The Hounding of David Oluwale
Former patient briefs actors on the shocking truth of life in High Royds
Friday 23rd January 2009
A former patient of High Royds psychiatric hospital is advising actors taking part in a major stage production about life in the Menston asylum.
Derek Hutchinson spent several months at High Royds after experiencing what doctors claimed was a ‘psychotic episode’ in the early 1970s.
He was given electro convulsive therapy (ECT) and had major surgery during which electrodes were put into his brain.
His treatment was similar to that experienced by illegal immigrant David Oluwale, whose story is the focus of a major production due to start at West Yorkshire Playhouse.
The Hounding of David Oluwale tells of the Nigerian’s tragic ordeal at the hands of two West Yorkshire policemen who were eventually found guilty of assault and jailed after Oluwale’s bruised and battered body was pulled from the River Aire.
The play, which opens this Saturday, is based on a book about his life.
Included in the production are scenes from Oluwale’s time at High Royds where it is believed he was given regular bouts of ECT.
The young immigrant was sectioned and placed in the refractory ward at the hospital – a unit specifically designed for people ‘resistant’ to treatment.
Derek, 62, said: “David would have been subjected to a lot of ECT and would have suffered. They used it as a way of controlling people in those days.
“The actors asked me about how I would have reacted after the ECT and wanted me to help them understand people with mental health problems.
“I told them that Oluwale would have been dosed up with drugs so that he didn’t really know what was going on. It’s like being really drunk and barely being able to walk. You don’t remember things and you feel totally out of control and can very suddenly feel aggressive.”
Derek said he had spoken to staff who worked at High Royds when Oluwale was there and they had said he spent most of his time asleep under the radiators.
“It must have been awful for him, not understanding what was happening, having just turned up in Britain to make a new life for himself,” said Derek.
“There would have been no one to speak up for him or take care of him when he was let out.
“He would just have been turned out on to the streets and left to fend for himself after eight years in an institution. It is a real shock coming out of that place to anyone, let alone someone with nowhere to go and no one to turn to.”
The Hounding of David Oluwale will run from Saturday, January 31, to Saturday, February 21. Tickets costs £20, £15, and £10 and are available from the box office on 0113 213 7700.
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31 January 2009 to 21 February 2009
Courtyard Theatre
4 May 1969 and the battered body of a 38 year old man is pulled from the River Aire. An internal police inquiry will follow, revealing how he had been the victim of horrific, systematic, police brutality.
Based on Kester Aspden’s award winning book, Oladipo Agboluaje brings David Oluwale back to Leeds to tell his story, face to face with the Scotland Yard Detective charged with investigating the case. From the prayers of his Maa’mi in Lagos and the glitter of the Mecca Dance Hall to the vagrant shelters of a city that’s trying to recreate itself, this is a story of one man searching for justice and another who just wanted to find home.
Praise for the book The Hounding of David Oluwale, winner of the crime writers’ association Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction 2008
“A SHOCKING AND ENGROSSING STORY…A KIND OF IN COLD BLOOD SET IN LEEDS”
Financial Times
WEST YORKSHIRE PLAYHOUSE,THE NEW WOLSEY THEATRE, BIRMINGHAM REPERTORY THEATRE AND NOTTINGHAM PLAYHOUSE AS PART OF THE ECLIPSE THEATRE INITIATIVE
By Kester Aspden
Adapted for the stage by Oladipo Agboluaje
Director Dawn Walton
Designer Emma Wee
Lighting Designer Johanna Town
Sound Designer Mic Pool
Movement Director Stephen Medlin
Casting Director Julia Horan CDG
Fight Director Kate Waters
Dramaturg Alex Chisholm
Assistant Director Simeilia Hodge-Dallaway
Assistant Director Madeleine O’Reilly
(Birkbeck Trainee)
Cast: Howard Charles, Ryan Early, Daniel Francis, Steve Jackson, Luke Jardine, Richard Pepple, Clare Perkins, Laura Power
Press cuttings
““Kester Aspden’s account is a timely one, reminding us of the profoundly sad connections between past and present””
Independent
““A shocking and engrossing story… a kind of In Cold Blood set in Leeds’’ ”
Financial Times
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The Tragic Story of Former High Royds Patient – David Oluwale
The hounding of David Oluwale
By Harmit Athwal
An important book investigating one of the first known Black deaths in custody – that of David Oluwale – has been written.
Thirty-eight years ago to the day, on 4 May 1969, the body of David Oluwale was pulled from the River Aire in Leeds. Two years later, in November 1971, two police officers – Inspector Ellerker and Sergeant Kitching – were prosecuted for involvement in his death and were found guilty of various assault charges. This was the first and last time that police officers have been successfully prosecuted for involvement in a Black death in custody.
