OUTRAGE OF A D-DAY HERO
In a police station, former head of the Army Lord Bramall, 91, looks on with quiet fury as police ask if he knew Jimmy Savile – and if he was part of VIP child abuse gang. Nine months later, he was completely exonerated
THE former head of the Armed Forces reacted furiously as he was questioned by police over ‘preposterous’ claims made by an alleged fantasist that he was a paedophile, a court heard yesterday.
At times, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, then 91, banged on a table as a junior Scotland Yard detective grilled him for 100 minutes over a series of historic child sex claims made by former nurse and school governor, Carl Beech.
These included allegations made by Beech that he had spiders tipped over him by his abusers and that Lord Bramall forced him to eat his own vomit after making him perform a sex act.
Beech, 51, formerly known by the pseudonym ‘Nick’, also accused Lord Bramall of abusing him at Christmas parties where he was regarded as a ‘present’ to be unwrapped, and also molested him on Remembrance Days, at the private members’ Carlton Club and Dolphin Square apartment block in London.
When it was put to Lord Bramall that disgraced TV presenter Jimmy Savile was a member of a supposed VIP child abuse gang also including the heads of MI5 and MI6, his fury turned to outright laughter. ‘Jimmy Savile? Jimmy Savile?’ said the Old Etonian. ‘I have seen him on the television and always thought he was a dreadful man but I have never met him.’ He later described Savile as ‘the most odious man I have ever seen’. When the D-Day hero was asked about sex orgies in swimming pools and whether he could swim, he snapped to Detective Constable Gavin Sealey: ‘I landed at Normandy and I jolly nearly had to swim.’
Newcastle Crown Court was yesterday played a video of Lord Bramall’s interview in Aldershot police station, in April 2015 – seven weeks after his home on the Surrey/Hampshire border had been raided by the Metropolitan Police.
The search took place nearly four months after Scotland Yard publicly described Beech’s VIP child sex allegations relating to the 1970s and 1980s as ‘credible and true’.
The force spent 16 months and more than £2 million investigating his claims against Lord Bramall, former PM Edward Heath, former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor and various former security services chiefs before closing the inquiry without any arrests or charges.
An investigation by Northumbria Police was launched into father-ofone Beech, and he is on trial accused of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud. He denies the charges.
Lord Bramall rose to be Chief of the General Staff – the top Army post – and then Chief of the Defence Staff, the officer commanding the combined forces of the Army, Navy and RAF.
Before the video of him being questioned by police was shown yesterday, jurors were told the war hero, now 95, was ‘in very poor health’ and unable to attend court and give evidence.
The film showed him being interviewed under caution by DC Sealey. Repeatedly denying ever being involved in child abuse, he told the officer in a series of sharp exchanges: ‘I am absolutely astonished, amazed and bemused.
‘I find it incredible that anybody should believe that someone of my career standing, integrity, should be capable of any of these things, including things like torture. Unbelievable.’
Beech told police his stepfather Major Ray Beech had sexually abused him, then taken him to Lord Bramall’s office in Erskine Barracks, Wiltshire, when he was in charge of the UK Land Forces, in about 1976. Beech, a former head of complaints at the Royal Gloucester Hospital, told police that Lord Bramall undressed him and sexually molested him, but the peer told detectives this was ‘absolute rubbish’. He was scornful when it was put to him that two other senior military figures – General Sir Roland Gibbs and General Hugh Beach – were also involved in the alleged VIP sex gang.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he told DC Sealey. ‘They have taken in the whole damned Army.’
Lord Bramall said he had never heard of Major Ray Beech.
Responding to an allegation that he had raped defendant Beech, whose identity police refused to give to him during the interview, he said: ‘How anyone could think me capable of doing these things.
‘Astonished and bemused’
I have never had sex with anyone of my own sex.
‘I certainly never had an inclination of being a paedophile.
‘I have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren – I love children and any allegation is absolutely outrageous.’
Lord Bramall was told the allegations by ‘Nick’ included that abuse had happened at Imber – a derelict village on Salisbury Plain used by the Army for training.
Lord Bramall said: ‘I have never seen boys tied together and I have certainly never tortured them.’
Of the other men Beech named, he said he had only seen Mr Brittan in the House of Lords, and not spoken to him, and he did not know Mr Proctor, whom he thought was in the Labour Party. He knew Sir Maurice Oldfield, head of MI6, and praised his reputation in intelwife ligence, but did not know Sir Michael Hanley, who led MI5.
Lord Bramall later scolded officers for searching his house in the presence of himself and Avril, his of 65 years, with evidence from Beech that was uncorroborated by anyone. And he pleaded with officers to complete their inquiries as quickly as possible so his reputation was not damaged any further than it already had been.
Of the allegations themselves, he said: ‘This thing is so preposterous, it is so very difficult to understand how it could possibly have been made up other than by someone who specialises in sci-fi fiction.’
He became frustrated that Beech had been unable to give specific times and places for when and where he claimed the abuse had happened. DC Sealey said the police had to ‘make allowances’ for that as Beech had been a young boy.
Lord Bramall slapped his hand on the table as he replied: ‘I make no allowances, I will not make any allowance for it, I think it is absolutely monstrous.’
His wife, whom he married in 1949, died before detectives from Operation Midland announced in January 2016 that they were not proceeding with the case against him.
In a second police interview in his home, soon after his wife’s death, he was reduced to pleading with the police to clear his name swiftly. He told them: ‘It is really awful for someone in my position to have had this damage done by what has gone to press and the web net.
‘Please report to your superiors and say there is no evidence, there is no case to answer. Make it clear I am no longer a suspect, no longer under investigation. Otherwise my
‘Absolutely monstrous’
reputation is still being damaged on Google and that is not fair after my record and at my time of life.
‘I ask you to clear this matter up and take me out of this investigation as soon as you possibly can.
‘It is a very painful experience to have to go through at my age of 91 and having now just lost my wife.’
In that same interview at his home, he asked the police what corroboration there had been for Beech’s claims before they searched the house in March 2015.
Lord Bramall complained that officers had ‘thought it was sufficient to get a warrant with uncorroborated evidence’.
Collingwood Thompson QC, defending, told the jury that had Lord Bramall been able to attend court, he would have been asked a series of specific questions on Beech’s behalf, including suggesting to Lord Bramall he was a ‘leading member of a paedophile ring’.
The trial continues.