Harold Challenor
A
glance at Challenor’s obituary tells you a fair bit about his life:
Harold
‘Tanky’ Challenor was an SAS war hero. He was in the Flying Squad, then a
ferocious and controversial Detective Sergeant working out of West End Central
in 1960’s Soho – with morally questionable methods. He once, on foot, chased
Reggie Kray down Shaftesbury avenue and halfway back to the East End. The twins
offered a grand to anyone who’d help stitch him up. He had a well-documented
struggle with his mental health.
Challenor was in the SAS with my
grandad, and I first met him when I was only ten years old. He was always
Tanky, to us. He told a lot of stories that day, leaving my grandad nervous and
my nan rolling her eyes.
‘We were dropped into Italy*,’ he told
me. ‘I landed slap-bang in the middle of a group of Germans. Off I went to a
prisoner-of-war camp.’ I remember looking at my grandad, who said nothing. ‘So,
I made friends with a washerwoman,’ Tanky went on, ‘borrowed her nail file to
cut through the wire – which took three nights, mind – and, wearing her
clothes, off I walked across Italy to re-join the regiment.’
That meeting stayed with me.
Challenor’s
reputation was made as a ruthless Detective Sergeant, the scourge of Soho, that
‘Bastard Challenor’ as he was known. He was instrumental in arresting key
figures in the Soho underworld, the near beer establishments,
and clip joints. ‘Near beer’: the ale’s watered down so much there’s no need
for a liquor licence. ‘Clip joint’: at the club’s entrance, a striptease and
cheap drinks are promised, but neither materialise – and the extortionate bill
is collected with the threat of violence.
It would be easy to glamorise a figure like
Challenor, the derring-do, the hardman milieu. Challenor was ‘bent for the
job’, meaning any corrupt practices he indulged in were not for personal gain
but to clean up the filth of Soho, as he put it, his behaviour sanctioned by
his superiors when those he put away were known villains.
But Challenor couldn’t always distinguish right
from wrong, and then the problems began. As I write in my novel about my
grandad:
‘I’m proud of
everything he did; proud of how he lived his life.
But I’m not sure
quite how Tanky lived his life –
And I’m definitely
not proud of everything he ever did.’
Bent by Joe Thomas, published by Arcadia, £9.99
Read
Mark Timlin’s review of BENT here
* Further information regarding Operation Speedwell can be found here
