Police

Paul and I were riding our bicycles up the Stanningley Bypass. We turned off onto the slip road to go into Stanningley. This is quite a long slip road. It’s a wide single lane dividing into two lanes, left for Pudsey and right for Stanningley, with traffic lights at the end. Halfway up the slip road, I looked round to check there was nothing coming up behind us. There wasn’t. I indicated right and pulled over to the right-hand side of the lane, ready to go into the right-hand lane and turn right at the lights.

Paul, a couple of dozen yards behind, didn’t move over immediately. When he looked round, there was something coming – crazily fast. The car zoomed between us at a lunatic speed, missing me by millimetres according to Paul, who saw more clearly than I could. The driver had to slam his brakes on hard at the lights, which turned red too soon for him to consider jumping them – indeed, he’d have hit a car going the other way if he had.

We caught up with him at the lights. I was pretty wound up, having been badly scared by the close encounter. I brought my hand down hard on his roof. I know this makes a wonderfully loud noise inside a car!

He jumped out of the car. He was a big bloke, but he didn’t threaten me physically. He said, “I’m a police officer,” flashed his warrant card and told me to get in the car. “What will you do with my bicycle?” I asked. “Put it in the back of the car,” he said. “There isn’t room.” There wasn’t, which was obvious. “Your friend can look after it.”

Fortunately Paul was right on the ball. “Friend? I’m just a witness.” quoth he. I managed to keep a straight face. “Tell you what,” Paul said, “We’ll follow you to the police station, it’s not far.”

Amazingly, the officer accepted this solution.

It’s funny how slowly one can ride a bicycle when one wants to. I doubt he got out of first gear all the way. There were a couple of places where we could have disappeared down alleyways wide enough for bikes but not for a car. He was probably beginning to wish we would. But we had other plans. We followed him all the way.

The police station is close to the roundabout where the road through Stanningley meets the end of the bypass again. You have to go three quarters of the way round the roundabout, then leave the roundabout onto the Farsley Ring Road, and finally turn right into the police station car park.

But not if you’re on a bike. While he was going round to the car park, we jumped off our bikes, walked them across the road, and straight in through the front of the police station. By the time he arrived, we’d told the whole story to the station sergeant, and were in the process of lodging an official complaint.

Statements were duly taken. He said I’d dented his roof. We all duly traipsed out to the car park to inspect the dent. There really was a dent in the roof – but the paint had cracked at one edge of the dent, and there was rust along the line of the crack. It was obvious that it wasn’t a new dent. He’d presumably known there was a dent there but hadn’t realized it was so obviously old.

We didn’t hear any of his colleagues sniggering, but we guessed they probably were.

I actually received a letter of apology from the Chief Constable himself. He didn’t mention the lie about the dent, but I’m sure that was what clinched the case in the mind of the station sergeant.

The funniest thing about this is that I’ve only ever twice banged on the roofs of cars by way of venting my anger with drivers, and on the other occasion it turned out to be a policeman, too.

Many, many years later, I was riding home from the station on my folding bicycle, a Raleigh Shopper. Just as I was coming around the corner by the Angel Pub, a car overtook me much too close. I was leaning over quite a bit, taking the corner quite fast, and he caught my right heel. I was put badly off balance, and tried to steer to correct. I’m quite good at recovering in this kind of situation, but was obviously going to hit the kerb in the attempt, so I stepped through the bike and ended up running across the pavement half carrying the bike. I was shaken but unhurt, and nothing was obviously wrong with my bike, either.

Unsurprisingly, I caught up with him again in the traffic – and banged on his roof. He got out looking dangerous, so I scarpered quick. Then, from a safe distance, I took a note of his registration. To make sure he didn’t catch up with me again, I turned left up Juniper Hill, which is closed to motor vehicles.

But he followed me! However, he obviously had never been there before. It’s not wide enough for a car to get past a bike, and the gate at the top isn’t wide enough for a car at all. I didn’t hang around to watch him reversing all the way back down.

At this point I still had no idea who he was.

I threaded my way through the alleyways in the town centre to the police station, and told them the whole story. They checked the registration I gave them against the DVLA database – and looked very surprised. “That’s a British Transport Police vehicle!” But it was the right make and model and colour.

I didn’t press the issue, and haven’t ever heard anything more about it. I wish I had pressed the issue though. I’m pretty sure that was the event that started the crack in the frame that finally killed that bike a few weeks later. I saw the same chap, with the same car, at the station a few times over the next few weeks. He pretended not to recognize me. I wondered if someone had said something to him.

In case you’ve got the impression that I have a pretty poor opinion of the police, I’d better set the record straight. I do have a pretty poor opinion of some police officers, there’s no doubt about that; and some police forces seem to have more than their fair share of bad eggs, or even to be run by them at times. But not all forces are like that, and neither are all individual officers. Whether they’re a majority or a minority is impossible for me (or anyone else) to know. It’s not the kind of thing one can collect statistics about in any meaningful way.

