Ice cream vans can be a sweet memory for many, but for Glasgow in the 1980s, they were anything but.
From selling drugs to inciting gang wars and even murder, we'll uncover the dark and shocking tale of the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about ice cream.
[00:00:25] But today’s story isn’t really about ice cream, it’s about murder, police corruption, drugs, prison, Glasgow, Buckingham Palace, and a two-decade-long fight for justice.
[00:00:38] Ok then, let’s get right into it and talk about the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
[00:00:46] I imagine that many of you might have memories of your childhood that include ice cream.
[00:00:52] Maybe that’s eating ice cream at the beach, perhaps it’s being allowed to go down to the ice cream shop on a Saturday afternoon, maybe it’s being taken to your favourite ice cream shop by a grandparent and being able to choose an extra scoop, or a flavour that you weren’t normally allowed.
[00:01:11] The U.K. isn't a part of the world that is particularly associated with ice cream.
[00:01:18] Sure, there are some ice cream shops, but the fact that it is cold and wet for a lot of the year probably means that there aren’t as many days when people feel like a cold, refreshing ice cream as there are in Italy or Spain, let’s say.
[00:01:34] What every British person of a certain generation will recognise, however, is the sound of the ice cream van.
[00:01:43
[00:01:46] Children would hear this tell-tale jingle, plead with their parents for some coins, and rush towards the van.
[00:01:55] These kinds of vans were popular all over the country, and were in particularly high demand in areas without easy access to ice cream.
[00:02:07] This was, really, most of the country, as ice cream shops aren’t so common in the UK, but there was one area in particular where the residents cheered in ecstasy when they heard this sound.
[00:02:21] Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, had been an economic and industrial powerhouse in the 19th and early 20th century, but by the 1960s, with many of the major industries closing, the city was in a downward spiral.
[00:02:39] The centre of the city was crowded and unsanitary, people crammed into small apartments, often without their own toilet.
[00:02:49] There was a mass project to move people out from the centre to new so-called “schemes”, housing developments outside the city. The apartments would be fit for purpose, they would be practical, they would have proper bathrooms and toilets, it would be a big step up from the previous situation.
[00:03:13] As this took place, there was a mass mobilisation of people out from the centre. It was, in many ways, a big improvement. Better housing, green fields to play in, and fresh air.
[00:03:27] The major problem was that the planners and architects hadn’t thought of everything. Public transport options were limited, and there weren’t enough shops.
[00:03:39] Soon enough, entrepreneurial Glaswegians, people from Glasgow, stepped up to plug the gap.
[00:03:47] There would be grocery vans, fishmongers, and people selling fresh vegetables who would drive up to the schemes, make their presence known, and would find that they were flooded with potential customers in no time.
[00:04:02] And for the kids, ice cream vans soon started to pull up to the estates, their trademark music playing, and they would find that kids were excitedly chasing after them and that there was a queue around the block.
[00:04:19] Or perhaps more realistically, as we are talking about kids here, their vans were surrounded by crowds of children thrusting coins in the general direction of the van and arguing amongst themselves about who was there first.
[00:04:34] Now, ice cream was a relatively profitable thing to sell: high margins, customers who want it every day, and pretty easy to make.
[00:04:44] And ice cream van drivers became quite possessive over territory. Some routes and locations were more lucrative than others, and ice cream van drivers would resort to intimidation and violence to protect their territory, to make sure that nobody else sold ice cream to their customers.
[00:05:07] At the beginning it might be something relatively harmless, a rival driver squirting sticky raspberry ice cream sauce all over the windscreens, so that the other driver would have to spend hours getting it off because it was so sticky.
[00:05:22] But often it was more violent than that.
[00:05:27] Rivals would use baseball bats to smash windows, tyres would be slashed, vans would be put out of action.
[00:05:37] And this all took place in an area of the city without much of a police presence, a deprived area that was characterised by street gangs and petty crime.
[00:05:50] And before long, organised criminals started to enter the ice cream market. They bought up vans and got into the legitimate ice cream business, but they would also use ice cream vans to sell products that were not as frozen or innocent as ice cream.
[00:06:08] First it might be alcohol, cigarettes and tobacco.
[00:06:13] It might even be stolen goods, which criminals could take in a robbery during the night, load up into an ice cream van and sell by midday the following day.
[00:06:25] Others went a step further still, selling hard drugs, in particular, heroin.
[00:06:33] Since the 1980s, Scotland has been battling a serious problem with drugs, and especially with heroin. Even today, Scotland has 5 times more drug-related deaths than England on a per capita basis.
[00:06:49] And back in the 1980s, in these economically deprived areas of Glasgow, heroin was a serious problem. For heroin users in these areas, the drug wasn’t particularly easy to get hold of, given that these areas were far out of the city centre and poorly connected by bus.
[00:07:10] Ice cream vans were the perfect vehicle, literally and figuratively, for selling heroin.
[00:07:18] Naturally they were on the go, they would travel from place to place, and there was nothing unusual about someone approaching a van and handing over money and being given something in return.
[00:07:32] There were already clear territories, and the ice cream trade was already characterised by violence and rivalry.
[00:07:41] As you might imagine, as the value of the goods sold from the trucks increased, so did the violence. Gangs and drivers would go to extreme lengths to protect their most valuable routes, seizing territory from others through a mixture of intimidation and real violence.
[00:08:01] If an ice cream truck ventured into the wrong zone, it would soon find its windows were smashed and tyres slashed.
