Free Life on the Run by Stan Eldon

applied to rejoin the Berkshire Constabulary. I had to report to my old police station at Windsor to see if I measured up to their requirements. I had no problem education wise, but the inspector who was checking me out, started to take my measurements. Everything was all right until it came to my chest measurement. He put the tape around my skinny frame and it was barely thirty-four inches; quite a bit below the required thirty-eight inches. Luckily the superintendent came in to see how things were going; the inspector conveyed the disaster of my chest measurement to him. The ‘Super’ then asked the inspector to measure me again, and he put his hand behind my back and twisted the tape to take up a few inches, and I was in the police. The only problem was that every year when I got my new uniform, it was like a sack and always had to be tailored to fit. In these early days we had two different uniforms; one was the now familiar open-neck collared tunic with lapels, and the other was a relic from the previous century, the buttoned-up to the neck tunic.
    Shortly after my interview at Windsor, I was at the Police Training College at Sandgate, in Kent. There was a slight panic when some of the ex-servicemen on my course were called back to the forces for the Suez crisis. I was under threat of being called back for a few days, but they did not require my running, signalling or shooting skills, so I was able to settle into the course. Surprisingly for someone who had never been very good at exams, I had top marks all the way through the course; all over ninety per cent; much to the annoyance of my class mates who studied every evening, while I ran along the seafront between Sandgate and Hythe. I enjoyed the time at Sandgate and got plenty of training.
    Other memories of Sandgate were not so good. The chief constable who took the salute at our passing out parade, went to prison shortly afterwards for corruption, and not long after that there was a scandal around the commandant of the training centre. It was a time when the practises of the past had got out of hand and were being jumped on.
    I managed to keep up with regular racing and was getting more invitations. Somehow I managed to get away from Sandgate to take part in quite a few of these events. I won a two mile race at one of my favourite events, the Agars Plough meeting at Slough, in 9:10.8, and then two days later I was at the White City in an invitation 3,000 metres, where I managed fifth in 8:28.6. I went back to the White City again for the Fire Brigade Sports, where I ran the 3,000 metres in 8:32. I had plenty of club races to take me up to November, when I finished fifth in the five mile race at Rochester in 25:53.
    Once that was over, it was into work as a police constable on the beat at Wokingham. I lived in digs and got home to Windsor as often as I could. It was a very uneventful year of policing, apart from racing home on my cycle one lunch time, and not watching the traffic in front of me in the main shopping street of the town. I hit a car that had stopped and went clean over the top, with my helmet flying off in another direction. The populous of Wokingham were amused and I was suitably embarrassed but not damaged.
    On another occasion, I set off the Broadmoor alarm early one Sunday morning and had everyone in a panic for miles around.
    There was, for a few weeks, some trouble on Saturday nights at the Drill Hall in Wokingham, where gangs of teddy boys from Slough and Maidenhead used to congregate, but it did not last long as our ‘governor’ believed in treating force with force, and after a few Saturday nights of “pressure” from us in blue, they decided Wokingham was not the place to be. Today it would be called “zero tolerance” - nothing much has changed over forty-plus years!
    It was on the beat at Wokingham that I first came across real poverty. It was in an unexpected place, in cottages between the very good Rose Inn on