 So, for the benefit of the audience, whoever may someday watch this video, we're here primarily to explore the circumstances surrounding Operation Spanner and your involvement within that. So, before we get into any of the specifics around that, would you give us a general idea about Operation Spanner? Well, it was a few days after the big British storm, where famously the weatherman said, I can assure Mrs So-and-so that it's not going to be any storm tonight. And then it was a huge storm. That was in, like, November 77. Then about a week or so after that, there was a, you wouldn't call it a knock, more like a battering at the door at around 7 o'clock in the morning. We were both still in bed, went down to see what it was. It was policemen, seven or eight of them. The first thing I knew about it was this strange bloody policeman turned up in my bedroom telling me to get out of bed and so on. So, I mean, I didn't actually realise initially who the hell it was. You just thought, my God, there's someone in the house. Well, it was made fairly clear they were police. And I had to come down immediately and talk to them. And I remember one phrase that was something like, right, do you want to get dressed? I said, no, I didn't invite you in here. I'll get dressed when I want to. And so I didn't, I stayed in my dressing-gill. I didn't know what they were going to do. I mean, almost straight away, they said, oh, I expect you know what we're here for. And I said I didn't because in detail, I didn't really know. I knew there'd been some raids going on. I thought they were vaguely SME. But still, I had no real idea that anything I'd been doing would be of interest to the police. So we got down here and they started, it was a sort of interview. It wasn't under caution, it wasn't cautioned or anything. There were, as I say, seven of them. Three of them were in charge, pretty much. Inspector Baker was the sort of main man that came. And then we had, I can't remember what the actual police titles were at the time, but Inspector, did a set of inspectors or detective constables. Robert Langley, I think, and something, Yeo. And they played sort of, you know, soft cop, cop, tough cop, sort of. So anyway, Baker started explaining what they were here for. We're here in connection with obscene material and assaults on people and all this sort of... And even then it didn't click. It took a bit of time to click what they were talking about. My real, of course, they're talking about the SME side of my life. So that was definitely a bit of a shock. They were here for over two hours. They said effectively that, you know, if I wasn't going to answer their questions, they'd just take me down the police station and question me there. The three main ones were to do really with the questioning side of life. And the other four were going on a search of the house because they had their search warrant looking for obscene materials, this, that, and the other. So they were rummaging through all the drawers and wardrobes and anything else, and I had a look in the loft or attic, would you prefer, or garrick? And out in the garage and the workshop and the summer house, anywhere they thought I might have had a dungeon or whatever, and which I didn't too much effort, honest. And so while they were rummaging around, the three main ones were asking me all sorts of questions. And when I'm under pressure, my mind goes a complete fog. That sort of pressure. I mean, this is authority figures, you realise, I turned up into my life of which I've always had a sort of certain dread. Not basically only real event, to be honest, because I never had been in trouble with the police before, but just the thought of authority, like, you know, the religious figures and the police, of course, always sort of terrified me. And so he started on at me, they started going through, they wanted to know where the tapes were and whom the contacts were. They looked at the tape, at dress books and the stolen that they found out there. They rummaged through the doors and took all the household financial and other documents the way that they could find. We found out later that not only did they think we were doing snuff movies, when I say us, I mean, us as a group of people charged, but not only were we doing things like snuff movies, but we're obviously doing it all for profit. And so they took all the financial stuff away. The only thing is, plugged being plugged, they took all the financial stuff away, and none of mine, so they couldn't even get that right, you know. And then at one point they found some children's games in one of the drawers, which was like Snakes and Ladders and Ludo and these sort of draft sets and things. And one of them said, and maybe they say these things to offend and see how you react. I don't know. But they said, oh, do you get children here to torture them? You know, and that sort of really got to me. I said, no, I don't. I said my mother, who's in her 80s, she likes to play board games and things like that when she comes over, so we keep them to play with her when she comes. So they sort of dropped that bit of it. And then I, at one stage I told them, I said, oh, I was, what did you do? They wanted a brief history. They said, we don't want your life story. Anyway, it's like in a brief history. And then they talked about work and where it previously worked. And then they said, oh, I see you had a connection here with the Boys Brigade. They're putting two and two together already making five like they tend to. And I said, I've never been involved in anything untoward whatsoever within the Boys Brigade. I said, not only that, I didn't volunteer to join. Someone at work said, if you've got nothing to do this summer, would you like to come and help out with a camp? Well, as I said previously, I was relatively lonely. This was before I