[00:08:10] It was a period of intense violence, with anyone who didn’t comply falling victim to beatings and vicious attacks.
[00:08:19] Understandably, many complied, they went along out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t.
[00:08:26] Many, but not all.
[00:08:29] One person who was not going to play by these rules, he was not going to sell drugs, and he wasn’t going to avoid an area just because some gang member told him to, was a man called Andrew Doyle.
[00:08:43] His nickname, which probably wouldn't be quite so acceptable today, was “Fatboy”, which seems a little unfair as he wasn’t even particularly fat.
[00:08:54] Anyway, Andrew Doyle was only 18 years old, but he was a good, upstanding citizen. He drove an ice cream truck, he wasn’t a drug dealer, and he wouldn’t be intimidated into becoming one, or playing by the rules of the gangs.
[00:09:11] He would go where he wanted, if kids wanted ice cream, he would drive to sell it to them, he had no intention of playing by other people’s rules.
[00:09:21] But if you know anything about Scottish drug dealers, or perhaps we should say drug dealers in general, it is that they aren’t the sort of people to say “ok, no worries, have a good day!”
[00:09:34] After numerous threats, one day Doyle found two masked men in front of his ice cream truck with a shotgun. They fired a shot through the window, not aiming at him, but to the passenger side.
[00:09:50] The objective was clearly to frighten him. Next time we’ll point it at you.
[00:09:58] But Doyle wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t prepared to compromise his morals.
[00:10:04] In April of 1984, the gang members decided that Doyle needed another frightening, or something worse. If a shotgun through the windscreen didn’t do it, he needed reminding that they knew where he lived, and they could hurt him and his family.
[00:10:22] In the early hours of the 16th of April 1984, a group of men approached Doyle’s apartment, where he and his family were sleeping.
[00:10:33] They poured petrol on the front door, lit a match, and ran off into the night.
[00:10:41] Black smoke gushed into the apartment, and the fire continued to spread.
[00:10:47] The fire brigade was called, but it was too late.
[00:10:52] Of the 9 people inside the apartment, 6 were killed. Andrew Doyle died, as did his father, two of his brothers, his sister, and her 18-month-old baby.
[00:11:08] His mother survived, but she would end up burying her husband, her daughter, three sons and her baby grandson.
[00:11:18] It was all over the national news, a sign of the lawlessness of these housing schemes and the inability of the Glasgow police to do its job and enforce law and order.
[00:11:31] There was a huge investigation, but nobody was willing to speak to the police. Nothing. Not a word.
[00:11:40] Then, the police revealed a breakthrough.
[00:11:44] A man named William Love was willing to go on record and say that he had heard a group of men plotting in a pub about how they were going to set Doyle’s apartment on fire in a bid to intimidate him.
[00:12:00] This witness, William Love, was a petty criminal, and at the time that he gave this statement he was in jail awaiting trial for armed robbery.
[00:12:13] The names that he gave the police were Thomas “TC” Campbell and Joe Steele.
[00:12:21] Now, these men, TC Campbell and Joe Steele, were no angels.
[00:12:27] TC Campbell was well-known to the police.
[00:12:31] He also had an ice cream van, registered in his wife’s name, and there had been reports that he had been intimidating people for years, including other ice cream van drivers in a bid to protect his most profitable routes, from which he would sell stolen goods.
[00:12:48] He was arrested shortly afterwards.
[00:12:51] When the police searched his house, they reported that they found a street map with Doyle’s apartment circled out. The police also claimed that TC Campbell confessed his involvement, even though TC Campbell denies ever having made any such confession.
[00:13:11] The police also had another witness, another petty criminal who was in jail at the time. His name was Joseph Grainger, and he was willing to go on record saying that he was there at the scene of the crime, but it wasn’t him who lit the match: it was TC Campbell and Joe Steele.
[00:13:33] But TC Campbell and Joe Steele maintained their innocence. Sure, they might have done other things they regretted, but this wasn’t them. They were innocent.
[00:13:46] There was a trial, and the prosecution’s argument rested on four things: the testimony of the first petty criminal, William Love, who said that he had overheard a plot being made at a pub, the other petty criminal Joseph Grainger, who said that it was TC Campbell and Joe Steele, the map found in TC Campbell’s house, and the police statements.
[00:14:12] The problem was, when Joseph Grainger was questioned, he broke down. He admitted that he had made it up, he wasn’t there and had never said he was, but the police had pressured him into signing this statement because they had told him that if he collaborated he would get off the other, unrelated charges.
[00:14:35] And then there was the question of the map found at TC Campbell’s house.
[00:14:40] It seemed odd, unusual, for someone who was a career criminal to leave such an obviously incriminating piece of evidence visible to anyone who would come into the house, especially as, if he really did commit the crime, he would presumably have thought that the police might come knocking on his door.
[00:15:01] All throughout, he protested his innocence, saying that the map must have been planted by the police, placed there in a bid to frame him for the crime.
[00:15:12] Despite all of this, the jury was unanimous in its decision. The two men were guilty, and were each sentenced to life, at least 20 years in prison.
[00:15:25] The public was sick to death of the violence that had plagued the city, and horrified by the fact that an entire innocent law-abiding family, including an 18-month-old baby, had been murdered in their sleep.
[00:15:42] The jury no doubt saw these two men who were well-known violent criminals and thought, well, perhaps the evidence is a bit flimsy, but the city will be safer if they are behind bars.
[00:15:56] They were duly sent to prison, but constantly appealed. It wasn’t us, they said, you have the wrong people.
