CHAPTER 9

Those Wonderful Men in their Flying Machines

When I joined the police force in 1962 I couldn’t believe my luck when each year the force was asked to send a quota of policemen to the Finningley Air Show to assist the RAF personnel with crowd and traffic control. When these duties were over, you could spend the rest of the day wandering around the various displays and talking to the pilots. I was like a little kid all over again and the thoughts of free admission, free food at the venue and then to get paid for going, had me rubbing my hands big style. Most of our lads volunteered to cover the football matches in Sheffield but, being a cricketer myself, football never held much interest to me; but sometimes if they were short we had to go the Finningley Air Show and I always found it odd that not many of the lads would volunteer to go.

Right from being a nipper I have been fascinated by aeroplanes. How did they get off the ground? How did they stay in the air? Was it cold up there in the sky? How did they know where to go and then land? Did they take their snap up to eat in the air? Where did they go for a wee or a pooh?

All these were the questions that I asked myself and my dad as a little boy. Dad was a coal miner and he was called up to do his National Service in the RAF during the Second World War after which he went back down the pit. I saw photographs of him in his RAF uniform and, like all kids in those days, just after the war, I was mesmerized by it all. In those days we all thought that our respective dads had won the war on their own, including me and the highlight of my social calendar, as a youngster, was the day trip to Finningley Air Show (now Robin Hood Airport) near Doncaster and about fifteen miles from where we lived in Darfield. I felt like Biggles.

Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Wellingtons, Beverleys, Austers, Tiger Moths and Gloucester Meteors were all there and then later came the famous Vulcan. I was enthralled along with the tens of thousands of other people there on the day.

Little was I to know then that many years later my daughter Sally’s partner Michael Woodhall would become a ground crew member of our country’s famous Red Arrows Flying Display Team. As I write this on the 3rd September 2012 Christine and I, along with Sally and our grandson Max have just returned from the home of the ‘Reds’ at Scampton Air Base in Lincoln. Each year family members of the crew are invited to the base for a private display. In 2011 the family day was quite rightly cancelled due to the two terrible and separate incidents that caused the untimely deaths of pilots Jon Egging and Sean Cunningham in that year. Having met them both before on different occasions I can tell you that they were both super guys and, as the remaining seven Red Arrows flew over us and then formed a giant heart shape out of smoke in the sky, I can assure you that amongst the few hundred privileged people that were there that day there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen. Part of Great Britain’s reason to be proud was witnessed there that day, as was tradition.

I am proud to say that both Jon and Sean had read my first book (What’s Tha Up To?) and, along with the rest of the crew, had sent me a wonderful signed photograph of the Reds, wishing me all the best with my books. The photograph takes pride of place in our home.

Anyway let’s get back to work.

Sunglasses, jeans, a pair of fast-running pumps and a tee shirt were the order of the day, it was red hot. Now I was back here as a detective and as I strolled and mingled with the crowd at the Finningley Air Show, I felt like Sean Connery from the latest James Bond film, Diamonds are Forever, but without his looks and his gun.

‘Pick pockets’ were always a problem and the more people that were gathered together, the more the ‘dippers’ liked it.

Along with about another dozen or so detectives from various police stations we had been deputed to watch out for the dippers. We’d been shown photographs of the faces of organized gangs which operated out of a lot of major cities in the country, to help us in our search.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were no such things as credit cards and people generally got paid on a Friday – and mostly on a weekly basis – in cash. This, of course, meant that peoples’ wallets and purses would be full of money and that was the big attraction to the pick pockets. Families were there with their kids on probably one of the very few days out that they would have in the year. So when you looked at the fact that there were tens of thousands of people at the Air Show the ‘artful dodgers’ decided that they would also put on a display.

Never having done it before and with very little information to go on, I decided to apply some logic to the scenario and in my mind’s eye I turned into a pick pocket looking for my target, ‘Where would I start?’ I thought and looked around me. People were milling about everywhere and some were queuing at the various refreshment stalls. As I looked closely at the queues you could see mums standing there, purse in hand and ready to pay, whilst the men stood waiting with wallets in hand – just as you and I have done many times before.

Having been served at the counter you could see that some of the kids were playing their parents up as they vied for their mum’s or dad’s attention and it was easy for the mums to casually pop their purses back into their shopping bags. The bags would be full of jumpers and Pak-a-Macs and because of that, mum’s purse landed on top of those things, in open view for all to see. Because it was so hot the men weren’t wearing jackets and as a result their wallets would end up in the back pocket of their jeans or trousers with half of it sticking out because the pocket was too small. Further checking of the other queues showed that this was common practice and I suddenly realized that, for the same reason, half of my own wallet was also on display in the back pocket of my jeans. I grabbed it and stuffed it into the top of the waistband of my trousers – but inside my shirt. It shook me when I realized just how easy it was for the opportunist thief to make a good living at the expense of our carelessness. People must have already had purses and wallets stolen as it came out over the loud speaker, ‘Watch out, there’s a thief about.’

