CHAPTER 13

What’s Tha Up To This Time?

‘What’s tha up to this time?’ I thought as I peered through a set of galvanized railings towards him. Whatever it is, it must be criminal, especially at two in the morning.

The night shift on a Tuesday was normally fairly quiet. Starting at 11pm I climbed the stairs of the police station and into the CID office. First things first – and after mashing a pot of tea I grabbed an ash tray and my crime diary and sat with my feet up on the desk at the side of my snap box containing cold fish sandwiches and tomato sauce and two bananas.

As usual I was behind with the mounting paperwork side of the job, so I was glad that, for the time being, it was a quiet shift. After a couple of hours or so my two typing fingers felt like broken pit props so I packed it in and ate my snap while the going was good. You never knew on that job, what you would be dealing with next or, for that matter, what time you would get off duty.

The CID car for that night was a new Ford Escort for some reason and not the usual brown Morris Minor. I decided to nip up to the charge office in the city to drop off some paperwork and as I drove up The Cliffe I waved to my mate, Ken Adams, who was working my old beat. He didn’t wave back and obviously hadn’t recognized the new car. I knew that he was due back at the station at 2.45am and he would have checked all the shop premises on his side of the road, whilst whoever was working the beat on the other side of the road would be due back out of the station and back on his beat after having eaten his snap. This meant that there was always at least one bobby working the busy main road at any one time.

The traffic lights at the bottom of Staniforth Road were on red as I pulled up behind a Daily Express newspaper delivery lorry. When the lights turned to green the lorry slowly set off with me tucked in behind him. Glancing to my left to look at the bank and the high-class stationers next door, I saw the figure of a man standing next to the gate at the top of the passageway separating the two premises. His face showed up clearly in the glow of the small night light left on in the stationery shop. Because I had been tucked in behind the lorry, he hadn’t seen me. I was glad I was driving a new car – the brown Morris Minor CID cars were a dead give away and any decent criminal could recognize us a mile away in one of those.

There was very little traffic knocking about in those days and especially so at 2am. I’m sure that if he’d seen a car coming towards him he would have ducked into the passage way so as not to be seen but, because he saw the Daily Express lorry, he hadn’t felt the need to hide. What a bit of luck!

Following the lorry I drove the third of a mile to Effingham Road and then round the bend to Washford Bridge where I was out of his sight. I didn’t want to cause him to be suspicious in case he was watching.

As I went to use the car radio I discovered that there wasn’t one fitted in this car, the car must be on loan, or something. That’s knackered that then, I thought. No assistance and not a phone box in sight. The police box, which I’d just passed, was only about twenty yards from where I’d seen him, as was the public telephone box so they were out of the question.

This guy was no mug – he was a professional burglar as well as being a scrapper and I knew that he wouldn’t come easily.

Decisions, decisions, decisions – he was a crafty ‘pillock’ and had obviously waited until after Ken had checked the properties and had started to work his way back down The Cliff to the station. The last time I’d had dealings with him he also had an accomplice with him so I had to be mindful of that.

It must have been six or seven years before, when I was still a probationary bobby, that I’d come across him. It’s weird really, because it was on the same beat that night that Ken was now working and at a similar time in the morning as now and to cap it all only about 200 yards from where I had just seen him.

Banners, the Sheffield department store, was on the main Attercliffe Road and at one side of it was Baltic Road, a very dark and small side street and lit only by a single gas lamp. So it was on that occasion and at a similar time in the early hours that I found myself standing in a side doorway of the shop having a crafty fag, when all of a sudden and, without any warning, a huge bundle of what turned out to be, sheepskin coats tied together with a rope, landed almost at the side of me followed by the long rope itself. I nearly shit blue balls of lightning! There was obviously a burglary taking place.

I looked up into the darkness to the top of the four-storey building but couldn’t see anything. There were that many doors to cover that it was impossible for me to surround the building on my own, so I ran like the wind to the police box, which was only thirty yards away and phoned for assistance. It was nerve wracking and I was on tenterhooks waiting, hoping that the perpetrators wouldn’t get away. At last the cavalry arrived in the form of the Hillman Husky police car, a CID car, the Ford Zephyr Zodiac road traffic car and a police dog handler.

