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Harold Taylor transferred from Horsham to Worthing police force in May 1951, aged 25, and took up residence in a police rented house in the eastern part of the borough with his wife, Monica. Harold tells us ...
My main beat was to become the east side of the town centre although I nearly always worked this in conjunction with another beat which gave me the whole of the east side of town, south of the railway line to the Lancing boundary.
I do not really remember any of my early successes, or whether I was placed on attachment to CID that same year. Certainly that autumn I had two minor recognitions of ability. The first was coming up to firework day. I was not working my usual beat, but one on the west side of the lower end of the town. This is where luck comes in again.
I was making a point at the pier, when my attention was drawn to some children letting off fireworks. I went to remonstrate with them about letting them off in a public place, and realised that they had a lot of money's worth.
On questioning them, I was not happy with the answers, so I trooped the group of eight, back to two shops at which they alleged they had bought the fireworks. It transpired that most, if not all, had been stolen by shoplifting. The ringleader was a lad of eight, the eldest being a boy of thirteen. In the end five of the kids were prosecuted.
The ringleader, Barry, was the son of an ex-Hong Kong Police Inspector. He had been brought up on the streets of that town with its urchins, and learnt their streetwise habits. In fact he was a real little villain. Where the father lived I do not know, I only met him the once.
What work he did is also unknown to me, but sometime later I understood that he had gone to Kenya as a Chief Inspector in the Police. The wife seemed to be fundamentally a one-parent family, and carried on as the local area distributor for a mail catalogue firm.
I had a certain amount of difficulty and found my efforts frustrated as one of the other constables in my section was for sure having an affair with her and passing back bits of information that would help the lad's defence.
When the lad was in his teens, he mounted an armed hold up in Worthing, and in recent years has been convicted of a brutal double murder of two prostitutes in London.
I have just come across some cuttings on the subject and am reminded of his accomplice in this savage crime, which was variously described as the 'Bondage Murderers' and the Miss Whiplash Killers.
He was at one time a near neighbour of mine after I left the Police and was living at Sompting. I had during my service dealt with his father several times arising out of driving uninsured, unlicensed vehicles and being disqualified as well as being banned etc.
When this lad was about 14 he had a disagreement with his mother. I believe it had something to do with school. He went to the local garage not far from his house, bought a gallon of paraffin then went home, poured it all over the place and set fire to the house.
At the time my youngest daughter was only four or five and the fire left a long lasting impression upon her and her fear of fire.
There has always been a calculated theory that most local crime is engineered by big business barons and a set of circumstances that came together over a period of years after I left the force convinces me that this is probably true.
Following quite closely upon the last case and probably running with it, I also had another bit of good fortune of clearing up petty crime of a nature that was almost unheard of as a success.
I was returning to the station to pick up some information, when a young girl, who complained that her cycle lamps had been stolen within recent minutes, approached me. When I got to the station I found that the purpose for which I had been called back was a similar offence in the same area.
Recalling my own childhood, I thought about the dark winters evenings when we would go to the parks and have a game chasing using torches to indicate your whereabouts before moving on to another position. With this in mind I went to the nearest local park and waited.
Sure enough, after an interval of time, I saw lights flash and kept track of them till I found them congregate in one area with a shelter. I was then able to approach the area without being seen. When I entered the shelter there was little room for escape and they were also surprised and unable to dispose of their loot.
Sure enough two of the torches being used were cycle headlamps. This piece of common or garden detection was regarded as pure genius in some eyes and by the general personnel as exceptional, and as the result of this I was given a second spell on CID.
This could be sheer boring, as one was only given the types of crime for which no successful conclusion was expected, or just circulating details to dealers etc. in between walking round the local stores on the lookout for shoplifters.
During the early part of my arrival at Worthing one of the Detective Sergeants was away at Police College with a view to improvement. When he came back he went on the streets as a Patrol Inspector and attached to the section that I was in.
He had also been impressed with my success and when in the following year there was a spate of serious housebreaking in the Goring area, a re-organising of beats was made.
It was decided that to improve the patrols in that area, the chaps on that area would be permanent, and that the beat would never be shared with another. I was selected to be one of the officers, and the local beat policeman was another. The third was of the same name as myself.
This was a long traipse for me each day, as another rule had been brought in to maintain good cover. This was that the last point each day had to be on that beat.
This meant that having made that point one had to then travel into the police station to deposit the police cycle and collect your own before going home. As these had to be signed for, there was inevitably a delay, as well as the prospects of being way laid to talk about aspects of the day's circumstances.
It was not a happy situation as far as I was concerned.
Harold Taylor, West Sussex, 2001
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