Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  When we finally left, there wasn’t any closing ceremony at Gregory Boulevard, we simply stopped going there. It was abandoned in a similar manner to when the German 6th Army retreated from Russia, except in our case the locals seemed much more hostile.

  The new building on Radford Road was more in the Basford area of Nottingham than Hyson Green, between the Shipstones Brewery and Cussons soap factory, neither of which are functioning today. For years working at Radford Road became synonymous with the not unpleasant aromas of brewing beer and perfumed soap, particularly in summer when the windows were wide open.

  I think many of the regular locals thought we’d left the country, because for several weeks after the move very few of them came to see us. Clearly the distance to the new station was just too much. It gave us chance to settle in before the inevitable rush. I never understood the dichotomy here. The police at the time were apparently despised, and yet the very people who had the greatest antipathy towards us were always the most frequent visitors asking for help. I don’t think this has changed much.

  I made my acquaintance with my tutor constable. He was an extremely tall, bespectacled and moustachioed man in his late thirties known as Roofer Bob. I didn’t ask where his nickname originated. I was to be attached to him all the time I was at work, at least for the next few weeks. Sadly we didn’t get on at all. I got the distinct impression he didn’t like me.

  I remember a particularly warm evening on one of my first afternoon shifts when we were in the police car driving around Hyson Green. It was an area with a wide diversity of population, as it is today. At that time the largest visible minority ethnic group were the West Indian community. Because of low staffing levels and high workload we didn’t walk anywhere. The windows of the car were wound down and Roofer Bob was driving. We stopped briefly at the junction of Gregory Boulevard and Birkin Avenue, in the centre of Hyson Green. A very tall, black Rastafarian man was standing at the junction, at my side of the car. I said to him: “Aye up!” in a bland but sincere attempt at making a connection. He didn’t reply, but he wasn’t rude either. I didn’t really expect a reply so I wasn’t upset. This was an era of racial unrest in Britain and it wasn’t long since the Brixton riots, so relations between the police and the black community were very poor.

  As we drove away Bob said to me: “You don’t want to talk to them black bastards!” He was scowling and appeared to be gripping the steering wheel ever tighter. I was shocked, but I didn’t say anything. I looked at his face and could see that he wasn’t joking. I should have said something, I know, but I’d already become aware of a similar attitude among quite a few officers and I didn’t feel able to challenge it. I decided to ignore his advice though.

  Bob proved to be one of the most ignorant men I’ve ever met in my life. I’d spent almost five years travelling the world living among other cultures and this man was promoting a narrow-minded, pernicious attitude. I shrugged it off at the time, but it was an outrageous thing to say to a young probationary officer.

  Bob was almost constantly negative about everything I did, including my attempts at being a police officer. I was criticised harshly and not in any way constructively. I think it is safe to say that I didn’t learn anything from him. Later that summer while I was away at training school there was a minor riot in Hyson Green. It wasn’t anything on the scale of the Brixton riots but a few windows were broken with bottles and bricks thrown at the police. While I don’t wish injury to anyone, least of all a police colleague, Bob took a blow in the face from a brick thrown at him by some anonymous black man. I happen to believe in Karma, so there was some irony in this. Thankfully he was not seriously injured and he made a full recovery. He was then moved away from the city and placed somewhere in the county, though I didn’t really care enough to find out. He finished his service in some sleepy English village; presumably well away from people he didn’t want to talk to.

  I worked my first night shift as a police officer on 9th July 1984. We worked seven consecutive nights in those days, starting at 10pm and finishing at 6am. As the shift ‘sprog’ it was my duty to arrive half an hour early and make tea for everyone. This was the tradition, and it would be my job until the next sprog arrived on the shift. Night shifts in the police are unlike some industries where you can sleep for a few hours. We were expected to work non-stop all through the night, to be out of the police station all the time, with permission and a good reason required to come back in.

  I remember my first night shift trying to fingerprint a prisoner just as dawn lightened the sky at 4.30am. I fiddled with the small tube of fingerprint ink, dabbing it on the copper block then rolling it smooth. I managed to do it right, but I was exhausted and all I wanted to do was go home. I’d worked night shifts before at the kibbutz factory, but they finished at 4am. It seems this time of night is the lowest point for the human body.

  Nottinghamshire Police were very busy in the summer of 1984. We were at the centre of a lot of media attention. Leave was heavily restricted, and the first few months of my service at the station were hard work. Soon after starting at Radford Road we began working twelve hour shifts, with only one rest day in every ten. This incurred a huge amount of overtime. The first item of paperwork I became familiar with was the overtime form. The reason of course was that the miners’ dispute led by Arthur Scargill and his National Union of Mineworkers had started on 12th March, and it was becoming increasingly bitter. It seemed that I wouldn’t escape it for much longer.

  FIRST ARREST AND THE MINERS’ DISPUTE

  They say you never forget your first arrest, and this is true. There are aspects of mine that I remember, but because I was partnered with Roofer Bob for the first few months I have actually forgotten almost everything else, as you do with bad memories. But I do remember it was a hot day when Bob and I brought a man into the cell block at Radford Road police station, swearing and generally being very uncivil, though our prisoner hardly said a word. There was little conversation with him, as Bob had virtually dragged him from behind the wheel of a car. He then said to me:

  “You nick ‘im.”