I’d only just checked the doors to the property and they were all locked, so whoever had lowered the coats down to ground level must have broken into the store through the roof. Between us we surrounded the building and covered every doorway – there was no escape. The manager was sent for and he eventually arrived, allowing access to the inside so that we could search the interior of the premises.

We slowly worked our way up through each floor of the building looking for Burglar Bill. The third floor contained household furnishings in the form of beds and settees and as we made our way through it, we watched in disbelief. Almost every bed that the police dog passed he cocked up his leg and peed on them, how we didn’t burst out laughing I’ll never know; and the dog handler never lived it down. By this time some of our lads had reached the top floor where two men were arrested.

When found, the two arrested men put up a fight and one of our lads had ended up with a broken nose and black eye as he had been head butted by the same man who I had just spotted in the alleyway.

It had been assumed that they had broken in through the roof but no signs of forced entry to the building were ever found and it remained a mystery.

By sheer coincidence I later got to know the man’s brother who, for a while, lodged in the same digs as me at Mrs Proctor’s. Alan was a lovely man and as straight as a die. He was ashamed of his brother’s criminal background and had told me that his brother’s actions had finished their mother off.

Anyway, back to the present. Having no way of communicating with anyone for assistance, I turned off Attercliffe Road and realized that if I wanted to arrest him I would have to do it myself. I drove round all the little back streets before dumping the car and continuing on foot to a safe place where I could observe him. A good five minutes had already elapsed and I was worried that he might have already scarpered. The gaps in the railings afforded me a decent view and, looking across at the bank and stationers, I could see that the iron gate at the top of the passage was now wide open and not locked, as it should be during the night.

It was now Tuesday, so why tonight? Both the bank and stationers shop would be paying out wages on a Friday. I knew that each set of premises had a safe, so why break in on Tuesday and not Thursday the night before pay day. At that point I saw him furtively come out of the shadows of the passage way and look around him. There was no one about so he bent forward and I saw him doing something near the door handle of the stationers shop. He was holding a small torch in his right hand and what seemed like about once every minute, I could see him looking at something that was obviously in his left hand but out of my view. What was he up to? I got as near to him as possible without being seen but still couldn’t work out his game. He must have done it ten or twelve times over a period of perhaps ten minutes.

Assuming that he’d been crafty enough to know that Ken had already checked the premises earlier on, he most probably knew as well that the other policeman would, any time now, be making his way back to where we were now standing; maybe this was why he was rushing. This placed me in a dilemma as to what to do next. If he saw the beat bobby or the beat bobby saw him, the game would be up and he’d be off, so I decided that I had to cross the road and grab him before that happened.

A car was approaching from the city and, as soon as he saw it he nipped into the shadows of the alleyway and at that point I silently ran across the road and pressed myself into the doorway of the bank. I’d be about ten to fifteen yards off him now. Peeping round the corner of the wall I could see that, once more, he was messing with the door and I realized that this could be my only chance to grab him. Just as I was about to sneak up behind him I heard someone cough and turned to see my mate PC Terry Bruce approaching from about forty yards away. I wasn’t the only one to hear the ill-timed cough and the guy set off like the clappers, running towards Effingham Road with me hot on his heels, at least he was on his own. We ran past the Bulldog pub and up Effingham Road and I could hear Terry shouting, ‘I’m behind thee Martyn, keep going.’ Thank goodness Terry had recognized me even though I was in plain clothes. If he hadn’t have recognized me and had seen two men legging it from the doorway of premises he could have easily caught up with me and hit me with his truncheon before realizing who it was. I was just closing in on the bloke now and, not wanting to be butted in the face, I drew level with him, stuck my left leg out and tapped his ankle which sent him sprawling, face down on the pavement, which he hit hard (how sad!). ‘That’ll do for me,’ I thought. ‘It’ll have knocked the wind out of his sails.’

Trying to get my breath back, I bent down to grab his arm but at the same time he must have rolled over and managed to grab my arm instead and then he hit me in the face with the fist of his free hand; and I could feel, yet another of my teeth go. At that point he was scrambling to his feet and I let him have one on the chin end with my right fist, ‘Cop for that mate.’ He went down like a sack of spuds. Luckily, Terry had caught us up and between us we managed to handcuff him at the same time we noticed that he had on a pair of thin rubber gloves.