Nationality: Wog – The hounding of David Oluwale by Kester Aspden details the circumstances surrounding the suspicious death of David Oluwale. Despite its title (and I do consider it racist – words like these have implications beyond just grabbing sales) this important book should be read by anyone interested in how the state and its officers treat the most vulnerable.
The offensive title of the book is taken from police charge sheets from February and March 1969 (recently released at the National Archive), on which police officers had noted David’s nationality. On one, in the nationality box, the word British, which had been typed in, was crossed out and replaced by ‘Wog’. On the other charge sheet David’s nationality had been typed in as ‘Wog’. These entries were made in the last months of David’s life as he was persecuted by officers of Leeds City police. In the subsequent police inquiry into his death, all officers denied making the racist defacements to the charge sheets.
Aspden’s book is a mixture of recent interviews with police officers, lawyers and people who knew David, and evidence from old documents held in the National Archive, including police statements and logs, records from the police inquiry into his death and information from the later trial of the two police officers. It painstakingly details David’s life, from his arrival in the UK as a stowaway on the boat that brought the Nigerian national football team on its first overseas tour to showcase its talents in the UK, to his ignominious death.
David’s slow decline into destitution and a life on the streets of Leeds is told alongside the ‘success’ story of Albert Johanneson, a young Black South African footballer signed to Leeds United in April 1961. Both men struggled against the stark racism of 1960s Britain but one was successful for a time and was adored by a city which loved football and the other was left to rot.
Reconstructing David’s life
David arrived at the port of Hull in September 1949. After serving a 28-day sentence in Armley prison in Leeds for stowing away, he found a place to live and employment. Interviews with people who knew David as a young man paint a completely different picture of him to that which was later conveyed at his assailants’ trial, where even the judge, Mr Justice Hinchcliffe, made his feelings about David quite clear: ‘I would have thought that had been established a thousand times. It is accepted on all hands that he was dirty, filthy, violent vagrant.’ One friend described David as ‘a quiet man and he was always happy and smiling’.
Menston Asylum
On 25 April 1953, just three years after arriving in the UK, David was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, assault on a police officer and damage to a police uniform and jailed for two months. This was the beginning of his problems. At Armley prison, a medical officer reported David as acting strangely. He was sectioned in June 1953 and transferred to Menston Asylum, where he was held until May 1961. At Menston, David was medicated with the ‘liquid cosh’ of Largactil and probably also received electroconvulsive ‘therapy’ (ECT). He was released from Menston after spending eight years without receiving one visitor.
No records from David’s time at Menston exist as they were destroyed in a flood. However, his psychiatrist gave evidence to the inquiry into his death and Eric Dent, a charge nurse at Menston, gave evidence at the trial. Dent approached the police after the trial had started after reading about the case in the paper because he was concerned that too much sympathy was being shown to David. His evidence was significant because he painted David as a dangerous savage with superhuman powers.
On his release from Menston, David was able to find a job and a place to live – though not for long. Eight years in Menston had institutionalised him. He moved between London and Sheffield but always returned to Leeds – his only home. Without a job he was unable to find a place to live and ended up on the street, surviving on meagre benefits. David was charged with malicious wounding after he was caught attempting to enter a derelict house that he used to sleep in. While on remand in Armley – a psychiatrist from Menston found David ‘very paranoid about the police whom he accused of ill-treating him, stealing his money and persecuting him’. On 11 November 1965, David was sent back to Menston (now called High Royds hospital) where he was kept in a secure ward for another two years. On 27 April 1967 he left the hospital and returned to Leeds. David lived on the street and from time to time hostels in Leeds were persuaded to take him in. The police inquiry was told by a hostel in Leeds ‘our hostel does not take in coloured men and never have done [sic].’
Meeting ‘the bullies’ in uniform
In April 1968, David had his first recorded contact with Sergeant Ken Kitching and was charged with disorderly conduct, for which he received a conditional discharge. From then on he was, according to the evidence assembled in the book, persecuted by this officer and Inspector Geoff Ellerker who made it their mission to rid Leeds of the ‘lame darkie’.
Ellerker and Kitching made it known to their shift co-workers that anyone coming across David during their rounds was to inform them. After one particular incident in September 1968, during which Ellerker alleged David had bitten him, the Inspector promised to get revenge.