[00:16:04] Campbell went on hunger strike in a bid to try to get a retrial.
[00:16:10] Steele, on the other hand, had a different approach. He escaped from prison, doing so three times. And every time he escaped, he did some kind of publicity stunt to try to draw attention to his situation. The first time he climbed onto the roof of his mother’s house and shouted down his defence, but the following time he went one step further.
[00:16:37] He travelled to London, leaving Scotland for the first time in his life, and glued and handcuffed himself to the gates of Buckingham Palace, the royal residence, in a bid to speak to the journalists who descended to cover this unusual story.
[00:16:55] And it was…unusual, to go to all of the effort of escaping but to do something that would mean you would immediately be arrested, only to draw attention to the fact that you said you were innocent.
[00:17:09] It didn’t necessarily look like the actions of a guilty man.
[00:17:13] But it didn’t work.
[00:17:16] Steele was immediately put back in prison, and his request for an appeal denied.
[00:17:23] Fast forward a few years, and in 1992 there was a breakthrough. The case’s supposed “star witness”, William Love, admitted to journalists that he too had made the entire thing up. He said that police had encouraged him to testify against TC Campbell and Joe Steele, and he had gone along with it because he thought that they would let him off the other charges.
[00:17:50] But this was a private conversation between Love and journalists, it wasn’t evidence in a Scottish court of law.
[00:17:59] Still, it was a strong sign that the men were not guilty, or at least, that the case should be revisited. So, in 1996, pending the appeal, the two men were released on bail, 12 years after being sent to prison.
[00:18:16] They were free, finally.
[00:18:19] Two years later, they had their day in court, the case was duly referred to the Scottish Courts of Appeal.
[00:18:26] But, to their horror, their appeal was refused.
[00:18:32] Even though William Love had said that his testimony was a lie, meaning that there were now no witnesses putting them at the scene of the crime, there were still the statements from police officers saying that the two men had confessed, statements that the two men vehemently deny ever having made.
[00:18:52] Still the judge’s verdict stood; after living for two years as free men, TC Campbell and Joe Steele were sent back to prison.
[00:19:02] It wouldn’t be until 2004, 20 years after the crime, that the case was referred again, and a committee decided that the evidence of the police officers was not reliable.
[00:19:16] In other words, the police officers lied about Campbell and Steele’s confessions in a bid to frame them for the crime.
[00:19:25] The pair were officially declared innocent, and they were allowed to walk free after two decades of being thought of as the men who burned an innocent family to death.
[00:19:37] And the people who really committed the crime, if we are to presume that TC Campbell and Joe Steele are innocent, the guilty parties have never been found, nobody else has been convicted for the crime.
[00:19:53] In an interview from 2019, Joe Steele told a Scottish newspaper that it was another local criminal called Tam McGraw who was behind the murder.
[00:20:03] He was, according to Steele, a close friend of the police, and that’s why the law enforcement officers tried so hard to pin the crime on TC Campbell and Joe Steele, so that their friend and associate wouldn’t have to pay for what he did.
[00:20:19] Tam McGraw was asked about the murder, but he always denied it, and if it really was him, he took the truth to the grave, as he died in 2007.
[00:20:30] Now, there’s an urban legend that ice cream trucks are banned in Glasgow because of the city’s history with them being used by criminals to sell drugs and stolen goods.
[00:20:42] It isn’t quite correct to say that, but several housing schemes have banned them.
[00:20:48] It’s more from a public health point of view, to curb Scottish obesity rates, but certainly for many Glasgow residents who were alive during this period, the noise of an ice cream van brings back memories they would prefer to forget.
[00:21:05] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
[00:21:10] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:13] Have you been to Glasgow? Have you heard of this story before? What other similar stories are there from your country?
[00:21:20] I would love to know.
[00:21:21] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about ice cream.
[00:00:25] But today’s story isn’t really about ice cream, it’s about murder, police corruption, drugs, prison, Glasgow, Buckingham Palace, and a two-decade-long fight for justice.
[00:00:38] Ok then, let’s get right into it and talk about the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
[00:00:46] I imagine that many of you might have memories of your childhood that include ice cream.
[00:00:52] Maybe that’s eating ice cream at the beach, perhaps it’s being allowed to go down to the ice cream shop on a Saturday afternoon, maybe it’s being taken to your favourite ice cream shop by a grandparent and being able to choose an extra scoop, or a flavour that you weren’t normally allowed.
[00:01:11] The U.K. isn't a part of the world that is particularly associated with ice cream.
[00:01:18] Sure, there are some ice cream shops, but the fact that it is cold and wet for a lot of the year probably means that there aren’t as many days when people feel like a cold, refreshing ice cream as there are in Italy or Spain, let’s say.
[00:01:34] What every British person of a certain generation will recognise, however, is the sound of the ice cream van.
[00:01:43
[00:01:46] Children would hear this tell-tale jingle, plead with their parents for some coins, and rush towards the van.
[00:01:55] These kinds of vans were popular all over the country, and were in particularly high demand in areas without easy access to ice cream.
[00:02:07] This was, really, most of the country, as ice cream shops aren’t so common in the UK, but there was one area in particular where the residents cheered in ecstasy when they heard this sound.
[00:02:21] Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, had been an economic and industrial powerhouse in the 19th and early 20th century, but by the 1960s, with many of the major industries closing, the city was in a downward spiral.
[00:02:39] The centre of the city was crowded and unsanitary, people crammed into small apartments, often without their own toilet.
