The Last Linslade Bobby Chapter Nine. Part One.

Please read from chapter one first....

Chapter
Nine.

Policing a Small Town.

I always thought that Leighton Buzzard and Linslade had
far too few police officers for its population. (Leighton station
then also covered Linslade, Old Linslade, Tilsworth, Billington,
Tebworth, Hockliffe, Heath and Reach, Stanbridge, Eaton Bray,
Eggington, Battlesdon, Potsgrove and the A5, then about 55,000
people.) I can only assume that the powers to be think we are a
reasonably ordered, law abiding community. I lived in the town for
five years still serving at RAF Halton before I joined the 'Force (or
is it 'Service now?) I visited the town often in my childhood as
well, as Camden Motors supplied most of my father's (very dodgy) cars
and I purchased the odd (ancient) motorcycle from their Lake Street
show rooms. During all that time up until 1988 I though Leighton was
a nice little market town, not unlike Olney or Newport Pagnell. But
once you get underneath the very thin veneer of our society and see
the underworld as a copper, your eyes are opened wide for you. All
towns are the same, if you do not mix with the nasty set, you would
never get to know them. Police spend 95% of their time dealing with
that 2% of the public.

If PC Ray Wootton (the local intelligence officer, LIO)
was not available, it often came to me to brief the town's newspaper
reporters of the weeks events. People could elect on the crime report
not to have their crime reported to the news, but there was a clause
that if the investigating officer thought publicity might assist
detection, they could be over ruled. The end of any statements given
would have, “and I will abide by any decision of the Chief
Constable in the investigation of this report”, which means you
hand over to the police. Mick King was the Observer's man who called
to take notes and he was born and bred in Leighton and knew everyone.
He also had an eye for a good story and had a way of putting it over.
He did not use shock techniques as the national daily the 'Sun' did.

At the junction of West Street and North Street is the
Black Horse pub, back in the times of these tales it was a very
popular pub for the younger generation and at closing time all these
youths would pile out and literally block the round-a-bout there. We
would be running a van normally at the weekends to deal with such
things and as alcohol was involved the odd fight would break out, not
just at North Street, but in the Market Square and even Church
Square.

One
Saturday summer's evening at closing time, there was only me out in
the van with WPC Dianne Steward who was then a probationer. The only
panda car out was being driven by PC Willy MacIntosh. There was only
we three to cover the town and villages, no specials had turned up
that particular day. (I
was told recently that on a day in November 2012 there was only one
patrol officer out in a panda for the whole area, so nothing changes
or improves it seems. He was backed up by three PCSO's on foot.) It
was a warm evening and had been very quiet up until about 22.30
hours. Then a phone call to Kempston HQ had my van and PC MacIntosh
all converging on the Black Horse. A fight had broken out and there
was well over a hundred youths out in the road all milling about and
crowding around the two combatants. Traffic had been brought to a
halt when we arrived and a few more lads had started to throw
punches. We were hopelessly outnumbered but waded in to try to stop
the fight (we did not have CS gas then, just our fists and little
wooden truncheons). By now the duty Inspector was on route to us from
Dunstable, but his troops were already busy at a fight outside on of
their pubs so there was no back-up. Willy and I grabbed hold of the
ringleader in the fight, a lad well known to us both and known to
carry a knife. I held one arm and Willy the other and we dragged him
towards the panda car, intending to handcuff him as soon as possible.
But what we had missed seeing was a lamp post. We both ran either
side of it with the lad between us and a loud 'dong' followed. Our
prisoner fell to the ground almost unconscious, we had unwittingly
knocked him out on the post! There was a young woman and a man who
were assisting us to try to get order as the crowd jeered us and
threats were shouted. I was looking for the other lad who was in the
fight, another well known yob. These two 'assistants' turned out to
be off-duty police officers from the Met (London police) and they
kept yelling, “Where are the carriers?”, which meant nothing to
us. The Inspector arrived and ran over, only to be met with a full
fist right in the face from our other fighter. I spotted him and as
he ran off up towards the Market Square I ran after him. Remember I
was by now in my mid forties and he in his late teenage. He ran up
Hockliffe Street and was slowing down. Eventually he stopped by the
vets doubling up and gripping his waist and sat down on the pavement.
He was obviously in agony. He had consumed about eight pints of beer
and a kebab and had a terrible stitch. I sat down beside him and
grinned. He burst into tears and said, why did it have to be me who
caught him, he would never live this down. I knew his parents and
brother and in fact him, alas he is also now currently in prison for
manslaughter. Willy's panda arrived and took both prisoners to the
station. Today H&S would have a fit over one constable
transporting two violent prisoners 'cuffed in the back of a panda
car. I went back to the Black Horse to find it all quiet, only Dianne
and the two Met coppers still there. The Inspector had left to make
his statement over Assault on a Police Officer. I asked the male Met
copper what they were shouting about. They explained they were trying
to get us to call up the 'carriers'. In London they have teams of
officers held in vans called 'carriers' specifically to back up
fights and transport any prisoners. Dianne and I laughed at this
telling them we were it, we were the only three police officers for
miles and miles; there were no 'carriers'. It was then it dawned on
them just how dangerous a quiet market town out in the sticks can be.
We then told them that one of we three was now dealing with the
prisoners, so we were now only two officers for 55,000 residents!
That was 22,520 each.

