The Last Linslade Bobby Chapter Six, Part Two.

This is Part Two of Chapter Six, you need to read from Chapter One to follow the tale.

General Incidents.

I was walking down Old Road towards the canal one day
when a radio message came and asked me where I was. I told them and I
was directed to go to The Mill which is next to an Indian restaurant
near Yirell's butchers. There I was to await a well known local
toe-rag who would be leaving in an unknown car. I was to arrest this
lad for deception and await a panda car to collect him for CID. Once
his car was known I was to search it for stolen credit cards. It
transpired that this lad was still in the restaurant, totally unaware
that the staff had discovered the card he had just used to pay for a
meal, was in fact a stolen one. I waited for him and as we knew each
other he acknowledged me outside The Mill as he walked past me to a
Vauxhall Cavalier in the small car park in Wing Road. I approached
him as he unlocked the car as we now knew it was being used by him,
and held his elbow and told him he was under arrest. He threw back
both his arms throwing me off balance and tried to make a run for it.
As this happened I heard a panda car skid to a halt and the two
officers put him on the floor and handcuffed him. I will not repeat
what he yelled at me, but it was very rude. The lad who was with him
had left the restaurant a few minutes after he had and had seen me
talking to his mate. He became suspicious so he ran off up Old Road.
But not knowing the area he dodged into Yirrel's butchers store room.
I saw him out of the corner of my eye and ran after him. He was not
going to put up any fight and meekly put his hands forward for my
cuffs. PS Graham Shepherd had by then arrived and grinned as I
marched the accomplice out to the panda car. They were both held by
the car as I searched it (so they would witness anything we found),
but I found no more cards so he was whisked off to CID. Later a CID
Sgt found me and asked if I had searched the car, I said I had, then
he produced a number of stolen bank cards that I had missed. They
were slid under the rubber heel-pad sewn to the carpet by the pedals.
I had just looked under this carpet and the sound proofing. As they
were found some time after the arrest any defence solicitor worth
his salt would argue anyone could have put them there. They were now
useless evidence. The often used sentence by the layman of, “Well,
its obvious is it not?” has no weight in law at all, only facts
count.

As a police officer I was given quite a bit of
discretion when dealing with people. Unless the offence was a serious
one for anyone with no criminal record I and many of my colleagues
would bend over backwards to try to give advice, the 'Verbal
Caution'. Many errant children were taken home to have a parent deal
with them rather than a court, of course with the injured parties
agreement. Quite a few kids were caught shop-lifting at the stores in
the middle of Bideford Green. It was often done as a dare and the one
who dared was usually caught red-handed. I would be summonsed and
would take the child home to Mum & Dad. This was just what the
child did not want. A girl I took home to a house in Bideford Green
quite close to the shop, had really been stupid and had tried to
fight off the shop manager. Once I had her home her parents were
horrified and she was grounded for months afterwards. Alas today if
you took a child home as above, you would get a lot of abuse from the
parents as well so today the officer arrests the child and gets a
tick on the arrest register for the Forces statistics for the Home
Office; and a child sets off on the wrong side of the law with a
criminal conviction. That is the down side of giving the police
targets, no discretion just boxes to be ticked to improve statistics.

Luckily the vast majority of Linslade residents are law
abiding. Rothchild Road is a dead end of quite nice houses that leads
to the canal on the North edge of Linslade. As there is no through
traffic, strangers are unusual. A resident had just retired from the
Post Office and during the tending of his garden he became very
suspicious of male visitors to an elderly gent who lived opposite
him. These 'visitors' looked very scruffy and did not stay very long
so he correctly suspected a fraud was being perpetrated. He was
correct, these travellers were calling on the frail and elderly in
the area and telling the often Alzheimer sufferers that they had
completed the work on their chimney/fence/garden and demanded £400+
for the work carried out. No such work had of course been done but
the unsuspecting and confused old people just paid up. It was
becoming an epidemic around the town and I got this resident to phone
HQ and tell them to contact me by radio if these visitors called
again. As I took an interest in his old neighbour, the word must have
got back to the con-merchants as they left him alone after that, but
not before they had taken a considerable amount of cash for work they
had never done.