[00:02:49] There was a mass project to move people out from the centre to new so-called “schemes”, housing developments outside the city. The apartments would be fit for purpose, they would be practical, they would have proper bathrooms and toilets, it would be a big step up from the previous situation.
[00:03:13] As this took place, there was a mass mobilisation of people out from the centre. It was, in many ways, a big improvement. Better housing, green fields to play in, and fresh air.
[00:03:27] The major problem was that the planners and architects hadn’t thought of everything. Public transport options were limited, and there weren’t enough shops.
[00:03:39] Soon enough, entrepreneurial Glaswegians, people from Glasgow, stepped up to plug the gap.
[00:03:47] There would be grocery vans, fishmongers, and people selling fresh vegetables who would drive up to the schemes, make their presence known, and would find that they were flooded with potential customers in no time.
[00:04:02] And for the kids, ice cream vans soon started to pull up to the estates, their trademark music playing, and they would find that kids were excitedly chasing after them and that there was a queue around the block.
[00:04:19] Or perhaps more realistically, as we are talking about kids here, their vans were surrounded by crowds of children thrusting coins in the general direction of the van and arguing amongst themselves about who was there first.
[00:04:34] Now, ice cream was a relatively profitable thing to sell: high margins, customers who want it every day, and pretty easy to make.
[00:04:44] And ice cream van drivers became quite possessive over territory. Some routes and locations were more lucrative than others, and ice cream van drivers would resort to intimidation and violence to protect their territory, to make sure that nobody else sold ice cream to their customers.
[00:05:07] At the beginning it might be something relatively harmless, a rival driver squirting sticky raspberry ice cream sauce all over the windscreens, so that the other driver would have to spend hours getting it off because it was so sticky.
[00:05:22] But often it was more violent than that.
[00:05:27] Rivals would use baseball bats to smash windows, tyres would be slashed, vans would be put out of action.
[00:05:37] And this all took place in an area of the city without much of a police presence, a deprived area that was characterised by street gangs and petty crime.
[00:05:50] And before long, organised criminals started to enter the ice cream market. They bought up vans and got into the legitimate ice cream business, but they would also use ice cream vans to sell products that were not as frozen or innocent as ice cream.
[00:06:08] First it might be alcohol, cigarettes and tobacco.
[00:06:13] It might even be stolen goods, which criminals could take in a robbery during the night, load up into an ice cream van and sell by midday the following day.
[00:06:25] Others went a step further still, selling hard drugs, in particular, heroin.
[00:06:33] Since the 1980s, Scotland has been battling a serious problem with drugs, and especially with heroin. Even today, Scotland has 5 times more drug-related deaths than England on a per capita basis.
[00:06:49] And back in the 1980s, in these economically deprived areas of Glasgow, heroin was a serious problem. For heroin users in these areas, the drug wasn’t particularly easy to get hold of, given that these areas were far out of the city centre and poorly connected by bus.
[00:07:10] Ice cream vans were the perfect vehicle, literally and figuratively, for selling heroin.
[00:07:18] Naturally they were on the go, they would travel from place to place, and there was nothing unusual about someone approaching a van and handing over money and being given something in return.
[00:07:32] There were already clear territories, and the ice cream trade was already characterised by violence and rivalry.
[00:07:41] As you might imagine, as the value of the goods sold from the trucks increased, so did the violence. Gangs and drivers would go to extreme lengths to protect their most valuable routes, seizing territory from others through a mixture of intimidation and real violence.
[00:08:01] If an ice cream truck ventured into the wrong zone, it would soon find its windows were smashed and tyres slashed.
[00:08:10] It was a period of intense violence, with anyone who didn’t comply falling victim to beatings and vicious attacks.
[00:08:19] Understandably, many complied, they went along out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t.
[00:08:26] Many, but not all.
[00:08:29] One person who was not going to play by these rules, he was not going to sell drugs, and he wasn’t going to avoid an area just because some gang member told him to, was a man called Andrew Doyle.
[00:08:43] His nickname, which probably wouldn't be quite so acceptable today, was “Fatboy”, which seems a little unfair as he wasn’t even particularly fat.
[00:08:54] Anyway, Andrew Doyle was only 18 years old, but he was a good, upstanding citizen. He drove an ice cream truck, he wasn’t a drug dealer, and he wouldn’t be intimidated into becoming one, or playing by the rules of the gangs.
[00:09:11] He would go where he wanted, if kids wanted ice cream, he would drive to sell it to them, he had no intention of playing by other people’s rules.
[00:09:21] But if you know anything about Scottish drug dealers, or perhaps we should say drug dealers in general, it is that they aren’t the sort of people to say “ok, no worries, have a good day!”
[00:09:34] After numerous threats, one day Doyle found two masked men in front of his ice cream truck with a shotgun. They fired a shot through the window, not aiming at him, but to the passenger side.
[00:09:50] The objective was clearly to frighten him. Next time we’ll point it at you.
[00:09:58] But Doyle wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t prepared to compromise his morals.
[00:10:04] In April of 1984, the gang members decided that Doyle needed another frightening, or something worse. If a shotgun through the windscreen didn’t do it, he needed reminding that they knew where he lived, and they could hurt him and his family.
[00:10:22] In the early hours of the 16th of April 1984, a group of men approached Doyle’s apartment, where he and his family were sleeping.
[00:10:33] They poured petrol on the front door, lit a match, and ran off into the night.
[00:10:41] Black smoke gushed into the apartment, and the fire continued to spread.
