Endeavor: DS Arthur Lott’s Corrupt History

Warning: contains spoilers for Endeavor Series 9 Episode 3 ‘Exeunt’.

This was something for the Morse believers. The last time fans saw Arthur Lott was inMake an effort‘s 2012 pilot. Lott, then a Detective Sergeant, had been expelled from Oxford by Fred Thursday for having corrupt connections to local criminals. His departure left a bagman on Thursday, which opened up a job for a certain bright young constable from Carshall Newtown and the rest, as they say, is history.

In theMake an effortIn the finale, Lott (Danny Webb) returned to Oxford and emerged from the shadows to reveal himself as the mastermind behind the Blenheim Vale cover-up. Lott and a cabal of corrupt London officers were the ones who let out threats, bullets and hot shots to keep the child abuse scandal under wraps. Lott was even behind the loss of Fred Thursday’s life savings on Series 5. Here’s his story on the show.

Judges, churchmen, councilors, peers

Morse and Thursday first case together was the disappearance of 15-year-old schoolgirl Mary Tremlett. In June 1965, her investigation into her murder uncovered a child abuse ring operating out of a mansion in Wolvercote. It turned out that Mary’s killer was not one of her perpetrators, but the case nonetheless forged links between child abuse victim finder Teddy Samuels, a knighted MP, and corrupt police officers including DCS Crisp, the predecessor of ACC Bright , and DS by Fred Thursday Lott.

DS Lott and Constable Morse had developed an immediate dislike for one another. Lott derided Morse’s Oxford university background and erudite theories, nicknamed him ‘College’ and mistakenly assumed he came from privilege. Lott tried to undermine Morse at every opportunity, especially when his superior detective skills brought him closer to the truth about Teddy Samuels and the underage abuse that Lott accepted bribes to cover up.

While Lott was bribed by Samuels to destroy evidence and turn a blind eye, DCS Crisp was blackmailed into doing so. Samuels nursed underage girls at Cowley Park School, including Crisp’s teenage daughter Jenny, of whom Samuels had nude photographs and who was a classmate of Mary Tremlett.

At Samuel’s “parties” the schoolgirls were sexually abused by much older men, including the Oxford North MP. Incriminating photos of the perpetrators were held by Samuels as a lever for blackmail against powerful men, including, according to DS Lott, “judges, churchmen, councilors and colleagues” who crowed that Fred would never succeed if he competed against people of their rank.

ACC Clive Deare, Blenheim Vale and “The Square”

The powerful child molesters who attended Samuel’s “parties” were also linked through Morse’s eternal enemy – the Freemasons. When Samuels boasted to Fred and Morse about his powerful inner circle, he corrected himself by referring to Freemasonry “or should I say squarely”. Fred’s answer? To send Morse out of the room, give Samuels a bloody nose and take the incriminating photos of Crisp’s daughter to give to his boss, who later quit.

The MP for North Oxford was also shot (at gunpoint) by a shady official employed by the government to investigate scandals involving HMG, which in the public eye was still suffering from the Profumo affair of 1961 forced to resign. It was presumably the same arm of the law that put the official seal on Morse and Thursday’s Series 2 investigation into the Blenheim Vale child abuse scandal.

DS Lott, as revealed in the Series 9 finale, was part of the same police recording as ACC Clive Deare and once acted as his bagman. In Series 2, it was revealed that Deare was part of a child molester ring that brutalized vulnerable boys in Blenheim Vale and used his position in the police force to cover up the scandal. Deare tried to kill Thursday and Morse was shot by an abuse survivor at the end of series 2 and the official story was that he had gone insane.

Lionel Godfrey Chambers, Brenda Lewis and Josiah Landesman

Regardless of whether Lott was personally guilty of child sexual abuse or arranged the abuse for financial gain, he and Deare were accomplices in Blenheim Vale. After Deare was killed, Lott and his men attempted to cover their tracks by murdering child molester Josiah Landesman and his personal secretary Brenda Lewis, who had learned what was going on there, and burying their bodies on the grounds.

Lott then created a false identity with the name Lionel Godfrey Chambers – that of a dead child buried in the same churchyard as his family property. Under this identity, he bought Blenheim Vale through a front company said to be based in Bermuda to ensure the land would remain undeveloped and the bodies of Lewis and Landesman would never be discovered.

Charlie Thursday, Len Drury, The Ostrich Fanciers’ Club & Mickey Flood

After being expelled from Oxford by Fred, Lott moved to London to join the Vice Squad, where he presumably joined forces with another corrupt officer we met in Series 8 Episode 2, “Scherzo”. Commander Len Drury was Vice boss and ran an illegal blue film network called The Ostrich Fanciers’ Club, which stretched as far as Oxford. When Fred got wind of this, he confronted Drury and both parties made threats.

Drury and Lott were obviously in cahoots, and it was their men who murdered Andrew Lewis (in a very nice Easter egg, a relative ofTheLewis) with a “hotshot” and threw his body onto the college lawn.

It was also Lott and his twisted copper cabal who were behind the loss of Fred Thursday’s life savings. In Series 5, Fred agreed to help his brother charlie with a hefty loan that was never repaid. Charlie, whose wife and daughter were being threatened by Lott and Co., had been forced to get the loan from Fred, leaving him financially vulnerable and therefore controllable. When Fred ignored repeated threats to stop the business in Blenheim Vale, Lott deigned to return the money as a bribe, but clearly had no intention of actually returning it, as seen in his attack on Endeavor in Blenheim Vale .

Mickey Flood – the petty London crook who was murdered in Oxford before he could sell information to Fred – wanted to tell Fred that DI Arthur Lott was behind all of this, but Lott’s heavyweights got to Flood first.

Peter Williams, Tomohawk and The Death Head Motorcycle Gang

Fred was right about Lott being killed by the Death Head Motorcycle Gang because he was not only responsible for the murder of one of their members but also seriously wronged one of their own. Lott joined Drugs from Vice where he ran operations across London. When the Deathhead gang attempted to encroach on his territory in Camden, Lott ordered the death of one of her brothers.

In revenge, the gang attacked and killed Lott, allowing Morse to escape with Fred’s life savings. The gang’s revenge was even more fitting, as it turns out Tomohawk – the member who killed Fred to defend his son Sam – had started out as Peter Williams, a young resident and abuse survivor in Blenheim Vale. When Williams set fire to one of his perpetrators’ cars, he disappeared and his friends assumed he had been killed. Really, he’d been sold to a couple in Lincoln (‘who wanted a child of their own,’ Lott said, and probably wouldn’t treat them like a beloved son) and renamed Raymond Kennett. The adult Raymond became a violent criminal and drug dealer who joined the Death Head Gang, but his own death brought him back to Oxford.

Endeavor Series 9 is available to stream on ITVX in the UK. It will air on PBS Masterpiece in the US at a later date.

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