Rose, David 1959-

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ROSE, David 1959-

PERSONAL:

Born 1959.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Observer, 119 Farringdon Rd., London EC1R 3ER, England.

CAREER:

Journalist, author. Observer, London England, home affairs correspondent.

WRITINGS:

(With Richard Gregson) Beneath the Mountains: Exploring the Deep Caves of Asturias, Hodder and Stoughton (London, England), 1987.

Climate of Fear: Blakelock Murder and the Tottenham Three, Bloomsbury Publishing (London, England), 1992.

In the Name of the Law: The Collapse of Criminal Justice, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 1996, revised edition, Vintage (London, England), 1996.

Guildford and District ("Memory Lane" series), Breedon (Derby, England), 2000.

(With Ed Douglas) Regions of the Heart: The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves, National Geographic Society (Washington, DC), 2000.

The Poupart Family in the Borough of Twickenham, 1874-1936, Borough of Twickenham Local History Society (Twickenham, England), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Rose is a British journalist and outdoorsman whose books include Beneath the Mountains: Exploring the Deep Caves of Asturias. Rose and coauthor Richard Gregson, along with other cavers, were the first to explore the incredible limestone caves of the Picos de Europa mountains in the Asturia province of northern Spain. They descended using ropes and pitons and lived far below the surface of the earth for days at a time. What they discovered were subterranean rivers and waterfalls equal to those found aboveground, chambers as vast as cathedrals, and huge formations of stalactites and stalagmites. The group discovered the Sistema del Xitu, a network of caves, tunnels, and shafts that extend 4,000 feet deep. It eventually took six years to completely map the system, and the book contains many of these maps, plus an eight-page color photo insert.

Climate of Fear: Blakelock Murder and the Tottenham Three is Rose's account of the murder of police constable Keith Blakelock, who was stabbed forty times, slashed with a machete, and left to die on a patch of grass. The murder was never solved, and the sentences of three who were convicted were later dropped and the accused released. Blakelock was murdered as a result of mob violence after a local woman suffered a fatal heart attack when police raided her home on October 5, 1985. The climate was already volatile, and after Blakelock's death, police arrested dozens of young men and boys, including some who were mentally retarded, and treated them inhumanely as they attempted to extract confessions from them.

Brian Raymond reviewed the history in the London Observer, calling it a "meticulous catalogue of police wickedness," and wrote that "this excellent book is not a story of purposive malevolence, or pure racism, but of a system placed under such pressure that it abandoned any pretense of justifiable methods of investigation."

In the Name of the Law: The Collapse of Criminal Justice is Rose's study of the British system and its failure to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent. Rose, who makes his points by using real cases, accompanied police over the course of six months observing procedures. Radmilla May remarked in Contemporary Review that Rose "writes with passion and eloquence" and called his style "gripping.…On the whole, the police come out well in this book. Mr. Rose does not shrink from describing recent cases of appalling misconduct, but he sees great changes in the police's present attitudes, a real desire to move away from old unsatisfactory methods of policing to methods which will restore greater public confidence."

Rose emphasizes that while the crime rate is up, convictions are down. He looks at the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), reforms necessary to improve the jury system, and the fears of citizens for their safety. Richard Stern commented in the Spectator that the CPS "enjoys few fans. Prosecutors vary alarmingly in competence. Some mumble into their notes, some leave out elementary 'facts,' and some speak in elusively Equatorial versions of English. David Rose believes that the CPS is cost-driven to discontinue too many cases, before or after they reach the courts. The CPS's own criterion for pursuing a case, a 'realistic' chance of conviction, is turning into an insistence on water-tight certainty. In 1994 the CPS discontinued eleven percent of prosecutions. Is this excessive?"

Paul Barker commented in the Times Literary Supplement that "if neither the public nor the police can expect a reasonable chance that the guilty will be convicted, what happens to the bargain between citizen and state?" Rose looks at the rights of the noncriminal and how under the Criminal Justice Act of 1988, certain crimes have been downgraded. For example, theft of a car was changed to "taking without the owner's consent." Barker called In the Name of the Law "a recipe for having to think uncomfortable thoughts."

Rose and Ed Douglas wrote Regions of the Heart: The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves, a biography called "fiercely lyrical" by a Publishers Weekly contributor. In addition to relating the events of their subject's life and death in 1995, they explain the intricacies and dangers of climbing and the accomplishments of other women climbers. Hargreaves had an impressive history. She was the first woman to climb the North face of the Matterhorn, and she conquered Mount Everest, without supplemental oxygen, just two weeks before her solo attempt to climb K2, the world's second highest peak, again without oxygen. She succeeded, but on her descent, Hargreaves crashed against the mountain's side during hurricane-force winds; her body remains there. Her achievement was noted in the press, but obscured by stories of her foolhardiness in making the attempt, considering that she was the mother of two small children.

The story that Rose and Douglas tell reveals more about Hargreaves's life than had previously been known. She made the climb hoping to achieve financial independence, so that she could leave her husband, Jim Ballard, and gain custody of their children. The authors have used her diaries to reconstruct Hargreaves's fears and hopes and to show that she was caught in an abusive relationship. Sixteen years younger than Ballard, she skipped college to marry, and she was able to climb because he then had a successful climbing shop. They lost everything in the recession of the 1990s, however, and Hargreaves soloed six Alpine summits in 1993, looking for a sponsor. According to the book, Ballard pushed her to succeed.

In reviewing the book for UC Climbing online, Charles Arthur stated that Hargreaves "never told her side of her unhappy marriage and what it drove her to do. 'Better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep,' Ballard said at the news of her death. Thinking like that gets you killed on mountains. In truth, it's better to live. But a lioness will die defending its young. So, it seems did Hargreaves."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2000, Vanessa Bush, review of Regions of the Heart: The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves, p. 1834.

Contemporary Review, June, 1996, Radmilla May, review of In the Name of the Law: The Collapse of Criminal Justice, p. 325.

Economist, March 16, 1996, review of In the Name of the Law, p. S3.

Library Journal, June 15, 2000, Robert E. Greenfield, review of Regions of the Heart, p. 92.

Observer (London, England), May 17, 1992, Brian Raymond, review of Climate of Fear: Blakelock Murder and the Tottenham Three, p. 54.

Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2000, review of Regions of the Heart, p. 63.

Spectator, February 10, 1996, Richard Stern, review of In the Name of the Law, pp. 27-28.

Times Literary Supplement, April 12, 1996, Paul Barker, review of In the Name of the Law, p. 26; January 7, 2000, Kathleen Jamie, review of Regions of the Heart, p. 25.