How a man was convicted of biting a policeman with someone else's teeth

"The only man in British legal history to be convicted of biting a policeman with someone else's teeth."

That is not an inscription you would imagine be on a gravestone, but it is, in a Shropshire cemetery.

Is it true? Yes, says Alistair Mitchell's widow, Alexandra Preston: "He was convicted of biting a policeman, but he didn't actually bite the policeman."

Her husband spent time in two prisons before his conviction was quashed and she said the arrest "altered the course of our lives".

She told the BBC's Secret Shropshire series the four years he spent fighting a charge which he knew was false, showed him it could "be incredibly helpful having good legal advice" and inspired him to become a barrister.

The story of this most unusual of epitaphs, in Bridgnorth, goes back to 1990 and one of the most violent UK protests of the late 20th Century - the poll tax riot.

More than 500 people were arrested during trouble in London, which broke out during a protest against the unpopular Community Charge.

Mitchell found himself trapped in Whitehall during the disturbances and was arrested in Oxford Street, as he told the BBC in 2005, before his death.

He saw others being arrested and then a young man, surrounded by policemen and one of them "had their thumbs under his chin".

"I shouted out something like, 'Don't do that you could kill him'. Having shouted this I noticed a couple of the officers peel off from the group and make towards me," he added.

"One of them said - book this one in for obstruction and assault on me."

He was convicted for assault with one of the charges involving a claim he had bitten a police officer.

"I had no recollection whatsoever the next morning of my teeth having been anywhere near a policeman's hand, letting alone having bitten a policeman," he told the BBC.

His defence team disputed that and were able to compare the bite mark with a cast of Mitchell's teeth, to prove someone else's were responsible.

But he was still convicted and spent weeks in prison, the business he was running while he was behind bars was affected and the fight to clear his name took years.

Eventually, Mitchell's conviction was overturned by judicial review, although he said "it was a long time to wait for justice" and the unusual case was picked up by newspapers including Private Eye, which poked fun at the case.

Its journalist, Paul Foot, made the quip which ended up around Mitchell's gravestone.

Preston said her husband's experience changed him: "After four years of going through courts... he decided he wanted to do that too."

He trained to be a barrister and often represented alleged victims of injustice.

A second inscription on his gravestone is a poem, written by Mitchell's father, the poet Adrian Mitchell: "My brain's socialist, my heart anarchist, my eyes pacifist, my blood revolutionary."

"Alistair had similar sympathies to his father and sadly, his blood was revolutionary - and that is the illness that killed him," Preston said.

Mitchell was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2012 and died in 2019, aged 61.

But even in hospital, in the final weeks of his life, he was still trying to make people laugh.

Preston said: "He once bought the entire nursing team thirty tickets to see Stewart Lee at Theatre Severn.

"He thought they needed a laugh. They'd been putting up with him all week."

Asked to describe her husband, she said: "Warm, witty, clever, generous, kind, driven… he made me laugh every day.

"Even though he's not physically here, we still take our lead from him."

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