The Last Linslade Bobby, Chapter Five Part One.

Chapter
Five.

More Stories.

Tea Spots.

'A
copper worth his salt never gets wet',
was a quote from one Sergeant Ted Bowman to me once. Ted was in his
late forties when I met him and because I was 'of an age' he was no
where near as hard on me as he was with young probationers. I would
answer him back if he got the law wrong (I was studying for my
Sergeants Exam which I passed in 1990, so was pretty well up on
current legalities) and he did not like being shown up when wrong.
But the advice hidden in that comment was not to get wet. It was to
tell me to ensure I had a series of 'tea-spots' around Linslade. I
was bequeathed a couple by PC Allan Mills, the previous LBO and I
developed a few of my own. It was about this time the Town Council
closed the public toilets on the canal bridge. These I had found very
useful as it was very central to my beat and there are no public loos
in Linslade other than the Railway Station. Tea spots are also a
place to obtain intelligence about the local area; you might call it
gossip, but often there was something worthy of following up later.
My feelings today is that the police have totally lost this contact
with Joe Public, hence any information they might have.

Opposite the Station Hotel, then a busy local pub, was a
small engineering and fabrication business. This was run by one Les
Goulding who had been made redundant from The Foundry engineering
firm that once traded in the old Vimy Road industrial estate, along
with a tyre company, a car repair firm and Cinescreens (this area is
now Tesco). Les had purchased some of the machinery when the old
foundry buildings were being demolished and with a mate, set up
Goulding Fabrications Ltd. at the very far end of Old Road. He found
a lot of work making ducting for the nearby sand quarries and
supplying wrought iron gates and railing of all sizes. His premises
were almost at the very end of Old Road, where many, many years ago
in the 1800's the road had crossed the main railway line as a
level-crossing and where the original 'Leighton Buzzard' railway
station had been situated. This had been moved to its present
location three hundred yards further south and Soulbury Road had
gained an over-bridge when the level-crossing was closed. It was from
this bridge quite a few poor souls use to jump to their deaths,
committing suicide. We would get a phone call for help from the
British Transport Police (BTP) and to bring strong black plastic
bags. I leave the rest to your imagination.

Really wet days would find me spending a warming up
period chatting to Les about his life. He had been in the Army out in
the Middle East as a Signaller. Though now into his late seventies
when I knew him, he was still busy at his trade though his business
partner had died some years earlier. His wife ran Sutherlands Private
School on Stoke Road. They had 'separated' but still lived in the
same wooden house which had been partitioned into two dwellings and
still spoke to each other. Les would update me on who was hanging
about the railway station and the Station public house across the
road (this burnt down in about 1993-ish). It was Les and his wife who
had very poor service from the police over the death near The Globe.

Another popular tea spot with me was visiting Joe, a
porter on the platforms at the railway station. This was the old
station not the current one, that used a tunnel to get from one
platform to another, now blocked off. Joe was a fiery little
character who took no prisoners and was a station porter. He was very
near retirement as well but on late Friday and Saturday evenings, he
liked to see me arrive as the uniform stopped much of the nuisance
from drunken teenagers going home to Milton Kenyes. Leighton Buzzard
had a very popular night club then called 'The Unicorn' in Lake
Street and it attracted youths from a wide area. On one of my
Saturday evening visits I saw Joe over on the island platform getting
a lot of lip from a particularly obnoxious youth. I headed down into
the tunnel and as I ran up the steps onto this platform I saw Joe
give that lad a real heavy fist, full in the face. The lad went over
like a dead weight. I thought to myself that if the lad makes an
official complaint I'll have to arrest Joe. This would mean doing a
file for BTP as the railway station is not actually part of Linslade,
but British Rail property (the railways enacted by an Act of
Parliament have their own police and laws). Anyway, the lad came
round and got on his train and left with a sore lip, no doubt with no
idea he had been 'lumped' by Joe thinking it all part of his hangover
the next day. I berated Joe over this and he just said he was sorry,
he did not know I was watching. Once it was all quiet again I got my
cup of tea. One problem with being on a platform in a uniform was
passengers would ask me when the next train was due, or if a certain
train left from that platform. I told them I had no idea as I was not
a railway employee but the local copper. To this I often got quite
blunt comments that, “ Well, you should know!” I would reply
with something to the effect that it was like asking an AA patrol man
in Wigan what time an aircraft left Heathrow for the USA. Eventually
this tea spot died as the station became unmanned after 8pm and I
lost access to a loo.