met gay people. So I hadn't got anything. So I went out and stayed with them for a few years. That gave up for two reasons. One is I met my partner and then I hadn't got any time for the Boys Brigade because I was too busy. And the other thing was, which we got around, they said, oh, well, would you like to join the staff if you like? I said, what does that involve? Well, you have to do this, swear allegiance to God and so on. I said, no, I can't do that. I said, I'm sorry. They said, oh, it doesn't matter. Just say it. It matters to me. I said, if I say it, I have to mean it. I said, and I don't mean it. So I can't say it. So I didn't do it. So I left. Anyway, that was that. And then they done the financial stuff. They wanted to know where the tapes were. And at that time, the tapes were all in the front of the room in drawers that I'd made up. I had about 15, 16 tapes per drawer because I had over 300 of tapes. And then they started asking about names and addresses of people. And I couldn't remember virtually anybody's name at that moment. But they eventually sort of weadled out of me the names that they obviously had in advance and wished to know a bit about. So that was it. And, oh, and they came from upstairs with stuff. And one of the things they came from upstairs was a toy billiard cue that I'd had since I was about 11 or 12. Oh, my God. What do you use this for? Beating people. I said, no, I use it as a remote control for the telly in the bedroom because it had a little, I put a little sort of cup on the end and you could work with little knobs on the telly with it without getting out of bed. So I said, that's what that for. And then my mate said, we told you that as well already. He told him that already. So reluctantly this baker ships away and then give it back to him. You know, because they were looking for anything that they considered like fetish wear because they took fetish wear off lots of other people. They call it fetish wear. We call it leather gear. So, you know, they took all that sort of stuff off. And then after two and a half, two and a half hours or so, they left. Oh, one of them said, do you mind? Oh, baker, I think. Do you mind if I make a phone call? Do you mind if I make a phone call? I said, only if you give us the money for it. I said, I'm not going to pay for your phone calls. You come here uninvited. So reluctantly hand over 20 people. I didn't see that annoyed him. And then we were in a state of shell shock, really, because it just wasn't being expected. This was a Monday morning. Fortuitously, I'd actually got the day off work because I'd already booked it as a days holiday. And that was because I'd been off down the West Country for a weekend SM session with a couple of the other defendants it turned out. And that's the fortunate bit, so I didn't have to go to work that day. And then the unfortunate bit was the video equipment and everything was all sitting out in the hall, all the way. So they took that all the way. They took all the video equipment and stuff, which I'd brought originally to film with my parents who were aging, and their holidays and things like this, you know. So that was the day of the raid. It's hard, because although we'd been warned that loads were going on, it didn't actually occur to me that they'd come here. That's naivety, I think. It's not going to happen to me syndrome. A lot of people have. And as I said, we left shell shocked and we didn't know quite what to do then. We drove down to the countryside somewhere and we just sat in the car in the countryside talking. Of all the people that must have been on these tapes that they found, how were you identified? Well, first of course they were able to question everybody. I mean, we're not talking about, it's not like the telly where you have a ten minute question session and everybody fesses up in a few minutes. There's the interrogations of over 300 people questioned about Spanner. Wow. And those investigations and question sessions with the police, they obviously joined up lots of dots and so on. So I think they'd worked out pretty much from people's statements and so on, who it was, was where, at what time. So that wasn't too difficult. But when it actually got to court, the first court, this is just a brief one, it's only a magistrate court, the magistrate said, how did you know it was Jagad doing the filming? And I think it was Langley said, I recognised his voice on the tape. And I thought, yeah, of course you did. Because I didn't think it was that. It wasn't any different really to anybody else's. So that's more or less how that happened. So that's how I got identified. I hadn't told him anything. I had said no comment throughout because I knew that I didn't have to say a thing. And I wasn't going to. I mean, I was a bit silly a couple of occasions. I could have said something that would have been to my advantage, but I thought, well, start on the answering one question and we end up answering loads. So I didn't say anything. I mean solicitor advice, say nothing, so that's what I said. What do you know about the other people who were raided, anything at all? Well, at the time of the raid, I didn't know who had been raided, obviously. Because they don't tell you who else they've raided. You only find that out in retrospect once you get your chargeshoots and so on board. The people that I knew were a friend of a friend sort of thing. That sort of string of people that somehow I described earlier for how you make people originally in clubs and pubs and things. Sure. It's just people you get to know. So I got to know quite a few people. And some of them, it turned out, were involved. Some of them, I mean, when we've actually got to the court, the main court, the Central Criminal Justice Court, which are probably named and known colloquially as the Old Bailey. Okay. I have to