A violent journey from killing to court
Goodfellas. “My father was shot dead, probably murdered. Uncle John did life for murder and my uncle Wally shot my uncle Henry in the head with a shotgun after an argument over the division of warehouse spoils. Henry, of course, was an enforcer for the Krays.”
Of course. Gow’s mother divorced his father early on but had a succession of boyfriends, one of whom beat up her son. The family moved continually. Gow attended around 20 schools before he was 16 years old.
Always the new kid on the block, he was picked on and pressured to join the local gangs. But the skinny youngster had an independent mind. “It wasn’t anything noble. I thought they were numpties, which made me a target. And I stood up to them, which resulted in” – he points to his face – “the scars. All before I was 14.
“Fighting didn’t frighten me at all. The earliest memory I have, I think I was four, is of my father kicking the living daylights out of a bus driver who’d argued with my mother.”
Despite the constant battles Gow never fell foul of the law. “My grandma kept me right. And it was always self-defence. I was always picked upon.”
Aged 17 in 1970, Gow, thrown out of his home by his mother’s latest boyfriend, decided to join the army but failed his first medical due to “near malnutrition”. The eight-stone teenager persisted and with his worldly goods crammed into a plastic bag he ended up in rainsoaked Aldershot with the Parachute Regiment.
But wasn’t there an irony in the fact he was joining a very big gang? “The army weren’t numpties,” he counters quickly. “And I wanted a home. They fed me and clothed me and all they wanted me to do in return was kill people.”
Violence was rife and in the Paras he encountered a culture of bullying. Gow was already paranoid, a social misfit and inarticulate, he says. “To be honest, it was so bad it drove me to the point of suicide.”
The teenage Gow backed down to nobody, not even combat veterans. “Hit first, think later” was his credo. He trained hard and became a middleweight boxer. He fought civvies “for fun” on Saturday nights. “I’d wake up on Sundays with my bloodied face stuck to the pillow,” he recalls.
By the time he was posted to Northern Ireland Gow had been programmed to be a killer. “I never feared being hurt,” he says. “I felt invincible.”
Gow wanted to kill as many IRA soldiers as possible. “Yes, and I was a Catholic. But what they did to the country, to Irish people, made me renounce my religion.” What about the Ulster Volunteer Force? “They weren’t killing us,” he says, “and we didn’t care what they did to the IRA.”
Did he actually kill anyone while in Ireland? “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
A semblance of normal life emerged at 19 when he focused his sights on an Irish girl and married her. “She was a good woman but I never really liked her,” he says now.
Frustrated that he couldn’t deal with the known IRA members in the manner in which he had been trained, Gow bought himself out of the army, took himself off to Africa and fought in the South African Border War with the Special Forces.
“I fought all over, in Botswana, Mozambique, was shot once and decorated twice,” he says. “I was made up to sergeant.”
The politics of his killing choices didn’t register with him. Nuanced argument didn’t enter his thought processes. “I killed a lot of people and it felt great,” he says, “and I’ve never had a flashback. I’ve killed people closer to me than you are now, shot them through the head. When you shoot someone close up you feel this blast of air hit you in the face.”
He took a bullet in the leg in Mozambique. “I shot the guy who shot me. He began to twitch and turn like one of the aliens in the old Cadbury’s Smash advert.”
When Gow returned to Britain he joined the SAS. One great disappointment was having a mission cancelled when he was commanded to kill Argentine pilots on Port Stanley airport. The Argentines surrendered before he had the chance. Gow was gutted. But let me throw in a little psychobabble, Henry. Could it have been you didn’t care if you died because you had so little self-esteem?
“No, none of that crap,” he says, laughing. “I just figured I was better than everyone else.”
Gow is clearly a very intelligent man, with a law degree and a Masters in international relations. “My one piece of advice to anyone growing up as I did would be to get educated. Take a student loan. Get a degree. It makes you capable of so much more.”
But did his innate intelligence never get in the way of shooting people? He ponders. “I was intelligent ... but I had never been educated and taught perspective.”
If the story so far suggests a cold, heartless man, it’s far from true. Back in Britain he met his second wife. “As soon as I saw her I fell madly in love, right up until she walked out of my life.” He was heartbroken. But why did she leave?
“I had left the army and joined the RUC, and it was a time of constant threat, on and off duty, and constant overtime. I’d also began working for my sergeants exam.” He pauses and softly says, “If you want to keep a jewel shiny you polish it. But I didn’t. I then made the mistake of chasing after her. The more I chased, the more she pulled away.”
Gow’s heart was broken but soon the rest of his body was also in bits. When he was driving one afternoon in Northern Ireland, an old lady stepped out in front of him. He braked hard. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt and went through the windscreen. Among the injuries he sustained was a fractured neck. “Doctors said if I hadn’t been armoured with muscle I would have been dead. I could deal with the physical pain, but my career was over.”
He moved back to Hereford and spent months in recovery. To pass the time he wrote a book, Double Kill, under the pseudonym Harry McCallion. (He has since written several novels and his autobiography.) But what could he do for a career?
In his late 30s Gow decided to become a lawyer and began the process with the same determination and discipline he once brought to fighting the enemy. Gow is now a barrister, and most of his cases are against “the section of the police who don’t obey the law” (he gets more than his share of speeding tickets). He’s a contented man, naturally funny in conversation and exuding warmth..
Gow still loves to fight, but these days he gets his adrenalin fix in the courtroom.
“It’s legalised GBH,” he says. “Come and watch me some time. I still love a square go.”