Winston Trew and the Oval Four: The Long Fight to Clear Their Names

Winston Trew, Sterling Christie, George Griffiths and Constantine Boucher became known as the Oval Four after their arrest at a London Underground station in 1972. All four were born in Jamaica, had moved to Britain as children and were living in South London. Their wrongful convictions followed them through much of their adult lives. Trew’s determination to challenge what had happened helped turn a long-unresolved case into a major exposure of police misconduct. ¹

Black Power and community work

Trew joined the Fasimbas in May 1970, aged nineteen. The organisation grew from the youth wing of the South East London Parents Organisation, which had begun providing supplementary education in response to the treatment of Black children in schools. Its activities included African and Caribbean history, political education, bookstalls, plays and dances. For the young people involved, learning and organising belonged together. They were developing a shared understanding of their place in Britain, with opportunities to meet, discuss ideas and build institutions around the needs of their communities. ²

The Fasimbas’ work also included practical services. Research by the Special Branch Files Project records free plumbing, legal advice, self-defence classes and supplementary teaching, alongside drama and the distribution of literature about African history and Black Power. Based in Lewisham, the organisation worked closely with the Black Liberation Front. These activities give substance to Trew’s political background. His involvement was rooted in a network concerned with the problems families encountered in daily life, as well as the larger questions of racism and political power. ³

The arrest at Oval

On 16 March 1972, Trew and three fellow activists were travelling home after a meeting of the Tony Soares Defence Fund. At Oval station they were confronted by plain-clothes officers who accused them of stealing. The encounter became violent. The men said the officers had attacked them without first identifying themselves as police. Their return journey ended in custody, and the events at the station became the basis of a prosecution that would take decades to undo. ³

Trew’s account describes the pressure that followed inside the police station. He said threats and violence led him to sign a statement admitting offences he had not committed. At trial, he was acquitted of other alleged thefts and robberies after presenting alibis, yet convicted of offences said to have happened at Oval. The experience brought home the consequences of police officers controlling the evidence. He knew the admissions were false; a statement carrying his signature could nevertheless be placed before a court as evidence against him. ⁴

At the Old Bailey in November 1972, all four men were convicted of attempted theft and assaulting a police officer. Christie was also convicted of stealing a policewoman’s handbag. The patrol had been led by Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell, who was a key prosecution witness. Trew, Christie and Griffiths received two-year prison sentences, while Boucher was sent to Borstal, a form of youth detention. The convictions accepted the police account of a confrontation in which the defendants maintained that they had been attacked and falsely accused. ¹

An appeal in 1973 reduced the sentences but left the convictions standing. Release from custody therefore brought no correction to the verdict. Trew complained to the police and continued asserting his innocence. The distinction mattered: time spent in detention could end while the official record continued to identify somebody as an offender. For the Oval Four, the failure to overturn the convictions meant that the account they had given of police wrongdoing still lacked recognition in the judgment against them. ⁵

Keeping a record of the injustice

Warnings about Ridgewell were already circulating. The account later published by the Oval Four’s barristers records concerns raised in other Underground cases and calls in 1973 for the Home Secretary to establish an inquiry. Ridgewell was instead transferred to work investigating mailbag theft. In 1980 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal mailbags and received a seven-year prison sentence. He died in prison in 1982. His own criminal conviction supplied a powerful reason to question earlier evidence, but it did not automatically reopen the cases of people he had helped convict. ⁶

Trew continued working to establish what had happened. His book Black for a Cause, published in 2010, documented his experience and Ridgewell’s history of fabricated cases. Its importance would extend beyond keeping his own account in print. When investigators later examined another conviction involving the same officer, Trew’s book became part of the material considered. By then he had also built a career as a university lecturer. Public education and the pursuit of his case continued alongside each other, with knowledge gathered over many years eventually reaching a new audience. ⁶

Taking the story to new audiences

Filmmaker Stephen Thompson encountered the book through a mutual friend in 2010 and began developing the documentary Black for a Cause. A creative writing lecturer at the University of Winchester, Thompson explained that Trew’s experience of policing in the 1970s connected with his own upbringing in London during the following decade. By January 2018, the film had screened at the Winchester Film Festival and Canada’s Mirror Mountain Film Festival. The university announced a further screening with Thompson and Trew taking questions. The case was reaching viewers before the appeal victory, while Trew was still asking for his name to be cleared. ⁷

He also contributed to the Young Historians Project’s work on the Black Liberation Front. The project’s 2015–2017 team interviewed nine former members of the BLF and the Fasimbas, including Trew, and produced an exhibition and documentary. Its research covered community engagement, women’s activism, Black bookshops, newspapers and political culture. Trew was participating as somebody who could help explain a movement’s history from within. That work preserved a wider account of the period, including the organisations and everyday commitments that surrounded the better-known confrontations with the police. ⁸

A breakthrough in another man’s case

Stephen Simmons had been convicted in 1976 of stealing mailbags after an investigation involving Ridgewell. In 2013, still concerned about the injustice, he called a legal phone-in on LBC. Advice from the programme prompted him to search online for the officer’s name. He discovered Ridgewell’s criminal history and applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, usually called the CCRC. The commission investigated evidence about unreliable police testimony, false confessions and Ridgewell’s conviction, referring Simmons’s case to the Court of Appeal in August 2017. His conviction was quashed in January 2018. The development showed that evidence about the officer’s conduct could reopen a case long thought finished. ⁹

