You can’t beat a good joke

Oct 16 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

As the public remains worried about crime, a retired bobby writes about how it was in the old days. David Charters reports

THERE was once, we are told, another England: symbolised by huge, black, kipper-wide shoes, polished so brightly that they reflected the men who stood in them – high-hatted, dark blue and taller than the houses.

These men were not intellectuals, stuffed with bewk-learnin’, but they understood people and the difference between right and wrong.

And when they walked, they bent their knees in a funny way and if they saw something, which didn’t seem quite as it should be, or somebody with a shifty look and large sack, they said, “Hello, hello, hello, what’s all this then?” and reached for their notebooks.

They liked everything on their beats to be just so, these big men. They were hard and brave and knew every nook and cranny and every crook and nanny.

People slept soundly in their beds then.

Maybe it’s a romanticised view, but the old bobbies-on-the-beat have a warm place in British folklore.

With gun crime, absurdly called “gun culture”, drugs and endless statistics, graphs and paperwork, people yearn for the reassuring figure of the old-style copper.

Those days are caught in a book called Humour on the Beat, by Jim Finn, who served with the police between 1972 and ’86, having been a special constable for two years in the early ’60s when the old “Dixon of Dock Green” standards still prevailed.

Although the title suggests the funny side of the beat, the book, illustrated with cartoons, is really telling the everyday experiences of a bobby, the knocks and the laughs.

It obviously reflects the past, but Jim has great admiration for the present generation of policemen and women facing different challenges.

“This book is dedicated to all those police officers who, on a daily basis, steadfastly and diligently go about their duties in order to make our society a better and safer place in which to work and live,” he writes.

Stories came with the job.

Early one morning, Jim stopped a car travelling at over 40mph on a dual-carriageway, where the limit was 30. The road was empty and Jim and his colleague in a panda car felt that a warning would be sufficient.

The driver wound down his window and said that he had not been aware of the limit. On looking further into the car, Jim saw it was Ken Dodd. By the end of this particular performance, the comedian was handing out signed pictures of himself.

Ken made a fleeting reference to the incident on his World Of Laughter show on TV the following Saturday.

On another occasion, Jim had to break up a gang of children outside a shop. They were dancing around a car, on the bonnet and on the roof. In the middle was a man flailing his arms. It was Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool. When the children had dispersed, the two men enjoyed a cup of tea in the greengrocer’s.

He also writes of the time the whole Kop applauded him. It was during his spell as a special constable, when you were given a sixpenny (2½p) boot allowance on each beat.

“One of the crowd ran onto the field heading towards the visitors’ goal in a threatening manner,” he recalls. “I jumped from the dug-out and ran towards him, whereupon he turned tail and sped off whence he came. I was rapidly gaining ground and, as I was just about to put my hands on the scruff of his neck, my legs buckled beneath me and, quite by accident, my hands caught the back of his heels and over he went, making it look like the perfect rugby tackle, much to the obvious delight of the roaring crowd, as my cap went flying from the top of my head.” Jim was one of three children born in the Newsham Park area of Liverpool to Patrick Finn, a plumber, and Ruby, who worked part-time in a sweet shop. After leaving Liverpool Collegiate with GCE O-levels in Latin, Maths, English, French and General Studies, he had spells as a factory worker and a seaman, during which he sailed around the world.