Household Cavalry corporal, 45, 'slapped the bottom of teenage female recruit on night out' leaving his 28 year Army career in tatters
The 28-year Army career of a Household Cavalry member came to a 'sadly discreditable' end after he slapped the bottom of a teenage recruit on a drink-fuelled night out, a court martial heard.
Experienced Corporal of Horse Steven Henderson's behaviour in twice smacking the 19-year-old female twice after joining in with young trainees' 'partying' was 'outrageous', a judge said.
'An experienced, senior NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) can't expect to lay hands on young female recruits in this way and have people be anything other than outraged,' Assistant Judge Advocate General John Atwill said.
It was 'a sadly discreditable end to your creditable career', he added.
Cpl Henderson - who is leaving the Army at the end of the month - pleaded guilty to one charge of disgraceful conduct of an indecent kind at Bulford Military Court, Wiltshire.
The 45-year-old has been fined £1,800 and must pay a £100 service compensation order to the victim.
The Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment is known for its iconic tunics and plumed helmets, and for being at the heart of the King's coronation, royal weddings and state occasions.
The father-of-two, who was 44 at the time, drank 'a considerable amount of alcohol' on the night out with trainees who were 'much younger' than him, the court martial was told.
Prosecutor Captain Ciaran Rafferty told the court that Cpl Henderson went on a night out in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.
Trainees and instructors were there from the Defence Animal Training Regiment, which he was a part of at the time.
The court heard that the night out started in a Wetherspoons, before moving to a pub called The Anne of Cleves and finally ending up at a karaoke bar named The Generous Briton.
The prosecutor said that at one of the pubs, Cpl Henderson slapped the bottom of one of the 19-year-old trainee.
Capt. Rafferty said of the second incident, which happened 'a few hours' later as she waited for a taxi: 'From the complainant's perspective, seemingly without any context, there wasn't any flirtatious behaviour or any indication she consented to these touches in any way', he added.
She felt 'some confusion' and 'shock' at the incidents, the court martial heard.
Capt. Rafferty said that Cpl Henderson had a 'belief someone had slapped his bottom before he slapped her bottom and it was his belief this was the complainant'.
He said: 'His belief was the complainant slapped his bottom - that's not a position of fact.
'The crown accepts that was his belief at the time of the slaps.'
For the defence, Chris Harper said that the 'sexual element' of the case is 'tangential' and that there was 'no sexual motivation or element' to Cpl Henderson's actions, which were simply 'horseplay gone too far'.
He added that Cpl Henderson hoped after he apologised to the victim at work that 'that would be the end of it'.
Assistant Judge Advocate General John Atwill said that Cpl Henderson has been a corporal for more than 10 years.
He had previous convictions for battery in 2011 and a breach of standing orders in 2009.
Sentencing the soldier, the judge said he 'consumed a considerable amount of alcohol' and the trainees were 'much younger than (him), but (he) decided to get involved in their partying'.
Judge Atwill told Cpl Henderson it was 'a sadly discreditable end to your creditable career'.
According to the British Army website, The Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment is the ceremonial face of the Household Cavalry.
In May, The Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment and the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery led a military procession featuring 1,300 members of the Armed Forces through Whitehall to Buckingham Palace as part of the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
Last weekend the Royal carriage procession at Trooping The Colour was accompanied by the Sovereign's Escort of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment and the Band of the Household Cavalry, led by two shire drum horses bearing solid silver kettle drums.