An independent investigation could put the material into a form the appeal court could consider. In Simmons’s case, the referral drew together three strands: a confession excluded in another prosecution; acquittals and judicial concerns in other cases investigated by Ridgewell; and the officer’s own conviction. These were concrete reasons to re-examine the reliability of the evidence. Police conduct across several cases had become relevant to deciding whether one man’s conviction could safely stand. ⁹

Trew then pursued a review of his own convictions. In his account for the CCRC, he described supplying decades of collected information, including indictments from the National Archives. Journalist Duncan Campbell connected him with Graham Satchwell, a retired British Transport Police detective superintendent. Satchwell gave evidence about the force and located seven volumes of the original trial transcript that had been wrongly stored. The commission obtained the material and combined it with fresh evidence and legal arguments. Recovering those records helped turn years of research into a case that could be put before the appeal court. ⁴

Clearing all four names

On 5 December 2019, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of Trew, Christie and Griffiths following referrals by the CCRC based on police misconduct. Forty-seven years had passed since the original convictions. The result removed the legal findings that had stood against them through much of their lives. It also demonstrated why a review body able to investigate older cases mattered: the men’s insistence that the police evidence was unreliable had finally reached the court with material capable of changing the outcome. Their accounts could no longer be dismissed by pointing to the convictions. ¹⁰

Boucher’s case followed separately. He applied to the CCRC in December 2019, after the other three men’s convictions had been overturned. The commission referred his case in January 2020, and the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction that March. The sequence is essential to the history of the Oval Four: the December judgment cleared three men, and the fourth received his own decision months later. A shared experience at the station had produced separate legal records, each of which had to be addressed. ⁵

Writing together and demanding accountability

Trew’s collaboration with Satchwell continued in Rot at the Core: The Serious Crimes of a Detective Sergeant, published by The History Press in 2021. It brought together a man wrongfully convicted through Ridgewell’s actions and a former senior railway detective. Their subject extended to the police culture that had allowed the officer to operate and the serious thefts in which he became involved. The partnership combined different kinds of experience, and carried the investigation into a book for readers beyond the courtroom. It also continued Trew’s work of making the history available after his own conviction had been overturned. ¹¹

The British Transport Police eventually acknowledged its failure to respond adequately. In a statement issued in January 2024, Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi apologised to people harmed by Ridgewell’s actions and to their families. She said a review of his earlier investigations should have followed his conviction, and acknowledged that systemic racism had played a part in the force’s culture at the time. The statement concerned further cases in which convictions had been overturned. It recognised an institutional failure extending beyond the officer’s individual crimes: opportunities to identify innocent people had been missed, leaving them to live with the consequences. ¹²

A proposal to change what happens next

In September 2026, researchers at the University of York and the justice charity APPEAL launched a policy report associated with Trew’s campaign. Its authors were Joanna Gilmore, Mya Imadojemun and Mattia Pinto. York Law School reported that the launch took place at Lambeth Town Hall, accompanied by an animation explaining the proposed reform. The work drew the history of the Ridgewell cases into a practical argument about how the justice system should respond when a police officer is imprisoned. Trew’s name had become attached to a proposal intended to change that response. ¹³

The proposed Trew’s Law would require an automatic, independent review of relevant cases when a serving or former officer receives an immediate custodial sentence. The report called for police and prosecutors to identify cases in which that officer had played a material role, with independent oversight and notification to people whose convictions might be unsafe. These were recommendations for legislation. In his foreword, Trew described campaigning after the 2019 judgment as a new phase of his work. The reform he supported would place a duty on public bodies to look for possible miscarriages of justice, so that discovering an officer’s criminal history and securing access to evidence would no longer depend so heavily on the person wrongly convicted. ¹⁴

Sources

1. Criminal Cases Review Commission — Winston Trew case record.

2. Bristol Radical History Group — Winston Trew.

3. Special Branch Files Project — Black Power: Main groups.

4. Criminal Cases Review Commission — Police misconduct: Winston Trew’s story.

5. Criminal Cases Review Commission — Constantine Boucher case record.

6. Garden Court Chambers — Court of Appeal quashes convictions of the Oval Four.

7. University of Winchester — Short film documenting miscarriage of justice to screen at University of Winchester.

8. Young Historians Project — The Black Liberation Front, 1971–1993.

9. Criminal Cases Review Commission — Stephen Simmons case record.

10. Criminal Cases Review Commission — Statement on the quashing of the convictions of Winston Trew, Sterling Christie and George Griffiths.

11. The History Press — Rot at the Core: The Serious Crimes of a Detective Sergeant.

12. British Transport Police — Statement regarding outcome in Court of Appeal, 18 January 2024.

13. University of York — Trew’s Law report on police criminality and wrongful convictions launched.

14. APPEAL and University of York — Trew’s Law: The Case for Automatic Reviews of Imprisoned Police Officers’ Files, September 2026.