Page 5 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

Forward

Any publication that sets out to record the events of a persons’ life is like a
stage performance broken down into Acts and plots within each act. It also
serves as a different way of presenting the story. A far more celebrated and
famous writer once said:

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits
and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts”
William Shakespeare (from As You Like It

I hope you enjoy my performance.

This book is about policing in the eighties. It was not authored by a media
journalist with a biased or jaundiced view of the service. Neither was it written
by a TV production company sensationalising to make a book into a
documentary, nor was it plagiarised by a politician or other alleged expert
seeking to climb the greasy pole of fame and fortune. It was written by a real
frontline policeman who actually did ‘the job’ in the second largest UK police
force though the troubled years of the nineteen-eighties.

I wasn’t the best uniform copper of my day, nor was I another Nipper Read
(the Detective who nicked and the Krays). Tommy Clarke and Jack Slipper
achieved notoriety as old school detectives in the ‘60s and ‘70’s. I was a hard
working cop in and out of uniform in the ‘80s, with more than my fair share of
arrests and experiences. This book tells the story of a front-line copper and
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detective, warts and all.