere backwater in the furious theatre of a global war. Yet these internees had a ringside seat when the first major Allied bombing raid began over the city on January 8th 1942. They were to continue for the next three and a half years.
From the diary of an English trader after a raid in April 1943: "As the alarm sounded some idiots in one of the camp buildings started to smoke, and after a warning, were shot at by the guards… next day we discovered that the raid had hit Assumption College, a clinic at the end of Silom Road, and a row of shops on Jawarat Road. There were many Chinese casualties."
Later on in the war, waves of American Super Flying Fortresses would come howling and thundering "a mere 600 feet above the river following its curve and midnight glisten to the bridges and railyards at Lopburi. Many a hole was made in our mosquito nets when the ack-ack guns finally spoke…"
By which time, it appears, the bombers were already over another province, if not another country.
A former Archbishop of Canterbury once said that, "Cricket is merely organised loafing." He may be on to something there. At the camp, teams were patched together that consisted of men and women from countries as far a part as Uganda and New Zealand. A young Canadian who was politely asked to play at 'silly mid-off,' picked up a stump and threatened the umpire- a matronly, middle- aged English woman from Devon. Bad idea. She coolly told him to “Play where you're told, or you'll be moved to square-leg”- “and may I remind you, I have a bottle of Scotch that's older than you.” At which point he jumped into the river and swam off in the direction of Thonburi in a frightful rage, waving the cricket stump above his head, cheered on by two grinning solicitors from Ceylon holding plates of sandwiches. The Thai guards gulped once and blinked twice, but didn't shoot. I wonder what the Archbishop would have thought of that.
At the war’s end, the last entry in the trader’s diary is not his own, but from a survivor recently liberated by the Allies from the Thai-Burma railway in September 1945:
“Two hundred of us dressed in a queer assortment of garments dropped from relieving aircraft, filed noisily into a large hangar at Don Muang airport. Then an astonishing thing happened. All fell silent as we caught sight of a table in a corner with tea-urns and mugs on it. Standing there, smiling, was a pretty English girl with long fair hair sweeping in a wave over her neck, dressed in a crisp summery outfit. Two hundred toughs, clad like scarecrows, were hushed by the sight, and many were visibly affected. She signaled to us to file past to receive tea and sandwiches, and we did so quietly and even shyly. An elderly, unshaven private immediately in front of me, when asked if he would like sugar, murmured with genuine feeling, the old hackneyed reply, “Oh Miss, if you just put your finger in it, it will be sweet enough.” He stared at her in a doglike way, and stumbled past, blinded by her presence.
By the way, the English do not watch cricket, they study it. To find out how people perform while loafing about.

