George Thatcher - Fitted Up: The Mitcham Co-op Murder and the Fight to Prove My Innocence

In 1972, the playwright David Halliwell replied to an advert in the back pages of the New Statesman which said: Lifer needs help. PO BOX 142. The lifer was a man called George Thatcher who had been convicted of the capital murder of Dennis Hurden during a robbery at the Mitcham Co-op in 1963 and sentenced to death.

He was defended by the eminent lawyer, Christmas Humphreys, who has been credited with introducing Buddhism to the United Kingdom. He had been the senior counsel at the Old Bailey responsible for the successful prosecutions of Ruth Ellis, and Bentley and Craig. The summing up by Mr Justice Roskill lasted six hours and was clearly biased towards the prosecution. The jury was out for just four hours.

After four weeks in the condemned cell, George Thatcher was reprieved, but was to spend the next eighteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. David, who wrote the 1960s hit play Little Malcolm and his struggle against the eunochs built up a relationship with George, visiting him in prison and encouraging him to write firstly a document telling his side of the story and then two plays. David, myself and the actor Michael Elphick travelled to the Albany prison on the Isle of Wight to see George.

It was a high security jail and after passing through several barred gates we eventually were ushered into a small reception room where George was waiting for us. He seemed in total control as he gestured to the guard to leave us alone. I dont recall much of the conversation, but I do remember a guard bringing in a landscape painting. The gift for your friends, he said to George.

As soon as the Isle of Wight ferry left the shore we went to the very windy upper deck and carefully pulled off the back of the painting and there was Georges first play The Hundred Watt Bulb which was put on at the Little Theatre in St Martins Lane. George wrote another play The Only Way Out about his experience in the condemned cell which was put on at the Royal Court. Michael played him in the original production and Brian Croucher, who became a good friend to George, reprised the role in a later production. It received excellent reviews. The Times wrote George Frederick Thatcher has been awarded an Arts council grant of 50 for his play, but what he is likely to receive for it is a spell in the punishment block as his play was sent out of prison without permission. George, eventually was given a pass out to see his play performed but a week after the play finished !

After being interviewed about Michael Elphick for his The History Press biography, I decided to reread the document written by George about his case and his plight. Unfortunately, it had become damaged after forty years in a weather-beaten loft, but with the help of the actors Stephen Greif and Brian Croucher, I tracked George down to a small village in western Ireland where by an amazing coincidence he was living, with his wife Val, next door to some old friends of mine, Neil Johnston and Mark Long. We managed to get hold of, not only the original story, but an autobiography of Georges life which you are now about to read. It is a riveting tale of poverty, injustice, incompetence, skullduggery, survival and ultimately freedom.

Stephen Greif and I have spent many hours going through the Metropolitan Police files and the trial transcript at the National Archives and we are both convinced that George did not shoot and kill Dennis Hurden, the Co-op worker who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only evidence against George was police verbal evidence, which was clearly fabricated, and the dubious statements of Phillip Kelly, who on the last day of the trial and just after the Judge had put on the black cap, stood up and said I shot Dennis Hurden.

To be sentenced to death and then imprisoned for eighteen years for a crime one didnt commit is the ultimate nightmare and hopefully in the near future he will be exonerated.

My thanks to Val Thatcher, for all her help; David Halliwell; Mark Beynon of The History Press; and above all to George for allowing his story to be told.

I was born on 27 August 1929, in a small country town called Farnham in the county of Surrey in southern England. A year behind my brother, Bill, and four years ahead of my sister, Mary (though I know not where they were born, as my parents tended to be a migrant family, who moved house every few years). My mothers maiden name was Lillian Kitchen. She was a warm and simple country girl to whom life wasnt over-generous. She had two brothers and a sister named Maud. Their father was a farm labourer who lived in an isolated country cottage on the outskirts of a village called Beckham, one mile from the town of Marlow in Buckinghamshire on the banks of the River Thames.

My mums brothers emigrated in their teens, just after the First World War. One went to America to work on the railways in New York, and was last heard of living in Brooklyn, many years ago. The other brother went to Australia as a deckhand on a steam ship and was never heard of again. So there may be lots of distant cousins around the world that we know nothing of.

I am a believer that family are first in all things. That the first rule of life is survival and people born and raised in poverty do not owe allegiance to any establishment.

My mothers sister, Maud, married a local lad and lived in Beckham all her life. She ran the post office and sweet shop from the tiny front room of her cottage. They had one daughter who also married a local lad, who ran the village pub many years ago.

My father was a fine-looking man, who was born and grew up in Marlow. He had two brothers, George and Bill. All three went into the forces at the beginning of the First World War. My dad, Charley, went into the army with George, who was killed in France in 1917.

Bill joined the Royal Navy and served twenty-two years before losing an arm to gangrene and being pensioned out. He never married, and lived the remainder of this life in Marlow, never worked, spending most of his time in the local pubs, maintaining that beer was the substance your body needed for a good life. He was a happy, kind man who always had love and time for me, often telling me tales of the sea which Im sure were mostly fantasies he would invent to entertain me. When I was about ten, he would come to the house at five in the morning and take me into the fields to find and collect wild mushrooms, which he sold or cooked for breakfast, before Bill and I went off to school. At one time I had no shoes and wore girls slippers and felt so ashamed; we were always very poor.

After the war, my father soldiered in India for eleven years, before returning to Marlow and marrying my mother. Not a good match. He was proud of having been a military man, always acting like a soldier, stiff and upright. I dont remember him ever being cruel or unkind to Bill or I, though we saw little of him. He was either working at various seasonal jobs on the land or for the council, or in the various pubs in the town. He would try to teach us discipline and loyalty keep your mouth shut and never tell tales or snitch on anyone to be strong to survive in an underprivileged world that offered no charity of love for the meek, where those who had, had no time for those who hadnt, and its only the strong who survive.

The first recollection I have, as a very young child was taking a neighbours little girl into the middle of the ripening cornfields at the bottom of the small crescent of council houses where we lived, to play doctors and nurses naughty maybe, but at four it was to play, curious and totally innocent. When my mother found us, she put me to bed for the rest of the day. Later, in the winter I would walk across those frost-covered fields, on my way to junior school, crying with the cold and the chilblains on my toes and the lobes of my ears.