The lad whom we accidentally bounced off a lamp post
never made any complaint. (It is today [2012] no longer possible to
take any prisoners to Leighton Buzzard police station. They all have
to go to Luton....) Dianne eventually married Willy.

Dianne was attached to me for another event. This time
far more pleasant. St Barnabas Church was having problems with
youths from the park during services. So we two attended church for a
few services in uniform to catch these yobs. Being a local beat
officer I had told lots of the local kids we were to catch these
yobs. This meant the word got about before we arrived and they stayed
away, as well as the uniforms acting as a deterrent. Dianne knew half
the congregation, she had been born and bred and schooled in
Linslade.

As already mentioned earlier, I was a tutor constable,
one used to train new officers on the job. Normally this would be
done by a patrol officer in a panda car as they cover a much wider
area of work than a foot beat officer and deal with the urgent cases.
But often after the initial ten or twenty weeks with a patrol
officer, the probationer goes out with a LBO, a traffic officer, a
SOCO (scenes of crime officer), a families officer and a schools
liaison officer to get a full picture. After their two years as a
probationer they can get attachments to CID and the drugs squad (and
they really are an odd scruffy bunch!) To become a tutor constable
one goes away on a weeks course to Kempston HQ. I had done this long
before I was a LBO and now usually assisted in training special
constables. For one day we went off to a Police Training College, I
went to one right on the coastline of East Anglia, an ex-Royal Navy
training school with a big wooden ships mast. I remember being
briefed to some time during the day to have a heart attack. The
instructors, always on the look out for a training aid, had spotted I
was getting on in years and an ideal heart attack case. Mid afternoon
I was standing on some steps up into their dining rooms when I
thought it a good time. I had about a dozen very young trainees
around me and we had been telling them tales of Real Jobs when my
face contorted up. I doubled up and fell to the ground, rolling down
the steps. As I was fit I could hold my breath for quite some time.
This I did, at the same time making my face go red. They reacted
well, but assumed it was a training exercise, until they noticed I
was not breathing. I managed to get a few hidden breaths in between
their efforts to resuscitate me, unseen. I remained folded up 'in
pain' so they could not thump my chest as that CAN induce a heart
attack. By now they and the instructor were panicking and an
ambulance was called. I was getting dizzy with not breathing and a
good three minutes had passed, so I sat up and congratulated them
all. They nearly fainted and hurriedly cancelled the ambulance (which
arrived anyway, just as we police do to any 999 call, just in case.)
I insisted I had held my breath for three minutes and they believed
me, until I admitted I had silently gasped a few times unseen by
then. I bet they never forgot that lesson. Even the instructor
admitted he thought it was for real.