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If you ever thought, as I did growing up there, that Northern Ireland's fame was limited to 30 years of bombs and bullets, or building a ship that sank on its maiden voyage — you'd better think again. Twenty-one years ago, we were also host to the biggest robbery in British or Irish history at the time — in fact, the sixth biggest robbery in the world. Pretty impressive, eh? In one sense, it was impressive. On December 20, 2004, £26.5 million in cash was stolen from the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast's city centre — in clear view of the public as Christmas shoppers strolled round the continental market just feet away. Glenn Patterson, an admired Belfast-based novelist, has written a book showing how the robbers did it, and how they got away with it. It was not just a monetary robbery, but a symbolic one. The Northern Bank building is a landmark in Belfast's post-industrial city centre, a great, sturdy 1970s edifice in concrete. It's a building you can imagine Bill Bixby walking out of, coat over shoulder, in the credits for The Incredible Hulk. But the robbery was not the first of its kind that year. Already in 2004 there had been other 'tiger kidnappings', where robbers would take family members hostage and force bank employees to help them to carry out the heist. In response, the Northern Bank had changed its operations so that two key holders were needed simultaneously to access its cash vaults. The criminals' solution? To abduct two employees' family members at once. Kevin McMullan, the bank's assistant manager, and Chris Ward, a junior employee, both had a knock on the door the night before the robbery. Armed men took over their homes and held their families hostage while McMullan and Ward were taken away. The men were held overnight, then told to go to work the next day and act normally. At clocking-off time they were to use their access to remove cash from the vault, disguised in containers to look like rubbish, and load it into a waiting white van. And so they did: great blocks and boxes of new and used notes, kilos upon kilos of it. The cover of Patterson's book shows a CCTV image of Ward leaving the bank's side entrance with a holdall over one shoulder. The holdall contains £1.2 million. Little wonder he's leaning to one side to counter the weight. So who did it? There's no doubt: the only criminal outfit in Northern Ireland with the organisational capability to plan and execute the robbery so methodically was the IRA. (The single sign of amateurishness was that two men in the van wore Russ Abbot-style ginger 'Jimmy' wigs beneath their baseball caps. This odd sight alerted passersby and almost foiled the robbery.) Opinions are divided on why the IRA carried out the robbery. For a pension fund? Investment abroad? • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next The whole story is presented beautifully by Patterson, who adopts the right tone for each phase of the tale. The abduction scenes have the horrible tension of a thriller, and reminded me of Brian Moore's great Troubles novel Lies of Silence. Elsewhere, Patterson adopts a tone of amused incredulity at the shocking details of the robbery and its aftermath. 'You have to take your hat off to this country. It has a way of exceeding your worst, most lavish expectations.' But the robbery also presented a political problem for the British and Irish governments. In 2004, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly had collapsed, and there were 'talks about talks' to get it up and running again. Indeed, when MI5 detected high levels of phone activity between senior IRA men the night before the robbery, they optimistically — naively — thought it meant an announcement was imminent on the decommissioning of IRA weapons, to break the political deadlock. When it was announced who the likely culprits were, Sinn Fein — the IRA's political wing — complained of a smear on republicans. But as Patterson points out, in one of the few passages where he sounds truly angry, this was a common tactic for Sinn Fein. He reminds us about the brutal murder of Robert McCartney after an argument in a Belfast bar in January 2005, when nobody in the pub — including the future Stormont minister Deirdre Hargey of Sinn Fein — would speak to the police about what happened. Instead, Hargey claimed that reports of IRA involvement in the murder were 'part of the onslaught by the media and governments and political parties to criminalise Sinn Fein and the republican movement'. As Patterson coolly observes: 'There is chutzpah, and there is chutzpah.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Hardly any of the money has been recovered, and only one person was prosecuted for the robbery. That person was … one of the victims, Chris Ward, who was prosecuted on circumstantial evidence that the robbery had been an inside job — the IRA men were so well prepared that someone in the bank must have helped them. The case was abandoned partway through. Patterson attended every day of the trial. The case was clearly not an outstanding example of prosecutorial craft. Phil Flynn, who was vice president of Sinn Fein, took the view that 'there was nobody killed. At the end of the day, it was only money.' But it wasn't only money. The robbery revealed a lot about what was important in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein was welcomed back into government. And in a world where every conspiracy theorist sees two-tier justice in any outcome they don't like, the aftermath of the robbery provided a real example. The senior IRA man Bobby Storey — believed to be the brains behind the robbery, and 'a great human being' in the words of Gerry Adams — died in June 2020 and his funeral attracted more than 1,500 people, in contravention of Covid regulations. Other people could have no more than 30 at theirs. None of the Sinn Fein politicians who attended were prosecuted, while at a Black Lives Matter protest in Belfast a few weeks earlier, 70 people were fined. Patterson had once planned to write a screenplay of the robbery. I wish he had. It has everything: tension, dark comedy, human interest, big issues and more. But this book will do very nicely in its place. And if the Northern Bank heist was indeed a symbolic robbery, then here is the other symbol. Why did they do it? Because they knew they could get away with it. As Patterson points out: 'Something [else] disappeared in that white van in December 2004 that has never been recovered.' The Northern Bank Job: The Heist and How They Got Away With It by Glenn Patterson (Head of Zeus £16.99 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
