THE ICE CREAM WARS

In the early 1980s, Glasgow is a tale of two cities. While its leaders encouraged residents and visitors to see Scotland’s biggest city as “Miles Better”, refreshed with trendy bars and restaurants, its housing schemes became a battleground in criminal warfare. Gangsters found themselves fighting over an unlikely commodity – ice cream vans and the lucrative routes to be found in each of the city’s sprawling new schemes, such as Easterhouse and Ruchazie, which housed thousands but gave them little access to shops, pubs or other facilities. With little alternative, ice cream vans thrived and evolved to sell a range of goods, making so much money that they attracted the attention of the city’s gangsters.

Competition was fierce and would escalate into violence, before becoming deadly on 16^th April 1984. In the early hours of that morning a fire engulfed a top floor flat in Bankend Street, Ruchazie, a three bed apartment housing nine members of the same family. That family included Andrew Doyle, a young ice cream van driver who had received threats and intimidation in the months leading up to the fire.

Six members of the Doyle family, including Andrew, would not survive the impact of the fire. Their ages ranged from 53 years old to just 18 months. It was, in its time, the greatest mass murder in Scottish history and led to an inevitable demand from the media and public for the police to find and bring to justice the killers.

Featuring testimony from police officers, members of the ice cream business and reporters from the time, each with their own connection to the case, The Ice Cream Wars examines how Glasgow’s tough housing estates had developed into an environment where ice cream van routes had become prized possessions, before revealing the lengths some were prepared to go to in order to secure them.

Eyewitnesses describe events around the deadly fire which engulfed the Doyle family home and the days after, with the beginnings of the police investigation and a funeral which moved many across Scotland. Finally, the episode introduces Joe Steele, arrested in the aftermath but confident that he would be found innocent of any crime.