Dan Snow's History Hit - The Last Hanging in Cardiff Prison

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

In September 1952 Mahmood Hussein Mattan became the last to be hanged at Cardiff Prison, but Mahmood had in fact been framed by the police and 45 years later his conviction was quashed. Mahmood had been a merchant seaman who had ended up settling in Cardiff and marrying a Welsh woman called Laura Williams. They lived in the Tiger Bay district of Cardiff and had three children but in 1950 had separated. Mahmood had had a number of encounters with the police and had committed some minor offences such as small thefts. His vocal distrust of the police had made him unpopular with the local force though and when Lily Volpert, a Cardiff shopkeeper, was found murdered and her shop robbed they quickly turned to Mahmood. Despite a lack of any firm evidence linking him to the crime, he became the prime suspect. Poorly represented in court and facing a hostile jury he was convicted in July 1952 and sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was carried out three months later, but the case never truly went away. His family kept the fight alive for 45 years until 1998 when his case was the first to be reviewed by the newly created Criminal Cases Review Commission. His conviction was quickly quashed and his families fight for justice was finally over.To discuss Mahmood's case author Nadifa Mohamed joins Dan for this episode of the podcast. Her novel The Fortune Men, which has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, is based on the case and she immersed herself in the case, Mahmoud's life and the history of Cardiff's multicultural Tiger Bay area to bring this story of injustice to life.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the 3rd of September 1952, Mahmoud Hussein Matan became the last person to be hanged for murder in Wales. He was convicted of a murder which took place of Lily Volpert on the 6th of March 1952. He was a Somali former merchant seaman who'd come and settled in Wales. The trial was a sham, he was framed by the police and around 45 years after his execution his case was the first to be referred to the Court of Appeal by the newly formed Criminal Cases Review Commission. His conviction for murder was very quickly overturned. Talk to me all about this remarkable historic case. It's Nadifa Mohamed.

She is a Somali-British novelist. She's won all sorts of plaudits for her books, and her most recent book, The Fortune Man, all about Mahmoud Matan, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. We'll find out if it gets shortlisted this week. Very, very exciting indeed. She's been described by The Guardian as the literary star of her generation. And as you'll hear, she did a huge amount of historical research for launching into this novel. She clearly is as

good a historian as she is a novelist. And that really is saying something. If you want to hear lots of other great historians, you can do so at historyhit.tv. That's my digital history channel. We've got all the podcasts there, stretching back five years with none of the ads on them. We've also got hundreds of hours of history documentaries. So it's like Netflix for history. We've got all sorts of history. If you want Second World War, we've got that. Shooters have got that. Vikings have got that. We've got it all, stretching right back to the dawn of time, the earliest humans walking in prehistory on British soil. We've got it all, folks.

Historyhit.tv. You get 30 days for free if you sign up right now. Go and check it out. But in the meantime, everybody, here is Nadifa Mohammed. Enjoy. Nadifa, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure. Thank you for having me, Dan. Tell me about this extraordinary story and how you came across it. So it's thanks to the Daily Mail, as all good things are. I saw a double page spread a long, long time ago. I think it must have been 2004 or 2005.

And it was a double page spread on Mahmood's life and on what happened to him and then the appeal in the late 1990s to clear his name. It was still in the news somehow. It was still trundling through with the compensation claimed by the family. So that's how I came to see it. And who was he? He was a Somali sailor, the same age and background in some ways as my father. They were both born in Hargeisa, in Somaliland, British Somaliland, as it was then. And they both joined the British Merchant Navy, Mahmood from South Africa and my

father from Egypt. First of all, what do we know about him? Has he left a big footprint? In some ways, yes. I think he's haunted many people and many places. So he was the last man executed in Cardiff, but also the very first miscarriage of justice overturned by a British court in 1998. So these two quite momentous moments of history surround this young man who died in his 20s. His age is not 100% clear. On paper, he was 28, but it was possible he added years to his age to join the British Merchant Navy and could have been four years younger. So in his life, he was pretty obscure, anonymous. But after his death, he became a figure of history.

