Sir James Anderton

Former chief constable

SIR JAMES Anderton, who has died at 89, was the outspoken former chief constable of Greater Manchester, whose conversion to Catholicism earned him the sobriquet “God’s Copper”.

A former Methodist lay preacher, he gained notoriety after claiming he was receiving divine inspiration to speak out on moral issues.

In 1986 he faced calls for his resignation after widely reported comments about Aids, in which he referred to people “swirling around in a cesspool of their own making”.

Further controversy came a year later when he spoke of administering corporal punishment and even castration to make criminals “beg for mercy”.

He added: ”They should be punished until they repent of their sins. I’d thrash some criminals myself, most surely.”

Born in Wigan, the son of a miner, Cyril James Anderton left Wigan grammar school at 16 for a job as a coal board clerk, but his tour of national service found him installed in the military police.

He found it suited him and upon returning to civilian life in 1953 signed up for Manchester City Police.

His early career saw him patrolling the city’s red-light district, where his oft-repeated religious references earned him the nickname “Bible Jim”.

But he was a career copper, whose rise through the ranks was hastened after a course in criminology at Manchester University.

By then tipped for high office, he served in Cheshire, Leicestershire and London before taking over at the newlyrenamed Greater Manchester Police in 1976 at the age of 44. He held the job until 1991 and was knighted a year earlier.

It was not only moral issues on which he was outspoken. He believed the 1984 miners’ strike was the work of a “politically motivated industrial mafia” and was as a result was greatly admired by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

He was less popular with John Stalker, his deputy at Manchester, when Stalker led an inquiry into allegations of a shoot-to-kill policy by the Army and police in Northern Ireland.

The inquiry came to nothing when Stalker was suspended over later disproved allegations of inappropriate dealings with a Manchester businessman. The feeling that Anderton had betrayed him lingered for years.

Mr Anderton is survived by his wife, Joan, whom he married in 1955, and by their daughter.