[00:10:47] The fire brigade was called, but it was too late.
[00:10:52] Of the 9 people inside the apartment, 6 were killed. Andrew Doyle died, as did his father, two of his brothers, his sister, and her 18-month-old baby.
[00:11:08] His mother survived, but she would end up burying her husband, her daughter, three sons and her baby grandson.
[00:11:18] It was all over the national news, a sign of the lawlessness of these housing schemes and the inability of the Glasgow police to do its job and enforce law and order.
[00:11:31] There was a huge investigation, but nobody was willing to speak to the police. Nothing. Not a word.
[00:11:40] Then, the police revealed a breakthrough.
[00:11:44] A man named William Love was willing to go on record and say that he had heard a group of men plotting in a pub about how they were going to set Doyle’s apartment on fire in a bid to intimidate him.
[00:12:00] This witness, William Love, was a petty criminal, and at the time that he gave this statement he was in jail awaiting trial for armed robbery.
[00:12:13] The names that he gave the police were Thomas “TC” Campbell and Joe Steele.
[00:12:21] Now, these men, TC Campbell and Joe Steele, were no angels.
[00:12:27] TC Campbell was well-known to the police.
[00:12:31] He also had an ice cream van, registered in his wife’s name, and there had been reports that he had been intimidating people for years, including other ice cream van drivers in a bid to protect his most profitable routes, from which he would sell stolen goods.
[00:12:48] He was arrested shortly afterwards.
[00:12:51] When the police searched his house, they reported that they found a street map with Doyle’s apartment circled out. The police also claimed that TC Campbell confessed his involvement, even though TC Campbell denies ever having made any such confession.
[00:13:11] The police also had another witness, another petty criminal who was in jail at the time. His name was Joseph Grainger, and he was willing to go on record saying that he was there at the scene of the crime, but it wasn’t him who lit the match: it was TC Campbell and Joe Steele.
[00:13:33] But TC Campbell and Joe Steele maintained their innocence. Sure, they might have done other things they regretted, but this wasn’t them. They were innocent.
[00:13:46] There was a trial, and the prosecution’s argument rested on four things: the testimony of the first petty criminal, William Love, who said that he had overheard a plot being made at a pub, the other petty criminal Joseph Grainger, who said that it was TC Campbell and Joe Steele, the map found in TC Campbell’s house, and the police statements.
[00:14:12] The problem was, when Joseph Grainger was questioned, he broke down. He admitted that he had made it up, he wasn’t there and had never said he was, but the police had pressured him into signing this statement because they had told him that if he collaborated he would get off the other, unrelated charges.
[00:14:35] And then there was the question of the map found at TC Campbell’s house.
[00:14:40] It seemed odd, unusual, for someone who was a career criminal to leave such an obviously incriminating piece of evidence visible to anyone who would come into the house, especially as, if he really did commit the crime, he would presumably have thought that the police might come knocking on his door.
[00:15:01] All throughout, he protested his innocence, saying that the map must have been planted by the police, placed there in a bid to frame him for the crime.
[00:15:12] Despite all of this, the jury was unanimous in its decision. The two men were guilty, and were each sentenced to life, at least 20 years in prison.
[00:15:25] The public was sick to death of the violence that had plagued the city, and horrified by the fact that an entire innocent law-abiding family, including an 18-month-old baby, had been murdered in their sleep.
[00:15:42] The jury no doubt saw these two men who were well-known violent criminals and thought, well, perhaps the evidence is a bit flimsy, but the city will be safer if they are behind bars.
[00:15:56] They were duly sent to prison, but constantly appealed. It wasn’t us, they said, you have the wrong people.
[00:16:04] Campbell went on hunger strike in a bid to try to get a retrial.
[00:16:10] Steele, on the other hand, had a different approach. He escaped from prison, doing so three times. And every time he escaped, he did some kind of publicity stunt to try to draw attention to his situation. The first time he climbed onto the roof of his mother’s house and shouted down his defence, but the following time he went one step further.
[00:16:37] He travelled to London, leaving Scotland for the first time in his life, and glued and handcuffed himself to the gates of Buckingham Palace, the royal residence, in a bid to speak to the journalists who descended to cover this unusual story.
[00:16:55] And it was…unusual, to go to all of the effort of escaping but to do something that would mean you would immediately be arrested, only to draw attention to the fact that you said you were innocent.
[00:17:09] It didn’t necessarily look like the actions of a guilty man.
[00:17:13] But it didn’t work.
[00:17:16] Steele was immediately put back in prison, and his request for an appeal denied.
[00:17:23] Fast forward a few years, and in 1992 there was a breakthrough. The case’s supposed “star witness”, William Love, admitted to journalists that he too had made the entire thing up. He said that police had encouraged him to testify against TC Campbell and Joe Steele, and he had gone along with it because he thought that they would let him off the other charges.
[00:17:50] But this was a private conversation between Love and journalists, it wasn’t evidence in a Scottish court of law.
[00:17:59] Still, it was a strong sign that the men were not guilty, or at least, that the case should be revisited. So, in 1996, pending the appeal, the two men were released on bail, 12 years after being sent to prison.
[00:18:16] They were free, finally.
[00:18:19] Two years later, they had their day in court, the case was duly referred to the Scottish Courts of Appeal.
[00:18:26] But, to their horror, their appeal was refused.
[00:18:32] Even though William Love had said that his testimony was a lie, meaning that there were now no witnesses putting them at the scene of the crime, there were still the statements from police officers saying that the two men had confessed, statements that the two men vehemently deny ever having made.