On 10 April 1969, David was released from prison for the last time. The night of 17 April was the last time anyone saw him alive. The inquiry into his death reconstructed his last hours as best it could. Ellerker left Millgarth police station after he was alerted that David had been found asleep in a doorway by Kitching. David was then beaten by the two police officers and ran off screaming. The officers were seen to go after him and a bus conductor told the inquiry that he had seen, from a distance, two police officers chasing someone towards the same river from which David’s body was pulled two weeks later.
The internal inquiry
The inquiry began eighteen months after David’s death, in November 1970, and was headed Detective Chief Superintendent John Perkins and Detective Sergeant Basil Haddrell from Scotland Yard and Leeds CID officers. The book reveals that the inquiry was started as a result of a young trainee police officer, who had heard station gossip about Ellerker and Kitching beating David, repeating the information in front of a senior officer, who then initiated the inquiry. (At the time Ellerker was on trial for falsifying evidence while trying to cover up a fatal car accident in which another police officer was involved. He was later found guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison and dismissed from Leeds City police.)
The inquiry and subsequent trial were unusual in that police officers broke ranks to speak out about the abuse meted out by Ellerker and Kitching to David, although some did so very reluctantly. Ellerker and Kitching were both senior police officers who took advantage of their seniority to persuade other officers to make false notebook entries to suggest they were elsewhere on the day of David’s disappearance.
A catalogue of abuse was revealed during the police inquiry and the trial. For example, in August 1968, three officers, including Ellerker and Kitching, took David in a police car and drove him seven miles out of Leeds on a forty minute drive and left him outside a pub in the early hours of the morning. In the same week, the same three police officers woke David as he was sleeping in a doorway, forced him into their car and drove him, who was by now crying, to Middleton Woods in Leeds, where he was again left after being pushed from the car. Kitching was later heard to comment: ‘he should feel at home in the jungle’. After another arrest, David was taken to the police station where another police officer described Ellerker kicking David between the legs ‘with such force that Oluwale was lifted bodily off the floor.’ In May 1968, another police officer saw Kitching urinating on David as he lay in a doorway while Ellerker helpfully held a torch to light his way. Ellerker and Kitching made David perform ‘penance’ whereby they would force David to kneel and then bow and they would then hit his head against the floor.
Kitching, in his first interview with police officers investigating the allegations, made comments such as: ‘I have put him out of doorways and kicked his behind’, ‘tickled him with my boot’, ‘never hit him really hard’, ‘kicked him gently’, ‘just a slap’, ‘booted his backside out of it’, and described David as ‘a wild animal, not a human being’. Ellerker refused to co-operate with the inquiry and conveniently lost his notebook covering the period under investigation.
The trial
At the trial in November 1971, Ellerker and Kitching were charged with manslaughter and various assaults. There was no effort to humanise David during the trial. Countless police officers were called by the defence team to speak against his character but the officers who had spoken positively of him at the inquiry were not called. One officer PC Stephen Clarkson had said of David: ‘He always moved on, he was never violent, he just picked his bag up and went away chuntering’. A Yorkshire Evening Post reporter, who had described David as a ‘very popular young bloke’ and an ‘extremely proud man. He was proud of where he came from’, was not called. Nor was Mrs Franks, the wife of the shop owner in whose doorway David had slept who had told the inquiry: ‘He impressed my husband as being essentially a very pathetic little man and quite inoffensive, that my husband always bade him goodnight. Had he been of the criminal tough aggressive type he would not have felt comfortable in mind about leaving him next door to his premises all night in a quite arcade.’
The manslaughter charges were dropped on the order of the judge. Ellerker and Kitching were found guilty of two assaults on David (in August and September 1968); Ellerker was also found guilty of an assault in February 1969; both were found not guilty of actual bodily harm in April 1969. Ellerker was eventually sentenced to three years and Kitching 27 months in prison. Kitching is now dead. And Ellerker, when approached by the author, refused to give an account of his actions.
At the time, the case made newspaper headlines only when the two officers were sent down – and really as an example of police misconduct rather than an example of brutal racism. A Race Today article, ‘The death of one lame darkie’ tried to rectify that and a radio play by Jeremy Sandford Smiling David tried to humanise the victim. But until now, no one had access to all the documents. Kester Aspden’s brilliant book is extremely comprehensive, involving painstaking research which reconstructs for us what happened to David and how it was allowed to go on for so long. It deserves to be studied and ingested – not least by police cadets!
1971
At Leeds Assizes, a police sergeant named Kenneth Kitching was sentenced to 27 months imprisionment, and a former
police inspector named Geoffrey Ellerker to 3 years imprisionment, for assaulting a Nigerian vagrant, David Oluwale. On the judge’s direction they were aquitted of manslaughter charges
