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Chris Mullin Daily Mail Article 1991 Stanton Turns Really Nasty The End Of The Annus But Not The Horribilis
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INTO THE ROARING NINETIES: A New Year's Eve gale howled through the first hours of 1990: slates sliding off roofs, glass crashing, a dustbin lid rolling about. It made for a restless, broken night, and I worried about my two greenhouses and their heaters on low pilot light. I woke late with an uncanny feeling of relief. From the landing window I saw my greenhouse intact. Then I rubbed my eyes: the Stanton scaffolding tower had disappeared. My shout of astonished delight woke Maureen. In minimal clothing I crept out into the sunlit January morning to explore. The tower lay behind the hedge, in the lee of the gale. Both families would agree the storm solved a problem, in insurance terms by "an Act of God". I had a fleeting thought that surely they would not try to re-erect it, as that would be devastatingly hostile and provocative. Next day, though it was a bank holiday, I phoned the legal secretary at Bournville Village Trust (BVT) to relieve his office of any guilt for not removing the monstrosity that had so blatantly infringed the covenants. I needed his co-operation. I had paid for a very expensive Counsel's Opinion from a land law specialist, stating I would not win an action to force BVT to remove the tower or to enter the land and remove it. I delivered a copy to the Trust Office as a reminder of the old man's vicious assault on me with his iron pole. It was, surprise surprise, illegal to poke iron poles into a neighbour's groin, but without medical evidence the police could not prosecute. The barrister also confirmed that Terry Stanton's letter to Maureen, blaming me for his mother's death, was libellous. But Maureen was the only one who read it and she didn't believe it, and libel actions were for the wealthy, so it was best ignored. The Trustees had held back from helping me, expecting the Stanton house to change hands after their matriarch's death, but then yielded to my neighbour's procrastinating letters pleading for delay. The Trust will always listen, talk and write letters, but is unlikely to act when a precedent might be created. Six years later Secretary Thompson told me he had hated and loathed the Stantons and seethed at my treatment, but he was a servant putting his employer's interest first. Now the tower had gone, I wanted action under the covenants. The hedge was still unreasonably high; I had removed only five feet off the top. I told him that after a year's recovery from the trees' shock, next September I would cut another four feet. Nine feet in a single year might kill them, which I could not risk. Dead trees would either destroy my case or leave dead stalks the old man would keep deliberately as an eyesore. My decision was vindicated. Neither Mr Thompson nor I knew then that the close-up photographs taken from the top of that tower would be devastating evidence, getting an action before the courts and keeping it there for five years. My vigorous lopping the previous summer had given us our first winter sunlight for years, though at a terrible price of death, violence, libel, wasted police time, expense and stress. Cutting back branches over three years had also gained us a six-foot strip of land, but the remaining eighteen-foot hedge still deprived us of light and moisture. My cordon apple trees just stayed alive on the north side of the conifers, never fruiting. I pressed Thompson: would the Trust reduce the Leylandii, or force the Stantons to? BVT guidelines say boundary hedges should be six feet six, and a Beech hedge was part of the original planning application. The sixty-foot boundary hedge was half original Beech, which we had trimmed to the proper height for three years despite the old man's rage and violence, and half Leylandii. He suggested mildly that the Stantons would leave and new neighbours could not be less considerate. I answered irritably that whoever lived there in September, I would cut another four feet and then maintain it at that height annually. The Peace Festival Arrangements for my Easter Saturday Peace Festival on 14 April 1990 were going strongly. Being in sole charge, I chose the title "Defence of Our Planet", which pleased the expanding number of groups. The Green Party had won 15% in the European Elections without a seat, and in Selly Oak had pipped the Liberals for third place in the council elections. Margaret Thatcher had gone green, and all parties put environmental issues at the top of their agenda. Each of our eighty constituent peace, justice and environmental groups submitted a 30-word summary with contact details, and these went out on a leaflet to the whole local electorate: free publicity, and a resource for the media. The four council candidates were asked for 50 words on "Peace", displayed in colleges, churches and libraries. A blank space would look bad, so none refused; the Tories initially declined, so I wrote in their space, "The Conservative Candidate declined the invitation". Peace, like sex, could be embarrassing, and no party aspiring to government wished to convey softness on defence: Neil Kinnock had been destroyed by the tabloids over his 1987 "Dad's Army" interview. Two days before the poll I held a candidates' forum at