Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2015 | Page 24

INTERVIEW

because within 18 months he’d risen in
rank to the heady heights of number one
cashier at the branch. This made him
responsible for running the Frimley Green
sub-branch, to which he was regularly
despatched with his own elderly ‘guard’.
Such was his progress that Den was told
by his manager that he could expect to
be a bank manager himself… by the time
he was 40!
And that scary little prediction, it
seems, was enough to kick the more
unconventional side of his personality
into action.
“I was only about 18 and I went home
and thought: ‘Who gets to be 40?’
It sounded impossibly old to me, and
the thought of waiting that long just
wasn’t on!” he says.
So what did he do?
The very next day he strode into the
police station, right next door to his bank,
and asked how he could go about joining
the Force. Two days later, he’d handed
in his notice at Lloyds and was looking
forward to training as a PC.
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“My parents weren’t best pleased,” he
says, “because they saw the bank as a
good safe career – but I’d already made
up my mind”.

On the beat
After spending three months at the
police training college in Sandgate, Kent
– which he loved and thrived on, with

“If I hear that little
voice telling me to do
something, I always
listen to it”
its mix of sport and comradeship – he
was posted away from his home turf, and
promptly landed on the Isle of Wight.
“I was posted to Shanklin, which I had

some memories of from holidays as a
young child, but otherwise it was all new
to me” he says.
He instantly loved the work though,
pounding the community beat and
getting to know people. Not that there
was much crime in those days: “You
might get the odd pub scuffle during the
summer season, but in winter there was
nothing happening at all”.
That left him with plenty of time to find
his way around and get to know people –
and it wasn’t long before the gregarious
Den had struck up a friendship with
the people at a bookshop in Shanklin’s
Regent Street, known rather quaintly
then as Ramsden’s Library.
He was often in there searching for
books on his abiding passion – matters
of the mind, spirituality and hypnosis
– and after hearing of his banking
background, the owners invited him to
do their bookkeeping in his spare time.
This was to turn into his next career
move – out of the police force and into
the unlikely role of a full-time job with