Wakefield Historical Society Meeting 7th December

Secrets of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper will be revealed in a talk to members of the Wakefield Historical Society at 7-30pm on Wednesday 7th December at the Wakefield History Centre, 127 Kirkgate, Wakefield.

The speaker is Sir Rodney Brooke, chief executive of the West Yorkshire County Council and clerk of the West Yorkshire Police Authority before they were abolished in 1986. Sir Rodney has just published his memoirs, The Winding Stair: From Morley boy to Westminster Knight.

Sir Rodney was intimately involved in the pursuit of the Ripper. In his memoirs, he reveals how Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw demanded the sacking of the West Yorkshire Chief Constable and why the police were stampeded into the belief that ‘Wearside Jack’ was the killer. The misidentification meant that Peter Sutcliffe was allowed to continue murdering women in West Yorkshire.

Another famous case in which Sir Rodney was a key actor was the tragic fate of Helen Smith, the Yorkshire nurse who met a mysterious death in 1982 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia during a sex and drink-fuelled party. The death resulted in ‘the inquest of the century’, held by Wakefield Coroner Philip Gill. The host at the party, Dr Richard Arnot, refused to attend the inquest unless his legal costs were met by the county council. When the council agreed to foot the bill, Dr Arnot chose the flamboyant lawyer Sir David Napley (who had defended Jeremy Thorpe when he was accused of conspiracy to murder). Every day Sir David arrived in his golden Rolls Royce. For his time he charged the county council £164 per hour, a fee deemed outrageous by the national press.

Sir Rodney was a pupil at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield and became chief executive in County Hall, Wakefield after local government reorganisation in 1974. His predecessors in County Hall included Sir Charles McGrath. When Sir Charles went to London the Wakefield stationmaster would hold the train until Sir Charles’s arrival.

West Yorkshire County Council was the largest of the Yorkshire local authorities. If nuclear war broke out, Brooke was to be county controller for Yorkshire. He was to take refuge in a cave under the Pennines and emerge to restore order after a Geiger counter showed that nuclear contamination had died down sufficiently. The cave was stocked with body bags so that corpses could be tidied up after the nuclear explosion.

The most lethal episode during Brooke’s tenure as chief executive of the West Yorkshire County Council was the fire at the Bradford City football club. When the County Council fire chief discovered that the old wooden stand at the football ground was stuffed with incendiary material, he told Brooke, who wrote a warning letter to the Football Club demanding that they cleared the material. Notoriously the football club took no notice. At the last game of the 1984-85 season, the club celebrated their promotion to the Second Division of the Football League. A capacity crowd included delegates from Bradford’s twin towns in Germany and Belgium. As viewers watched aghast, 56 spectators were burnt to death in full view of the television cameras.

When the West Yorkshire county council faced abolition, Brooke moved to be chief executive of Westminster council. There he had to deal with the mercurial Tesco heiress Dame Shirley Porter who became notorious for selling three council cemeteries for 15p. In due course she was surcharged £42m for the infamous ‘homes for votes’ scandal. Brooke was a key witness and acquitted of any responsibility. The inside story of this and many other notorious events are revealed in his memoirs.

During his distinguished career Sir Rodney was knighted and appointed CBE. He was appointed to the Order of Merit of France, Germany and Senegal and the Order of the Aztec Eagle of Mexico.