say I've never seen half the people there before. So they made a lot of the connections between us all whereas actually they're pretty tenuous, a lot of them. So in terms of no, I wouldn't say any of them were really what you'd call close friends at all. They were all acquaintances. They were sex-party gay acquaintances. Sure. Yeah, in this immoral world that us gays live, you know, where you can bump off with people you've only just met. So very naughty because again, as I mentioned previously, heterosexuals just don't do it like that. You know, they're the wine and dynam. Whereas we're, you know, sort of, hello, how'd you do? Yeah. Yeah. And so I didn't really know anybody. Someone were acquaintances. I actually got to know a lot of them a lot better during and after the case because that's when we spent more time together obviously. The raid upon your home. Yes. Was a monstrous violation of your privacy, your person. The police took, I think you said, your video camera, personal photos, mementos, videotapes, they were all confiscated and you had to go to court to recover your things. Well, even now I never got them all back. But some of the tapes they took, they took all the tapes and as I said before, the vast majority were nothing to do with or could be to do with the case. A lot of them were stuffed, filmed off television programmes, home movies on holidays and things, day trips out. There was, I treated to a special, a wayday steam day on one of his favourite locos. They took that one as well. That's one of the ones I applied to have back. And the reason for that was my camera at the time, which was an Olympus one of the early, full-sized VHS. It was a twin-pack thing where you had the power pack down at your side and the camera up here. And that was a jolly good system for this day. They took that, that's been filmed on that. And that allowed you to put text into the picture. Oh, God. A little menu. So I put some text in on the railway trip. But similarly, another tape they found, it said, naked youths in the same text. And that was me doing compilations of, I suppose you call them naked youths really, from various videos that I'd got and shops in books and things. Just sort of soft-porn, pin-up type stuff. You know, and that just signaled you to youths. So that was that. That did cause an embarrassing story, but I won't bother you with that at the moment. Suffice it to say. It wasn't pleased. Anyway, they took all those. And the reason we had to get them back, they wouldn't let us have anything directly connected with the prosecution, which as I said was very little, because it's evidence that could be used in court against you. But they still were terribly reluctant to give the rest back. They were all swage of stuff, back all the home general of the telly and stuff. But they didn't give, for instance, this home movie of the railway trip, and one or two similar ones. They wouldn't give them back. And so I applied to the court. As did Colin. I must bring in Colin Lasky and Tony Brown here as well. Colin Lasky also had his video cameras confiscated. He had two video cameras. So he got them both back, because they didn't know which one was doing the filming, so they couldn't confiscate either. As poor old Muggins here only had one, so they knew that must have been the one, so they kept that, which pissed me off a bit. But in that, even though the court had said they should be returned, they weren't. Things returned. So we applied through a magistrates' court to get them returned on the basis that the police are not above the law, and if the courts say return property, that's what they should do. And it's a fairly well-known tactic by all accounts. They assume that people that have been sort of raided and similar things aren't going to have the naus to do what they would just roll over and accept whatever the police say and do to them almost. And even in that early stage, I thought, no, sort this. This was one of our favourite days out. You know, it was a present, a treat for him and so on. I'm not going to let them keep that. Obviously, at those times, it was the only copy we had. And even I had some stuff with my parents, and that was part of the same thing. We also had a couple of personal photograph albums that we'd done. This was the day when Polaroids had just started life. What a release that was. Yeah. And so we had a little album of Polaroids that we'd done over the years, and I had to get them back through the court as well. The only other thing I didn't... The thing I never got back was I had a friend of mine. I mentioned CHE at the beginning, for a group there. The guy in charge of that where I stayed for two nights, he took some pictures of me when I was, well, almost the first week I'd met. And I didn't get them back, which was a shame, because I had them taken with the view that went on the age I am now. I'd barely looked back on a young me and think, oh, look at that long head, because it used to be down here and hippie style, shoulder length, only youth sort of thing. But anyway, there you go. What possible youths did they have from photographs of a day out? They don't have any youths. It's just bloody-mindedness. The whole attitude is bloody-mindedness, sort of, you know, we're in charge of this. We'll say what you can and can't do and so on. That was their attitude more or less throughout in all dealings with them. When we were preparing for this, you told me that the raid upon your home and your person and your things really affected both your physical and your psychological health, and it also affected your professional work. Tell us about that. Well, on the day of the raid, as I'd said, we'd disappeared off, he'd driven me out to the country, so I would just sit in the car and talk. And initially, understandably so, he was very angry that the raid had happened. He