[00:18:52] Still the judge’s verdict stood; after living for two years as free men, TC Campbell and Joe Steele were sent back to prison.
[00:19:02] It wouldn’t be until 2004, 20 years after the crime, that the case was referred again, and a committee decided that the evidence of the police officers was not reliable.
[00:19:16] In other words, the police officers lied about Campbell and Steele’s confessions in a bid to frame them for the crime.
[00:19:25] The pair were officially declared innocent, and they were allowed to walk free after two decades of being thought of as the men who burned an innocent family to death.
[00:19:37] And the people who really committed the crime, if we are to presume that TC Campbell and Joe Steele are innocent, the guilty parties have never been found, nobody else has been convicted for the crime.
[00:19:53] In an interview from 2019, Joe Steele told a Scottish newspaper that it was another local criminal called Tam McGraw who was behind the murder.
[00:20:03] He was, according to Steele, a close friend of the police, and that’s why the law enforcement officers tried so hard to pin the crime on TC Campbell and Joe Steele, so that their friend and associate wouldn’t have to pay for what he did.
[00:20:19] Tam McGraw was asked about the murder, but he always denied it, and if it really was him, he took the truth to the grave, as he died in 2007.
[00:20:30] Now, there’s an urban legend that ice cream trucks are banned in Glasgow because of the city’s history with them being used by criminals to sell drugs and stolen goods.
[00:20:42] It isn’t quite correct to say that, but several housing schemes have banned them.
[00:20:48] It’s more from a public health point of view, to curb Scottish obesity rates, but certainly for many Glasgow residents who were alive during this period, the noise of an ice cream van brings back memories they would prefer to forget.
[00:21:05] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
[00:21:10] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:13] Have you been to Glasgow? Have you heard of this story before? What other similar stories are there from your country?
[00:21:20] I would love to know.
[00:21:21] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about ice cream.
[00:00:25] But today’s story isn’t really about ice cream, it’s about murder, police corruption, drugs, prison, Glasgow, Buckingham Palace, and a two-decade-long fight for justice.
[00:00:38] Ok then, let’s get right into it and talk about the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
[00:00:46] I imagine that many of you might have memories of your childhood that include ice cream.
[00:00:52] Maybe that’s eating ice cream at the beach, perhaps it’s being allowed to go down to the ice cream shop on a Saturday afternoon, maybe it’s being taken to your favourite ice cream shop by a grandparent and being able to choose an extra scoop, or a flavour that you weren’t normally allowed.
[00:01:11] The U.K. isn't a part of the world that is particularly associated with ice cream.
[00:01:18] Sure, there are some ice cream shops, but the fact that it is cold and wet for a lot of the year probably means that there aren’t as many days when people feel like a cold, refreshing ice cream as there are in Italy or Spain, let’s say.
[00:01:34] What every British person of a certain generation will recognise, however, is the sound of the ice cream van.
[00:01:43
[00:01:46] Children would hear this tell-tale jingle, plead with their parents for some coins, and rush towards the van.
[00:01:55] These kinds of vans were popular all over the country, and were in particularly high demand in areas without easy access to ice cream.
[00:02:07] This was, really, most of the country, as ice cream shops aren’t so common in the UK, but there was one area in particular where the residents cheered in ecstasy when they heard this sound.
[00:02:21] Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, had been an economic and industrial powerhouse in the 19th and early 20th century, but by the 1960s, with many of the major industries closing, the city was in a downward spiral.
[00:02:39] The centre of the city was crowded and unsanitary, people crammed into small apartments, often without their own toilet.
[00:02:49] There was a mass project to move people out from the centre to new so-called “schemes”, housing developments outside the city. The apartments would be fit for purpose, they would be practical, they would have proper bathrooms and toilets, it would be a big step up from the previous situation.
[00:03:13] As this took place, there was a mass mobilisation of people out from the centre. It was, in many ways, a big improvement. Better housing, green fields to play in, and fresh air.
[00:03:27] The major problem was that the planners and architects hadn’t thought of everything. Public transport options were limited, and there weren’t enough shops.
[00:03:39] Soon enough, entrepreneurial Glaswegians, people from Glasgow, stepped up to plug the gap.
[00:03:47] There would be grocery vans, fishmongers, and people selling fresh vegetables who would drive up to the schemes, make their presence known, and would find that they were flooded with potential customers in no time.
[00:04:02] And for the kids, ice cream vans soon started to pull up to the estates, their trademark music playing, and they would find that kids were excitedly chasing after them and that there was a queue around the block.
[00:04:19] Or perhaps more realistically, as we are talking about kids here, their vans were surrounded by crowds of children thrusting coins in the general direction of the van and arguing amongst themselves about who was there first.
[00:04:34] Now, ice cream was a relatively profitable thing to sell: high margins, customers who want it every day, and pretty easy to make.
[00:04:44] And ice cream van drivers became quite possessive over territory. Some routes and locations were more lucrative than others, and ice cream van drivers would resort to intimidation and violence to protect their territory, to make sure that nobody else sold ice cream to their customers.
[00:05:07] At the beginning it might be something relatively harmless, a rival driver squirting sticky raspberry ice cream sauce all over the windscreens, so that the other driver would have to spend hours getting it off because it was so sticky.
[00:05:22] But often it was more violent than that.
[00:05:27] Rivals would use baseball bats to smash windows, tyres would be slashed, vans would be put out of action.
