Dirty tricks of chain-smoking men in trilby hats who formed Fleet Street’s Murder Gang
Legend has it that when the Daily Express sent its crime reporters to cover a breaking murder story four cars would depart Fleet Street.
The first would hold the journalists, led of course by the doyen of crime reporters, Percy Hoskins.
The following three vehicles were to block access points to the crime scene and hinder rivals trying to muscle in on the tale.
This was in the days when Fleet Street was in its pomp and the Daily Express had good reason to call itself The World’s Greatest Newspaper.
It built a significant part of its circulation – by 1949 it sold more than four million – on crime, for which read murder. This fascination was underpinned by a grisly truth: the death penalty.
The men (always men) who brought these stories in and followed them to the gallows were known as The Murder Gang, a name bestowed by journalist Hilde Marchant in a 1947 article for Picture Post.
Author Neil Root wrote a book about them, published in 2018 – The Murder Gang: Fleet Street’s elite group of crime reporters in the golden age of tabloid crime.
He describes them as… “men in overcoats, camel-hair and Crombie, notepads out, in and out of shops, pubs and cafes, pressing for leads, scanning the street, getting a feel, a taste led by instinct and experience. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and the Murder Gang are at the crime scene, response time: less than thirty minutes.”
When not casting a forensic journalistic eye over the crime scene, these reporters operated in the Scotland Yard Press room, or Fleet Street’s many pubs, or the Old Bailey and Bow Street Magistrates’ Court.
In a foreword to the book, Duncan Campbell, no mean reporter himself, calls it “a busy, exciting life, if it often tended to be a short one: chain-smoking and beer-drinking were as much a part of the job as shorthand-writing and cultivating mates in the Flying Squad.”
The Gang included such men as Hoskins, who famously had a grace and favour home in London’s then fashionable Park Lane, granted to him by his boss Lord Beaverbrook; or Norman “Jock” Rae, of the News of the World, who uncovered the story of the murderer Dr Buck Ruxton in the 1930s.
Duncan Webb, of The People, exposed the prostitution racket run in Soho by the Maltese Messina brothers; and Tom Tullett, of the Daily Mirror, tracked down a murderer who not only confessed to him, but also produced body parts to confirm his guilt.
This elite group covered the most famous British murders between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, says Root. They would stop at nothing to get the story. “If that meant becoming criminals in the process then that was part of the job.”
They would use “dubious and highly unethical methods” and they knew the criminals, top detectives and influential figures in the court system. Murderers and their families were paid large sums for their stories; reporters secretly met killers on the run.
Rivalry was fierce and some members of the Gang would sabotage phones near a crime scene to prevent other papers from phoning in copy. They carried potatoes in their car boots to stick up the exhaust pipes of rivals to prevent their cars starting.
“In extremis,” writes Root, “there was Percy Hoskins, of whom it was said, ‘If you are in trouble you should call Percy before your lawyer.’ ”
Revel Barker, of the Sunday Mirror, wrote of The Murder Gang: “Crime reporters aped the dress of CID detectives – three-piece suits, usually a trilby, and raincoats or trench coats, or heavy overcoats in winter.
“They also adopted copper slang – for instance, referring to suspects as ‘Chummy’. They learnt to talk in pubs without moving their lips.”
Root digs into 12 crimes that brought The Murder Gang out in force. They are well told in minute detail and if you are a true crime fan, you will enjoy them.
Recounting one of them, Root gives an insight into how and why Hoskins became the king of crime reporting.
Hoskins already had great contacts within the police. But so did some of his rivals.
“One very influential connection made at the end of the Second World War would move him into a different league, above his Murder Gang peers,” writes Root.
As the war approached its end, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison asked civil servant Harold Scott to become the Met Commissioner. It was a radical choice. Every commissioner since 1829 had risen through the ranks.
Scott launched a public relations drive to improve the image of the police. He allowed film-makers and TV executives to use the Met’s resources to make first The Blue Lamp, a film starring Jack Warner as a heroic copper, and then the TV spin-off, Dixon of Dock Green.
It cemented the image of the incorruptible, morally impeccable British bobby in the public imagination for decades.
Hoskins was able to foster this image in his reporting for the Daily Express and it gave him access to die for. He was liked and trusted by the most senior policeman in the land.
“His friendship and collaboration with Scott lifted him into a rarefied police information Valhalla about which other Murder Gang hacks could only dream,” writes Root.
Scott, perhaps significantly, had been Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the war and so must have known Lord Beaverbrook, who was Minister for that department and Hoskins’s proprietor.
He stayed as Commissioner until 1953. “By then,” writes Root, “Hoskins was very firmly ‘in’ with the police, and his scoops would reflect that.”
But nothing is for ever. By the Sixties, the mood was changing. Duncan Campbell recalls the growing unease in Britain towards capital punishment.