was angry with me for having bought it upon him, and, you know, he knew that this would be somewhat chaotic from here on. And he also knew that mentally he wasn't sure whether I would survive, because I'd never been very strong either physically. I know it belies looks, but either physically or mentally. But he was very angry with me initially, but that very soon wore off, and in a quick time, he was very angry with them, everything around them and the way they were dealing with things. And then I went into work the following day and one of the guys said, you look really ill. I said, I'm not great. I had had merit rises and so on prior to this, and as I said, doing well at work I never got another merit rise. Subsequently, I also got, if you like, shifted sideways. That's always a bad sign in any big organisation. The police never said that they'd visited work, but they must have. I had security clearance and they would have found that out quite quickly, so I don't doubt for a second that they'd been to work through me work stuff, be filing cabinets at my desk and stuff, because I understand from some of the other people in the case that they'd had their workplaces visited. Okay. And one of the peripheral guys, he was a teacher in the nearby private prep school, private in this country, he was public, he was a teacher there. My uncle had a good teacher and the police, he told, the teacher told his superiors in the school and they said, no, your private life. They took all his leather gear and stuff. Your private life is private, it's nothing really to do with us. So he didn't get sacked, but the police then decided, having heard that he hadn't got sacked, to contact the governors. All about it and they sacked him. So, you know, that's nothing to do with fairness and justice, that's to do with vindictiveness and so on. So this started having a bad effect me work, performance obviously declined. There was no timescale given, you had no idea whether they were going to turn up again the following day, week, month. In the event, it took them the best part two years to summons me for another interview. Oh no, I tell you like, we did have an interview down New Scotland Yard but the first one had to be abandoned because I more or less fell apart in the interview and I can remember one of them saying I don't know how this bloke keeps a job. Well, amazingly enough in my job, you very rarely get interrogated in that style of police use. I mean, there were no there was no violence involved or anything but it was obviously designed to where you're out and where you're down. So, they abandoned the first interview and the second one was done with tape recording available, you know, like the usage tape machines and actually that made me feel happier because I knew that they couldn't then bugger about with what they said they'd said. So, because I didn't trust them quite quickly and even in Solista when we took a a brief fresh air break I noticed he didn't leave his briefcase or anything in the interview or me talking with him and I commented on it and he said, no, I never leave anything or anything like that, I don't know what they're going to do. So, it had a detrimental effect, shall we say work performance went down. I had to keep going because I still had meetings to attend and projects to run and all the rest of it but I did get shuffled sideways I mean it was a bit demeaning, initially I moved from the office I had into a smaller office slightly further away and then another smaller office even further and eventually I was put back in amongst the guys in general, which was a more open plan place. So, that's all pretty horrible, especially when you enjoyed your job and you were good at it. And of course once we got to the being charged well, that's another story bit later on. So, they moved you from a larger office, they basically shuffled you sideways into another office. This obviously affected your work performance. Oh, yes. Well, what was the point of really making a big effort when you knew that it's certainly going to turn out badly? Sadly. And I wouldn't say it was a leaf at the end of ten years, two years when they finally decided to bring charges but you can't work under that sort of mental strain for ages wondering what's happening. We got very little information via sort of gay world because the police themselves they were busy putting information into the gay world. So, we were looking for a spiral staircase and we have reason to believe that people may have been murdered. So, what they were doing, they were fishing. They were putting sort of I don't think what the phrase for it is now. They were trying basically to sort of put in things that were shocking to try and bring out anybody who was a bit peripheral to say yes, we remember this or so and so happened and it turned out one of my videos was done in the place of the spiral staircase which I'm sure was what they were trying to get at they were trying to get some more dirt on anybody that might really vault in that. But nothing really shocking happened at that venue. That was really just some bondages and beatings and things like this. I did crack up under the strain and went down to see a psychiatrist. I went to see a doctor first and he prescribed anti-depressants and so on. And then it I was at a sort of stable level then up until I brought charges. So that sort of covers the two years with everything going pretty badly. There's a great strain on our relationship. He has said he would never have left but it's not going to be nice living with someone and that sort of stress. And also being a psychiatrist is a very private person and just a few things that have been very little written in the press originally because of course they had no names because they don't release names until you're charged. So worse was yet to come so to say.