Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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it was over and dealt with, though those who worked for him frequently remembered it for years.
‘He could go bloody mad when he was angry,’ a close colleague and admirer remembered. ‘He would use abusive language and then it was all forgotten. You had had your bollocking. The next job you did for him, you were just as likely to get a pat on the back. Some of the other senior officers bore you malice; if you had dropped a clanger it was with you for life, but it wasn’t so with him.’
Oldfield ran a tight ship. He wanted to know about serious crime when it happened within the force area. A divisional detective chief inspector was expected to let Oldfield have information quickly, rather than keep him in the dark. ‘We had to ring in, he never objected to being told about something at three in the morning,’ said the same officer, who worked closely with Oldfield over many years. ‘He was quite happy, once he got to know you and how you worked, to leave a serious job that happened during the night to you. But you had to contact him before 8.55 the following morning. This was so he had the story when he was asked by the chief constable about it and when the headquarters press conference took place. If ever something came up at either of those two meetings, which he had every morning, without him having been told, you got the mother and father of a bollocking. If it happened a few times, you didn’t keep your job.’
He was born Godfrey Alexander Oldfield in 1924 and grew up in that area of eastern Yorkshire where the terrain of flat, featureless pastureland is strikingly similar to Holland and the Low Countries. He lived in his early years with his brothers, who were twins, amid the farming community on the far eastern fringes of what was then the West Riding at Monk Fryston, a small village tucked away out on its own a few miles from Castleford. His grandfather was the local blacksmith. Like many villages in those days it still had a working windmill where flour was produced. The surrounding farmland hardly rose more than twenty feet above sea level all the way to the Yorkshire Wolds.
Oldfield’s father worked for the LNER (the London and North Eastern Railway). When he was eleven the family moved several miles across the Vale of York to Cawood, where his father became local station master. It was another closely knit rural community, more a small town than a village, but it had its own branch line to the inland port of Selby five miles away. The line halted at Cawood, which had grown in importance historically because of its proximity to the River Ouse, in whose flood plain it lay. Its swing bridge provided the last crossing point on the navigable River Ouse before the ancient City of York ten miles away. Several other rivers fed the Ouse on its journey via the Humber to the North Sea forty miles distant. Formerly Cawood was one of the chief residences of the Archbishop of York, who had a fortified palace-cum-castle built there, and frequently the royal court moved there from Windsor. It was the place where Cardinal Wolsey was arrested and charged with high treason.
The move coincided with Oldfield attending one of Yorkshire’s top boys’ grammar schools, Archbishop Holgate’s in York, where he became known as ‘George’. Indeed, he insisted on the name being used because of his intense dislike of being called Godfrey. The family never used it. At home, and to his future wife, Margaret, who also lived in Cawood, he was always called ‘Goff’.
After leaving grammar school he worked briefly at Naburn Station, just outside York, on the LNER route from London to Edinburgh. His first exposure to iron discipline came as a young naval seaman during the Second World War after he joined the Royal Navy, aged eighteen, in 1942. He hardly ever talked to his family of his war service, either after he got home in 1946 or in later years. He came from that generation of stoical men made brittle by the experience of war who preferred to keep to themselves the awful truth of what they had personally witnessed rather than burden those closest to them.
As a twenty-year-old seaman he saw enemy action aboard HMS Albatross, a much-overhauled former Australian seaplane carrier. In May 1944, she set sail from Devonport and headed up the English Channel in a convoy towards the Goodwin Sands. In darkness, at four o’clock in the morning on the 23rd, she ran aground. ‘We were high and dry,’ Phil Mortimer, then a nineteen-year-old telegraphist from Poole, remembers. ‘It was dark and I think we lost our way. We had to wait for the tide to turn. We came under attack from German shore batteries at Cap Gris Nez. You could see them flashing as they fired, and then the shells landed, splashing in the water around us. It was pretty nerve wracking.’
Two weeks later, the 6,000-ton vessel was positioned off SWORD beach during the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast around Ouistreham. The Albatross had been converted specially for the invasion of France into a repair ship for landing craft. Its cranes could hoist the flat-bottomed boats out of the water so engineers could work on them. She was armed with anti-aircraft and machine guns.
Twice in late June she was hit by shellfire from German coastal batteries, which penetrated the upper deck, though the damage was superficial. Eventually she came under torpedo attack on 11 August, off Courselles, and suffered sixty-nine dead and many seriously injured, at about 6.30 in the morning. The torpedo struck in the forward mess-deck on the port side. Phil Mortimer recalls how the Albatross immediately keeled over to one side. There was a general power failure and the lights went out. In shallow water the surviving crew members managed to shore up the damage. She made her way heavily down in the water to the safety of Portsmouth Harbour, listing badly and towed stern-first by a Dutch tug, with an escort from the minesweeper HMS Acacia. On this difficult journey some twenty of those killed were lashed in their hammocks and buried at sea. Those crew members who were able were mustered aft to witness the skipper reading the prayer to the dead.
In dry dock in the minesweeping section of the naval base the water was pumped out of the Albatross. Another fifty dead lay below decks, most still in their hammocks. Members of HMS Acacia’s crew were among those detailed to go below and retrieve the bodies. They included a nineteen-year-old steward/cook from Blackpool, Frank Roberts. ‘Retrieving the trapped bodies was a really gruesome task,’ he remembered. ‘We were given a mask and a tot of rum and told to get on with it. Some of the dead we found stuck in the portholes as they tried to escape. There was a hole in the side of the ship the size of a bus. We wrapped up those still in their hammocks and brought them out. It was very traumatic and of course we had no such thing as counselling in those days.’ The bodies were then transferred to a landing craft and buried at sea off Chichester. Immediately afterwards George Oldfield was sent home on sick leave to Yorkshire, where he remained for six months with a stress-related illness.
In 1946, after demob from the Navy as a petty officer, he arrived back in Cawood as one of thousands of reasonably educated young men throughout Britain wondering what to do with the rest of their lives. The local village policeman recommended a career in the police, and Oldfield joined the West Riding force the following year. It would, he assured his family, provide him with a good steady job and a pension. It was time to get on with life and forget the awful carnage he had witnessed.
Oldfield was to become living proof that it was possible in Britain gradually to rise from humble origins via a meritocratic police service to hold an important position within the local community. Like Dennis Hoban in Leeds, he spent virtually all his career in the CID gradually rising through the ranks. Unlike Hoban, his postings were far and wide, from one end of the West Riding to the other. Harrogate for one job, Barnsley for another. By 1962 he was a detective chief inspector at Dewsbury. Two years later, he returned briefly to uniform at Keighley before being transferred to the CID staff at the Wakefield headquarters as a detective superintendent and deputy head of CID for the whole of the West Riding. In 1971 he went back into uniform as a chief superintendent for two years. Then, in 1973, he returned to West Yorkshire CID as its head, taking the place of Donald Craig, who had become an assistant chief constable. When the major amalgamation with Leeds and Bradford took place in 1974, Donald Craig held the top job in overall charge of CID. Oldfield was his deputy.
Generally he got on well with his senior colleagues. However, he did have longstanding problems with some senior detectives from the Leeds and Bradford force after amalgamation. Some of the city detectives had no time for Oldfield, nor did he for them. A great deal of the mutual distrust had its origins in an official inquiry Oldfield conducted during the mid-1960s into corruption among some city detectives in Leeds. Called in to investigate as a senior officer from outside Leeds, he was utterly ruthless during this inquiry, often undertaking forceful