A MAN jailed for a brutal assault on a police officer 57 years ago has launched a fresh bid to clear his name for posterity.

Robert Cake, then aged 19, was imprisoned for three years, even though the Crown never claimed that he was the one who dealt the blow which left the constable unconscious.

On his first day in prison, Mr Cake says the governor warned him he could be hanged if the officer later died.

He claims that years later, a police officer told him he had been “fitted up” for the crime.

Mr Cake has always denied being at the Waveforms factory in Wallisdown Road, Bournemouth, on August 15, 1961, when PC Gordon Bailey was attacked.

It was reported that the case could have become a murder, but PC Bailey's motorcycle helmet saved his life.

PC Bailey said he was inspecting the factory shortly before 11pm when he saw a man trying to break in. He said that while questioning the man, he was attacked from behind and received a severe blow that left him unconscious.

The constable, 34, later picked Mr Cake out of an ID parade as the man he had questioned.

He had not seen the man who attacked him from behind, and the assailant was never found. But the Crown argued that Mr Cake was jointly responsible for the assault and he was convicted of grievous bodily harm, assault and attempted breaking and entering.

He was kept in solitary confinement at Walton prison in Liverpool.

“I was told, ‘If that police officer dies within a certain amount of time, you will hang’. I had that to think about every day of my life in that prison cell,” he said.

He said he remembered hangings taking place during his imprisonment. “I remember early in the morning, no one was allowed out of their cells to slop out. Then the clock would chime and you knew someone had just gone down the trap door.”

Mr Cake was a married man living in a caravan at Fernheath Road, Bournemouth, when the attack on PC Bailey happened.

He said the police were frequent visitors to his neighbours, one of whom was jailed for a post office robbery. He said a police sergeant was asking questions in the area and asked him whether he knew anything about the assault on the officer.

“There was a lot of crime around Kinson at the time. They had to get someone,” he said.

Mr Cake says he volunteered to help by taking part in an identity parade, with no idea he was a suspect. PC Bailey tapped him on the shoulder to identify him as the man he had questioned.

“I was arrested there and then,” said Mr Cake.

He says he appeared before magistrates and was remanded in custody without seeing his duty solicitor. He was then sent for trial at Winchester Assizes, where a solicitor introduced him to a barrister.

“The barrister came in, saw me and said ‘I’ve looked at the papers and I advise you to plead guilty’,” he said.

Mr Cake pleaded not guilty, but recalls his trial being over in around an hour.

The jury heard that Mr Cake had borrowed a bicycle and gone out on the night of the attack. The defendant, an amateur artist, said he had gone to look at Poole Power Station, which he was painting, and had been back by 9.10pm.

The court also heard a neighbour claim that while reading Bournemouth Echo, Mr Cake remarked that he would have “had his lot” if PC Bailey died.

Mr Cake was initially refused leave to appeal his conviction.

However, in 1982, Dorset Police investigated a complaint he lodged against the force. A case against one officer and one former officer was referred to the director of public prosecutions, who decided there was not enough evidence to justify proceedings.

In 1983, Sir John Butterfill, then MP for Bournemouth West, accompanied Mr Cake to see a London firm of solicitors. He did not succeed in persuading the then home secretary, Leon Brittan, to refer his case back to the Court of Appeal.

Sir John said then: “I am sympathetic towards Mr Cake. It is very unlikely that had he come before the courts in the last three or four years, he would have been found guilty.

“On the other hand, I don’t think it is possible to get him a pardon. There has to be overwhelming evidence that he was innocent. There is, however, a fair degree of doubt as to whether he was guilty.”

Mr Cake – who now lives out of the area – says that after that failed attempt at an appeal, he ran into an officer who had accepted one of his paintings as a gift in 1961. The officer told him he had been “fitted up” and named the senior officer responsible, he said.

He has now submitted paperwork to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

“I want my pardon to show my sons,” he said.

GROUNDS FOR APPEAL

ROBERT Cake, who says he was not properly defended at his trial, is arguing the jury was not aware of several key facts.

He says jurors did not know that PC Bailey’s colleagues had raised a £100 reward for information, and that this could have influenced a witness's testimony.

The jury should also have been told that forensic tests on his clothes found no evidence to link him to the factory site, he says.

And the court was not told that an officer in the case had previously admired one of his paintings of the pottery chimneys at Turbary Common and had asked for one to keep, he says. He believes this would have added weight to his story that he went out to see Poole Power Station's chimneys on the night of the attack.

He also claims the jury was influenced when the judge drew a parallel with the case of Derek Bentley.

Bentley had been hanged in 1953 for the murder of a police officer, even though his accomplice Christopher Craig was thought to have fired the gunshot that killed him. Bentley had his conviction posthumously quashed in 1998.

Mr Cake says his own conviction has affected his life ever since.

“When I came out, I got a job as a machinist and carried on like everyone else, but it’s always been in the back of my mind that it could have gone wrong and I could have been hanged," he said.