For boxer’s murder
That night Lewis decided to have a drink in the Blue Anchor in St Mary Street, and who should be in there as well but Danny Driscoll and Edward Rowlands, with John Rowlands – another member of the gang – and William Joseph Price, waiting in a cafe just across the road.
Lewis left the pub, John Rowlands left the cafe and seconds later the unfortunate Lewis received terrible slashes to his throat which left him in a pool of blood on the cobblestones.
One of the ladies of the night tried to stem the flow of blood with cloth torn from her petticoat and Lewis was rushed to Cardiff Royal Infirmary.
The police kept a vigil at Lewis’ bedside, and throughout the night there were regular phone calls from the same number inquiring about Lewis’ condition.
Those calls were traced to the Colonial Club, a well known dive in Custom House Street, and it was there that the Rowlands brothers, John Hughes, Danny Driscoll and William Joseph Price were arrested.
The suspects were taken to Lewis’ bedside and he told the police that he didn’t know how he got his wounds and to Danny Driscoll he said: “You had nothing to do with it. We were laughing together... my dear old pal.”
During the trial, police had told how they found blood on “Tich” Rowlands’ clothing.
But the lies and half-truths out of fear more than anything else, were not so strong.
Some people believed it significant that at three identification parades not one eyewitness, apart from the two police officers whose evidence didn’t tally anyway, was able to identify Driscoll.
Within hours of the verdict more than £600 was collected to help Driscoll pay the cost of his appeal, but there was no sympathy for the Rowlands brothers, who had been described as “vicious villains”.
At a jam-packed Cory Hall in Station Terrace, hundreds of Driscoll sympathisers were told that John Rowlands had maintained that he alone had killed Lewis.
Sackfuls of appeal forms were sent to the Home Office and even two members of the jury, who had found Driscoll and Rowlands guilty, went to London to visit the Home Secretary to plead for the lives of Driscoll and Rowlands.
As for Driscoll himself, he wrote from Cardiff Prison: “I say I am an innocent man. The evidence against me was so slender that no jury could reasonably find me guilty, but the fact their minds were inflamed against me by untrue statements.”
On the morning of the hanging, 5,000 men, women and children stood outside Cardiff Prison singing hymns.
Driscoll, we are told, walked proudly to the gallows, looked up to the heavens and said: “Well, they’ve given us a nice day for it”, and added: “Which noose is mine?”
Meanwhile Edward Rowlands, who had to be helped from his cell, was almost unconscious.
John Rowlands was to escape the hangman’s noose after being certified insane while William Joseph Price was acquitted.
■■Adapted from Brian Lee’s Racing Rogues: The Scams, Scandals and Gambles of Horse Racing in Wales published by St David’s Press at £12.99. ■■Please send your stories and pictures to Brian Lee, Cardiff Remembered, South Wales Echo, Six Park Street, Cardiff CF10 1XR or email brianlee4@virginmedia.com – please include your phone number as I cannot reply by letter.
Main, people reading the death notices posted on the doors of Cardiff Prison after the double execution of Daniel Driscoll and Edward Rowlands who were condemned to death for the murder of ex-boxer David Lewis, left, on January 1928 and, right, boxer Jim Driscoll, Tom Clarke, an unknown person and bookmaker Danny Driscoll