Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2010 | Page 26

life

INTERVIEW

February/March 2010
to walk home. Dunno what I was
suspected of.”
Bob could have become a cynical
decrier of the law. Another time
he was thrown into a van with
an Alsatian snapping at him, for
no good reason. But somewhere
in Bob’s mind was the idea that
policemen should be more like
television’s Dixon of Dock Green. “I
thought somewhere there must be a
nice police officer.”
Bob worked at the Co-op butcher
for five years, but by now he was
married and the money was poor.
So he left to work at the local dye
works, an unforgiving place where
he saw colleagues with terrible

Photo: Glyn Kenyon - Featured on Crime Watch 2001 - Received 16 life sentences at Bradford
Crown Court in Feb 2002. Likened to Fred West and Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
Carol describes how two people can

hand-me-downs and making do. “My dad

work on one book. “I’d say to Bob: ‘How

used to repair all the shoes: for two years

d’you see Dawn, [the main character’s

I thought I had a club foot, because one

sidekick]. Bob said ‘I see her as like Dawn

foot was higher than the other!”

French.’ So we can both imagine her,

He had two paper rounds before walking

physically, then her character was based

a mile and a half to school. “But,” he

on someone we both knew well.”

says, “you just got on with it. Everyone

Plot was not a problem: it was Bob’s
whole life. At first it is hard to square

did.”
He and all his siblings made it to

the circle between this very talkative

grammar school, but Bob was the only

avuncular comedian and the dogged

one not to take his GCEs. “I was offered a

and ha rd-faced policeman you see in the

job at the butchers

newspaper cuttings, carefully compiled

– and decided to

by Carol. For even in the fuzziest little

take it.”

newspaper picture, Bob appears as a

assuming the

of fixed pallid face. “There were times I

slaughterhouse

was dealing with six murder enquiries at

went some way to

once,” he says.

preparing him for

be healthy.” He stuck it for two
years and then, taking a massive
cut in pay, he joined the police force. The
training was harsh. “In the first fortnight,
I had my hair cut six times! We learnt
to march, press our own uniform, bull
our boots. You used to parade at 2 or 3
o’clock in the morning. I used to say to
myself “what the hell am I doing here?”
Two years and several exams later Bob
was working five weeks of night duty,

the blood and gore

have turned him off the idea of policing.

he was to come

“When I was six my elder brother picked a

across later. It was

fog warning detonator off the railway line

now that he had a

and told me he’d got me a watch,” grins

second run-in with

Bob. “I was given a clip round the ear by

the police. “I was

the policeman. That didn’t seem fair!”

travelling home

Bob, born in 1952, was one of five

by bus, still with

siblings in the small Yorkshire village of

my blood-stained

Marsden, on the border with Lancashire.

butcher’s smock

Although his father was working there

on. Suddenly the

wasn’t much money to feed a large

bus stopped, I get

family. “You used to hide under the

another clip round

stairs from either the lightening or the

the ear for wasting

rent man,” he grins. It was a life of

police time and had

26

off blue dye, and thought this can’t

You can’t avoid

human mask, exhausted eyes peering out

Bob’s early brushes with the law should

burns. “I’d blow my nose and give

Photo: 1975 - Rare occasion of Bob in police uniform - at the time
he was a beat car driver.
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