Christopher Payne
Police chief who played key roles in the Spaghetti House siege and the Cleveland child abuse affair
CHRISTOPHER PAYNE, who has died aged 89, served as Chief Constable of the Cleveland Constabulary from 1976 to 1990, as well as playing decisive roles in such notable events as the Spaghetti House siege, a hijacking at Heathrow Airport and the Trident air crash at Staines.
The highest-profile episode in Payne’s career came in September 1975: nine staff at the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge were settling down to count the week’s takings, around £13,000 (worth about £106,000 today) when a 28-year-old Nigerian student, Franklin Davies, and two accomplices, 24-year-old Wesley Dick and 22-year-old Anthony Gordon Munroe, burst into the restaurant and marched the all-italian staff at gunpoint into a small storeroom in the basement.
The storeroom was cramped but there was plenty of tinned food, and the robbers held out with their hostages for five days. After two days they released two who had fallen ill in exchange for coffee and cigarettes.
The trio claimed that they were members of the “Black Liberation Army”, a supposed offshoot of the Black Panthers, and demanded a plane and safe passage to Jamaica. Knowing there was a radio in the storeroom, the police carried out a media campaign to discourage the robbers, putting out bulletins declaring that there was no chance of the authorities caving in, all the while monitoring conditions in the cramped room via a fibre-optic camera squeezed through a hole in the wall.
It became clear that the police were not going to accede to their demands, and after five days Payne spoke to Davies through a hole in the cellar. “The hostages are coming out,” Davies told him. “All right, send them out, one by one,” Payne ordered.
The hostages filed out, looking remarkably unscathed by their ordeal, then Payne ordered the gunmen to put down their guns and come out with their hands on their heads.
“The first two gunmen came out one by one in this fashion, somewhat cautiously,” Payne told reporters later. “Shortly afterwards we heard a shot.”
Davies had shot himself in the stomach with a .22 pistol, but recovered in hospital. He was sentenced to 22 years’ jail, Dick for 18 and Munroe for 17. The success of the operation was seen as a vindication of the “wait and see” policy, with the police prepared to “be patient, and be patient again”, as a senior colleague of Payne’s put it.
Christopher Frederick Payne was born in South London on February 15 1930. He came from several generations of policemen: his father, Gerald, OBE, BEM, QPM, was a deputy assistant commissioner, while his maternal grandmother, whose father was head of
Westminster police, had lived in Bow Street police station. His mother was Amy, née Parker.
He attended Christ’s College grammar school in Finchley, and studied for a time at Hendon Technical College before working as a bank clerk for two years. His National Service was in the Intelligence Corps in Austria, work which he found so interesting that returning to a bank held little interest, so he decided to go into the “family business” – policing.
Accordingly, in 1950 he joined the Metropolitan Police, rising through the ranks, and in 1963 he was appointed Chief Inspector of the Operations Branch at New Scotland Yard, responsible for the Royal Family’s movements, ceremonial and special events, as well as issues of public order, race relations and emergency planning.
In 1965 he attended a senior command course, and was appointed superintendent, then chief superintendent, of the
Met’s Hammersmith division. In 1968 he moved to become chief superintendent in the Home Office research and development branch, with responsibility for manpower and establishments.
Payne next served as chief superintendent of “D” district in the West End then as commander of X District, taking in Ealing and Hillingdon. One major incident with which he was involved came in June 1972, when a BEA Trident flight from London to Brussels crashed near Staines soon after take-off, killing all 118 people on board.
In December 1974, Payne was named as Commander of the Met’s Airport Division. The following month a 29-year-old Iranian man, Saeed Madjd, an out-of-work television engineer, acting alone, hijacked a flight from Manchester Ringway to Heathrow, demanding a parachute and £100,000. When the plane landed the passengers were allowed off the plane on the supposed understanding that it would then be flown to Paris.
After an eight-hour stand-off the plane took off, but only for Stansted, where Madjd was arrested: the gun he had been brandishing turned out to be a toy pistol, while his dynamite was imitation. Again, the patient approach paid off. Following previous hijackings, the authorities had developed a policy of wearing down hijackers with endless negotiations, and Payne stuck to the script.
Even before taking over as commander at Heathrow, Payne had been involved in rewriting the airport’s planning for emergencies and terrorist attacks, and in May 1974 a car bomb had exploded in a multistorey car park at the airport, injuring three people and damaging 40 cars.
That year the Army occupied Heathrow, ostensibly to train for possible terrorist attacks, though there were rumours that they were there to prepare for a coup d’etat against the Wilson government. Payne gave a television interview to state that any military presence at Heathrow would be under his command.
Payne’s firm, steady hand powered his ascent, and in 1976 he was appointed Chief Constable of Cleveland. The area is a centre of the chemical industry, and Payne was put in command of a special force to establish a system of planning for emergencies.
But the case that brought most publicity during Payne’s 14-year stint in the North-east was the affair that broke in 1987, when doubts began to surface about an investigation into alleged child abuse in the area that had led to 121 children being taken into care.
Working with the senior police surgeon, Dr Alistair Irvine, Payne believed that a senior paediatrician, Marietta Higgs, her colleague, Dr Geoffrey Wyatt and a social worker, Sue Richardson, had rewritten previously agreed guidelines about investigating alleged abuse, particularly those concerning procedures used in the diagnostic test.
When Dr Higgs had arrived in Cleveland the number of suspected cases had shot up, and within six months hospital and social services were stretched to breaking point by the numbers of children being taken into care. Relations between the police and the medical authorities broke down, and Payne claimed that the county’s chief police surgeon had been denied access to the alleged victims by Dr Higgs. “It was not in the best interests of the young persons involved,” Richardson countered.
In 1988 a report by Elizabeth Butlersloss concluded that most of the diagnoses had been wrong, although a later television documentary, working with independent experts, claimed that 70 per cent had been correct. The report was also critical of Payne for not taking a lead in resolving the dispute between the police and the medical authorities.
Within the police force, Payne enjoyed a reputation as a nurturer of talent, and many senior figures recalled his kindness, and how he had assiduously brought on their careers.
He retired from the police force in 1990 and became a management consultant. From 1991 to 1994 he was a senior visiting research fellow at Bradford University, teaching a postgraduate course in disaster management, both at Bradford and at Budapest Technical University; he was simultaneously a consultant in Disaster Planning and Management at Dubai Aviation College.
Away from work, he enjoyed stampcollecting, painting, gardening, French polishing and furniture restoring. His children recalled the many wonderful toys he had made for them.
Christopher Payne married, in 1952, Barbara Saxby. She survives him with their three daughters and a son.
Christopher Payne, born February 15 1930, died February 27 2019