QUOTE OF THE DAY: In an interview in 2001, (Son) Omar spoke about how the family still misses Mattan. He confessed "She [Laura] still sits in the armchair speaking to him. Quite often she tells him: 'See? You should have listened to me. If we'd stayed in Hull like I wanted, then none of this would have happened and you'd still be here."
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SECOND QUOTE OF THE DAY: (The Times: Reporter Adrian Lee; Feb, 25, 1998;) "Widow wins fight."..."A widow's unceasing campaign to clear the name of her husband ended in triumph yesterday 46 years after he was hanged for the murder of a shopkeeper..."
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
The story of Laura Mattan, this week's 'Selfless Warrior,' saddens me to no end. Her beloved husband Mahmoud, who had been wrongfully convicted of killing 41-year-old Lily Volpert, an unofficial moneylender, was dead at the end of a hangman's rope, after a trial tainted by racism. This is the story of a loving woman, who spent almost half a century (46 years), honouring his wish to have his body exhumed from its felon's grave at Cardiff jail in Wales, and reburied in consecrated ground - and to clear his name. It is also the story of Laura's wish to be buried by his side.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Selfless Warriors Blog.
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PART ONE: THE CRIME:
Mahmoud Mattan, a Somali, was convicted of slitting the throat of Lily Volpert, a pawnbroker and moneylender on March 5, 1952.
PART TWO: ARREST, TRIAL, APPEAL, EXECUTION: (All within 6 months!):
Mattan, 28, was arrested within hours of the murder in March, 1952. Despite having alibis backed up by four separate witnesses, he was convicted at Glamorganshire assizes in Swansea in July, 1952. An appeal was rejected and he was executed in September.
But in the 46 years between his execution and exoneration new evidence emerged that the seaman, who only spoke halting English, was the victim of a miscarriage of justice inflicted by a racist police force and intolerant community. Even his defence lawyer called him "a half child of nature, a semi-civilised savage".
At his trial the prosecution case relied on the evidence of Harold Cover, a Jamaican, who was jailed for life in 1969 for trying to kill his daughter.
He claimed to have seen Mattan in the area where Volpert was killed but the jury was never told that he was paid to give evidence or that four witnesses had failed to pick out Mattan in an identity parade.
Vital information about another Somali, Tehar Gass, who had also been seen by Cover in the area at the time of the murder was also withheld from the court. Two years later Gass was tried for murder and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge said Gass was prone to violence against women and was obsessed with knives.
Forty-six years after Mahmoud was executed, an appeal court overturned his conviction, and declared him innocent after the judges ruled the case was "demonstrably flawed" and (noted) the complete absence of forensic evidence linking him to the murder.
Four and a half decades after Mahmoud's death, Appeal Court judges overturned his conviction and declared him innocent. The Guardian:
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PART THREE: A marriage sorely tested:
"Mrs Mattan, who is Welsh, endured years of abuse from the local community including taunts of "black man's whore" from neighbours who forced the couple to live apart.
"If Mahmood and I had been living in Biblical times we would have been stoned to death," she said after her husband was exonerated in the court of appeal.
"He was a lovely man. He was the best thing that happened to me. He was gentle. He loved this country, and he treated me like a human being, a queen." The Guardian.
The couple's relationship, steeled by the mutual hatred they were facing, is described by 'African Stories in Hull and East Yorkshire.'
PART 4: The prison/the execution/the cruelty of it all;
In case you are wondering why I was so saddened by the story of Laura and Mahmoud. 'The Times' Reporter Carol Midgley tells us that, "The weeks her husband spent on remand were traumatic for Laura, now a mother of three young boys. The family's house was so close to the looming prison that if she looked out of her window at an appointed time she could see her husband waving a handkerchief from the window."
"On the morning of September 3, Laura, still only 21, turned up at the jail as usual," reporter Midgley continues. "As she stood outside the gate in torrential rain an official came out and pinned a notice to the gate. It stated that the execution of Mahmoud Hussein Mattan had taken place at 8am and had "gone without a hitch". Laura had not even known it was going to happen. It was their son David's fourth birthday. Laura collapsed and was taken home by her mother. She was inconsolable and would not answer her door for nearly three weeks. Official reports say Mattan was 28 when he died, but the family insists he was only 24, having added four years to his age in Somaliland to enable him to go to sea."
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PART FIVE (A): : 'We don't need the sons of hanged men.'...The enduring stigma being the spouse or son of a hanged man.