Woodbrooke College, chaired for years by John Ferguson and then his widow Elnora, who also chaired the National Peace Council. Only about twenty-five attended, though turnout was always above the city average. The Tories never sent their candidate, a decision that proved unwise, because they lost their three seats year after year, out of touch with thinking voters. Their councillors were good practical public servants but couldn't keep pace with the bright academics from Labour, Green and Liberal parties, and they insisted peace was nothing to do with the council. Any fool knew the Soviets would not intervene in their crumbling East European regimes, but local organisers cursed me for pushing "Peace" into a drab election; there were no votes in it, and campaign time was wasted. The Easter Saturday Festival at George Cadbury Hall rose above local politics. People of all religions and none attended, including local Catholics, our Vicar, Methodists, Quakers, Humanists and Marxist-Leninists. The Transport and General Workers Union brought its banner and a donation. A couple of hundred came, eighty or ninety groups had free stalls, and the £500 target was easily met. The world was changing breathtakingly fast: Mandela had been released on 11 February after seven years of festival petitions, the Wall was down, Germany united. This was the last festival for the Anti-Apartheid Group, the German Democratic Republic Group and the Soviet Friendship Society, and the four-strong Albanian Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party. I marvelled at members' commitment to single causes; if the changed world ended some groups' purpose, they could find another in Selly Oak. At sixty-two I contributed advice on speakers, printing, rooms and finance, and sometimes kept a quarrelling group going a year or two longer, which was worthwhile. Maureen and the pub Maureen was a lay member of Birmingham Health Authority and chaired the Birmingham Family Practitioner Committee, handling complaints against GPs. Her skill and conscientiousness were admired; many received an OBE or MBE for far less, though knowing her opinion of gongs I never lobbied. While she did this work twice a week from midday, I went to the local pub for a couple of pints and an hour's chat, learning from ordinary people about ordinary things. None knew of my peace work. I was called "the schoolmaster" or "the professor", and joked about my jeans and tieless shirts, which hurt my self-image as a common man. Strangers sometimes offered cheap video recorders and TVs, with no protest that they were stolen; real anger was reserved for cemetery vandalism and stolen grave flowers. Sometimes customers brought personal problems, and I offered sympathy and my remaining counselling skills, never getting too involved. My old friends Denis and Maria Arnott-Job were devout Catholics and councillors, doing weekly advice bureaux. Denis was loyal from my days as chairman of Northfield Constituency Labour Party, where I'd learnt that factional power struggles always ended in bitterness; he took my part when I was caught between left and right battles. Maria became Lord Mayor after Denis's early death. Eventually, well into my sixties, midday pints didn't suit me; time was valuable, and I loathed the stench of cigarette smoke in my clothes. Maureen gave up her Birmingham Singers choir, where as secretary she had told women their voices were no longer suitable; she wasn't going to put anyone through telling her to go. Our grandsons, eight and nine, were happier and no longer tense now the tower was down. They lived opposite the Stantons and any bang had worried them. We took them to school, and Maureen heard pupils read twice a week. We had package holidays to the Rhine and Majorca, always in October and November because of the greenhouses. Football In 1989/90 we were back buying West Bromwich Albion tickets. Martin, our younger son, had gave his up in 1988, and we were moved from our covered seats in the Halford's Lane Stand, a rough treatment that hurt us. We missed our pre-match visits to our Sikh friends in the Star and Commercial, but I welcomed the time. Our neighbour Jim Cowling kept his Aston Villa ticket but joined us on alternate weekends. For 1990/91 I bought the boys season tickets in the nearly empty Rainbow Stand, where a new commercial manager had started free places for local schoolchildren, an investment that must have repaid a hundredfold. Jim, at sixty-five, qualified for concessions, I at sixty-two did not. The first match was ecstatic for the boys; they consumed vast quantities of coke and crisps, were good at pool, and proudly presented their ticket books at the turnstile. In the first fifteen minutes the ball was kicked to us and they touched it, a glory moment never repeated in fourteen years. Andrew, nearly eight, concentrated for the whole ninety minutes. The second hedge cut On 2 August 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We heard it on the BBC World Service, which we often had on through the night. The cold war was over, and now a bloody conflict loomed. At the end of August I began ringing tree surgeons. Several rejected me, sensing something "fishy". Two men agreed to cut the hedge at a line four feet from the top for £100 (they wanted £80), with four men, chain saws, a van to take the debris immediately, no swearing, and ignoring protests. I