Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  “Hands off cocks, hands on socks! Get up gentlemen, outside in fifteen minutes!”

  It seemed like the middle of the night. A dark North Yorkshire airfield shrouded in freezing fog is as far removed from Bondi beach as is possible to be. Somewhere under the many layers of uniform there were faded tan lines around my bottom from months of Australian sun. We stood in lines with vacuously empty stomachs, painfully hung over and freezing cold. I think my teeth actually chattered a little.

  We were introduced to the pleasures of drill, marching pointlessly up and down in unison like robots. Thankfully I’d done a lot in the air cadets and a little at Epperstone, so I knew what to expect, but most of the others hadn’t a clue. Some tried marching with their left hand forward in time with the left leg, and others just couldn’t keep a rhythm, despite some alarming hopping movements. Thick fog covered everything like dry ice at a Pink Floyd concert, and it seemed for a few moments I was in the army preparing for Arctic manoeuvres. I pulled at the ends of my black leather gloves to give my fingers some relief, and I could feel the bones in my face contract as though deep-sea diving. It was quite literally freezing cold.

  After what seemed hours, but was in fact only about thirty minutes, we were marched along Bruche Drive in small groups to the canteen block known as Rowan House. Breakfast was served promptly between 7.30am and 7.45am. If you ever missed it – which was unlikely – then you would remain hungry all day. The dining hall was humid and pungent with the wonderful smell of hot fat and buttered toast. There were masses of fried food in shallow stainless steel containers. The original steel-framed, single-glazed windows streamed with condensation, and the room was packed with RAF personnel at the far end, loud and raucous, paying us no attention at all. We jostled one another with our plastic trays, eagerly queuing up for food.

  We sat in the warmth slowly defrosting, immediately shovelling down huge quantities of fried bread, eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, tomatoes and black pudding. I had difficulty flexing my fingers enough to grip the cutlery, and as I looked around I could see the faces of my colleagues beginning to glow. We ate in a furious manner, as though we’d just been rescued from the Stalingrad kessel. We drank lots of sweet tea, and those who had them took out their cigarettes. The first traces of early dawn began peering in, the dim light filtering through the dense fog. This same ritual was repeated each morning when we woke up at Dishforth, for the entire fourteen weeks.

  LESSONS IN LAW

  Classes started at 9am, and we had to be seated by 8.50am. I was in classroom V in Provost Block. I had two dedicated tutors, both sergeants. One was called Andy, and was from my own force. The other was female and called Jane, from West Yorkshire. As Jane appeared I realised she was the same gobby female sergeant with the big tits who had shouted at me on arrival. I doubt she remembered me. She didn’t seem to, anyway.

  Our first lesson was given by her, and was on police regulations and restrictions on the private life of a constable. I had no idea. I don’t remember anyone warning me about these restrictions. From now on I couldn’t take any active part in politics, which meant I couldn’t even join a political party, even a mainstream party. I had to ask permission from the police to buy a house, to rent one or even to move house, and they had to approve the location when I did. Permission was needed to marry, or even co-habit, and the name of any prospective spouse was to be supplied for checking and approval. I was not permitted to take on any financial indebtedness other than a lawful debt from a reputable lender, or take part in anything which could be perceived to put the impartiality of my office at risk. All lawful debts were to be repaid on time or disciplinary action could follow. I was forbidden from borrowing money from a colleague, and on or off duty I should not behave in any manner which had potential to bring the service into disrepute. That’s potential, including actual. There’s clearly potential in anything we do, and I didn’t realise the seriousness of this at first. On reflection, it seems remarkable that this was the first thing we were taught.

  We were told Leon Britten was the Home Secretary of the day, and therefore our political master in charge of all policing issues. We noted all the pertinent facts in longhand using fountain pens in HMSO A4 notebooks, supplied free of charge. We were told the officer on the beat is the most important person in the police force, and that all the law and procedure we were being taught was expected to be thoroughly understood. The definitions of important offences were learnt verbatim such as theft, burglary, deception, and so on. We were instructed how to take an emergency phone call from a member of the public, and how to maintain a pocket notebook. The use of typing fluid was strictly forbidden when keeping a pocket book, as was removing a page or leaving gaps. Each page of the police pocket book was sequentially numbered so it occurred to me that if one was ripped out it would be blatantly obvious. At the time, the comedy stage show The Secret Policeman’s Ball was jokingly sponsored by Tippex.

  I found the lessons quite interesting. Except for the ones which followed a heavy lunch when I struggled to stay awake. I learnt how to yawn with my mouth completely shut, venting the subsequent air pressure through my nostrils in a well-practiced technique. It meant some rather strange facial distortions where I probably looked like a closed-mouth version of Donald Sutherland’s character at the end of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was once caught and shouted at: “If you don’t open your mouth your bloody head will explode!”

  We had very little interview training, which I found surprising. We were told some very basic psychology associated with it, such as if the suspect fidgets a lot and was sweating then they were clearly telling lies. The admission was everything, and you must obtain ‘the cough’ at all costs, as nothing else mattered. Fingerprints were the only other form of evidence, but these seemed secondary to the all-important cough. We learnt a code of conduct known as ‘Judge’s Rules’ which seemed vague and nebulous in nature, but the main thing I took from this was the fact that the judge was at the top of the judicial system, and was therefore all-powerful.

