Monthly Archives: March 2015

Duncan Verity – “The Murder of John Speed”

On the 18th of March the speaker who had been booked to talk to the Forum was unable to attend.  Speaker Finder Duncan Verity keeps a number of video presentations in reserve for these occasions and he produced one for this meeting.  It was entitled “The Murder of John Speed”.

The video was put together by the BBC Crimewatch programme and used actors and real policemen to reconstruct the crime of the shooting of a Police Sergeant in Leeds in 1984 and the subsequent enquiries which resulted in the arrest of the murderer.  A colleague of Sergeant Speed, PC John Thorpe, was also badly injured in the incident but he recovered to provide vital information to the crime investigators.

The investigation followed a number of false leads in a two and a half year period which resulted in the arrest of 224 criminals and the solution of a number of unconnected crimes.  Eventually the murderer David Griceworth, a career criminal from Middleborough, was involved in a police chase when he accidently shot himself in the stomach and died shortly afterwards.  His girlfriend admitted that he had killed Sergeant Speed and the police were able to arrest his accomplice.

The Forum members were stunned into silence by this excellent video and left in a reflective mood.

Bill Baker – “The Lighter Side of Banking”

On the 4th of March we welcomed Bill Baker as our guest speaker. 

Bill is well known locally as a regular presenter on Tempo FM but his chosen subject for his talk reflected his long career with the Yorkshire bank and was titled “The Lighter Side of Banking”.

On leaving school in 1961 Bill joined the bank after a series of five interviews, including a visit to his family, and became a junior clerk at the Head Office in Leeds.  At that time the most sophisticated piece of equipment used was an adding machine with a paper roll.  He worked in many of the small branches in and around Leeds and he told us about some of the characters he came across, both customers and colleagues.

He was the first manager in the Yorkshire Bank to be held up at gun point and he told us about this and other botched robberies from the Bank.  Bill was promoted to open a new branch in Newcastle which he enjoyed after he had learnt the dialect and had survived a brush with the Geordie Mafia.  He moved back to Leeds as the bank’s marketing manager which was his least favourite role and was involved in the setting up of an insurance unit.

Questions from the members included the mis-selling of PPI and the takeover of the bank by the National Bank of Australia.

Our Chairman Mike Earle proposed a vote of thanks to Bill for keeping us amused on a cold morning.