Walking about Linslade soon showed up some serious
problems with the police radio system. Underneath Linslade there is a
lot of sand and in the sand are great lumps of ironstone. This is
very hard sand glued together with ferrous oxide and it seriously
affects any radio signals. It is in effect a tiny planet like our
Earth with a magnetic field-effect, any hand held radio I had would
not work properly anywhere near to the railway tunnel. There were two
police relay aerials in the area, one on the water tower up on
Eastern Way/Gig Lane, the other on top of the RAF Stanbridge water
tower (both now defunct). Neither sent a strong enough signal to be
able to overpower the magnetic fluxes around Alwins Field or Bluebell
Woods. The panda cars fared better as they had more powerful
receivers. The answer was of course, not to get into any trouble in
Alwins Field area! Another area that had very poor radio reception
was around the Bedford Arms by the canal bridge, perhaps there was
more ironstone under the ground there as well? There is a story that
in the 1850s the firm who got the contract to dig the railway tunnel
at Linslade went bust because the quote given covered what they
thought would be an easy dig through clay and sand. They hit this
ironstone and went bust as nothing would touch it. Another company
took over and used gunpowder to blast the way through. When there was
a power cut an officer had to drive out to the Eastern Way aerial to
start up the little petrol generator underneath the tower, to supply
electricity to the aerial. Often this was Barry Gazeley or Diesel
Dick if between 9am and 5pm, otherwise it always seemed to be me!

Mention has been made of the Linslade family of Yirrel,
known to us all as the local butchers in Old Road. I met three ladies
whom I was told were all sisters of that family, I was also told by
another that they were not sisters. I was never able to prove this
either way but all three have a story to tell. The first one was a
very tall and slim lady of quite some age. She always wore the most
bright red lipstick and was always immaculately dressed. One day she
stopped me outside her house in Wing Road. She asked if I would come
in and see her husband who was bedridden. I could not do so at that
moment, but I was to patrol the next day with WPC Dianne Steward, a
tall slim blonde officer (yes, I know WPC is no longer politically
correct, but that was her rank in those days! Today it would be
Constable Steward. I do not have much time for the PC brigade.) We
both called that next day and discovered the elegant lady rode the
horses at the Rothchilds Stud Farm in Soutcott, there was even an old
stables in her rear yard where in better days she had kept her own
horse. She had been a chiropodist. He was very frail indeed but was
pleased to see us and we sat in his bedroom and had tea and cakes.
During the conversation we found out he had been a cavalry officer in
the Polish Army in WW1, yes World War One!

The second sister lived in New Road. She had a green MG
Montego which she had purchased new from Dunham & Haines in
Leighton Road about three years previously. I came across her one day
after she had reversed out of her drive and then had begun to drive
the wrong way up New Road, which is a one way street. She apparently
did this all the time as it was quicker to get to Old Road. She had
run into a car going the correct way. It was a 'damage only RTA'
(road traffic accident, now changed to a politically correct RTC,
road traffic crash...) with no injuries, so only required insurance
details exchanging. I gave her a verbal caution for her wrong-way
maneuver and got her to sign my pocket note book annotating it PC,
personal caution (again, not done any more). I had to check her
driving documents but she had no MoT. She had purchased the car new
but it had been in the show rooms for about three months prior to her
ownership. She had owned it three years, so it now required an MoT. I
told her to take it to Dunham & Haines and get an MoT certificate
as soon as possible, then bring it to the police station and show it
to me. This she did. She told me with a grin that she had gone into
their office and given them a real telling off for letting her drive
a car that had no MoT and it was their fault. To keep the peace for a
regular customer they did the MoT free of charge!

The third sister's story is less palatable. She lived as
a widow in Roseberry Avenue, in a tidy little bungalow. Her cleaner
of many years standing contacted me one day so I visited the
bungalow. The elderly lady resident had been married to a jeweler,
and there were glass cases in every room with some very posh stuff on
view. The cleaner had noticed things were going missing, but the poor
old lady had such bad eyesight she had not noticed. It seemed that a
travelling salesman had been calling regularly and had discovered the
lady had poor eyesight, so he had helped himself to some nice bits of
expensive jewelery. By the time the cleaner had become suspicious he
must have decided he would not risk another visit and was never seen
again. It makes my blood boil that people can do such things to the
elderly.