winked and said "I do hope you understand". They didn't. I had been dismantling the hedge bit by bit for years, but family and friends warned that this might be construed as teasing. Now I yielded against my instincts to take the four feet in one go. It meant technical trespass in the neighbours' airspace, which was why the Stantons had sent the police round the previous summer. The old man could not contemplate a permanent agreement: "No compromise with that man". We should have asserted ourselves fourteen years earlier, but Maureen and I, at the top of our professions, had been scared of the Stantons. His neighbours supported him, wanting freedom to light their own fires; one said, "The more you or any member of your family are hurt, the better we are pleased". They accepted the Environmental Health Director's ruling in my favour, and never again broke the law, though they gleefully backed Stanton. It was a good idea to win the bonfire battle before starting a hedge war. Andrew's birthday on 10 September carried an ominous ring, as it was a year since Freda Stanton's death, which was uppermost in Terry's mind. Then Connie Bourne, a croft neighbour in her eighties, died suddenly. She and her ex-policeman husband Bill had been magistrate, trade unionist and political rival to my mother in Handsworth forty years earlier. I had taken Connie to Selly Oak Labour Party meetings, where we voted together against the "loony left", agreeing Labour must first gain power before building the New Jerusalem. She had latterly become friendly with the Stantons, perhaps over funerals and politics. Old Stanton had also begun attending Humanist meetings after a Humanist officiant conducted his wife's funeral, which embarrassed Maureen. Connie's funeral morning gave me my opportunity: Maureen had an appointment, I wasn't going, and Bernard Stanton would be at the crematorium. I booked the tree men for 10am. Only three came, late, and returned for a better ladder and hand saw, since chain saws were unsuitable. It threatened rain and I lent them waterproofs. As soon as they started, old man Stanton appeared; he hadn't gone to the funeral. He shouted, "Stop, those are my trees, I've called the police, that's vandalism". I whispered to the men to carry on. He went away, and for forty-five minutes timber came down and light poured into the garden. Then Terry Stanton and others arrived with screaming, threats, a hose, stones, a piece of brick, a tin and broken bottle. One workman said, "We are willing to work for you but we will not die for you, they have a firearm". The men stopped and tidied up. I called over the hedge that the trees were now a reasonable height and we could live in peace. The woman screamed, "Your wife has left you, you don't do this when your wife's there, you are afraid of her", containing a grain of truth: I hadn't told Maureen, wanting to surprise her. As the men carried debris past, I saw Terry Stanton picking his way across the tools. Thirty-five years dealing with thwarted teenagers, and all-male school and college, had taught me: run if you can; otherwise avoid anything that could be misread as aggression, hide your hands, don't smile, don't look too stern. I put my hands behind my back. Stanton, nostrils flared, a bull in a rage, rushed at me and stopped: "Just one step nearer and I will hit you". My momentum carried me forward and, turning slightly, I presented my right jaw. He swung, then retracted the blow a microsecond too late; his fist just touched my jaw and then pushed hard, and I sprawled backwards into the debris, rolling and staggering up with branches having jabbed into me and my denture dislodged and biting into my mouth. I felt no pain or anger, only trembling shock, and a touch of triumph that this time his violence had gone too far in front of witnesses. I approached the Stanton car blocking the drive, a woman at the wheel, and said, "Help me get your man out of here, he is mentally deranged". She didn't answer. Stanton was sifting papers in the van. I paid the men and told them to load up. They protested that there must be more to this than tree cutting; I said, "I told you this was a special". Soon the Stanton car had gone. I sat in the front room and waited. Two flustered policemen arrived, late because of a major incident. They looked at the hedge and asked about the four-foot spike of the end tree. When I told them the price, one said, "What, a hundred quid for that? I would have taken the whole bloody lot down for that. I am in the wrong job". They were astonished to hear of the firearm threat. I showed them marks on my body, looking ghastly and trembling. I reminded them of the previous year's failure to prosecute and demanded, "This time I want that bastard done". They said I'd need medical evidence, but their radio crackled and they left. I left a note, "Terry Stanton knocked me over - gone for a walk", and went to the Raven for a quiet pint. I'd taken only a couple of gulps when Maureen walked in, for the first and hopefully last time. Our GP saw me later. My left jaw was puffy from inflamed gums where the denture had bitten, though Stanton's fist had touched my right jaw; the doctor wrongly assumed the swelling came from the blow, and his report went into evidence. Stanton's legal team failed to spot the discrepancy, as I will explain in the next chapter. The branch marks developed into