And tell us how he went from serving on the Merchant Marine to being in Wales. So as many Somalis did, they joined the British Merchant Navy because it was a way of earning a lot in a short space of time and seeing the world. And Cardiff and Newport were two important ports linking Britain to the rest of the world. So many Somali sailors either joined the British Merchant Navy from Cardiff or settled there. So Mahmood decided to settle there. And he, within three months, he'd met this young Welsh girl called Laura Williams and they fell in love against everyone's wishes they got married and instead of carrying on with his sailor life decided to stay in Cardiff and build a home build a family there and that's kind of I think the essential mistake he made. You're writing fiction How much history did you find yourself doing during this process? A lot. That's what we like to hear. That's what we like to hear. This is a novel that I couldn't

have written without the archives. And I was very lucky to have immense access to the police notes, to the court transcripts, to invoices and interviews between Mahmood and the prison medical officer. So I was really able to immerse myself in a way that I haven't been with my previous novels, which have been set either in the distant past or in Somalia, which because of the civil war, many records just don't exist anymore. But in Britain, everything seems to be kept. Everything, maybe not everything, but a lot of things are kept. And Mahmood's case was one where someone else had already put in a freedom of information request. And I was able to just really immerse myself as well as then going on to interview people in Cardiff, in London and in

Somaliland who were connected to the story in different ways. What could you make out about him and his family life? What could you read either in the lines or between the lines about what it was like for him? That he was soft-hearted. I think that's probably something that was lost because the police changed him into this awful predatory figure who had hounced on this poor shopkeeper and killed her for money so that he could gamble away her hard-earned earnings. But he wasn't that. shopkeeper and killed her for money so that he could gamble away her hard-earned earnings. But he wasn't that. He was someone who I think had been chewed up a little bit by 1950s Britain, who had come with a sense of equality and openness and had that stolen away from him in many respects.

He went from being very law-abiding to turning to petty crime, stealing, getting into arguments with people. He was separated from Laura when all of this happened. Another Somali sailor who knew him at the time said that he was fraying. And it's really interesting now with a deeper understanding of people's psychology to try and unpick what was going on psychologically with him. And I think he was dealing with a feeling of agitated subjugation. He was subjugated but couldn't settle, couldn't accept that and was acting out for a very modern term. Yeah, I've read stuff recently about the mental health impacts of migration. We now know so much more extraordinary

and that's before we even factor in having a different skin colour to the community around you. The reason historians are jealous of people like Una Deaf is you get to fill in the gaps, right? You get to just use your imagination and fill those bits in. Did you use your family's experience? Do you think you've added something to the history here in a way? Of course, it's conjecture, but reading those sentences, hearing those bits of testimony, do you think you're able to say, yeah, look, I can add something to this? For sure. I think I could identify with some of his experiences. I think that his open hostility to the police is very interesting for someone who was living in

the 1940s and 50s, for him to openly say that they are liars, when I think now, because of various miscarriages of justice, we are more willing to accept that the police can lie. But in the 1950s, that was kind of sacrilege. And it was something that I think worked against him, the fact that he was so blunt with the police. I think the feeling of being othered in British society was something I could easily identify with. My father's journey to joining the British Merchant Navy was different to Mahmood's in many respects,

but also because I'd researched and written about my father's own story, it did give me a head start as to understanding how and why Mahmood was in Britain. Tell me about being othered, both in his case and in other cases that you've come across in your own experience. What is the mental health impact of those people called the microaggressions? Is that constant sense that you are different to everybody in your community, everyone around you? Well, to focus on Mahmood's case, he would have entered a country where on paper he was equal, but in reality, he could only work certain jobs

within the Navy and beyond. So in the Merchant Navy, they were only able to work as stokers, which was the kind of grimiest, least paid, hardest job on the ship. And then for that, they were still paid only three quarters of a British sailor's salary. A few years before he had arrived in the country, they would also have been entitled to

just half the water rations and other food rations. So it was a very bluntly unequal system. When he arrived in Cardiff, he could only live, according to the law, in boarding houses set up by the shipping companies. And they were racially segregated. So the Somalis had their own, the Maltese had their own, West Africans had their own, Arabs had their own. And so you were entering a system where your ethnicity, your race, was a crucial part of the life you could live, which is not the case in such blunt ways for me. But there are other microaggressions, what we'd call microaggressions, on the street between individuals that I can identify with. And when Mahmoud steals for the first time, it's not for money, it's not for a criminal purpose, it's more as a form of mischief or

as a form of revenge, where he's sick and tired of being treated as a thief. So he does steal. He decides that he will play to the gallery to a degree, and so he takes his hand back just to annoy this woman who's given him a dirty look in the street. And sadly, you know, that feeling of being distrusted, of being treated as the aura of threat, I think that hasn't changed in this country. It can be very hard for people to get their heads around that final leap towards that stealing bit,

but I think we've all felt that impulse. Like, if everyone thinks I'm X, you know what? I'm just going just going to do ex like I'm just so sick of and it doesn't happen quickly and Mahmood was someone with a lot of dignity a lot of pride he looked amazing people that I spoke to that had known him said he looked good you know that was the first thing they said about him he was someone with a real sense of pride and I think just that constant insult the constant humiliation that word humiliation is an important one because that And I think just that constant insult, the constant humiliation, that word humiliation is an important one, because that is, I think, what degrades people's self-esteem, is when they're constantly humiliated. And so his family had broken down as part of this process? He was trying to win