As we walked him back to the police box we had to pass the stationers and the bank so I stopped for a quick look at the property. The gate had a closed shackle padlock, preventing it from being forced with a jemmy or something similar, but the lock was open. On the floor showing no signs of damage whatsoever, it must have been opened with a key. The gate was now open which had allowed him access to the stationer’s door where I’d been watching him fiddling about earlier. This door was also secure and not showing any signs of damage.

On arrival at the police box I switched on the lights, looked in the mirror and winced – there was blood everywhere and my teeth looked like a set of railings. Looking at him, he was in a similar state, but I resisted the temptation of giving him another clout for good luck.

Terry held him while I searched his pockets and the first thing I retrieved was a tube of red lipstick.

‘Not your colour this mate, what’s it for?’ I asked him but didn’t get a reply. As I emptied his pockets further I retrieved a small torch, several small files along with half a dozen keys including two very long thin ones which I immediately recognized as being safe keys because of their length. There was a short Yale-type key and this was covered in a red substance, as was a further Yale key and a more normal Chubb key. All three of those keys were covered in the same red substance. Then I recalled what Alan, his brother, had told me about the bloke not many years ago. Some of the keys were totally blank, having no notches on them, whilst the three keys covered in the red substance had got file marks and notches on them and it was then that I realized that the red substance on the recovered keys was in fact lipstick.

Alan had been right after all when he told me that his brother, who was nicknamed ‘Twirls’ was a ‘key man’.

He was one of the ‘key’ players within the criminal fraternity too, not just in Sheffield but throughout the north. He’d been an engineer by trade and his method of operation was quite simple. He would stand with his back to the door of premises which held items of high value and, using a key blank, Yale, Chubb or whatever, it might be, he would cover the keys with lipstick, put the key in the lock and then having withdrawn it he would be able see where the lipstick had been removed. That told him were he needed to file and he would file a corresponding notch in the key blank. This would allow the key to enter the lock even further and, through trial and error and filing out the necessary bits on the blank he was able to make a key that would open the lock. Although it was a tedious task it was very effective and it gave him notoriety within the criminal world.

In those days there were very few burglar alarms, unlike today, so he had all the time in the world to produce a key to get into the premises. I later established that the small Yale key that he had made fitted the padlock on the gate and the front door key was almost complete. If we hadn’t stopped him at that point he would have relocked the gate behind him, entered the premises, relocked the door behind him and then set to work making a safe key. The beat bobby would have checked the premises and found the gate closed and locked and satisfied himself that all was secure, whilst inside the burglar was hard at work. How clever was that? Luckily we stopped him in his tracks.

After having made a full set of keys he would have retraced his steps making the building secure as he left.

He was also an expert on opening safes with a combination lock and by listening to the clicks as he twirled the dial (hence his nickname) he could work his way through the combinations until the safe could be opened – he was a very clever man. His tasks completed he would then offer the keys to the highest bidder in the criminal fraternity and they in turn, would wait until their ‘intelligence’ told them that the safe would be full, so maybe the real burglary had been planned for the Thursday but we’ll never know.

He later told me, off the record, that he and his mate had got into Banners, using the same method some years before. Once in the shop they had relocked the door behind them so that when I (as a beat bobby) checked the door, it appeared to be secure. That was his method of operation. Most amateur burglars, when breaking into premises, would break in and then create an exit route for themselves to escape if they were caught.

In the case of Banners and the stationery shop the property would have been secure even though the people who had bought the keys off him were secreted on the premises.

He had no option but to admit the offence of going equipped for stealing and assaulting yours truly. When he later appeared at court he went to prison again for a further nine months.

As detectives we seemed to get involved in less fights than when in uniform, which was the one good thing about being in CID. I’d lost quite a few teeth while I was in uniform and had quite a few scraps, so I was getting uglier by the day. If you’re ever knocking about in Sheffield or Barnsley and see an ugly old man with a battered face and just one tooth left, spare a thought and give me a wave!

NB. It may be of interest to know that in Banners in those days each counter on every floor was supplied with a capsule where cash payments along with an invoice, were put. The capsule was then placed into a tube and it was sucked up and delivered straight to the Accounts Department on the top floor. They would deal with the payments and then send the correct change back to the shop counter, again through the tube. A long-winded affair but I suppose it meant that no money was handled on the shop floor. Banners even had their own metal money made called Banners cheques, which people could only spend within the shop.