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Harold Taylor was born in 1926 in Arundel. He then moved with his family to Chichester where he spent most of his young life, having undertaken many jobs, including plumber's mate and labourer, before joining the Merchant Navy.
He served with the MN during World War 2, before joining the police force in the late 1940's. Here Harold reveals some memories from his times on night duty.
Going back again to my days in Horsham, and I am reminded of another funny little incident. I was on night duty patrolling the east side of town, when John Moseley was doing the town centre. Not long after I had my supper break I got a call to go into the station.
There was John who had brought in a young girl of about 12. The story was, that as he went along Albion Road he had come across this girl in the shadows, and upon questioning her did not know what to make of the situation.
According to her story, she had arranged with several other girls to have a midnight feast at one of the other girl's houses. She had gone along to the house and although she had tugged and tugged on the string left hanging from the window, she had been unable to attract attention.
After some delay and being a bit frightened she had started her return journey when the policeman found her.
By the time the full story had emerged and the name of the girl had eventually been obtained I was sent at about 4.30 a.m. to contact her parents. The father was from a local firm of auctioneers.
Having eventually roused the household, they were incredulous that their daughter was not tucked up in bed. The consumption of about half a bottle of whisky between the father and myself was had before he thought himself fit to come and confront the situation.
By this time the Sergeant had arrived on the scene and I was glad to get out of the way before my breath was noticed. It is incidents like this which make night duty pass the quicker.
One night I was on office duty in the same town, and during the small hours, Alf, one of the nervous brigade reported in that he had disturbed intruders at the slaughterhouse.
I was able to contact one constable but it would be sometime before he was likely to put in an appearance, so I rang the Inspector, who lived across the road. He appeared in a mixture of pyjamas and uniform and instructed me to accompany him to the scene on cycle, where we arrived with truncheons drawn, but failed to find any intruder.
In the meantime, the constable reporting in from another beat had read the note left at the station and joined us for the ride back.
Funny things that one does in all innocence. On yet another wet and miserable night, about two o'clock in the morning a transport driver, probably the post office night delivery, reported that he had come across a herd of cows walking down Kings Road, which led out of town proper.
George Ide and myself were dispatched with a hurricane lantern on our bikes to locate this nuisance, which we did, but it was useless trying to get past the cows as they either ran ahead of you or tried to go off at a tangent.
We decided just to walk the herd and follow behind in the hope that we could turn them off the main road, which we did when we reached the junction of Rusper Road.
We still did not know what we were going to do with them, but we did know that we could not take them for more than about half a mile for there were railway crossing gates which were always kept closed for road traffic.
We passed where I was living in this road and carried on, but before we reached the crossing we noticed in the gloom that there was a gateway on our left, through which we managed to get the cows and closed the gate after us.
We stopped for a while for George to light a cigarette, then commenced our journey back, only to come across another herd of cows!
Having cursed our luck and commenced following this lot, I realised by their colouring that they were the same cows we had just left in a field. We went back and looked and could not believe our misfortune. The field had a gateway, but no fencing. So back to following the cows again.
This time when we reached Kings Road, they turned right and missed going down the main road but again took a side road, Pondtail Road.
A little way along here I remembered an open space where heavy goods vehicles were scrapped or stored by a family that seemed to collect them, as well as ex WD vehicles. We managed to turn the animals into this large area and were successful in barricading them in.
When we got in contact with the house to tell them what we had done, the owner of the land remarked that he hoped the animals would come to no harm as he had sprayed the field with caustic to keep the weeds down. I don't remember there being any more bother over the incident.
Harold Taylor, West Sussex, 2001
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