Early Life
Grantham was born in Camberwell, London, the son of Adelaide (née Flinders) and Walter William Grantham (1915–1998), and enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers regiment of the British Army in 1962, at the age of 15. On 3 December 1966 he attempted to rob a German taxi driver, Felix Reese. A struggle between Grantham and the driver followed, and Reese died from a gunshot wound to the head. In his statement to the police following his arrest, he claimed that he did not know the gun was loaded and it had gone off during a struggle with the taxi driver. He was subsequently convicted of murder, a surprise verdict after being advised by his lawyer that a manslaughter verdict would probably be returned.
Grantham was sentenced to life imprisonment at his trial in 1967. Although he had committed the killing in Osnabrück, Germany, he served the entirety of his imprisonment in various British prisons. This was because soldiers and officers convicted of any criminal offence that warrants a sentence of over two years are automatically transferred to HM Prison Service, since they are also automatically dishonourably discharged. Grantham was released in 1977, having served 10 years. While he was in Leyhill Prison, he acted in several plays for inmates and members of the public, and edited the prison newspaper. He was encouraged to get more involved in acting professionally by disgraced politician T. Dan Smith, who had also been an inmate at Leyhill. He also met actress Louise Jameson during her visit to Leyhill in the mid 1970s; she had also encouraged him to take up acting.
Read more about this topic: Leslie Grantham
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)