Every now and then the lower schools in Linslade were
used as polling stations for local and national voting. On such days
I had to visit the stations to ensure all was above board and the
staff were not being annoyed or threatened. It was nearly always a
doddle and often done as overtime, the cost being passed on to HM
Govt. I had occasion to go to Leopold Road on one of these voting
days when a passer-by complained to me that he had been hassled as he
left the school, where a man had demanded to know for whom he had
voted on the way out, and had also insisted upon seeing his voters
card on the way in. The only person who can demand your voters card
is the supervisor INSIDE the polling station. So I ambled down to
Linslade Lower School and stood near to the door. There were a couple
of political party groupies directly outside the entrance door asking
people for whom they had voted. I watched as one of these groupies
demanded to see a person's voting card as they entered the school. I
was over to them like a flash and told the chap going in to not under
any circumstances show the card to anyone other than the supervisor
inside, if they did not want to show it. That then brought forth a
tirade of language at me from the man demanding to see everyone's
card. I informed him that if he continued, I would arrest him under
the Representation of the People Act 1983, cover free voting. It
transpired he had been told by his political party committee he had
every right to ask. To which I replied that yes he did have that
right, just as the person being asked had the right to say, “ NO,
mind your own business”. These people who sit just outside the
voting station are there to collect statistics for their party, they
are nothing to do with the polling station. I then went in and
informed the supervisor who came out and told them all to get off
school property and carry out their data collecting on the public
footpath in Leopold Road. They went meekly.

A name that has almost been forgotten is that of Pig
Hill. It is the road directly opposite Station Approach that run up a
hill to join Old Road, opposite Durrell Close. It got its name from
the days it was used as a market to sell pigs. It was also adjacent
to one of my tea-spots with Les Goulding. There was a rather
dilapidated building on the railway side of this road, with little
terraced houses on the other side. The old building housed the
workshops of a local inventor. He was a friend of Les and I was often
taken in to see the latest 'invention' being worked on. To stop
people using the railway station using the bare earth frontage of
these workshops as a car park, the owner had a load of building
bricks dumped on it. These were old local bricks, most of them
broken. I was doing up my garden at the time and asked if I could
have a few bricks to edge the plots. The owner readily agreed telling
me to take all I required free of charge. Later that week on a rest
day I arrived with my little trailer behind my Morris Minor and
selected some good bricks. Just as I was about to leave a young man
arrived and asked me what I though I was doing. I had never seen him
before, I told him I was helping myself to some bricks. He then told
me he was going to call the local policeman and have me arrested for
theft. I openly, and with a big grin on my face, invited him to do
just that. He stormed off into the workshops to call the police. A
few minutes later he came out and sheepishly aplogised having spoken
to his father, the owner of the land and the inventor who knew me.
Les got quite a few pints of beer on that story at his local for some
weeks.

Dr. Sirinivassan was our family doctor and the police
surgeon that Leighton Buzzard police station then used for breath
tests and injured prisoners. He always grinned when he arrived and I
was on duty, remembering my name and one or two officers saw there
was more to this greeting than met the eye. That is the trouble with
working with people who are professional people watchers, they notice
things. So I had to tell them the following tale.

When we moved to Leighton Buzzard in 1982, I was still
serving in the RAF at Halton, as a technical instructor. My daughter
was just over two years old and like all infants had various
illnesses some of which could be dealt with at the surgery, but other
meant a home call by the doctor. One particular week we had been
suffering from the continual calling at our front door by
sales-people and my daughter was off colour in bed. They were nearly
all Asians who were pedaling items I considered to be too expensive
or rubbish; household items you could get at half the price and
better quality from Leighton Hardware or the town's Saturday market
for instance. One day we had had about four lots of these
cold-callers when the door bell rang yet again. I opened it to see a
small Asian man with a suitcase. Before he could speak I grabbed him
by the seat of his pants and propelled him out of our porch towards
the front gate, telling him I had had a bellyful of sales people.
Then behind me I heard my wife yell at me at the top of her voice,
"No Neil, that's the doctor.........” I had met Dr. Sirini (as he is
known, now retired).

Continued.....