Laura back, but they were legally separated, and he was living on the same street as her and her mother and father, with the in-laws. And he had also lived with them, which was very unusual for that time. Laura's family didn't disown her. They were not happy with the marriage. But once she did marry him, they let him live with them. So that was a very unusual circumstance. But by this stage, she was living with their three children and her family. And he was living across the road, keeping an eye on her.

Also, I think, trying to win her back. And talk to me about the escalation. How did he end up getting in more trouble? He was the kind of person that the police thought capable of a crime such as murder. And that's not because he'd ever committed a violent crime. His crimes were actually pretty petty. And the last one was a conviction for stealing money from the mosque. So he wasn't capable of committing the murder, but they didn't like him. And a lot of people didn't like him because they described him as cheeky, which I guess in British terms would be seen as uppity, as someone who didn't know his place. And he confirmed that regularly by being rude to the police. At first, they had quite a big net.

And then they decided that it was a Somali that had been seen outside the shop. And out of all of the Somalis in Tiger Bay, the one that they disliked the most was Mahmood. And they didn't like the Somali population as a whole because they thought them suspicious and truculent and as having no master. So it was a community, as well as being a Muslim community, a black community, that they were uncomfortable with. And we also have to put this in the backdrop of what was going on. And at this time, there was the Mau Mau insurgency in East Africa. And many of the policemen would have served in the colonies

and then come back to Britain. So you're dealing with people with experience and prejudices that were born of racially segregated societies in the colonies who are now seeing an influx of young black men into Britain, which felt very, very uncomfortable, to say the least. How big was the Somali community, do you think, in South Wales? It varied. So at this age, it was probably a few thousands. But then on top of that, there were the Yemenis, the Indians, the West Africans, the West Indians, Malays, Chinese,

all of them with their own kind of notoriety. So the Maltese were seen as the gangsters, the Chinese brought in opium, the West Indians, West Africans brought in the cannabis. So everyone had a reputation to struggle against. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we've indifa muhammad on star novelist talking about the last man in wales to be hanged more after this imagine a millennium that lay the foundations for the modern world as we know it today when kingdoms were forged languages shaped cultures created i'm

dr kat jarman and on gone medieval my co-host matthost Matt Lewis and I will tell you just why the so-called Dark Ages really weren't that dark after all. Subscribe to Gone Medieval by History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week.

The geography would have been a bit different. There would have been a really quite high concentration of these people living really close to docks, would there, rather than spread across the whole of Cardiff, for example. That was something that occurred after the 1919 race riots in Cardiff and across the port cities in Britain and in the US as well. And they're called race riots, but really they were kind of pogrom against black and non-white communities in Britain. And they were particularly violent in Cardiff. And that caused the black and Asian population in Cardiff to withdraw behind this kind of defensive wall that Tiger Bay became. It was hemmed in by the railway tracks, the canal, and then by the sea. So there was only one way of entry, and that could

be protected. And that's what they did do in 1919. You know, men went out with guns, with clubs, and protected their community from these marauders, who were often demobbed soldiers from Australia, Canada, as well as British ones. So it was defensive, and it also then allowed Tiger Bay to become a ghetto with high rates of tuberculosis, what was seen as high rates of crime, but were not actually much higher than other parts of Cardiff. It was somewhere where the public imagination could put its worst parts. So come back to his arrest for this crime. Tell me about the crime that he's supposed to have committed. He was accused of killing Lily Volpert, who was a 41-year-old Jewish shopkeeper.

And it was a terrible murder. And it took place while her family were having dinner, having supper in the next room. And they heard nothing. They only became aware of what had happened when the police arrived and knocked on the living room door. And poor Lily had had her throat cut and they assumed that money had been stolen from the shop. It was a very clean killing. Hardly any evidence, no fingerprints, I think. Nothing, nothing to suggest who it might be. And a few witnesses saw someone outside and even the family saw someone outside on the porch. But who that person was became the issue in the trial.