The support I got from the (male) police officers on duty at my local police station, the night I turned up in my nightie outside their first-floor back window, was first rate. I’m sure my brother-in-law Gareth was, before he retired, as lovely a police officer as you could hope to meet, as lovely on duty as he is in his private life.

One of Jyoti’s brothers in India is a police officer, too. I’ve no idea whether he’s a good egg or a bad ’un. Jyoti suspects he’s seriously corrupt, sad to say. A Christian, and a pillar of the local church, apparently – but that makes no difference. There’s good and bad wherever you look.

Here’s another example where I’ve nothing but praise for a few police officers – the same force as the lot who couldn’t find the thugs who trashed my flat, and not so many years later – dedicated police officers looking after the interests of a member of the public. A scruffy, long haired, anarchistic youth at that.

My friend Ed had an old Land Rover, very similar to mine, but long wheelbase whereas mine was a shorty. He’d seen it rotting away in a field, and asked the farmer if he could buy it. The farmer was delighted to get fifty quid for it. Ed got me to bring it home for him on my trailer, the one I’d made to take Brendan’s car to Fishguard, by this time repaired.

Ed spent every spare moment for the next few weeks doing it up. He did a beautiful job.

He took all the bodywork off and welded up the chassis where necessary. He rivetted patches into the bodywork where the aluminium had rotted around the attachment points to the chassis.

He dismantled the engine down to the last nut and washer and rebuilt it with all new piston rings and bearing shells. It ran like a dream.

Following my advice, when he put the bodywork back on, he insulated the aluminium from the steel with nylon washers and sleeves to stop electrolytic corrosion of the aluminium, and used stainless steel nuts and bolts with PTFE tape (plumbers’ tape) in the threads to stop crevice corrosion. This meant he had to use wired return instead of “earth” return for all the wiring, but that’s a better job anyway.

He gave it a beautiful paint job, and informed the DVLA (or whatever it was called in those days, I forget) about its new colours.

I used to work on my own hydraulic brakes. I trusted my own work more than I trusted any garage. But Ed didn’t trust himself to do the brakes. He got a local garage to do them for him. Big mistake. I hope the mechanics involved weren’t any of my former apprentices!

Ed took several of our friends out for a day in the hills the first weekend after it was finished. I couldn’t go, I had too much work to do. On the way home late that evening, they were descending a long, steep hill when the brakes failed. Ed pumped them as hard as he could, but there was nothing there at all.

He tried the handbrake. In something of a panic, he probably pulled it on too hard – whatever, the effect was disastrous. Series I Land Rovers (probably later ones as well, but I don’t know the workings of them so well) have the handbrake on the back end of the gearbox, not on the wheels, so the braking force is transmitted via the transmission.

Well, a loaded Land Rover descending a steep hill quite fast puts a pretty large torque on the halfshafts if you pull the handbrake on hard. One of them sheared, leaving him with no handbrake – and no engine braking, either.

In fact, if Ed hadn’t been panicking, he’d surely have realized that the handbrake, and the engine braking, would have worked on the front axle, if he’d shoved it into four wheel drive. Not a nice thing to do while moving, but possible if you get the engine revs right to match your speed, and what’s a nasty bit of wear on the four wheel drive engagement dogs compared with rolling out of control down a steep hill? Whatever, he didn’t do that.

He did what he could to save his life and that of his passengers. There’s a right-angled bend under a railway bridge at the bottom of that particular hill. The last thing Ed wanted to do was crash into the abutment wall at speed!

All the way down the hill, there are little old houses each side of the road. Ed suspected that if he’d crashed into any of those, they’d have fallen down around him. Not good for the occupants of the houses, and not good for the occupants of the Land Rover, either.

But outside many of those houses there were cars – some big, some small. Ed deliberately crashed the Land Rover into the back of a smallish car. The Land Rover slowed, but didn’t stop. The two vehicles slewed around a bit, and shortly the Land Rover left the other car behind.

Ed used several cars like that, trying to slow down. He eventually did crash into the bridge abutment, but not going terribly fast, and with the remains of a couple of other vehicles in front of him. Ed and all his passengers were able to climb out of the wreckage, battered and bruised but not seriously injured – not one of them.

They got away from the wreckage as quickly as they could, afraid it would all catch fire. It didn’t.

Of course people all down the hill were brought out of their houses by the noise, and were pretty upset about what had happened to their cars. Someone rang the police – probably more than one someone. Fortunately at least some of the people realized that Ed and his friends were more in need of tea and sympathy than getting beaten up.

The police breathalysed Ed, who fortunately was – unlike some of his friends – stone cold sober. They took statements. They took the Land Rover away for examination, and local garages were called to take the other wrecks away.

Why is this a pro-police story? It’s the care the police took over examining the Land Rover. They established the cause of the brake failure – a small piece of grit in a brake pipe connection, causing a slow leak of hydraulic fluid – and confirmed Ed’s diagnosis of what had happened when he pulled on the handbrake. They helped Ed with a letter to his insurance company, who then sued the garage who’d done Ed’s brakes.

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