In Soulbury Road, just after the junction with Leopold
Road, is a row of detached houses close to the pavement. This is a
bit odd as they all have huge back gardens with a stream running
through the centre. This stream has never been known to dry up as it
drains the Aylesbury Vale and the hills to the north. Alas the stream
is buried underground from after a short open to the air length in
the park and eventually runs into the canal near Mentmore Road Park
on its northern boundary. In one of these houses lived Anne and John.
They were very pro-police and Allan had introduced me to them as
their new LBO. The front door was always on the latch and one simple
called out as the door was pushed open. As I like cats Anne quickly
took to me, feeding me lots of home made cakes as one or other of the
felines sat on my lap. I would pick up all sorts of local gossip (a
very good reason for tea spots) and some would come in useful to put
in an 'intelligence' form. Across the road there were a number of
families known to me and whom I was very pleased to have information
about.

One day I was given a warrant for the arrest of a very
well known Linslade toe-rag. He was a petty criminal who did not
bother with things like tax and insurance when driving, nor the fact
he was banned by a court of law from driving. His wife was a prolific
shop-lifter with her friend, another well know 'lady of the town' (a
drug addict, alcoholic and prostitute). I rang John to tell me when
he knew this lad was at home. John would telephone HQ with my collar
number, for them to radio me. That way I knew the lad was in and
could execute the warrant. I convinced a panda car driver to sit up
at the rear garden entrance of the house as I knocked on the front
door as the lad would certainly make a run for it as he knew there
was a 'no bail' warrant out for him. ('No-bail' is a warrant to go
straight to gaol, the courts have become impatient that the offender
fails to turn up on bail.) The panda car driver could convey me and
my prisoner to Dunstable cells. But I was let in by the wife and a
house search revealed he was not there. John would not be wrong but
there was no sign of the lad. So I gave up, the lad would appear
again soon. Three times I had a radio message the lad was now in,
three times I could not find him and he certainly had not run out of
the back door. I searched the loft, under beds, under the stairs, in
cupboards all to no avail. Then his wife fell out with the 'lady of
the town'. To get her own back on her ex-friend I was told by her to
look a lot harder under the stairs. There is no honour amongst
thieves

The next time I got a message from John when my victim
was in I found him! The very rear end of the under-the-stairs
cupboard had a false hardboard wall. As the lad was not small there
appeared to not be enough room to hide there, but when I pulled it
away he was crammed in, all folded up. He went to prison for eight
days for non-payment of motoring fines. Due to the crazy system our
prisons operate he did just three. The first was the day I arrested
him, and because he behaved he did half his sentence as they all do
now, so was out in three days. What a waste of time. Is it no wonder
the criminal classes just laugh at our so called justice system.

In New Road there was once a Second-Hand shop owned by
another John. The chap who ran it made a living selling house
clearance items. You could do quite a good job furnishing a
newly-weds first home from John's stock, good enough until one could
afford better. I often popped in to chat to him, but we both knew he
had done time (been in prison) and sadly that he did not have much
time left. He had cancer, but bore it well and accepted his fate. I
always got a hot cup of tea and a long tirade of all the latest
regulations he had been bombarded with from the Health & Safety
crowd. The Regulations insisted that he had to cut off three-pin
plugs from leads from lamps, hoovers, radios and the like. He put
them in an old bowl and the lamp's purchaser was free to pick up a
plug if he wanted one. Utter stupidity as the purchaser went home and
refitted the plug. He did get caught out by having quite a stock of
decent three-seater settees that did not have the 'fire retardant
labels' the Regulations insisted upon.

Continued....