And so they saw a person of colour? Yes. Yeah. And what linked our hero to that person? Nothing, just the colour of his skin? Some people said they were very specific about saying they saw a Somali. So that again centred the police's attention on the Somali community. And then there was a Jamaican carpenter, Harold Kovar, who then said it was definitely Mahmood that he saw and that he has no reason to lie. And that he'd seen him about Tiger

Bay. And it was him, it was definitely him outside the shop. And was he properly represented? No, that's very easy to answer. His barrister, who had represented another Somali in another murder case a year before, successfully represented him in court by describing Mahmood as a semi-civilized savage and a half-child of nature and a childish liar. And he had used most of that same language in the previous trial, representing that other Somali. I think what he was saying was, you and I, the jury, understand that he is not capable of morality and thought in the way that we are, but that doesn't make him a killer. So that was the kind of attitude and this idea of savagery

and the savage was something that was constantly reinforced in Britain in psychology, in politics. The Mau Mau were savages who would drink blood at night. Films represented black and Asian and non-white people in the same way. It was a solid caricature that he could place on Mahmood. In a weird way, he thought that that would diminish Mahmood to the point where he would be seen as a childlike figure, rather than as this clever killer that the police were trying to portray him as. So it's not the best defence. And did the jury take long to decide? It took about an hour and a half in Swansea. There was no one like him or anyone representative of Tiger Bay on that jury. It was a very white, middle-class jury.

And despite there being no real evidence against him, there was no money found on him. There were no bloodstains found on him. He did have an alibi where he'd gone to the cinema and had then been seen by Laura outside her house at the time of the murder. But none of this mattered. And also, I think when I read Mahmood's own witness statement in the court when he was in the dock, he's not a great representative for himself. He's angry. And of course he's angry. He's been in jail for six months for a crime he's not guilty of. So he comes across as belligerent and sarcastic and mocking.

And I think that also probably turned this already hostile jury against him even more. And in those days, this carried the death penalty. How long before that was enacted? It was longer than usual. So normally after you were sentenced, the execution would be planned for three weeks after that, three Sundays after that. But you were entitled to two forms of appeal, one to the court of appeal and then a royal pardon. So that delayed everything from mid-August to the beginning of September. And then he was executed in the beginning of September. Was this a case that made the press at the time and grabbed the imagination of the country? It's really interesting. When the crime is first committed, it's across all of the front pages. It's a big crime. And when the reward, which the family put up, is reported again, that's front page news.

And then with each month, each appearance at the magistrates, Mahmood becomes a smaller and smaller figure in the news. And then when he's finally executed, there's this tiny column in the Western Mail which says, Woman weeps while Somali hanged. So by the time he was executed, he had disappeared from the public imagination. He wasn't someone that they cared about. And it's funny that what should have been a very anonymous death just didn't disappear into history. There were about 25 executions that year, and they all have kind of disappeared. And I'm not sure if all of them were men who were guilty. I think the majority probably were guilty

of the crimes they were executed for. But there was something about Mahmood's case that just would never settle. What do you think that was? I think the fact that he always claimed his innocence. The imam in Cardiff went to visit him a day or two before he was executed. And he said, it's time to come clean and get this weight off your spiritual chest. And he, again, refused to saying, I'm'm innocent of this he will one day realize that so him being so stubborn about his own innocence probably kept a worry I guess alive that he had been innocent and also Laura you know

she was this 20 something year old Welsh girl from the valleys incredibly poor working class but she wouldn't let it rest either. And she kept bringing it back to the authorities in 1969. And then later on, and also the community around them, the Somalis had paid for his defence, he didn't need to claim legal aid, they'd raised what is around about 15,000 pounds in today's money for his defence. And they had paid for this terrible barrister and they paid for the solicitor out of their own funds. So they also kept bringing it back to the authorities. And so when did the Authorities Act take notice to actually do something about it? Much, much later.

So almost 50 years after the execution, there was the establishment of the Criminal Case Review Commission. And so, sorry to interrupt, the community just kept it alive for 50 years, his family and the community? His family and the community. Not family and the community, not consistently. You know, there'd be long periods of time where there was nothing happening. But then whenever they saw an opportunity, they would jump straight back in. So this opportunity presented itself.

