The Trials Of Gordon Anglesea

Rebecca Television covers the whole of the UK but includes a built-in bias to issues concerning Wales. It’s independent, does not accept advertising or sponsorship and depends on donations to cover its costs.

The Editor is the Irish-born journalist Paddy French. He was a current affairs producer on the ITV Wales current affairs strand Wales This Week for nearly ten years. He left ITV in 2008 and now lives in France.

GORDON ANGLESEA
The North Wales Police superintendent won a major libel case against journalists who accused him of abusing young boys at the Bryn Estyn children’s home outside Wrexham.
Photo: Rebecca Television

GORDON ANGLESEA, the former North Wales Police superintendent, is an enigma.

On the one hand he won a famous libel action which saw some of the country’s biggest media companies pay£375,000 in damages for falsely accusing him of sexually abusing young boys.

On the other, he was an important character in the events which led up to the decision to set up the north Wales Child Abuse Tribunal in 1996.

He was a senior police officer and a freemason in a situation where critics were alleging that the police were covering up child abuse, some of which was laid at the door of freemasons.

The Tribunal could find no evidence that would have persuaded the libel trial jury to change its mind.

But its three members expressed “considerable disquiet” about some of the evidence Anglesea gave when he appeared before them.

And now a Rebecca Television investigation reveals that the judge in his libel action also shares that “considerable disquiet”.

Much more at Rebecca Television