yellow and blue bruises, which we photographed. Stanton has convinced himself he never hit me, but he failed abysmally in court and later dug himself deeper on TV. The assault in law had been made, and I was glad it was provable. Ian was furious and went to the police station to demand the crime book and a record of the incident. The contractors refused to give a witness statement, as it was a quarrel unconnected with tree cutting, and said they wanted no further association with either neighbour. At 8.30 next morning I sawed off the remaining four-foot spike and pushed it over the Stanton side. We had light and a level fourteen-foot hedge; six feet six would have been my choice, but I was prepared to maintain this height permanently. The bare trunks were being covered with fresh greenery. I rang the solicitor, who got in touch with the police, then phoned Mr Thompson to ask what BVT would do about the firearm threat and assault, and wrote letters confirming the conversation. A WPC and policeman took my statement and stayed with the case for a year until it reached court; they could not understand why I hadn't cut the hedge lower, and, like their colleagues, marvelled at how well hedge maintenance paid. Today, a firearm threat would bring an armed response unit. After Andrew's birthday we took a week in the Moselle valley, glad to avoid missing an Albion home game, with the thought of coming back to light, a hedge that no longer looked grotesque, and a tranquil life at last. Campaigns and war Life was busy. Plans for the Selly Oak by-pass had the enthusiastic backing of the three main parties, and I helped start B.R.A.G., the Bristol Road Action Group, opening an account for donations at the West Bromwich Building Society (also an Albion sponsor, purely by coincidence). A local gun maker, whose factory lay on the route, joined the opposition, along with the allotment society and the University, which stood to lose half its playing fields. When the Council's plans collapsed under media pressure, the parties, sniffing uncertainty, withdrew their endorsement. It was exciting. There were other groups, such as the Nuclear Trains Group, but I had to limit my contribution. The Gulf War made it imperative that Selly Oak Peace Council opposed all war. Elnora Ferguson, chair of both the National Peace Council and ours, chaired the Birmingham protesters centred on the Cathedral, with the support of Provost Peter Berry. He tried for rapport with the Central Mosque's Imam, but forgot that the British Legion members in his flock thought the new war would fit well with Remembrance. Anti-war groups demonstrated outside, then met in the crypt. Richard Burden, newly selected as Labour candidate for Northfield, gave me his card. A meeting at Woodbrooke arranged marches and publicity. I volunteered for nothing, leaving it to the young and keen, but the volunteers were committed members of the Socialist Workers Party, Trotskyist groups and ex-Labour militants, who would normally not touch each other, let alone my Rainbow Coalition, with a barge pole. Local Baptists said they would not associate with Muslims in a holy war against Iraq. All accepted Selly Oak Peace Council's auspices and Elnora's chairmanship; we deliberately had no members, committee, money or bank account, only treasurer Walter Hillman, who cashed cheques not made out to me. Everyone agreed only on opposing the war, and everyone disagreed on why. I joined the march, planned through the Muslim areas of Balsall Heath. The Tories had held absolute power for eleven years, and everyone knew that if Thatcher called another election she would win. Labour was building from its roots, but with no credibility at the top, while the right-wing press ridiculed Kinnock. Then the poll tax produced a whiff of people power, and the Tories ditched her while she was at the Paris conference. I had promised to dance in the streets the day Maggie went. Instead the nation watched, fascinated, as John Major emerged and a tearful old lady tumbled into the Downing Street limousine. At what point were we supposed to dance? The mood wasn't there, and the same lot carried on without the matriarch, a missed chance for Kinnock. I got stick for breaking my promise, but who would dance with me? Not Maureen, whom I put through a school cupboard forty-five years ago at a Labour League of Youth social. Christmas and family We had our traditional Christmas turkey, with Ian, Rose, Christopher and Andrew The Clays next door but two, with daughters Liz (eighteen) and Becky (sixteen), had enriched our lives; the girls, having lost their last grandparents, asked us to be their adoptive grandparents. On Boxing Day evening we joined their extended family, while Ian's family went to Rose's parents. The 1990 festive season was happy, our home filled with natural light, the fresh green foliage steadily masking the stark trunks and sharp cuts. The Baggies were doing badly, and Terry Stanton seemed to have got off completely from pushing his way into my home and knocking me down on my own garage floor. But what a year: the nation at war, the most turbulent Tory leadership crisis since Chamberlain, and the most powerful Prime Minister since Churchill deposed by a ruthless internal putsch. The old year drifted away peacefully, in stark contrast to how it had begun. |
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