Researching the Story of the Mattan family, I was struck by the minimal attention that is devoted to the harm caused to family and friends of people sent to prison, be they innocent or not. They get punished too. Reporter Midgley did an excellent job of relaying the punishment imposed on each of the members of the family after Mahmoud was hung.
""All I remember about that time is my grandmother looking after us and being told that mother wasn't well," says Omar, a painter and decorator," Midgley wrote. "Up until I was eight I was told that my father had died at sea, and I believed it. Then one day the Salvation Army band was playing near our house and I went out to sing with them," she continued. "One of the leaders said: ‘We don't need the sons of hanged men.' Until I was about 12 that knowledge felt like a cancerous growth in my head. I can still remember my Dad carrying me on his shoulders, and when he bought me a huge teddy bear."
Omar spoke to the Imam who spent the final hours with Mattan in his cell before the execution. "He told me that he'd said to my father: ‘Now is the time to make your peace with God.' My father replied: ‘I have no peace to make. My conscience is clear.' "
The boys had problems enough growing up as half-caste children in a racially intolerant era, but having a hanged man as a father increased the stigma. They lived in abject poverty. "We were incredibly poor. We had to rely on charity for our clothes and food and roll up pieces of cardboard for the fire because there was no coal," says Omar. But Laura always told her boys that their father was innocent and they fought a long campaign to clear his name.
Mahmoud's granddaughter Natasha Grech, talked about the searing backlash from the community, when she addressed a vigil held outside Cardiff prison to remember Mahmoud, as reported by ITV, in an article that ran on September 5, 2020, under the heading, 'Remember Mahmoud Mattan: The last man to be hanged for a crime he did not commit.'
"Everybody knew that my grandfather was innocent. My mum and dad always said the impact it had on the community was really awful," Natasha told the vigil." Mahmoud's sons were ridiculed, bullied, outcast. They couldn't do normal things. Everyone called them 'murderer's children', my dad hated that especially later on in life when they actually pardoned him."
All of those lost years, all of that time. Things could've been so different for the three sons. They grew up without a father.
Like his brother Omar, son Mervyn was torn by the British Government's wrongful taking of their father's life. After the Government announced the family would receive financial compensation, Mervin told the Guardian.
"The piece of my father that they have given back to me is in the form of a financial award. But the money cannot buy back his soul. They stole my father's life and no amount of money can change that."
Sadness upon sadness: The sizeable 725,000 pound payout in 1998 could not wash away the decades old wounds:
As a passage from one of Reporter Midgley's storyies shows, those wounds were always there.
"To this day Laura still talks to her husband. Omar says: "She still sits in the armchair speaking to him. Quite often she tells him: ‘See? You should have listened to me. If we'd stayed in Hull like I wanted, then none of this would have happened and you'd still be here.' " Shamefully for British justice, she is right.
The wounds were always there for Omar, Mervyn and David. As reported by Wales Online:
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PART FIVE (B): PERSEVERANCE: 'KILLED BY INJUSTICE.' Laura Mattan persuades the authorities to permit her to have Mahmoud's body exhumed and reburied: The Tombstone says: "Killed by Injustice.'
Once again, I turn to 'The Times' Reporter Carole Midgley - for her account of Laura's pursuit of permission to have Mahmoud's body exhumed and reburied.
"It took 46 years and a dogged family campaign before the Appeal Court overturned Mattan's conviction and allowed his Welsh widow, Laura, to exhume his quicklimed body from its felon's grave at Cardiff jail and rebury it in consecrated ground," Midgley reports.
"But Laura always told her boys that their father was innocent and they fought a long campaign to clear his name," this report continues. "Their first attempt to have the conviction overturned was refused in 1968 by the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan. But in 1996 they achieved their first breakthrough when permission was granted to have the body exhumed and reburied.
Even then, however, there was little dignity for the Mattans. "They wouldn't let us have a hearse," says Mervyn bitterly. "My father's body was carried in a dirty blue Transit van for the journey to the cemetery and his coffin was made of cheap plywood. The Home Office wanted it to be as low-key as possible. When they brought out the bodybag I touched it because I just wanted to feel close to him for a moment." In a further slight, the family, not the Home Office, had to meet the £1,400 cost of the exhumation.
(I would think that it must have brought the family some satisfaction in itself to see this miserly government that couldn't even provide Mahmoud's remains with a decent coffin being required to fork over 725,000 pounds.)
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PART SIX: PERSEVERANCE: Exoneration at last:
Laura Mattan did not give up - even though two Home Secretaries in the 1950's and 1960's had refused to refer the case to appeal.
