The phrase “ice cream wars” sounds almost comic. It is not. The conflict that played out across the east end of Glasgow between 1982 and 1984 used ice cream vans as its cover – the vehicles were real enough, and the routes through housing schemes were genuinely contested – but the underlying business was drugs, stolen goods, and the money that moved through schemes where official employment had largely ceased to exist after the closure of the area’s industrial base.
The van routes ran through Garthamlock, Ruchazie, Easterhouse. These were peripheral housing schemes built in the 1950s to absorb population from the old city slums, and by the early 1980s they had unemployment rates that dwarfed the already severe city average. The vans were one of the few mobile retail points in areas with almost no shops. They were also, for criminal networks, a useful distribution mechanism and a way of extracting cash from communities that had very little of it.
The Doyle Family
On 16 April 1984, a fire was started at the door of a flat at 29 Bankend Street, Ruchazie, in the early hours of the morning. The flat was occupied by the Doyle family. Six people died: Andrew Doyle, known as Fat Boy, who was an ice cream van driver for the Marchetti family and had refused to cooperate with a rival network; his father, Andrew senior; his mother, Christina; two brothers, Mark and James; and a baby, James Doyle junior, who was 18 months old.
Andrew Doyle had been subjected to threats and harassment in the weeks before the fire. A shotgun had been fired at his van. He had reported the threats to police and had been advised, according to subsequent accounts, that there was little they could do.
The Convictions and the Collapse
Thomas Campbell and Joe Steele were convicted of the murders in 1984. Both maintained their innocence throughout. Their case became one of the longest-running miscarriage of justice campaigns in Scottish legal history. The convictions rested substantially on the testimony of William Love, an informant who later recanted. Campbell and Steele conducted a series of dramatic protests over two decades, including roof-top demonstrations and hunger strikes.
In 2004, after 20 years of imprisonment, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred both cases back to the Court of Appeal. Campbell’s murder conviction was quashed in 2004 – the court found that the Crown had withheld evidence and that the original trial had involved a miscarriage of justice. The actual perpetrators of the Doyle murders have never been conclusively established in a court of law.
What the Ice Cream Wars Were
The phrase stuck, in the way that absurdist labels for horrific events sometimes do, partly because of the apparent incongruity between soft-serve ice cream and organised violence. But the van routes were not incidental. They mapped the territory of communities that had been abandoned economically and were being contested criminally, and the police investigation – whatever its original failures – eventually produced two decades of wrongful imprisonment.
The Doyle flat on Bankend Street no longer exists. Much of Ruchazie was subsequently demolished and partially rebuilt. Six people including a baby burned to death in it in April 1984. No one has been punished for it.
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