He quotes Bill Connor, the Daily Mirror’s Cassandra, in a column about the execution of Ruth Ellis:-
“It’s a fine day for haymaking. A fine day for fishing. A fine day for lolling in the sunshine. And if you feel that way – and I mourn to say that millions of you do – it’s a fine day for a hanging.”
And the Daily Express’s own Victor Davis explained why The Murder Gang no longer cast its spell on the reading public after the death penalty was abolished in 1969:-
“…much of the buzz went out of crime reporting. The Swinging Sixties swung a little less. No more judge’s black cap, no more execution date planted squarely on the Home Secretary’s desk as a reminder that there is a yes-or-no decision to take, no more Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Allen, the deadly duo, overnighting with the prison governor while they tested the trap, rigged the rope and ate a dinner always described as hearty – just like the condemned man’s breakfast.”
Instead, the cult of celebrity began to take hold. And look where that’s got us.
*The Murder Gang, by Neil Root, published in 2018 by The History Press. Available on Amazon.
*****
As the evidence against him mounts, what now for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor?
Some of that evidence is circumstantial, it’s true. But I found the new picture of him on all fours leaning over a woman on the floor disturbing and pretty damning.
And two women are now claiming Jeffrey Epstein sent them to Britain to have sex with the former Duke of York.
Shamed and disgraced, he has been booted out of Royal Lodge, Windsor, and exiled to the rather less salubrious Marsh Farm on the King’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.
His ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, has scarpered abroad. His daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, are keeping their distance from their father.
Now Sir Keir Starmer wants him to testify before Congress, telling what he knows about Epstein’s sordid web. He would be failing victims if he did not, Starmer said.
Well, good luck with that, Sir Keir. After Emily Maitlis shot down his defence and laid his Woking Pizza Express alibi open to ridicule in her TV interview, he won’t be talking again any time soon.
Most of us would not consider his public downfall sufficient punishment for his seedy association with the convicted paedophile Epstein, especially if those “trafficked” women are telling the truth.
But what else can be done? It would take a brave Met Commissioner and perhaps a braver Home Secretary to have him arrested and charged, even assuming they had enough evidence.
The Prime Minister’s next meeting with the King would be fraught with embarrassment and hand-wringing. Neither would want that, nor their advisers. The Establishment would close ranks.
Could Mountbatten-Windsor be extradited to the U.S.? There is a treaty but it is complex. And in any case, if they won’t send us their CIA hit-and-run drivers, why should we send them our suspected Royal paedophile?
The other question that must haunt the Monarch is this: Will the latest revelations break his brother? The awful picture of him was one of 180,000 images released by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ). Three million pages and 2,000 videos were also put in the public domain.
He knows now that the game is up. So did Epstein, and he killed himself.
But Mountbatten-Windsor, in pictures taken this week out and about in his Range Rover and on his horse, looks angry and defiant. He is an arrogant man and not inclined to show remorse.
His determination not to go quietly won’t win him any sympathy from the King.
Lord (Peter) Mandelson is a different kettle of fish. He’s finished. Kaput!
If the $75,000 payment from Epstein – Mandelson claims to have no record or recollection of the handout – doesn’t finish him in public life, then the risible picture of him standing in his underpants at one of Epstein’s homes surely will.
There is also the small matter of Mandy allegedly leaking Government secrets to Epstein, who was more than shrewd enough to use them for his own gain. Knacker of the Yard is on the case and Mandelson cannot rely on the Establishment to save him.
He has resigned from the House of Lords, it was revealed yesterday, but Starmer wanted him to be stripped of his peerage. Quite right. It would require legislation but that is long overdue.
We have this debate every time a Peer is caught behaving badly. Time for the PM to show the Lords that what he giveth, he taketh away if they’re naughty.
The latest dump of documents and files relating to Epstein was another treasure trove. Fleet Street slavered over them.
Our national newspapers were spoilt for choice and it showed in the first day’s headlines: “Epstein sent thousands of pounds to Mandelson’s husband, emails show “ – FT; “Trump hit by underage sex claim” – Mirror; “Gates ‘caught STD from Epstein sex girls’ ” – Star; “Epstein fixed Russian girl for Andrew” – Sun; “Epstein invited to Palace” – The Times.
Donald Trump is mentioned “hundreds of times” in the documents, the BBC reported. But the DoJ said allegations of sexual abuse are false and Trump claimed he had been exonerated.
As for Epstein… well, who keeps millions of documents and many thousands of images and videos relating to their rich and famous friends, acquaintances and house guests?
A blackmailer, that’s who. The Russians would call it kompromat. Epstein was the arch manipulator, as sponger Mandelson’s exposure has shown.
I said it would be the story of 2026. And before January was out, so it was.
*****
And the winner for the best line in a review of Melania Trump’s “documentary” goes to… the U.S. showbiz bible, Variety: “If they showed this film on a plane, people would still walk out.”
RICHARD DISMORE
4 February 2026
