Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes Read online

  Three

  The very one-sided partnership with my first Tutor ended unexpectedly after only a few weeks, when he managed to wangle a move onto some ‘secret squirrel squad’ in Headquarters. I never fully understood what his new post involved other than walking round HQ in a sharp suit, sitting in the canteen drinking tea with other men in suits, and pouring scorn on anyone in a uniform, but at least I was rid of him. To celebrate his departure I spontaneously bought a hamster on my way home and called it Arthur, for no particular reason.

  My joy at losing Alex was however tempered by finding out who was to replace him.

  George Upton.

  George had only lately returned to uniform duty having left the CID under a cloud. Something to do with a large number of crime reports being found in his locker. Apparently the problem wasn’t that they were in his locker, it was the fact that they were found.

  He had a reputation as an extremely direct, no-nonsense man with an outrageous sense of humour and a laugh like none I have heard before or since – impossible to describe accurately, but probably best imagined as a donkey’s bray crossed with a chainsaw cutting through concrete. I soon realised he was a very different man to Alex, and any misgivings about his ability vanished rapidly. He had a fundamental and permanent effect on my professional ‘education’ and I soon realised I was under the wing of a true professional.

  Almost a law unto himself, George was a legend within the town as the scourge of the wrongdoer and champion of the oppressed. It sounds clichéd, but if you wanted an example of the term ‘larger than life’, George was it. Without saying anything about Alex, it was rapidly evident George had little confidence in my original tutor’s ability, and took me straight back to basics.

  We were sent to a shoplifter – a 12 year old who had stolen a tube of glue. An absolute bread and butter job for a probationer, but a framework which could be applied to every crime thereafter.

  With the offender lodged in the cells we went to do some of the clerical work. George pulled up a chair next to mine in the parade room and handed me a crime report form. I was about to start filling in the details when he stopped me.

  ‘This is a crime report – you fill one in for every recordable crime you deal with.’

  ‘George I know that.’

  George ignored me and carried on.

  ‘At the top it says Officer dealing – put your name there, your rank there and your collar number there.’ He stabbed the paper with a finger at each appropriate point.

  ‘George, I know.’

  ‘Below that it says offence – put “theft”’

  ‘George, I...’

  ‘Below that it says Act and Section. Put “Section 1 Theft Act 1968”’

  ‘GEORGE, I…’

  ‘LISTEN. My job is to teach you and teach you I will. I’ll tell you what you need to know, and I will assume you know nothing up to the point where I’ve told you. OK?’

  ‘OK’.

  That’s how it was with George. No frills, no messing. He had a job to do and he got on with it. His approach with the public was the same. He gave no quarter and everything was black or white, no compromise. He was a big believer in patrolling on foot whenever possible as a way of finding out what was going on, as it gave you time to assess your surroundings and take things in. As proof of this, when we had finished with our shoplifter we went out in the car but drove only as far as the edge of one of the council estates before parking up, whereupon George began a walking tour of the area.

  To start with it looked quite pleasant – solid, brick built houses from the mid 1950s, play areas for children, neatly tended grass verges, everything of which modern-day social engineers would seem to approve.

  Unfortunately as you went deeper into the estate standards dropped. Grass in the front gardens got higher, graffiti was daubed on walls, wrecked cars were abandoned in front gardens, and smiling children were replaced by feral street urchins with runny noses and eyes that looked in at least two different directions at the same time. George was in his element. His manner was like a safari guide to a tourist, highlighting features and creatures of interest.

  We stopped by a low hedge where a family were sitting out in the sunshine. Three teenage children – two girls and a boy – lay in deck chairs as their parents watched from the kitchen.

  ‘See them – that’s the Corfield family. They’re all thieves. If you see any of them in town lock ’em up. Parents aren’t so bad now, the son’s just a nuisance, usually drunk, but the girls – can’t keep their hands off anything.’

  All this was done in the way a museum curator would talk about exhibits behind glass, but this was in front of real live people in their own front garden, and at a volume calculated for them to hear.

  The older of the girls spoke. ‘You’re a bastard Mr. Upton,’ she said with a slight smile.

  ‘Maybe,’ said George, ‘but you still call me Mister.’

  She obviously hated him, but also knew he was right in what he said about her, and was wary of upsetting him for fear of becoming even more of a ‘target’ of his than she already was.

  We walked on, into a crescent which put all the others into the shade in terms of grime and general disorder. No one seemed to take any interest in the area at all. Litter, old prams and discarded toys lay with broken glass and half-crushed beer cans. In one garden, curiously, was just the front half of a family saloon car, rusty and useless, like some ‘cutting edge’ work of art but of considerably less valuable. I wondered for a moment whether the rear half formed a similar ornament elsewhere, and more strangely was the thought of how it actually came to be there. However I had little time to ponder these questions in any depth as George continued with the tour, pointing out various houses and giving thumbnail sketches of all the occupants, their habits and offence histories. He also revealed an unusual public relations skill during this introductory walk – the wife of one of his ‘regulars’ came out to us and started to complain about the antics of one of her neighbours, demanding that George do something about it. We went into the complainer’s house, apparently to take more details. The carpet was dark and sticky underfoot, a huge pile of dirty crockery filled the sink and draining board, the obligatory fat-encrusted chip pan sat on the cooker, and a large dog of indeterminate ancestry was draped along the settee. Amid this scene of underprivileged poverty there was one incongruity – in the lounge was an enormous television, out of all proportion to the apparent income of the occupants.