  The importance of the caution was discussed, to be issued as soon as the person was suspected of committing an offence. The differences between Common, Statute and Case Laws were also revealed. We had to make sure we knew the phonetic Morse code, which I did anyway from my air cadet days. We learnt of the different uniform roles within the police service, such as the beat officer, the area constable, and the car beat constable who drove around in a panda car. The ‘panda’ car was so called because the doors were black and the rest of the vehicle was white or pale blue. This is not to be confused with the ‘jam sandwich’, which was the larger traffic car. This had a red or orange stripe around the middle, and was white everywhere else.

  Then there was the role of the CID, the Criminal Investigation Department, joining which was considered to be a positive move, almost like a promotion, even if you remained at the same rank. I was to realise later that some constables really did think they had been promoted when they went onto the CID and ditched their uniforms for good. Quite often they would expect you to open the door for them in the station; some of them had climbed so very far up their own backsides they lost sight of daylight and behaved as though they were being filmed for an episode of The Sweeney, wandering about full of their own self-importance.

  We were told of the collator’s role in the station, a job usually undertaken by a uniformed officer with a considerable amount of service who invariably knew all the local villains and where they lived, because he’d most likely dealt with them personally in his long career. The collator at each station maintained a comprehensive hand-written card index system of addresses, and this was used to assist in any crime enquiries. ‘Liaison with Collator’ was one of the ticky-box questions on the back of every crime report. I imagined that perhaps when I was very old and reaching fifty years of age there’d be a job for me as a collator, with no shift work and permanently in the station warm and dry.

  I was very impressed with the PNC,
the Police National Computer, introduced ten years before, in 1974. Though I’d not seen it yet, it sounded like an incredible machine, with all the country’s vehicles recorded, thousands of criminal names, and all at the touch of a button. We had lengthy lectures on how to take a good witness statement, including validity of evidence, hearsay, points to prove, opinions, and the value of setting the scene and obtaining good descriptions. A statement was just like a story which you had to write quickly and accurately, often in difficult circumstances. I enjoyed this because it was like being taught observation skills and professional writing. I never tired of writing statements, for obvious reasons, and would always volunteer when necessary. ‘Fred Smith hit me,’ would be the main evidence in an assault statement against Mr Smith, but it is clearly insufficient. Where was the aggrieved when it happened? Was he at home, in a pub, in the street? Had he been drinking? What time was it? Who was he with? What was he doing? Did he know Fred Smith, and if so how? What did Smith use as a weapon? Where did he hit you? Did it hurt? Did you provoke him? Did you hit back?

  The treatment of prisoners and their rights were discussed, though not in great length. To be brutally frank I don’t think they had many rights at the time. We were told that if necessary a person could be restrained using handcuffs, and if convenient they could be escorted on foot to the nearest police station. An arrested person was a ‘prisoner’, not a ‘detainee’ and very definitely not a ‘customer’ as they are sometimes referred to today. There were varying degrees of contempt for anyone who had chosen to break the law and feelings of sympathy were not encouraged, unless it was fake sympathy in order to obtain the cough.

  The days rolled into weeks, punctuated by the drive home every Friday evening and the return on Sunday nights. On each Monday morning there was a written multiple choice exam of the previous weeks’ input. I’ve never been good at exams, always a popular excuse used by thick people like me who find them difficult. I should have seated myself closer to the front of the examination hall. A colleague told me years later that he could see the answer papers on the examiner’s desk so he cheated in every single exam.

  At the end of the fourth week I spent the entire weekend at home in bed with a chest infection. It was quite serious and on the Saturday evening my parents were forced to call the emergency doctor as I had real trouble breathing. I was dosed up on antibiotics and painkillers and just managed to get back to Dishforth in time on Monday morning. Unfortunately it was the first of the four-weekly ‘stage exams’. It came as no surprise that I failed it, as I’d spent most of the weekend unconscious rather than revising. I took it again later in the day with all the other ‘dippers’ and passed. It was obvious I wasn’t well. There was a real danger I’d be re-coursed, or worse, so I tried my best to carry on, despite feeling terrible. Luckily I was excused PT and swimming during that fifth week, and by the following weekend I was fully recovered.

  I still didn’t feel like a police officer. We had no idea what it was like; I don’t suppose any of us did, except those who had already been police cadets. We hadn’t as yet done anything, or more accurately, done anyone for anything. Like actors in an empty theatre, we were always in dress rehearsal.

  Eventually it was announced that we would undertake some role-playing. They were officially called practical tests, and I was struck by just how much it was like acting. An instructor in plain clothes drove a very old Austin 1100 similar to that driven by John Cleese in Fawlty Towers around the narrow camp roads, pretending to be a member of the public. Huddled together in our little groups we each took it in turn to stand in the road and use the number one stop signal, right arm raised with flat palm facing the driver. We then had to find offences connected to the driver’s use of the vehicle. These were known as ‘Construction and Use’ offences. There’d be a bald tyre somewhere, the tax disc might be missing, there’d be a broken light, or the driver would very coyly admit to not having a driving licence. I thought this was excellent, the way offenders would just admit things straight away.