By Roger Beaumont
  Available at Bookazine

Tragedy at the farm

A classic love triangle ended in death - and two trials

THE RURAL calm of Farleigh Court Farm near Warlingham in Surrey, England was rudely shattered by two gunshots just after 12.30am on 14 June 1967. A police pathologist was summoned to the scene, where he saw the body of Mr James Ian Gray (aged 46), lying at the foot of the stairs. He had died from a gunshot wound fired from a double-barrelled 12-gauge shotgun, and the weapon was lying in the hallway. The wound was in the right side of the chest, three inches below the nipple, and it had taken an upward and outward direction, fracturing the victim's right lung. The pathologist deduced that the 12-gauge round had been fired from the left of the body in front and from a lower position on the stairway.
This was not a case calling for a massive police investigation, for the man who had caused the death was already in the custody of Surrey Police. He was 49-year-old George William Barr, a neighbour and at one time a close friend of the victim. The story which slowly unfolded told of a tragic sequence of events which had begun on Guy Fawkes Night (5 November) two years previously.
Mr Barr was a manufacturer of women's blouses and Mr Gray was a farmer who lived at Farleigh Court Farm nearby with his wife and family. The two families became friendly and after a night of fireworks at the Guy Fawkes party in 1965 there began a liaison between Gray and 34-year-old Mrs Ethel Barr. In 1966 Mr Gray made a sudden decision to immigrate to Australia and gave Mrs Barr 240 pounds sterling so that she could join him there. She did not do so, and he returned to England in October of that year. The affair continued with the knowledge of both Mr Barr and Mrs Gray.
In the spring of 1967, Mr Gray and Mrs Barr spent a romantic weekend together in Scotland. When they returned to Surrey, Mrs Barr did not go home to her husband but went to stay with her mother in nearby Croydon. Mrs Audrey Gray had already left home and taken her children with her to another house which her husband had provided. He also entered into a deed of maintenance for her and the children. All these events took place a few days before the night of the shooting.
On the evening of 13 June 1967 Mr and Mrs Barr went out to a local country club for a candlelit dinner. They had a long and detailed discussion about their troubled relationship and, according to Mr Barr, had resolved their differences and his wife had agreed to return home and live with him. They walked home, hand in hand like newlyweds, after Mrs Barr had said that she no longer loved Mr Gray.
Although the married couple were reunited, there was no happy ending to this tragic tale. Later Barr told police that he had seen his wife into their house and then gone to make up the boiler, and afterwards to the toilet. He assumed that his wife had gone upstairs to bed, but was unable to find her after searching everywhere. Thinking that she must have gone back to her former lover, James Gray, he got into his car and drove, first towards Croydon (and her mother's house), and then to Farleigh Court Farm. He drove through the gates but then changed his mind, turned his vehicle around and drove back to his own home. He asked his cousin, who was staying at the house, if she had seen his wife, and she replied that she had not.
Weeping in anger and despair, George Barr then went to the gun locker and took out his shotgun. His alarmed cousin shouted to him, "You don't need that!" Barr ignored her and pocketed a handful of cartridges after loading both barrels. He then walked out with the loaded weapon and drove back to Farleigh Farm. There he got out of the car, leaving the engine running.
The front door was open and at the head of the stairs he saw James Gray, who said politely, "Come in, George." Barr asked if his wife was there and was told that she was not. He replied, "I want to see for myself", and began to mount the stairs, holding the gun across his chest, the barrels pointing to the ceiling. He tried to get into the bedroom where he expected to find his wife, but Gray stood in his way, shouting. "Put that bloody gun down and get out!" The two men joined on the stairs and there was a struggle. Two shots were then fired. The first blew a hole in the ceiling. The second mortally wounded James Gray.
Mrs Barr was not in the bedroom; and was not even in the farmhouse. When the police arrived they mounted a search party that found her lying in the woods nearby, unconscious from an overdose of sleeping tablets that she had taken in an attempt at suicide. She was rushed to Croydon General Hospital and recovered the next day.
George Barr was charged with murder, and in his first formal statement, he wrote: "I walked to the top of the stairs and we got together. I had the gun at the high-port (across the body with the barrels pointing upwards) and it went off into the ceiling. At the same time the gun broke in half at the narrow part of the stock. I fell down about six stairs still holding the gun barrels. The deceased ran towards me with his arm up and the gun went off again. I think that I was lying on the stairs. He walked past me holding his stomach wound and said, 'Get me a doctor, quick.' Then he got to the bottom of the stairs and fell over. I got to him and threw the gun up the passage. I knelt down beside and took hold of his head. I said, 'What have I done to you?' Then I dialled 999 and asked for the police."
Police firearms experts quickly discovered that the shotgun, (which by a strange irony Barr had bought from Gray some months before), had a defective safety catch, although Barr was unaware of this.
In September 1967 George William Barr was tried at London's Old Bailey for the murder of James Gray. On any murder charge it is open to the jury to bring in a verdict of not guilty to murder but guilty of manslaughter. In fact the jury acquitted Barr on all charges. They believed his defence plea that both shots had been fired accidentally.
But that was not the end of the litigation arising from the fatality of 14 June at Farleigh Court Farm. If one person kills another in circumstances which are at least a civil wrong, and there are a wife and children dependent upon the deceased, they have a right of action under what lawyers call the Fatal Accidents Act. And so the administrators of Gray's estate brought an action against Mr Barr on behalf of the widow and children to recover damages equivalent to the dependency they would have enjoyed had Mr Gray lived on. Like the famous OJ Simpson case of 1994, this fatality led to first a criminal trial and then a civil one.
The civil action was remarkable and it took place more than two years after the jury at the Old Bailey had acquitted Barr of the murder or manslaughter of his wife's lover. A High Court judge ruled that this was a case of manslaughter.
Because of that Barr was ordered to pay 6,112 pounds in damages to Mrs Gray, plus the costs of the long court action to decide the circumstances in which farmer James Gray had died from a fatal gunshot wound. Mr Justice Jeffrey Lane's "inescapable conclusion" (with regard to the jury's verdict) was that "this death was the outcome of an unlawful assault involving a threat of violence by Mr Barr; a threat which he must have realised was likely to result in some injury to Mr Gray. And in my view, that is manslaughter."
Barr claimed that the shooting occurred accidentally when he took a loaded shotgun to Gray's house with the intention of frightening him. So, his defence lawyers maintained, any damages he was liable for should be paid by the Prudential Assurance Company under an 'accidental injury to others' clause in a Hearth and Home policy.
The Prudential denied liability on the grounds that, despite the Old Bailey jury's verdict, Gray's death was not an 'accident' within the meaning of the policy, and Mr Justice Lane ruled that it would be contrary to public policy to allow Mr Barr to recover by insurance. In long-winded phrases much loved by English judges, he stated in summing up, "It was urged on Mr Barr's behalf that public policy should be applied not on the grounds of principle but according to the view taken of the degree of culpability or wickedness of the claimant in a particular case. It was submitted, therefore, that Mr Barr's actions, even assuming they were criminal, were understandable. But a husband who arms himself with a loaded shotgun, however outraged he may be, to search for his errant wife, is not easily forgiven."
Mr Justice Lane held that as the death was the outcome of an unlawful assault involving a threat of violence, this amounted to manslaughter, and was a crime. It was, therefore, against public policy to enforce a contract for indemnity against the consequences of a crime, and the claim against the insurers failed. After making some necessary deductions, as the law required, he awarded the widow, Mrs Audrey Gray, 6,000 pounds sterling. The case went to the Court of Appeal but Mr Justice Lane's verdict was upheld.
As in the OJ Simpson case of 1995-97, the civil action had a completely different outcome to the criminal trial.

(Research, 'Croydon Advertiser' and Surrey Police Case Files, 1967)

IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979.

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