  “What for?” I replied.

  “He’s DQ. Nick him.”

  I assumed correctly that he was disqualified from driving, so I formally arrested him, and then cautioned him, in the correct manner. He must have thought I’d swallowed a police training manual. The man allowed me to handcuff him quite easily, which I was surprised about. I was always surprised when this happened. Many people would allow themselves to be handcuffed and then constantly moan about the pain.

  Instead of standing at the charge desk Bob took the man into an adjoining office where I was given my next task.

  “Get his clothes off. He needs strip searching.”

  I probably looked even more bewildered than usual at this, but it didn’t seem a surprise to our prisoner because within seconds he was standing naked in front of us, having thrown his clothes all around the room while chuntering obscenities. I was then given one of the most bizarre instructions I’ve ever had in my life.

  “Look up his arse.”

  “What?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. If I didn’t look confused before this I certainly must have then. Where was this leading?

  “Check his arsehole. Bend forwards youth!” To which the man immediately obliged by touching his toes with his feet wide apart and legs straight.

  “Go on then...” Bob indicated to me, nodding at the man’s rear, which now dominated the tiny room. I remember thinking how white and spotty it was as I leaned my head on one side to get a clear view. Yes, it was a bum hole; I could confirm it was there. What on earth? This man had been brought in for apparently driving when he shouldn’t have been, and we were both looking up his bum. I didn’t realise we had to do this, they never told us at training school. There definitely weren’t any bum gazing lectures at Dishforth, unless I’d been in after-dinner sleep mode when it happened.

  It was full summer and I noticed a pungent sw
eaty bottom aroma, and I thought to myself: What a shit job.

  “I haven’t got nowt,” the man said, protesting, turning his head around while still bent forward.

  To my horror Bob then produced a box of disposable rubber gloves. He put on a pair and threw me the box, indicating for me to do the same. For a moment I prepared myself for the next stage of unpleasantness. What were we looking for? What could the man possibly be hiding up his bum anyway? Was he a magician? Was he about to pull out a rabbit, a string of knotted handkerchiefs, or a stolen television? I’d never put my fingers up another man’s bum before, let alone have a poke around. Bob prized the man’s cheeks apart and briefly put his face up close to the gaping hole. He nodded and murmured to himself, and it came with a huge sense of relief when Bob said:

  “Right then, get dressed.”

  We searched his pockets. A lighter, cigarettes, some money, all placed on the desk. I listed everything, none of which came from his bum. The strip search had been reminiscent of the scene in Lawrence of Arabia in the Turkish Bey’s quarters, with people milling about and walking through the office. Bob knew the man very well. It seemed he was a renowned drug dealer, hence the strip search. Somewhere in the arrest process I wasn’t told or didn’t hear this crucial bit of information. Thankfully looking up a prisoner’s bum was not the usual practice for every arrest.

  It was typical of the poor communication that existed between me and my tutor. When you don’t get on with someone, maybe due to an early misunderstanding or a personality clash, very often the relationship becomes worse rather than better.

  I spent the next ten minutes looking for some relatively new carbon paper for the charge sheets and a bottle of Tippex, just in case. Everything was in triplicate, and so two sheets of carbon paper were essential. Some of the typewriters didn’t work very well, either the ink ribbons were too ancient or some of the letters didn’t function, or both. I found the correct charge in the summons heading book known as the Book 20 and he was bailed to court. It was the first and last time I looked up a prisoner’s bum. If it was ever required again I made sure someone else did it for me.

  My diaries contain little in the way of enthusiasm for these first few months of active duty in Hyson Green, and I longed to escape. If someone had contacted me in the latter half of 1984 asking me to leave the UK and join them overseas I would probably have grabbed my passport and ran for the door, never to return. I was desperately unhappy with the job and I was beginning to regret joining.

  I was aware that I wasn’t learning much, all I seemed to be doing with Bob was driving around placating people and not really sorting anything out properly. In police terminology this is called ‘knocking stuff on the head’ or ‘keeping the lid on’. There’s very little job satisfaction and it is very unprofessional. To be fair, this was not entirely Bob’s fault. The miners’ dispute was raging and Bob and I were often the only two cops available in that part of the city, everyone else had been drafted onto the picket lines. We couldn’t afford to get involved in anything or spend quality time investigating crime. I had never done it before, I was never shown how to do it, and so it followed that I hadn’t a clue. We constantly drove from one job to the next knocking stuff on the head. This was how I learned policing. A crime report was something you simply filled in and forgot about, with absolutely no investigations whatsoever. I was told to make sure I wrote ‘Offender unknown’ on the back of the form, even if the offender was known. The victim was placated with some well-rehearsed platitudes and never seen again. I remember one of Bob’s survival mottos when dealing with the public was:

  “For fuck’s sake don’t give ‘em your name, they’ll just keep ringing you up and you’ll never get rid of the bastards.”