[00:05:37] And this all took place in an area of the city without much of a police presence, a deprived area that was characterised by street gangs and petty crime.
[00:05:50] And before long, organised criminals started to enter the ice cream market. They bought up vans and got into the legitimate ice cream business, but they would also use ice cream vans to sell products that were not as frozen or innocent as ice cream.
[00:06:08] First it might be alcohol, cigarettes and tobacco.
[00:06:13] It might even be stolen goods, which criminals could take in a robbery during the night, load up into an ice cream van and sell by midday the following day.
[00:06:25] Others went a step further still, selling hard drugs, in particular, heroin.
[00:06:33] Since the 1980s, Scotland has been battling a serious problem with drugs, and especially with heroin. Even today, Scotland has 5 times more drug-related deaths than England on a per capita basis.
[00:06:49] And back in the 1980s, in these economically deprived areas of Glasgow, heroin was a serious problem. For heroin users in these areas, the drug wasn’t particularly easy to get hold of, given that these areas were far out of the city centre and poorly connected by bus.
[00:07:10] Ice cream vans were the perfect vehicle, literally and figuratively, for selling heroin.
[00:07:18] Naturally they were on the go, they would travel from place to place, and there was nothing unusual about someone approaching a van and handing over money and being given something in return.
[00:07:32] There were already clear territories, and the ice cream trade was already characterised by violence and rivalry.
[00:07:41] As you might imagine, as the value of the goods sold from the trucks increased, so did the violence. Gangs and drivers would go to extreme lengths to protect their most valuable routes, seizing territory from others through a mixture of intimidation and real violence.
[00:08:01] If an ice cream truck ventured into the wrong zone, it would soon find its windows were smashed and tyres slashed.
[00:08:10] It was a period of intense violence, with anyone who didn’t comply falling victim to beatings and vicious attacks.
[00:08:19] Understandably, many complied, they went along out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t.
[00:08:26] Many, but not all.
[00:08:29] One person who was not going to play by these rules, he was not going to sell drugs, and he wasn’t going to avoid an area just because some gang member told him to, was a man called Andrew Doyle.
[00:08:43] His nickname, which probably wouldn't be quite so acceptable today, was “Fatboy”, which seems a little unfair as he wasn’t even particularly fat.
[00:08:54] Anyway, Andrew Doyle was only 18 years old, but he was a good, upstanding citizen. He drove an ice cream truck, he wasn’t a drug dealer, and he wouldn’t be intimidated into becoming one, or playing by the rules of the gangs.
[00:09:11] He would go where he wanted, if kids wanted ice cream, he would drive to sell it to them, he had no intention of playing by other people’s rules.
[00:09:21] But if you know anything about Scottish drug dealers, or perhaps we should say drug dealers in general, it is that they aren’t the sort of people to say “ok, no worries, have a good day!”
[00:09:34] After numerous threats, one day Doyle found two masked men in front of his ice cream truck with a shotgun. They fired a shot through the window, not aiming at him, but to the passenger side.
[00:09:50] The objective was clearly to frighten him. Next time we’ll point it at you.
[00:09:58] But Doyle wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t prepared to compromise his morals.
[00:10:04] In April of 1984, the gang members decided that Doyle needed another frightening, or something worse. If a shotgun through the windscreen didn’t do it, he needed reminding that they knew where he lived, and they could hurt him and his family.
[00:10:22] In the early hours of the 16th of April 1984, a group of men approached Doyle’s apartment, where he and his family were sleeping.
[00:10:33] They poured petrol on the front door, lit a match, and ran off into the night.
[00:10:41] Black smoke gushed into the apartment, and the fire continued to spread.
[00:10:47] The fire brigade was called, but it was too late.
[00:10:52] Of the 9 people inside the apartment, 6 were killed. Andrew Doyle died, as did his father, two of his brothers, his sister, and her 18-month-old baby.
[00:11:08] His mother survived, but she would end up burying her husband, her daughter, three sons and her baby grandson.
[00:11:18] It was all over the national news, a sign of the lawlessness of these housing schemes and the inability of the Glasgow police to do its job and enforce law and order.
[00:11:31] There was a huge investigation, but nobody was willing to speak to the police. Nothing. Not a word.
[00:11:40] Then, the police revealed a breakthrough.
[00:11:44] A man named William Love was willing to go on record and say that he had heard a group of men plotting in a pub about how they were going to set Doyle’s apartment on fire in a bid to intimidate him.
[00:12:00] This witness, William Love, was a petty criminal, and at the time that he gave this statement he was in jail awaiting trial for armed robbery.
[00:12:13] The names that he gave the police were Thomas “TC” Campbell and Joe Steele.
[00:12:21] Now, these men, TC Campbell and Joe Steele, were no angels.
[00:12:27] TC Campbell was well-known to the police.
[00:12:31] He also had an ice cream van, registered in his wife’s name, and there had been reports that he had been intimidating people for years, including other ice cream van drivers in a bid to protect his most profitable routes, from which he would sell stolen goods.
[00:12:48] He was arrested shortly afterwards.
[00:12:51] When the police searched his house, they reported that they found a street map with Doyle’s apartment circled out. The police also claimed that TC Campbell confessed his involvement, even though TC Campbell denies ever having made any such confession.
[00:13:11] The police also had another witness, another petty criminal who was in jail at the time. His name was Joseph Grainger, and he was willing to go on record saying that he was there at the scene of the crime, but it wasn’t him who lit the match: it was TC Campbell and Joe Steele.
