Irish immigrants from Cork. His father had been first a lorry driver, then a sales rep for a haulage firm. Dennis was born in 1926, the year of the General Strike.
When Hoban became a fully fledged detective in 1952, Leeds was an overcrowded town bursting at the seams, with masses of substandard housing fit only for demolition. Some 90,000 homes needed demolishing, 56,000 of them squalid back-to-backs built a hundred years earlier eighty to ninety to the acre. Post-war housing estates were planned and built across the city, but the council house waiting list stretched out for twenty years. It made Hoban and Betty determined to own their own home.
Their first son was born while they were living next to Dennis’s parents in Stanningley, a working-class district well to the west of the city centre. Then they moved to nearby Bramley, where Betty’s widowed mother came to join them. In the late 1960s the couple bought a brand-new Wimpey home with a large garden on the Kirkstall-Headingley borders, even though Hoban was the world’s worst and least interested gardener. Neither could he turn his hand to DIY in the home, though he loved cars. Shortly after they married he had bought the chassis of a Morris 8 which stood on the drive of their home. Hoban rebuilt it with a wooden frame and aluminium sheeting, but his real hobby was being a policeman. Whatever cars the family possessed were frequently used in his job, often taking part in high-speed car chases.
While his close-knit family endured his obsession with work, all his working life Hoban coped with two ailments, diabetes and asthma. The regime of daily insulin injections was bothersome. Lazy about using his hypodermic syringe, he had no routine for taking insulin. Consequently there were plenty of times when he felt ‘squiggly’, the word he used for being hypoglycaemic. Then he knew he had to eat something sweet, usually a few cakes from the kitchen pantry. He would administer the insulin in a very haphazard way, never at specific times. Then it would be jab – straight into his thigh. ‘He didn’t look after himself,’ his son Richard reflected. ‘He didn’t live in a world where he could look after himself. He never ate well because he was at his best when he was in pubs and clubs and smoky dives getting information from his snouts.’
The family evening meal was often a snatched affair. He would arrive home, wash, shave, eat, watch the Yorkshire TV soap opera Emmerdale Farm, and then be off back to work. He rarely smoked. It would have exacerbated his asthma, already made worse in his early years by the fact that Leeds was one of the most polluted places in the North of England. Soot and smoke from the mills and factories were blown over the town by the prevailing south-westerly winds. For several generations those who could afford it had moved to the cleaner areas of Leeds in the Northern Heights, and ultimately Hoban and Betty joined them.
They had only just moved round the corner to a new and slightly bigger semi-detached house in 1976 when, a few weeks after the inquest verdicts on Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson, they learned he was on the move professionally. As part of a wider reshuffle among the senior management, he was being transferred to the West Yorkshire force headquarters at Wakefield, fifteen miles away. He was to be deputy to the new CID chief of the amalgamated force. A West Riding man, George Oldfield, was being promoted to assistant chief constable (crime). Within a few months Hoban had moved offices to the brand-new divisional police headquarters in Bradford, still as Oldfield’s deputy, but this time in charge of the CID for the entire Western area of the force.
Two and a half years after the amalgamation between West Yorkshire Police and the Leeds and Bradford city forces, the chief constable, Ronald Gregory, had decided to make crucial changes among the senior management. Moving senior personnel around would provide a better balance between the city and county forces. West Riding men transferred into the Leeds and Bradford divisions – some of the senior city boys had to bite the bullet and move to towns like Pontefract, Huddersfield and Halifax. A new culture was being created and these moves were not always popular. Enmities and petty rivalries abounded. Bradford police viewed Leeds detectives as ‘flash bastards’. ‘More gold than a Leeds detective,’ was a popular saying among the Bradford CID, a reference to their Leeds colleagues’ penchant for wearing gold wrist identity bracelets and rings bearing a gold sovereign. Leeds and Bradford officers called their West Riding colleagues ‘Donkey Wallopers’ or ‘The Gurkhas’ – because they took no prisoners, a reference not to West Riding detectives ‘finishing off the enemy’, but a belief by the city men that the county boys hardly ever got to make an arrest.
These important structural changes in the way Yorkshire and the rest of the country was policed had been a long time coming. The amalgamations, creating one big West Yorkshire force covering half a million acres and a population of more than 2 million, had been delayed for more than half a century. Bringing about cost efficiencies and rational organization to law enforcement had been a drawn-out, tortuous process. For almost a hundred years very little had altered in the way the various police forces of Britain were controlled.
By this time the West Riding of Yorkshire no longer existed officially. At the stroke of a pen in 1974 a massive local government reorganization approved by Parliament did away with a nomenclature that had defined an entire region of Northern England for hundreds of years. The East, West and North Ridings of Yorkshire – titles originating from the Anglo-Saxon word thriding, meaning ‘a third’ – became mere counties, bits and pieces of their local geography seemingly thrown into the air by civil servants and politicians in London, only to land as new structures called Humberside, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.
Hoban’s home town of Leeds had managed to weather the storms of economic upheaval over the years better than most. In the immediate post-war years, it remained a giant among the great manufacturing towns. In 1952 it was at the centre of the world’s clothing industry. Montague Burton was the world’s largest multiple tailor, with 600 outlets. Burton’s was only one of several large clothing factories in Leeds, all of which subsequently closed. In the words of Denis Healey, a local MP: ‘It went on making three-piece suits long after people stopped wearing waistcoats, and failed to adapt to the growing taste for casual wear.’
Leeds was a key part of England’s central industrial belt, whose origins, wealth and history had been essentially determined by two pieces of natural good fortune. First was the topography of the landscape across Yorkshire from the Pennines going eastwards – rough moorland and fells capable of little but sustaining sheep farming. It had done this for centuries. In addition there was the availability of vast quantities of water. Via becks and streams flowing off the fells and moors, water from the heavens poured into an abundance of river systems passing through the West Riding in its search for the sea. The rivers not only provided power for the wool and textile mills; their pure soft water also cleaned the wool. Later canals were built east and west of Leeds and waterways made navigable, allowing the wool, its finished products and other manufactures to be transported to both coasts. As the engines of the industrial revolution turned faster, so the population of Yorkshire’s towns and cities multiplied. It doubled and doubled again.
By 1840 Leeds was an industrial and commercial centre with a population of 150,000 and still expanding. Fifty years on and the official census of 1891 recorded Leeds’ population as 395,000. Many were immigrants or their descendants. They had come flooding in initially in the early 1800s from the rural areas of England, but also from deprived parts of Scotland and then Ireland, following the potato famine. Later in the 1880s they were joined by Jews escaping the pogroms in Poland and the province of Knovo in Russia. The only word in English many Jewish immigrants knew was ‘Leeds’. In an effort to escape compulsory military conscription or religious persecution, they had headed for the place which for them signified a modern term for El Dorado.
Dominating the city centre was the magnificent edifice of the town hall, built to demonstrate the achievements of a city bursting with pride at its commercial and industrial dynamism. But where the urban poor were concerned, Leeds, like many other overcrowded British cities, had little to celebrate. In 1858 a sizeable number of the town’s then 15,000 Irish immigrants, who lived in some of the worst housing, were said to have been among the cheering crowds of more than 100,000 who waved flags and shouted greetings