  I was making a lot of money. My basic wage of around £400 a month more than doubled. I ate out most nights, shifts permitting, at a Berni Inn steakhouse just down the road from where I lived. I worked months with just one occasional rest day between ten exhausting twelve hour shifts. Recruitment had stopped and Nottinghamshire was under siege by flying pickets from all over the country. As the miners’ dispute dragged on it seemed to absorb virtually everyone in Nottinghamshire Constabulary, and eventually I was called up for it. By this time they were clearly getting desperate for staff.

  Starting at 3am usually meant waiting at the station to be collected, and then being driven all over the county reacting to radio messages or driving to pre-arranged points. The first time I stood in a picket line was at Harworth pit. I linked arms with colleagues who were trying to hold back a large group of miners outside the gates. My initial thoughts were how very real it all was. I don’t mean this flippantly, but when you see large groups of men on the television shouting at one another it may look dramatic, but when you are standing amongst them it is entirely different. These were well-built miners, all using very colourful Anglo-Saxon expletives. They pushed heavily against us and I was so close I could smell their breath and see the spittle flying as they shouted past me at the working miners. It was alarming but I didn’t fear for my personal safety. I could see they were looking right through me as though I was an inanimate object, rather than a person. I was a living crash barrier to be pushed against and leaned on, nothing more. During the scuffling there were never any personal conversations on a human level between us, but afterwards there could be. I later saw this in the judicial system, when the defence and prosecution chatted amiably until the court was in session and then everything changed.

  By the time I was there we were months into the strike and it was becoming very acrimonious. Our job was simply to ensure the working miners were not prevented from getting to work, and to ensure the trucks were allowed to collect the coal. There were serious expressions on the faces of the miners, and of course there would be, they saw their livelihoods at risk and their whole way of life in jeopardy. It was all about the closure of the mines and the future of the industry, and the miners claimed the government were seeking to destroy the British coal industry. This notion was derided at the time, and even denied by the government, but has since proved to be true of course. All the pits have gone.

  I had become a member of ‘Thatcher’s Army’, one of ‘Thatcher’s Bully Boys’ as we were variously known. It was only a year since I’d returned from my travels with my long hair, broad mind and a mild antipathy towards the police. I was now paid to be sworn at and pushed around outside a coal mine. It wasn’t pleasant, and though occasionally exciting it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Thankfully I never came to blows personally with any of the miners and I certainly didn’t relish the prospect. Other colleagues were not so lucky.

  Frankly most of it was very boring. They say warfare is the same. There were long periods of sitting around in the blue Ford Transit vans eating rubber sandwiches and trading Mars bars for little packets of biscuits. Life in a van consisted of crushing boredom interspersed with a lot of mutual piss-taking, communal flatulence and belching. I don’t remember any female officers being involved, mainly because there were very few of them in those days.

  I remember standing on the A614 near Worksop at 4am one morning turning cars around that looked like they might contain groups of men who could be flying pickets. We weren’t sure they were, of course, and they denied it, but we still did it and got away with it. On another occasion the van I was in was sent on a rapid response to another pit, Pye Hill 1, near Selston, where the familiar shout went up for “More troops!” We tore through Nottinghamshire with the blue lamp on the roof turning slowly, dodging vehicles and pedestrians, clinging on desperately as the van rolled around bends at high speed. We had two-tone sirens in the vans, but fully laden with a dozen hairy-arsed coppers these vehicles didn’t inspire confidence. When we finally arrived nothing was happening, as was so often the case. We parked up and resumed our positions, trying to sleep between the malodorous bodies and foul-mouthed obscenities.

  I saw hundreds of cops from all over the country. There were a huge number from Lond
on. I’d heard rumours of impropriety surrounding the Met officers, but I didn’t witness anything personally. A famous story was of a man in Nottinghamshire admitting to some local cops that he’d been banned from driving. When the PNC stated he wasn’t banned the man was adamant and argued that he was. A Met officer had apparently ripped up his licence in front of him and demanded fifty pounds cash by way of an on-the-spot fine.

  I was removed quite randomly, a collar number used to fill gaps, and plunged into the dispute for a day or a few days, then sent back to the dark streets of Hyson Green. I wasn’t sure which I preferred. More accurate would be to ask which I hated the least. My overwhelming memory of it all is of being constantly tired, and there didn’t seem to be an end to it.

  It was outrageous that striking miners were trying to prevent other miners from going to work, but it was also quite disgraceful in my opinion how the police were being manipulated nationally by the government to serve their own political aspirations.

  In common with all my colleagues, I was accumulating a vast amount of annual leave and time owing. I dreamed of escaping for a while, and suddenly in October I was able to book some leave. I wondered how this was possible. Maybe it was becoming clear the government, our side, would win the dispute, or maybe I was just too inept to be missed. It was probably the latter.

  I had no hesitation in deciding where to go. I flew back to Israel, to the cleanliness and anonymity of the Negev desert, back to Kibbutz Be’eri on the fringes of the Gaza Strip.