Bill Furner, known as HN3095 in the Undercover Policing Inquiry, served as a Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) officer from 1968 to 1970. Prior to joining the Metropolitan Police in 1964, he was part of the British colonial police force. Furner primarily handled administrative tasks at the SDS office in Scotland Yard, including paperwork, expenses for undercover officers and dealing with incoming information from MI5. He occasionally attended activist meetings. Furner was the officer who recalled the SDS boss HN325 Conrad Dixon talking to home secretary Jim Callaghan in 1968.
Furner left both the SDS and the Metropolitan Police in 1970 and worked at the Ministry of Defence afterwards, where he was later joined by fellow former SDS officer HN3093 Roy Creamer.
Despite being one of the few living members of the original 1968 SDS intake, Furner was not called as witness to the Inquiry hearings. He did submit two written statements and provided some photographs of himself and SDS colleagues that were not disclosed by the Inquiry. Unless otherwise stated, the information in this profile is taken from Furner’s second witness statement, submitted in writing to the Inquiry on 18 September 2020.
HN3095 William ‘Bill’ Arthur Furner was born in 1931. He served in a British colonial police force before joining the Metropolitan Police in 1964, aged 33.
Having attended police-training school, he was posted as a uniformed constable to Leman Street Police Station in Hackney, from 1965 to August 1966 and then in Chingford, Essex, until 1967. He joined Special Branch in January 1968 and spent his first six months in E Squad before joining the SDS.
Detective constable Bill Furner was part of the first team when the squad was founded on 31 July 1968. Furner said he was posted into the squad rather than volunteering for it.
Furner was not an undercover officer and was based at the SDS office at Scotland Yard. He wrote that he mainly dealt with paperwork, though occasionally he did attend activist meetings, see below.
His role was mainly to deal with the minutiae of SDS administration. For instance, he made sure that the undercover officers paid for their cover accommodation on time and that their expenses were correctly calculated.
Furner’s managers were HN325 Conrad Dixon , HN1251 Phil Saunders and HN3990 Riby Wilson. He worked most closely with Phil Saunders and detective sergeant HN3095 Roy Creamer as both of them were mainly office-based.
Creamer mentioned that ‘Furner… did the administrative work, passing on of messages… he was a very competent man… but he was very modest’. He did all the ‘mundane jobs that needed to be done’. One such job was checking the registration of activists' cars.
Furner is one of the few police witnesses to give details on how information from MI5 came into the SDS. He said the unit had a very close liaison with the Security Service. It was a major part of his job to go through and extract any relevant names and details relevant to the SDS operations.
Most other police witnesses have emphasised the assistance that the SDS, and Special Branch in general, gave to the Security Services rather than vice versa. Conversely, Furner said that he did not receive any requests from MI5 asking for information.
Police telegrams
Although already falling out of use by the general public by the late 1960s, the Metropolitan Police still used telegrams to communicate internally in this period. It was part of Furner’s work to receive and forward on these messages within Special Branch.
Telegrams of note in the disclosure include two sent in the immediate lead-up to the 27 October 1968 anti-Vietnam war demonstration. The first relayed a message from Sussex Police that a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) meeting had been held at Sussex University and decided that no violence would be used on the march.
The second suggested a plan was afoot by students from the London School of Economics to sabotage railways in and near London. ‘No specific roads or railways were mentioned.' And no such action ever materialised. Interestingly, this telegram was sent by a sergeant whose name is redacted, identifying as Collator ‘UD’ – which most likely referred to ‘university demonstrations’.
In reference to a proposed hunger strike by two members of the Irish Republican Party at the prime minister’s residence, a ‘reliable delicate source’ had picked up that ‘there may be trouble outside No. 10 this evening’. The form of trouble was not specified, but the expression used was 'make it hot in Downing street [sic]'. The handwritten notes on the telegram show that this warning was taken very seriously.
Furner said he was not involved in writing up SDS intelligence reports, although he did sign a few, both on meetings he attended himself and on behalf of undercover officers, for instance for HN326 ‘Doug Edwards’.
When Furner attended meetings, he did not use a cover name and would ‘just observe and take notes’. One report made jointly with HN321 described a Lambeth VSC meeting on 6 February 1969 descending into a ‘verbal brawl’.
Another document relating to Lambeth VSC, again with HN321, is a ‘comprehensive report’ ordered by chief superintendent HN2857 Arthur Cunningham and gives an overview of the VSC branch, in terms of political dynamics and affiliations.
Photographs and the SDS Christmas party
The Inquiry asked Furner to identify who was on the photos of what appears to be the first SDS Christmas party, held in late 1968 for all officers who were part of the squad at that time. These pictures were provided to the Inquiry by HN334 'Margaret White'.
Furner had a collection of his own of 15 photos; partly the same or similar to the ones released, almost all taken at the same occasion at the office in Scotland Yard. But for one, the extra photos Furner supplied have not been disclosed.
He told the Inquiry he thought the reason the photos were taken was because it was a rare occasion to have all officers together in one place. A faint date stamp reveals they were printed in November 1968, and Furner remembered that they had a Christmas do at the safe house in West London, so this was probably just before they went there. He could not remember who took the pictures, but said it might have been the Special Branch photographer revealing the SDS had a close working relationship with him:
[He] was the person that we would ask to go to demonstrations and take photographs of the demonstration or certain individuals that were present.
Knowledge of the SDS by senior police officers and home secretary
Bill Furner remembered an occasion when the assistant chief commissioner (crime), HN1876 Peter Brodie visited the SDS just before the VSC demonstration on 27 October 1968. Furner was asked to collect him from Waterloo rail station in south London and drive him to the SDS safe house to avoid them travelling there directly from Scotland Yard.
He was also the one to recall Conrad Dixon’s meeting with the home secretary, showing that knowledge of the SDS’s activities was present at the highest levels:
Conrad Dixon did have an interview with Jim Callaghan, the then Home Secretary, at least once to brief him. I heard about it after it happened on one occasion, but I think it happened more often than that.
Furner left the SDS on 29 September 1970 as he had accepted a job at the Ministry of Defence. Roy Creamer said that after he himself left the Metropolitan Police in 1980, Furner became his boss at the Ministry of Defence.
Neither Furner nor Creamer specified what their jobs were, but given their background it is likely they joined the military police.
Furner did not make an application for a restriction of his real name, the Inquiry revealed on 28 February 2023. He submitted his first witness statement in October 2019 and his second in September 2020.
All pre-hearing documents can be found at the foot of the Documents tab.
Despite Furner being one of the few of the surviving early SDS officers, the Inquiry did not call him as a witness to the hearings. No specific reason was given for this. Furner's professed lack of awareness of the more controversial aspects of SDS operations was therefore not cross-examined. For instance, he denied knowledge of any SDS undercovers being caught up in the legal system.