  The woman was by now in full rant about how her neighbours were causing all manner of problems, and how she demanded the Police do something about it. Had George and I not been passing she would probably never have phoned up about it, but the convenience of a passing policeman (and one who she knew to be capable having been on the receiving end of his attention) meant that she wanted full value for money.

  But then George’s eye fell on the television, and he spoke.

  ‘Let’s see your TV licence first please.’

  The woman stopped as if stung. ‘What do you want to see the TV licence for?’ she asked. ‘I want you to sort out my neighbours.’

  ‘The law says you must have a TV licence – let me check you aren’t breaking the law and I’ll gladly help you.’

  The woman paused, deep in thought. She obviously knew George well.

  ‘What if I haven’t got one?’ she asked.

  ‘Then I’ll report you for summons before I get on with dealing with your own complaint. You want wrongdoers punished, I’m only too keen to help, but the law applies equally to all. So, your licence please…’

  ‘OK, forget about me neighbours then,’ she said.

  Unethical it may have been, but George’s tactic reduced the number of times people would expect the law to be enforced on their behalf while not complying with it themselves.

  He applied the same approach to dog owners, as at that time it was still obligatory to have a dog licence. Knowing what was coming, one of his ‘victim
s’ had claimed that the dog in his lounge was what he called a ‘street dog’. This meant, he explained, that the dog was fed and cared for at random by residents in the street, with no specific family having outright possession. George countered this by deeming it ‘lost’ and taking it into the Police station.

  The following day the family arrived at the Police Station to see George, complete with apology and brand new dog licence. It was very rare that George lost a battle.

  Talking of dogs, it seemed that houses with domestic problems would always own at least one enormous mongrel dog, and as such was usually the most intelligent and well-behaved occupant of the premises. The owners were often the type of people who would complain endlessly about matters over which we have little influence or control, but who would still call the Police at the drop of a hat for the simple reason that we are available 24 hours a day and free – even the 999 call is free. When (many years later) CS gas was issued to patrol officers, it didn’t take long for them to learn that dogs are not affected by CS, and there were several instances where if the resident shaggy dog followed departing officers outside it was quickly grabbed, taken round the corner and given a good squirt of CS. Of course when it came back indoors, the first thing it would do is have good shake...

  Other examples of policing George-style came thick and fast as we toured the town – a phone box with all its small panes of glass broken – ‘I found the lad who broke those,’ he said,‘just as he was breaking the last few windows. About one o’clock in the morning last January. He made the mistake of breaking them from the inside. I drove the car up to the door to stop him opening it, then left it parked there and did the rest of my shift on foot. It was freezing. By the time I came back to him he was nearly dead with cold, but he couldn’t phone for help because they’d only have sent me back to him.’

  I used to wonder at some of these tales as they seemed a little bit implausible even by his standards. One was of how he had dealt with a man who had thrown acid at an ex-girlfriend and was on the loose in the town centre. George had seen the man crossing the road and decided the best way to effect the arrest was to run him over with the car. As he bore down on his target, the man saw what was coming and having previously crossed swords with George did the most sensible thing he could and ran. George’s account went thus – ‘He was a quick runner – I had to drive onto the pavement to get him. The car went right over him but he got back up and still wanted to fight so I wellied him across the throat with my staff.’ George stopped for a second, reliving the moment. Then he added, ‘He sort of gurgled a bit and fell over.’

  I put this story to one side as being too fanciful even for George, but was forced to revise it when by chance a few weeks later we had to take prisoners from Court to a Remand Centre. George drove the van while I sat in the back with another Constable and three or four of life’s unfortunates. After a while the one nearest the front of the van pointed through the grille at George and said to the others,‘You don’t want to mess with him. He ran me over he did. And hit me on the neck. God it hurt. Mind you I had it coming, didn’t I Mr. Upton?’

  Although I had crossed the strange and invisible boundary from member of public to member of Police Force, a lot of me was still looking in from the outside, and I was a bit taken aback at the thought of George’s level of violence towards the man, and later I asked him how he managed to justify his actions. I didn’t ask out of condemnation, just intense curiosity.

  George paused, slightly incredulous that I should want to question his actions, but happy to explain, and what he said gave me an insight into the Police world which through naivety or ignorance had really escaped me prior to then.