[00:13:33] But TC Campbell and Joe Steele maintained their innocence. Sure, they might have done other things they regretted, but this wasn’t them. They were innocent.
[00:13:46] There was a trial, and the prosecution’s argument rested on four things: the testimony of the first petty criminal, William Love, who said that he had overheard a plot being made at a pub, the other petty criminal Joseph Grainger, who said that it was TC Campbell and Joe Steele, the map found in TC Campbell’s house, and the police statements.
[00:14:12] The problem was, when Joseph Grainger was questioned, he broke down. He admitted that he had made it up, he wasn’t there and had never said he was, but the police had pressured him into signing this statement because they had told him that if he collaborated he would get off the other, unrelated charges.
[00:14:35] And then there was the question of the map found at TC Campbell’s house.
[00:14:40] It seemed odd, unusual, for someone who was a career criminal to leave such an obviously incriminating piece of evidence visible to anyone who would come into the house, especially as, if he really did commit the crime, he would presumably have thought that the police might come knocking on his door.
[00:15:01] All throughout, he protested his innocence, saying that the map must have been planted by the police, placed there in a bid to frame him for the crime.
[00:15:12] Despite all of this, the jury was unanimous in its decision. The two men were guilty, and were each sentenced to life, at least 20 years in prison.
[00:15:25] The public was sick to death of the violence that had plagued the city, and horrified by the fact that an entire innocent law-abiding family, including an 18-month-old baby, had been murdered in their sleep.
[00:15:42] The jury no doubt saw these two men who were well-known violent criminals and thought, well, perhaps the evidence is a bit flimsy, but the city will be safer if they are behind bars.
[00:15:56] They were duly sent to prison, but constantly appealed. It wasn’t us, they said, you have the wrong people.
[00:16:04] Campbell went on hunger strike in a bid to try to get a retrial.
[00:16:10] Steele, on the other hand, had a different approach. He escaped from prison, doing so three times. And every time he escaped, he did some kind of publicity stunt to try to draw attention to his situation. The first time he climbed onto the roof of his mother’s house and shouted down his defence, but the following time he went one step further.
[00:16:37] He travelled to London, leaving Scotland for the first time in his life, and glued and handcuffed himself to the gates of Buckingham Palace, the royal residence, in a bid to speak to the journalists who descended to cover this unusual story.
[00:16:55] And it was…unusual, to go to all of the effort of escaping but to do something that would mean you would immediately be arrested, only to draw attention to the fact that you said you were innocent.
[00:17:09] It didn’t necessarily look like the actions of a guilty man.
[00:17:13] But it didn’t work.
[00:17:16] Steele was immediately put back in prison, and his request for an appeal denied.
[00:17:23] Fast forward a few years, and in 1992 there was a breakthrough. The case’s supposed “star witness”, William Love, admitted to journalists that he too had made the entire thing up. He said that police had encouraged him to testify against TC Campbell and Joe Steele, and he had gone along with it because he thought that they would let him off the other charges.
[00:17:50] But this was a private conversation between Love and journalists, it wasn’t evidence in a Scottish court of law.
[00:17:59] Still, it was a strong sign that the men were not guilty, or at least, that the case should be revisited. So, in 1996, pending the appeal, the two men were released on bail, 12 years after being sent to prison.
[00:18:16] They were free, finally.
[00:18:19] Two years later, they had their day in court, the case was duly referred to the Scottish Courts of Appeal.
[00:18:26] But, to their horror, their appeal was refused.
[00:18:32] Even though William Love had said that his testimony was a lie, meaning that there were now no witnesses putting them at the scene of the crime, there were still the statements from police officers saying that the two men had confessed, statements that the two men vehemently deny ever having made.
[00:18:52] Still the judge’s verdict stood; after living for two years as free men, TC Campbell and Joe Steele were sent back to prison.
[00:19:02] It wouldn’t be until 2004, 20 years after the crime, that the case was referred again, and a committee decided that the evidence of the police officers was not reliable.
[00:19:16] In other words, the police officers lied about Campbell and Steele’s confessions in a bid to frame them for the crime.
[00:19:25] The pair were officially declared innocent, and they were allowed to walk free after two decades of being thought of as the men who burned an innocent family to death.
[00:19:37] And the people who really committed the crime, if we are to presume that TC Campbell and Joe Steele are innocent, the guilty parties have never been found, nobody else has been convicted for the crime.
[00:19:53] In an interview from 2019, Joe Steele told a Scottish newspaper that it was another local criminal called Tam McGraw who was behind the murder.
[00:20:03] He was, according to Steele, a close friend of the police, and that’s why the law enforcement officers tried so hard to pin the crime on TC Campbell and Joe Steele, so that their friend and associate wouldn’t have to pay for what he did.
[00:20:19] Tam McGraw was asked about the murder, but he always denied it, and if it really was him, he took the truth to the grave, as he died in 2007.
[00:20:30] Now, there’s an urban legend that ice cream trucks are banned in Glasgow because of the city’s history with them being used by criminals to sell drugs and stolen goods.
[00:20:42] It isn’t quite correct to say that, but several housing schemes have banned them.
[00:20:48] It’s more from a public health point of view, to curb Scottish obesity rates, but certainly for many Glasgow residents who were alive during this period, the noise of an ice cream van brings back memories they would prefer to forget.
[00:21:05] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.
[00:21:10] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:13] Have you been to Glasgow? Have you heard of this story before? What other similar stories are there from your country?
[00:21:20] I would love to know.
[00:21:21] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
