Walter Norval

Before Arthur Thompson was given the title by the newspapers, Glasgow already had a man the press called its godfather. Walter Norval, from Possilpark, led a team of armed robbers who carried out dozens of raids on wages deliveries, banks and post offices in the 1970s, planned with a precision the police had never seen before. Their trials in 1977 were among the most dramatic in Scottish legal history, marked by an arson attack on the High Court, armed protection for judges and jurors, and the first use in Scotland of what came to be called a supergrass. Norval died in 2014, aged 85.

Norval and his friends sometimes portrayed the gang as harmless rogues who never hurt anyone. The detectives who caught them, and the people they robbed, remembered it differently, and this page sets out the record.

Possilpark beginnings

Walter Norval was born in 1928 in Possilpark, in the north of the city around the Garscube Road, and by his own account he was stealing from the age of eight, taking potatoes from shops and coal from lorries to sell on. During the Second World War he broke into shops and warehouses in the blackout to steal rationed goods. Legend has it that he modelled himself on the American bank robber John Dillinger after seeing a film about him as a teenager.

His first serious sentence came at sixteen, after holding up a newsagent with a fake gun. During his national service he was given eighteen months’ hard labour for slashing another soldier. In 1963, after part of his ear was bitten off in a fight, he stabbed his attacker several times in a Possilpark pub. Charged with attempted murder, he was defended by the famous Glasgow lawyer Joe Beltrami and the charge was reduced; he served three years for assault in Peterhead.

The XYY gang

When Norval came out of prison in 1967 he moved from protection rackets in pubs, clubs and bookmakers into armed robbery on a new scale. Over several years in the mid-1970s his team carried out a long series of raids on wages deliveries to workplaces, including hospitals, as well as on banks, building societies and post offices, in Glasgow and beyond. Typical hauls were between £15,000 and £20,000.

The raids were carefully planned. Gang members watched targets for weeks, sometimes reconnoitring on bicycles to avoid suspicion, and learned when cash was delivered. After a robbery they would abandon the first getaway car and switch to a second to throw off pursuit. The police suspected who was responsible but for a long time could not prove it, and detectives working on the case were armed for their own protection.

The robberies were not victimless. Wages clerks and counter staff, most of them ordinary low-paid workers, had shotguns pushed into their faces, and shots were fired during some raids to frighten witnesses. Graeme Pearson, the detective who led the team that caught the gang, has described the experience as devastating for many of those involved.

The supergrass

The breakthrough came in 1977, when one of Norval’s most trusted associates was arrested with others after a post office robbery in Buckie, in the north-east. He decided to give evidence for the Crown, and told detectives where to find the gang’s weapons and stolen money. It is often described as the first case in Scotland to rely on such a supergrass. Kept under protection in prison, he was attacked with boiling water but survived to give evidence.

The trials of 1977

The prosecution was so large that it was divided into four separate trials at the High Court in Glasgow. On the night before the first trial was due to start, the north court of the High Court was set on fire, apparently in the belief that the evidence was stored there. It was not, and the trial went ahead in the neighbouring south court. Judges and jurors were given armed police protection throughout.

To reduce the risk that jurors in one trial would be influenced by reports of another, the accused were referred to in court by letters of the alphabet. The press quickly named Norval’s team the XYY gang. Norval and five co-accused were convicted, and he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

Later life and death

When Norval was released, after serving around nine years, the world of crime had changed. Banks were better protected, cash machines meant less money was kept on premises, and the profits of organised crime increasingly came from drugs, which he said he had always opposed. He did not return to armed robbery. His last appearance in court was a minor one, for possessing a small amount of cannabis, which he said he used for arthritis.

Walter Norval died of pneumonia in August 2014, aged 85, after suffering from cancer. His funeral at Maryhill Crematorium was attended by members of a bikers’ club who carried his coffin, and the Clash song Bank Robber was played. It was the kind of send-off that feeds the legend. The detectives who caught him have been careful to remind people that the real story was one of fear and violence inflicted on working people going about their jobs.

His place in Glasgow’s history

Norval’s career marks a turning point between the street gangs and razor fights of the earlier twentieth century and the organised, drug-based crime that followed. The XYY trials also changed Scottish criminal justice, showing both the value and the dangers of relying on an accomplice who turns Crown witness, a theme that returned in the trial of Paul Ferris fifteen years later. The wider story of the city’s gangs is told on our razor gangs and Calton Tongs pages.

Timeline