The Q.P.M. awarded to Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Reece, Sussex Police C.I.D., who led the enquiry that led to the conviction of the Brighton Bomber after the bombing of the Grand Hotel during the 1984 Conservative Party conference

Queen’s Police Medal, E.II.R., 2nd issue, for Distinguished Service (John Frederick Reece) in its fitted Royal Mint case of issue and named outer card box, extremely fine £500-£600

Q.P.M. London Gazette 14 June 1986: ‘John Frederick Reece, Chief Superintendent, Sussex Police.’

The following obituary was published by The Daily Telegraph:

‘Jack Reece, who has died aged 86, was the detective chief superintendent of Sussex Police CID who led the inquiry that led to the conviction of Patrick Magee, the man who bombed the Grand Hotel, Brighton, during the 1984 Conservative Party conference.

When the bomb went off in the early hours of October 12, Reece was on the brink of retirement and looking forward to enjoying his passion for sea angling. From the start, it seemed that the security services were unlikely to be much help. While they had discovered a stash of IRA bomb timers in woodland near Northampton nine months earlier, they had no idea where or when they would be used and in October the official risk assessment was low.

The morning after the blast, which left five people dead and 31 injured, Reece set his men to work sifting through every ounce of rubble until part of the timing device was eventually found lodged in a lavatory bowl in what had been Room 629, where, three weeks previously, Patrick Magee had fixed the device behind the bath panel.

Reece’s next task was to investigate the 800 people who had stayed in the hotel in the month before the bombing. All checked out except one: a “Roy Walsh”, who had given a false London address. On his registration card, however, he had left a partial handprint, which was matched, incredibly, not to records taken during Magee’s internment in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, but to his time as a teenage thief in Norfolk. He was traced to an IRA safe house in Glasgow, where he had been planning a whole series of bombings intended to create a security and political crisis which IRA strategists believed would lead, within two years, to the British withdrawal from Ulster.

The investigation led to Reece’s name being put on an IRA death list, while the subsequent court case, during which Magee’s defence team accused Reece of planting the telltale handprint, required all his resources of patience and concentration.

In September 1985 Magee was found guilty of planting the Brighton hotel bomb, detonating it, and of five counts of murder. He received eight life sentences with a recommendation by the judge that he serve at least 35 years – later extended by the Home Secretary Michael Howard to “whole life”.

When Magee was released from prison in 1999, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, Reece was horrified; and in 2004 when Magee returned to Brighton for a “reconciliation” meeting, he was outraged. “All we seem to worry about in this country is the offender and not the victims of crime and this is an appalling example of that,” Reece observed.

John Frederick Reece was born at Thrybergh, south Yorkshire on April 20 1929. When he was eight his father, a miner, was killed in a colliery accident and the family subsequently moved to Hastings, East Sussex.

After two years’ National Service as a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, Reece joined Hastings Borough Police Force (later part of Sussex Police), in 1951.

He worked his way through the ranks, taking part in Operation Countryman, the investigation into police corruption in London, in the late 1970s, eventually becoming chief superintendent in charge of Sussex CID.

After his retirement in 1986, Reece became Chairman of the National Federation of Sea Anglers and President of East Hastings Sea Angling Association. In 1990 he entered the European record books after catching a six-gilled shark off the Azores, recorded by Fishing Digest as weighing 1,069lb 3oz. He was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal in 1986.’

Jack Reece died on 2 November 2015.

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