First viewed : 31 August 1986
This series seems half-forgotten now but in 1986 it was deeply controversial. It was based on a book of the same name by William Allison and John Fairley published in 1978 adapted for the screen by Alan Bleasdale. It traced the career of a criminal called Percy Toplis who had spells in the army and was shot dead by police near Penrith in 1920 while on the run for the murder of a taxi driver . While in the army, he sometimes posed as an officer, with a monocle as part of his disguise, to pull girls or impress friends . That much is undisputed. However the book alleged that Toplis was the ringleader of the Etaples mutiny of 1917 and that he was pursued after the war by the Secret Service who arranged the ambush leading to his death. Historians with no axe to grind pointed out that the records showed that Toplis's regiment was on its way to India at the time of the mutiny, an event that the authors had greatly exaggerated. This led Tory politicians and the Daily Mail to excoriate the BBC for supposed left wing bias for advertising the drama as "a true-life story".
I missed nearly all of it first time round because I had become reconciled with my old friends Michael and Sean and went to the pub with them on a Sunday night instead. I did see a small part of the first episode in The Red Lion, Littleborough with them, showing the horrendously botched execution of a young deserter. When the series was repeated in 1988, I watched it right through and it was an impressive piece of drama with Paul McGann furthering his reputation in the main role.
At the time of the broadcast , a witness to Toplis's death was still alive, a man called De Courcey Parry who did not enter the controversy. When I used to attend slide shows at Kewsick's Moot Hall in the early nineties ,the host Ray McHaffie would always point him out as an old man attending a summer fete on one of his slides.
Toplis has long since fascinated me. The BBC shot themselves in the foot promoting it as 'a true life story' but as to those claims of where Toplis was at this stage (ie India or Malta) by historians, I remain unconvinced.
ReplyDeleteI may be being naive here, but whilst there's no evidence he was in Étaples, there's equally precious little evidence he was with his regiment at that time either. If the man was a notorious deserter, surely he could have left his troop before they boarded for India and taken himself Étaples, where he had previously hidden out in the forests around the region with other deserters, pacifists and socialists? Overall, it brings up more questions than answers: why did the Home Office effectively run such a massive manhunt for someone the authorities deemed guilty of murder? Why was his funeral held in private, his family lied to and turned away, and why was he buried in an unmarked grave? The documents pertaining to all that occurred in Étaples was due for release this year following its centenary embargo by the state, but lo and behold it had come to light in the late 70s that they were destroyed many years earlier.
Ultimately I think Bleasdale's story became a whipping boy for a Tory govt whose Tebbit led Peacock Committee were rabidly looking to condemn the BBC as leftist in a manner not dissimilar to the McCarthy witch hunts; police raids at BBC Scotland in relation to the planned and subsequently banned programme concerning the Zircon signals intelligence satellite, a dossier suggesting the BBC news team were biased against America in their coverage of their bombing raids on Libya and 100 Tory MP's signing a motion for "the restoration of proper standards at the BBC" followed by the sacking of DG Alisdair Milne.
I don't know all the answers but I think it unlikely that even if he was around Etaples that the serving soldiers would have accepted the leadership of a serial deserter or that he would have had the courage to expose himself in that way. Was the manhunt disproportionate for a murderer on the loose ? His grave was unmarked because the family had no money.
ReplyDeleteI can't really see why the Home Office and the SIS would have effectively ran a manhunt for someone wanted simply for murder, surely that's for the police to operate? As for the question of leadership at Étaples, I guess it depends on how much you buy the line as to whether serial deserters and mutineers were primarily involved; if they were, I see no reason as to why Toplis wouldn't figure as large as he does in Bleasdale's interpretation based on the Allison and Fairley book. An unmarked pauper's grave is understandable, but it still begs the question why the family were kept away?
ReplyDeleteThe frustrating thing is we'll only ever have questions, rather than answers. But what questions!
All sounds interesting stuff! Funnily, despite my dad's paternal family all being from Penrith, I've never heard of this guy.
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