However, she managed to have her husband's case brought before the newly created 'Criminal Cases Review Commission' which had been set up to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice.
Mahmoud's case became the first referred by the Commission to the Court of Appeal, where in 1998, three justices threw out the conviction.
Laura told a reporter, "I feel that I have waited forever for this day. I still can't believe it."
The reporter notes in her 'justice at last' story that, "Her main emotion was one of anger that it had taken such a short time yesterday to destroy the case against her husband." (As will be seen by the Wikipedia entry below, by the time the case reached the court of appeal - the prosecution's case against Mahmoud had been demolished - not that there had been any evidence whatsoever against this innocent man to begin with.)
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PART SEVEN: COMMENTARY: Laura Mattan's monumental battle for justice for her husband was well captured by Wales Online, in an obituary, published on March 29, 2013. "The wife of the last man ever to be hanged in Cardiff has died (age 78) after dedicating her life to overturning her husband's conviction." The newspaper paid tribute to Laura, noting that, "the great-grandmother and her family campaigned to clear his name and have him buried in a human fashion" and that, she "always stood by her illiterate husband's side as he protested his innocence." The more I learned about the case - and the lives of the other members of the family which were so damaged by their mutual ordeal - the angrier I became about the death penalty, and the racism that had tainted - and continues to taint - so many of the ugly miscarriages of justice I have been exposed to in many jurisdictions around the world (including my own), and have written about over the years. I pay tribute to Laura Mattan as well. She had the strength, courage, wisdom, and dedication to her husband, to take on the British government in her quest for justice, and win. May she rest in peace. In my books, she truly is a 'Selfless Warrior."
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Thanks to my daughter Kyra (Jolliet) for her stellar editing assistance.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Selfless Warriors Blog.
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PART EIGHT: CHRONOLOGY: (More detailed chronology on Wikipedia entry at link below):
Mahmood Hussein Mattan (1923 – 3 September 1952) was a Somali former merchant seaman who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Lily Volpert on 6 March 1952. The murder took place in the Docklands area of Cardiff, Wales, and Mattan was mainly convicted on the evidence of a single prosecution witness. Mattan was executed in 1952 and his conviction was quashed 45 years later on 24 February 1998, his case being the first to be referred to the Court of Appeal by the newly formed Criminal Cases Review Commission.[1]
Early life
Mahmood Hussein Mattan was born in British Somaliland in 1923 and his job as a merchant seaman took him to Wales where he settled in Tiger Bay in the docks district of Cardiff. There he met Laura Williams, a worker at a paper factory. The couple married just three months after meeting, but as a multiracial couple they suffered racist abuse from the community. The couple had three children, but in 1950 they separated and afterwards lived in separate houses in the same street. Mattan had left the merchant navy in 1949, and by 1952 had done various jobs, including working in a steel foundry.[2][3]
Conviction for murder
Murder and investigation
Lily Volpert, a 42-year-old woman who owned a general outfitter's shop in the Cardiff Docklands area, was murdered on the evening of 6 March 1952. After closing the shop at around 8.05 p.m., she was about to have supper with her family in the back room when the doorbell rang. Her sister and mother saw a man outside the shop door and Lily went to deal with him. A few minutes later her niece saw her talking to an apparently different man at the door. Soon afterwards her body was found in the shop by another customer. Her throat had been cut with a razor or sharp knife, and it seemed that at least £100 (equivalent to £2,899 in 2019) had been stolen.[4]
The Cardiff City Police investigated a number of local men, including Mattan. About two hours after the murder two detectives visited his lodgings and questioned him. They searched his room but discovered nothing suspicious. There was no evidence of any blood-stained clothing, the missing money or anything that could have been the murder weapon. Later, other witnesses contradicted Mattan's alibi and the police interrogated him at length, and organised an identification parade attended by Lily Volpert's sister, mother and niece, but they did not identify him.[5]
They also questioned two women, Mary Tolley and Margaret Bush, who had been at the shop immediately before it closed. They gave detailed statements but did not mention having seen anyone else in the shop. After Mattan had come under suspicion, they were shown a photograph of him and they said they knew him by sight but had not seen him for about a month. But following further intensive questioning, Mary Tolley made another statement in which she said Mattan had come into the shop while they were there and had then left. But her companion, Margaret Bush, still said she had seen no one there. Mattan was arrested immediately after this and on the following day, ten days after the crime, he was charged with Lily Volpert's murder.