  ‘That man was a known acid-thrower. He had scarred a woman for life, how was I to know what he was capable of when I got a grip of him? I had to make sure he hadn’t got a moment to retaliate. You’ll find if you get sympathetic or hesitate you’ll end up hurt, and most of them would leave you dying in the gutter without a second thought. Remember that.’

  George’s ability to give as good as he got (or anticipated getting) was deeply reassuring. That part of me which had not been absorbed into the Police side of the line felt reassured that men like George were on ‘our’ side.

  To be fair to George, he was capable of enormous compassion in the right circumstances, but he never gave second chances and could be brutally unforgiving.

  We went to do a death message very late one night, not far in fact from the house where the Riley family had given me such an odd reception just a few weeks earlier. By now confident that I could deal with such a task, I offered to deliver the news that the father of the family had died unexpectedly during a routine piece of minor surgery in hospital.

  ‘You’re all right,’ said George, ‘I’ll do this one. I know the family so they’ll probably be easier for me to deal with.’

  The family obviously knew George too. He knocked at the door, and after a few moments an upstairs window opened.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked a voice.

  ‘It’s the Police. Can I have a word – inside please.’

  ‘You can f-ck off,’ came the short but clear reply.

  ‘It’s important. Please can you come down. I do need to speak to you.’

  ‘You deaf? I said f-ck off. I know you, you bastard, and I’ve nothing to say to you.’

  ‘OK,’ said George. ‘And you’d better phone the hospital because your Dad’s dead.’

  He turned and walked back to the car, and we drove away just as an anguished man ran half-dressed from the front door to head in our direction, a confused and desperate look on his face. But it was too late. George had made his polite request, been rebuffed, and that was that. Give as good as you get. In the same way as when he dealt with the owner of the ‘street dog’, he had ensured that his next visit would secure a much higher degree of cooperation, and he hadn’t asked for anything more than basic good manners in the first place.

  Four

  Eventually my time ‘in company’ ended. I lost the comfort of having a chauffeur to take me from job to job, and became a ‘foot patrol’ in the town centre. My work consisted of dealing with shoplifters, vagrants, parking tickets and giving directions to tourists who flocked to the place from all over the world to lap up the cultural and historical atmosphere. Many saw an ‘English Bobby’ as one more thing to photograph and tell the folks back home about. Often you would be asked to stand with people’s wives and children as the camera clicked, and it felt good to be appreciated, to have played a small part in helping someone enjoy their holiday. Americans in particular found it strange that we were not armed, being turned out with just truncheon and handcuffs. Some asked to see these ‘appointments’ as they were called. One officer even complied with the request to ‘put the handcuffs on Hank and pretend to hit him with the truncheon while I take a photo – oh that’s fantastic’ (click, click).

  So impressed were the tourists with this spontaneous and humorous display that they wrote to the Divisional Superintendent expressing their thanks. Unfortunately they also included copies of the pictures.

  That was a bit of a ‘closed door’ session with advice given.

  One morning two colleagues found themselves standing on a corner a short way from an old flat-topped stone pillar which marked some significant location in the town’s history. It was a quiet day and they were at something of a loose end, when an American lady came up to them. She made the usual assumption that the Police would know everything, and asked what the pillar was for. Ian, the more senior of the two, explained that the pillar marked the spot where public executions used to take place, and the flat top was where the severed heads of wrongdoers were placed as a warning to others tempted towards a life of crime. Shocked but intrigued, she continued her questioning –

  ‘When did they stop doing public executions?’

  ‘The last one was about ten years ago,’ was the poker-faced reply.

  ‘Really! How barbaric!’


  ‘Actually’ Ian went on, realising it was approaching midday, ‘that’s why we’re here. We have to salute the monument every hour on the hour as an acknowledgement of its contribution to preserving law and order in the town. Stand back please.’

  The lady stood aside, and a few moments later the town hall clock struck the hour. Ian and his colleague (who followed the lead like a professional actor) snapped to attention, marched in step to the column, halted, saluted, performed an immaculate about-turn, and marched back to their starting point. The lady’s camera clicked furiously as she captured this quaint English ritual.

  ‘Thank you Madam,’ said Ian. ‘Back in an hour.’

  They walked off, their duty done.

  A few minutes later they were back in the station eating their lunch when the Superintendent walked in, red-faced.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you two were playing at in town this morning, but if I ever see you saluting public monuments again I’ll have you locked up!’

  By a majority verdict the incident was deemed a success.

  My academic background had endowed me with an ability to consider a problem from many angles, but the key to success as a foot officer was usually to make a quick decision and stick to it without considering too many variables. But not always. John Morgan, one of the stalwarts of my block, told me of an incident early in his service which showed the perils of making too hasty a decision, but more than that the benefits of a quick mind to rectify a bad situation.

  When John had been at about my level of service, he was on foot patrol in the town when a voice hailed him by first name. He looked and saw his old French teacher from school.

  ‘Good grief – John Morgan joined the Police. I can’t believe it!’