After a couple of hours of people watching and looking for ‘Fagin’s gang’ I have to say that I was disappointed not to have made an arrest but these lads were professional and not easy to catch. I felt a bit better when I went into one of the hangers for a sandwich and a pot of tea to be told by the RAF police that no one had as yet been caught.

Looking at the events programme I could see that one of my favourite planes, the English Electric Lightning was due to give a display and then land, so I made my way to the wide, roped-off area where, after landing, the plane would taxi back towards the hangers. I wasn’t surprised to see a crowd of about ten-deep behind the ropes already and I, like them, couldn’t wait and wished that I was in the front row.

A couple of minutes later in came ‘the Lightning’ – the plane was in low level horizontal flight and no noise could be heard until the pilot suddenly turned the plane skywards at what seemed like an impossible angle. The noise was incredible as it very quickly became a dot in the sky.

The Lightning was unusual in that it had two huge jet engines that were mounted in the tail with one on top of the other and, after landing, it was approaching us from our left and in the middle of the roped-off runway. The heat from the red-hot engines made the air shimmer behind him and as he got nearer to us the noise was getting louder and louder – it was brilliant.

The plane about to taxi passed us when a big bloke in front of me moved to one side to get a better view, which then blocked my view. I was furious and as we were all craning our necks forward in order to get a better view of the plane, out of the bottom corner of my left eye I saw a man’s hand shoot forward and grab the wallet out of the big man’s back pocket. If I’d have blinked I’d have missed it – so fast and for a split second I thought I must have been seeing things.

As I spun to my left I saw a slim chap of about twenty-five and six-foot tall wearing a denim jacket about to walk behind me and away from the crowds – the total opposite behaviour of all the other people there who were watching the plane. I was just about to grab his arm when he turned, saw me coming towards him, and set off running. He must have realized that I had spotted him and also, probably, who I was; and he was running like a hare with me hot on his heels. About twenty yards in front of us and blocking his way were a couple of fire engines which were there to make sure that the plane had made a safe landing and after a quick look round to see me still following him, he turned left down the side of them, ducked under the rope and set off to cross the runway. By this time I was shouting, ‘Stop!’ but no one could hear me because of the noise of the aircraft, so I also ducked under the rope in pursuit. The runway was very wide and there was a fair distance between us – I didn’t stand a chance. As I watched him he suddenly fell over and, much to my astonishment, started to roll over and over. ‘What the hell?’ I thought and then I suddenly realized that the runway was roped off because of the power of the jet engines, the powerful turbulence of which had obviously bowled the lad over. I could also feel the blast and had to stop or otherwise it would have been me on the tarmac next. At this point the plane turned towards its allotted parking spot, so the engines were now facing away from us and this meant that I could race across the tarmac and grab him.

A uniformed policeman, who must have been nearby, arrived a couple of seconds later and the man, who made no attempt to escape, was writhing about on the floor in agony. His left arm was broken and he had superficial cuts to his face. An ambulance was sent for but before its arrival I searched him and found three wallets which, it turned out, had all been stolen from the crowd who, like me, were waiting for the plane to taxi up the runway. It was obviously part of the man’s strategy to take advantage of the fact that the noise was deafening and the people in the crowd were jostling each other in order to get a better view – how clever. The Artful Dodger was accompanied to the hospital by the uniformed policeman and I later visited the guardroom and gave a statement to the RAF Police.

I was never called to give evidence and for that reason I assume that the man must have pleaded guilty to theft, but I have no idea what happened to him. To think that he alone could have stolen twenty to thirty purses or wallets made me realize how crime can pay. No wonder that they could afford to travel up by train from London or anywhere else for that matter and make it a profitable day.

It would have been very easy for me to pretend to my mates that I’d observed the man and followed him prior to his arrest but the truth is that it was a pure fluke and I was just lucky that I happened to be in the right place at the right time and I am still in awe at the speed and deftness of his profession. The rest of the day was uneventful apart from the fact that I must have checked to see that my own wallet was still there once every ten minutes.

I would like, if I may, to dedicate this chapter to pilots Jon Egging and Sean Cunningham of the Red Arrows Flying Display Team and their respective families. They were doing what they were doing for you and I and they will be greatly missed. The Red Arrows are as much a British icon as the London Bus or our Red Telephone Boxes – a national treasure. Let us all make sure that they keep flying by giving them our support.

Per ardua ad astra (Through adversity to the Stars)