Mary Tolley later made a further statement in which she said she had not seen Mattan leave the shop. The police suggested that Mattan had hidden and murdered Lily Volpert immediately after the two women had left. They suppressed Tolley's earlier detailed statement which had not mentioned anyone being there. They also suppressed the original statements of Lily's family, which implied that she had been seen at the door twice after that. They then argued that this had happened earlier, before the women arrived.[6]
Committal proceedings
The prosecution case was presented at the committal proceedings in Cardiff magistrates' court on 16-18 April. Beforehand, the police confronted Mattan with another witness, a 12-year-old girl who had called at the shop at around 8 p.m. and had seen a dark-skinned man nearby. But she said Mattan was not the man she had seen. During the hearing, Mary Tolley changed her evidence again, failing to identify Mattan as the man who had come into the shop. But another witness, Harold Cover, a Jamaican with a history of violence, did identify him. He had walked past the shop around the time of the murder and had seen two Somalis outside. One was walking out of the porch and the other - a six-foot-tall man - was standing near the door. In court he said the first man was Mattan. In fact, he had earlier identified the first man as another Somali living in the area at the time, Tahir Gass, but this did not become publicly known until 1998. The outcome was that Mattan was committed for trial.[7]
Trial
The trial took place at the Glamorgan Assizes in Swansea on 22-24 July 1952. Harold Cover was the main prosecution witness. Another witness, May Gray, gave evidence that she had seen Mattan with a wad of banknotes soon after the murder. But Mattan's counsel suggested she was lying and motivated by a reward of £200 (equivalent to £5,797 in 2019) that had been offered by the Volpert family, of which Cover later received part. Evidence was also presented that microscopic specks of blood had been found on a pair of Mattan's shoes. But the shoes had been reclaimed from a salvage dump and there was no scientific evidence linking the blood to the murder. Although Mary Tolley gave evidence, the jury was not told that other witnesses had failed to identify Mattan.
Mattan's barrister succeeded in having a large part of the prosecution evidence ruled inadmissible because of the restrictions that then existed on questioning suspects in custody. But in his closing speech he described his client as "Half-child of nature; half, semi-civilised savage". These comments may have prejudiced the jury and undermined Mattan's defence. Mattan was convicted of the murder of Lily Volpert and the judge passed the mandatory sentence of death.[2][8]
Execution
Mattan was refused leave to appeal and to call further evidence in August 1952, and the Home Secretary decided he would not be reprieved. On 3 September 1952, six months after the murder of Volpert, he was hanged at Cardiff Prison. He was the last person to be hanged at the prison.[9][10]
Subsequent events
In 1954 Tahir Gass, the man seen outside Lily Volpert's shop by Harold Cover, was convicted of murdering wages clerk Granville Jenkins in a country lane near Newport, Monmouthshire. Jenkins had been stabbed to death in a frenzied attack. At Gass's trial, medical evidence was presented that he was suffering from schizophrenia and was delusional. He was found to be insane and sent to Broadmoor, but less than a year later he was discharged and repatriated to the protectorate of British Somaliland, later part of Somalia and now Somaliland.[11]
In 1969 Harold Cover was convicted of the attempted murder of his daughter in Cardiff, by cutting her throat with an open razor, and sentenced to life imprisonment.[12]
Mattan's middle son, Omar was found dead on a Scottish beach in 2003, and an open verdict was returned.[9]
Posthumous appeal
The first attempt to overturn Mattan's conviction came in 1969 after Harold Cover's conviction for attempted murder had raised concerns about the case in Cardiff. But the Home Secretary James Callaghan decided not to reopen the case. By this stage, three years had passed since the death penalty's abolition.[13][14]
In 1996 the family was given permission to have Mattan's body exhumed and moved from a felon's grave at the prison to be buried in consecrated ground in a Cardiff cemetery.[2] His tombstone says: "KILLED BY INJUSTICE."[15]
When the Criminal Cases Review Commission was set up in the mid 1990s, Mattan's case was the first to be referred by it. On 24 February 1998 the Court of Appealcame to the judgement that the original case was, in the words of Lord Justice Rose, "demonstrably flawed". The family were awarded £725,000 compensation, to be shared equally among Mattan's wife and three children.[9] The compensation was the first award to a family for a person wrongfully hanged.[16]
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READING MATERIALS:
ITV Story:
Carole Midgely: The Times:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304031236/http://www.innocent.org.uk/cases/hhmattan/index.html
Guardian Story:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/may/14/jamiewilson
Times appeal story:
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