And this was probably because there'd been another miscarriage of justice just beforehand, the Cardiff Three in the late 80s, early 90s, where another group of black and mixed race men from Tiger Bay were accused of a vicious murder of a young woman and convicted of it with really terrible evidence. And they spent some time in jail before their convictions were quashed. So I think there was a momentum created by the community effort around that. And Jesse Jackson had arrived from the US to support that Cardiff Three campaign. So the family suddenly felt as if this might be our last chance. We could do this. We need to clear Mahmood's name.

And Laura at the time was dying of cancer. She was very sick and also had that impetus to get this thing finally done. And their case was the first one accepted by the Criminal Case Review Commission in 1997. And how much evidence did it require to overturn this? The shocking thing, it was so swift. Once it was actually looked at again, and the evidence was looked at again, and they found a notebook from one of the detectives at the time, which clearly identified another Somali, Tahir Ghaz,

as the man that had been seen outside the shop that night. And he only lived a couple of doors down and admitted being in the shop a couple of times that night buying small items so that was the man of the gold tooth that Mahmood was meant to have been but I don't believe that that was the real killer I think Tahir was seen outside but there was another Somali sailor who confessed to other Somalis that he had been the last man in the shop and he disappeared to Brazil straight after and was never ever on the police's radar but the police decided they had framed Mahmoud they had known that he wasn't the person lots of witnesses that said it wasn't him that they had seen near

the shop they hid all of that evidence and they created a scenario where they were walking around Tiger Bay saying do you recognize this fellow did you see him near Vulper's shop that night? And fed a story using people such as Harold Cover, the Jamaican carpenter, who was probably a police informer, and another woman called May Gray, who concocted this pretty ridiculous story of Mahmood turning up at her shop wearing white trousers and an Air Force jacket straight after the murder, desperate to buy new clothes. And so his case was overturned, but how does it work? What's the logistics? Does he receive a pardon or something? They quashed his conviction. So they weren't able to give a pardon, but they were able to quash the

conviction that had already happened. And he's now not considered as having had any role in what happened to Lily Volpert. And they also suggested that the proof was that the person that they had wanted to find at the time was Tahir Ghaz. But Lily's case is still an open case. Thank you for being a historian and giving that to us. Just coming back to your day job, your thing you're really good at, which is the novelist. What does this bit of history allow you to do? How did you tell a story on the outlines of this case? I immersed myself in it. It was obsessive. You know, it stayed with me for about 17 years. And there's something attractive about Tiger Bay and Cardiff in the 1950s, this quite exciting world of people from all over the world creating a multi-racial, cosmopolitan, quite liberal and quite bohemian space in Britain. I

found that attractive. And then the more I learned about Mahmood and the fact that he doesn't neatly fit into the idea of what a victim is, I think there can sometimes be this slide into either infantilizing someone that something like this has happened to or turning them into a saintly figure and he was neither a child or a saint he was a complicated man a well-traveled man who spoke Hindi and Swahili and Arabic and felt very much equal to anyone that he met in this country if not a bit superior and wanted to marry and do whatever he wanted there was something quite radical about him and Laura's approach to life that I found really attractive. And I wanted to try and get

under his skin. What was making him do these things? When I read the archives, he comes across as very difficult and kind of unlikable. But I can see how he could become that. He becomes jagged. He becomes paranoid to a degree. He becomes someone who's constantly on a war footing. And I think that's an important thing to understand because that's still the way many of us are treated and how many of us respond. You've mentioned your dad once or twice in this conversation. Were you sometimes substituting

your dad for this? They were very different. I think sometimes I was substituting myself. My father, he's passed away, but he was a very different figure to Mahmood. Mahmood came from quite a well-off background, a very stable background in Hargeisa. His family had been shopkeepers and they owned lorries and things. So he'd been the youngest child of a well-off family while my father was the son of a single mother and he had lived on the streets from the age of six and really hustled and fought for himself and I think had a better radar for trouble and how to avoid it than Mahmood. Mahmood arrives and I sometimes joke that it's almost as if he was on a gap year here and he had that kind of swagger and that kind of sense of nothing that I do here matters while my father was much more watchful and understanding of power and how power can be abused

it's an amazing story and I have so many historical novelists on this if that's what you are that feels like you should be writing like bodice ripping things so anyway I have lots of novelists on this podcast who talk about the historical episodes that have influenced them. But I think few of them have been as much of a historian as you. So thank you very much. Pleasure, pleasure.

I love history. If I could just write history, then I would do that. Well, we wish you would. Write some more history. So what's the title of the book so people can go and get it? The Fortune Men. Fortune Men.

Brilliant. Thank you very much indeed, Nativa. Thank you, Dan. I feel the hand of history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

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