Word: scotland
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Smarter Crooks. When it comes to solving crime, it is still elementary to call in Scotland Yard. Last week, led by such wise old bluebottles as Commander George Hatherill, 65, the Yard's dean of sleuths, who speaks eight languages and has solved 17 murders, Yard men investigating the Great Buckinghamshire Train Robbery succeeded in rounding up nine suspects, recovered $761,367 of the $7,000,000 loot. Also on hand were Ernest Millen, boss of the Flying Squad, alias the Heavy Mob, whose 100-odd sleuths know more about the underworld than Dante; and the Terrible Twins...
...many critics' eyes, undereducated. In recent years, police recruits have included not a single university graduate; only about 10% of all new bobbies have the equivalent of a high school diploma. British criminals, by contrast, are becoming more imaginative and technically proficient every year. As for Scotland Yard, even its staunchest admirers admit that the legend tends to overshadow performance. Of a record number of crimes reported in London last year, fewer than 25% were solved; police have recovered none of the $700,000 stolen in four major robberies from one bank during the past three years...
Among other hints of nastiness in the woodshed, or the police station, Britons were perturbed by recent charges that Scotland Yard had browbeaten a convicted prostitute into testifying against Ward (she later recanted), and by speculation that police deliberately failed to produce a defense witness at the trial of "Lucky" Gordon, the Jamaican singer who was imprisoned on charges of beating Christine Keeler, and later mysteriously freed. Since there is no watertight separation of executive, judicial and legislative powers* in Britain's unwritten constitution, the disquieting implication to many Britons was that, in its embarrassment over the Profumo scandal...
...sense of outrage does remain. Profumo, for example, would not dare to enter one of the St. James clubs, or to appear at the Goodwood races (he fled to Scotland and his sister's place during the recent bank holiday). Lord Astor continues to entertain, but, says one Establishmentarian, "people resent him for mixing his family and his circle with his peccadilloes...
...later he joined a quiet gathering attended by other bishops wearing black gaiters and aprons. Stockwood was resplendent in purple cassock and cape. "Ah, Mervyn," said one friend, "incognito, I see." Shortly after young Prince Charles, 14, was caught drinking cherry brandy in a hotel bar in Scotland last month, Bishop Stockwood was introduced to a parishioner's son at a sherry party on the lawn of a rather staid Surrey rectory. Jovially, he asked the boy: "Have you had your cherry brandy today...