Small town bobby to top of the cops
Last updated 05:16, Friday, 21 November 2008
As a young constable in Wigton, in 1949, Ray Huddart was comprehensively kitted out. He was issued with a steel rule, a whistle, a pair of handcuffs and a heavy wooden baton. The wooden baton was kept in a special pocket in his uniform trousers.
A Cumbrian Copper: Recollections of a Top Detective by Ray Huddart. Bookcase. £10
A bike was essential for a policeman with a rural beat and Ray was required to provide his own, but he did have a shilling a week bicycle allowance. He also had to provide his own torch.
He was ready to deal with any incident. When he stopped to remonstrate with an old lady crouched over the gutter outside Noel Carrick’s sweetshop about her lack of modesty, he was told, “Tek ne notice of him, Maggie – he’s nobbut a bairn!”
He would cycle for four hours around Wigton to ascertain the condition of the road signs, take responsibility for dog-licences and visit local sheep clippings.
One Sunday night he found a dead body in the alley beside the church. A local publican had suffered a heart attack.
In the years since those early days on the beat in Wigton, Ray’s police life changed beyond measure. The police have lost something of that neighbourly, local-bobby feel, society has become wealthier and more complicated and crime seems to have risen inexorably.
Ray has witnessed the changes in Cumbria from a unique vantage point. He was a constable in Keswick and Kendal, and then a detective sergeant and eventually he was to be found in Police Headquarters as the Head of Cumbria CID. Quite an impressive journey for a lad who’d started work on a farm near Dearham.
He’s encountered some villains in his time. He still recalls escorting prisoners by public transport across the country. He’d deliver a criminal to Durham jail or collect one from London. The pair of them would be hand-cuffed together and get on the bus and catch the train and they would be inseparable for the duration of the journey. It was one way of getting to know the clientele.
Ray led the inquiry into the Seaton murder. John Alan West, a 53-year-old van driver was battered to death in his semi-detached house in King’s Avenue.
Gwynne Owen Evans was found with West’s name badly scratched off a wrist watch. He’d entered West’s house along with Peter Anthony Allen in the small hours thinking they’d find some money.
Evans gave himself away under interrogation when he mentioned a knife being used. West had, in fact, been stabbed in the heart. Evans was hanged in Manchester gaol and Allen in Liverpool. They were the last two men to hang in Britain.
The most unpleasant, villainous man Ray ever encountered was ‘Black Jack’ Preece, a long-distance lorry driver from Stoke. He’d murdered Helen Will, a lady of ‘easy virtue’ from Aberdeen and dumped her body in a wood by a lay-by near Longtown.
Ray’s was a long career. He received the Queen’s Police Medal, the Service’s highest award and in his later years he was involved in the setting up of television’s Crimewatch UK and developing the HOLMES computer, which was at the heart of police investigations for many years.
Ray’s was a distinguished career. Few people know the full breadth of society as well as a senior policeman. Ray’s memoir is not simply a recollection of a life encountering the worst of Cumbrian crime, but an interesting reflection on the great changes that have taken place in our society since those days when he was first issued with his wooden baton in Wigton.
A Cumbrian Copper is available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and from www.bookscumbria.com
