Page 151 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

I sat on my arse on the pavement thinking “what the fuck were you
thinking?” Realising that if the gun was loaded and he’d pulled the trigger I
would have been a dead hero. Whatever possessed me to run toward
danger like that I’ll never know as I’ve never considered myself courageous
or reckless, but I was lucky and got away with only my pride being bruised.

As my colleagues turned up no more than sixty seconds behind me, I sat
there I cursing my own stupidity that I was so intent on foolishly trying to stop
the car that I didn’t catch the licence plate, although it wasn’t to matter as
the car was recovered in the grounds of a hospital within the hour.

The gang had arrived in two vehicles, the Granada and a Ford Transit. They
waited until they knew the counting house would be flush with banknotes,
then reversed the transit at high speed straight through the window, narrowly
avoiding injury to the staff. The getaway driver poised in the Granada, the
other three robbers grabbed as many cash bags and notes as they could,
abandoning the transit and escaped at high speed with their haul of over
£50,000.

The CID team turned up, including the DCI Gordon Heatley and DI Alan
Moore and they took over. The DCI took me to one side and congratulated
me on getting there so quickly but added to my misery when he said, “Pity
you didn’t get the number son, that’s just lost you a commendation”. I wasn’t
one for gongs and awards, but it hurt all the same.

Later that afternoon, it transpired that three vehicles had been used. They
had driven to a meeting point in the grounds of St Margarets Mental Hospital
in Great Barr, a few minutes away from Kingstanding Circle. They left a car
there, taking the transit and Granada to do the job at Natwest. Making good
their escape, they fled back to the third car in which they drove away with
the cash, leaving the two vehicles used on the job dumped in the hospital
car park. All three vehicles it turned out, had been stolen for the job.

Within a couple of hours of the robbery Shaw Taylor and the film crew
appeared at Kingstanding. Before the cameras rolled, he asked me what
had happened, so I related the story to him.
On Police 5 that night Shaw Taylor was filmed interviewing DCI Heatley. My
part was covered with a sentence along the lines of “officers raced to the
scene, but they weren’t in time to prevent the robbers escaping”. My initial
feelings of shame at my folly thinking I could stop a getaway car with a piece
of wood were replaced with a sense of relief that I was still here to tell the
tale. You would think that once is enough and that I would learn from my
experience, but only a few weeks later I found myself in similar circumstances.

Rollin forward a year or so for a moment, DC John Raby pulled me one day Page151
to update me on something. “Remember that bank robbery at Nat West?