  On one occasion we were quite shocked when the driver stated he couldn’t get out of the vehicle because he was too drunk to move. It was only right that people should be honest with police officers, as who would dare tell outright fibs to an officer of the law? People clearly had an innate sense of wanting to help the police and coughed everything immediately.

  We noted down the important facts in our pocket books and after each minor drama we returned to the classroom and composed witness statements from an evidential point of view, without irrelevant opinion or hearsay. Unless it was an opinion of a person’s intoxication; this is one of the few professional opinions an ordinary police officer can give that is valid in court.

  Gradually as the weeks passed these practical scenarios became longer, more elaborate, and with the law becoming increasingly technical. I found the traffic side of the job crushingly boring. Kerb-side and gross weights, the different types of HGV and PSV licences and so on, just didn’t stay in my head. I became more interested in crime because it seemed more straightforward and easier to remember.

  On 16th April 1984 we were given the following statistics:

  Reported crime in 1984 in England & Wales is broken down as follows:

  Theft & handling stolen goods: 54.1%

  Burglary: 24.4%

  Criminal damage: 13.0%

  Fraud & forgery: 3.6%

  Violence against person: 3.4%

  Robbery: 0.7%

  Sexual offences: 0.7%

  Others: 1.0%

  The figures were meaningless other than to demonstrate the type of offences we were likely to come across. Theft and burglary would be the most common, and anything such as robbery, sexual offences and fraud would be dealt with by those clever people in the CID. We were told that most criminals were from a working class background, and that Nottinghamshire shared some of the highest crime rates in the country, at 7,500 per 100,000 of population, in common with Merseyside, London, Manchester and Northumbria. It seemed that most posh people never encountered the police, and so by implication never broke the law.

  Offences of assault were covered, including sexual offences. A person could never consent to assault, even in the bedroom and in private. ‘Unnatural’ sexual offences were discussed which mainly consisted of buggery with another person or with an animal, both of which seemed to be categorised together and were therefore seen as equally bad. Sodomy was discussed, and was defined as: ‘Sexual intercourse per anus between males or male and female’. It was a serious crime, an arrestable offence, i.e., it carried a prison sentence of five years, and was illegal even with a spouse. Consent, apparently, was no defence.

  There were some lawful homosexual acts, but they must take place in private, with the consent of both parties, and a maximum of two persons taking part, both being male and over twenty-one years of age. There was an excellent mnemonic to remember this: Private, Over 21, Only 2, and Full consent: POOF.

  It has never been a crime for two females to have sex with each other. Most British sexual offences legislation originated in Victorian times, when it was assumed such things didn’t happen. It was deemed to be a criminal offence to have sex with any close member of your own family, except your grandmother, should you fancy it.

  A wife was chattel and belonged to her husband. He could therefore never be guilty of the offence of rape against her. How times have changed.

  SWIMMING AND FIGHTING

  We did a lot of swimming, usually at Thirsk baths when sessions were closed to the public. This was always straight after a huge breakfast, or a heavy lunch with jam sponge pudding for desert. I enjoyed the swimming, mainly because I was good at it, having previously spent a lot of time splashing about on some of the greatest beaches in the world. We had to retrieve a black plastic brick from the deep end of the pool while wearing pyjamas, something I found very easy, but was a difficult task for some. We had races against the clock and formed swimming teams. We were also taught life-saving, w
hich consisted of hauling a colleague in his or her pyjamas across the pool merely by gripping the underside of their chin with the fingers of one hand.

  The return journey to Dishforth was usually very quiet, with the windows of the bus running with condensation from fifty wet heads and our exhausted breathing. Absorbing information after this was particularly challenging. These were usually the most common occasions I’d practice my closed-mouth Body Snatchers yawning technique.

  We acquired some useful first aid knowledge, and we also took part in self-defence classes. I found this choreographed wrestling quite difficult to remember. We had to learn things such as ‘wrist twist’, ‘wrist turn’, ‘side arm lock’, ‘arm entanglement’, ‘cross-block front pull-down’, ‘cross-block rear pull-down’, and ‘shirt grab release’. I couldn’t even remember the names let alone the moves. If they’d asked me to perform a cross-block wrist twist bum’s rush I’d give it a go. Whatever it was it usually ended up with everyone rolling around on the floor. The PT instructors were ruthless and unsympathetic. While struggling with one of these movements and taking extra time to finish, I was shouted at from across the gym on more than one occasion:

  “There’s a factory not far from here where they make fireworks. You need to go there and get yourself a rocket so you can stuff it up your bloody arse!”

  There were some quite frightening scenarios where we were expected to fight a colleague one-to-one, then two-to-one, and ultimately try to defend ourselves with bare hands against four simultaneous attackers from all angles. The only concession to health and safety seemed to be a rubber mat on the floor barely an inch thick. There was usually a catalogue of minor injuries and sprains following each session.