As Linslade is not large, one soon got to know the
relevant people on a beat area. I aimed to try to find all the
Homewatch groups, not an easy thing as Beds Police were a bit
piece-meal about this civilian lead system (to put it mildly). Quite
a few Homewatch coordinators just gave up doing their bit as no one
ever told them anything. I did try to get a few new ones up and
running and one successful one was in Lochy Drive. I even got the
Crime Prevention Officer (PC Dave Rawlings) to give them a talk. This
was an area of those badly fitted patio doors where the upper block
were omitted. Dave assumed they had been left out on purpose so a
later visit for a burglary would be made easy. The major problem with
both the estates of Knaves Hill and Bideford Green was, they were big
dormitories. Almost all the population cleared off to work at 8am,
returning at 6pm. You could wander about the roads and see no one at
all, all day. As Bideford Green had been designed with back
passageways so in theory no one need walk on a road to the shops, the
developers had unwittingly given any burglars an easy access and
exit. When burglaries got too bad I recruited the RBO from Heath and
Reach, PC Ian Dedman. We wandered about these rear alleyways in
civvies all day looking for thieves. Police HQ got quite a few phone
calls about 'two strange men walking about the area', which of course
was Ian and I. But no one ever saw the actual burglars. The burglars
were eventually caught, but by forensic evidence, not we local
bobbies. They get careless if too successful.

Whilst a patrol officer will arrive in a panda car to
record your burglary, CID actually deal and investigate them. But as
CID often get so overloaded they cannot cope, the local RBO gets the
job of doing the door-to-door enquiries. As the majority of house
burglaries (called 'burglary dwelling' by the police) are committed
between 11am and 1pm, not many are seen. It can become very boring
going from door to door with no results and lots of door are never
opened. And to put it mildly, some peoples idea of security leaves a
great deal to be desired. One house I called at in Grassmere Way had
its front door open. I knocked, called out, yelled louder, went in,
went into every down stairs room, shouted upstairs, only to find the
shocked householder in the rear garden weeding. What a gift to a
opportunistic ferral youth!

The reader cannot fail to notice that much of my work
was totally on my own, unsupervised. Such is the job of any constable
out on the streets in this town. More often than not there was no
sergeant at the station, we would be 'covered' by the Dunstable
patrol sergeant. Well, oddly enough this person often had their hands
full with Dunstable and Houghton Regis, so we very rarely saw them.
Because I was a mature officer I was left alone and I certainly
produced plenty of work to earn my salary. When a sergeant did
occasionally appear, they would be inundated with overtime sheets
that required signing and files that needed signing off for court.
That meant they would be stuck in an officer for hours, reading
through files, checking that the 'points to prove' were proved. CPS
had not yet been invented, files went via the prosecution department
in Luton, run by Insp Allison Macho (who would soon be the town's
Inspector).

As mentioned some members of the public confuse civil
and criminal law. I was contacted by the wives of two men who were at
logger heads with each other, being neighbours. They lived in a nice
semi-detached house in Grange Close and both had had ground-floor
extensions built out into their back gardens to enlarge their
dining-cum-living rooms. A pitched roof had been put onto these
extensions lengthwise and there was the one gutter running the full
length. This gutter had a central discharge pipe. Each man thought
the rain water from this pitched roof theirs so both had a big
plastic 'Texas' water barrel on their respective side of the fence.
The angled discharge pipe was always being moved to either one, or
the other barrel. Both men were keen gardeners and this water was
very useful during a hot dry summer for their respective greenhouses.
The disagreement over whose water it was and the movement of the
pipe had now gone up the scale a little, they were threatening each
other with a thick lip. The wives, who both got on with each other,
asked me to come and read the riot act to the two men. So I did, but
as the whole thing was a civil argument about property ownership I
had no real offences to get hold of so could only offer advice. Any
way, it quietened down for a few weeks but then it started up again.
One couple was walking down Springfield Road, going home after
shopping, when the other pair drove down the road towards them. The
driver crossed the road with his car, mounted the pavement with two
wheels and drove at the other two. Now it really was getting very
serious, all over a bit of rain water. The poor woman who had been
terrified by this stupid action phoned the police when she got home
(no mobiles then, remember...). All she told the call handler was
that she wanted to see me very urgently, not about the actual
incident. I was called up on my radio and went round to see her. Both
men were home by then and I tore into the pair verbally, threatening
then and there to arrest them both to prevent a breach of the Queens
peace and get them 'bound over', and if there was sufficient evidence
to put one of them in front of a magistrate charged with attempted
murder. I told them loudly I would leave a report for all officers at
LBPS to arrest them if any further stupid actions were reported and
to then contact me and I would do the file for court. Half that
street must have heard me. The two drew up a truce and I heard no
more.

Continued.....