Britain once had unarmed police, and gave permission for civilians including private security guards to carry guns, for protection. That was until Frederick Dighton, a file at the National Archives at Kew shows.
The file is HO 288/2, and it arises from an attempted robbery of what we now would call a cash in transit (CIT) van on a Thursday morning round of the East End of London. On December 14, 1961, its first stop was a wharf at Wapping; it was mainly due to call on North Thames Gas Board premises. Typically wages were paid weekly, in cash, to workers. At 9.45am, the van belonging to the contractor Glyn Mills reached the junction of Turners Road and Bow Common Lane. A (stolen) vehicle turned from a side road in front of the wages van, stopped at the junction and reversed into the front of the wages van. Meanwhile, another (stolen) vehicle that was parked on Turners Road crashed into the side of the wages van. Also, a van reversed up to the back of the wages van, showing from an open side an industrial gas cylinder and other apparatus. Men got out, wearing crash helmets and masks. They broke the wages van’s windows with pick axe shafts, and attached chains to the doors of the wages van and to the robbers’ van behind. The robbers drove it back, and wrenched off the wages van’s back doors.
Inside the wages van was the driver, in a separate compartment; and behind, the armed guard, 48-year-old Frederick Dighton, carrying an automatic pistol; a bank messenger-clerk, William Shelton, also armed, with a Walther pistol; and a City of London Police man, PC Buckle, with an Alsatian, Flash. Buckle let Flash off the leash and man and dog got out the van, to be attacked by two men with pick axe handles. Buckle subdued one, only for four more men to rescue the robber. Dighton fired his pistol towards some of the men. Police thought he shot one in the left arm. They decamped, in their van at the back.
Such a hired security van was smaller than the bullion vans used by banks. The van had barred side windows, and two metal-faced doors each with a square window made of toughened glass. A klaxon was operated by a foot pedal. Dighton and Shelton’s pistols each carried five rounds of ammunition. The van after its first drop-off was carrying £122,000 in 14 bags, a colossal amount in an era when a working man might earn £10 a week. Police surmised that the robbers were going to force pepper and other powder into the van, to incapacitate those inside.
Dighton admitted that he first fired a shot at random, through a broken window; then three shots at a man with a sledge hammer, who was reaching into the van. Those three shots missed, leaving him with one bullet. Dighton fired it at about eight men running away, and the man Dighton had aimed at earlier clutched his left arm. Shelton, for whatever reason, did not fire. One round was found on the van floor. A sign that Dighton’s had been confused was that he had operated the klaxon with his foot, only to step on the button again, and switched the klaxon off. Police doubted that Dighton had fired four shots, because the stories of the others in the van didn’t match. As police remarked, ‘this particular raid was planned with considerable ingenuity and every possibility apart from the bank staff being armed was catered for’. Police and civil servants contrasted Dighton unfavourably with the police dog.
The file ends in 1967 when a member of Parliament, Anthony Grant, wrote to the then Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. Jenkins gave his view that firearms should only be carried ‘in exceptional circumstances’; ‘the police rarely carry weapons and the basic objection to their use namely the risk of escalation also applies to the use of firearms by private guards’. A separate minute of Jenkins’ states that arming of private security guards should be approached ‘with great caution’. Grant, by occupation a solicitor besides an MP, had taken up the case of MAT Transport, which carried most of the country’s gold bullion. Police had withdrawn its firearm certificates in 1962, and the firm was asking for them back; ‘they are strongly of the opinion that the stick at nothing methods of highly organised criminals call for a reconsideration of the question.
The stakes were high; Grant reported that a van’s load was usually £5m, and might be £10m; by comparison, we can add that the assumed haul from the ‘Great Train Robbery’ of 1963 was £3m (from the Post Office). Home Office officials wondered, if other security firms – Securicor was named, as a premier name of the era – might also ask for certificates. The civil servants had in mind also the view of rank and file police; that they did not want to ‘provoke’ criminals into carrying firearms.
The background went back decades, according to the file. Police chief constables could decide whether to grant certificates; in 1961, the Met Police commissioner had issued 33, to four firms in the field of escorting consignments of bullion and banknotes. Those certificates went back as far as 1921, for pistols or revolvers. Home Office advice dating from 1945 described it as ‘hardly ever …. necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person’. Exceptions might be for the ‘elderly and isolated’ worried about burglary; and bullion dealers and the Bank of England’s printers.
