Gangland: The Case of Bentley and Craig

On the evening of 2nd November 1952, a shot fired from a makeshift weapon on a warehouse roof in Croydon killed PC Sidney Miles. Next morning the newspaper headlines proclaimed a Chicago gun-battle in London, gangsters machine-gunning armed police over the rooftops.

But the trial of Bentley and Craig affronted common sense and alienated a generation raised in the post-war suburbia of cinemas, coffee bars and drab streets. How could Derek Bentley, nineteen and with learning difficulties, be h...