Chapter 11

No Head for Heights

he miner’s daughter from Twechar, Dumbartonshire, had wanted to join the police since the age of sixteen. She had been involved in a car crash, and was impressed with the authority of the police constable who arrived and took particulars of the incident. Short in stature, she confessed to having no confidence, so she went to gymnastic classes and eventually reached a height of five feet five and one quarter. Aged just twenty, former typist Margaret Shaw Cleland travelled down to London to join the Metropolitan Police; coincidentally, the sergeant who had interviewed her for her new job had been the constable who recorded the details of the car accident four years earlier. She would later say that previously, if she was short-changed in a shop, she would be too nervous to go back to rectify matters. But all that would soon change; within months of joining, when a man attacked her, she grabbed hold of the scarf round his neck and all but garrotted him, before carrying out his arrest. And what was more, Margaret was quite unequivocal about not having a head for heights; but her courage, forty-three feet above street level, her razor-sharp reactions as a gymnast and her strong hands would soon be put to the test; none would be found wanting.

It was a chilly afternoon as Woman Police Constable 232 ‘E’ Cleland set off on patrol from Gray’s Inn Road police station on 4 March 1964. Her career had commenced on ‘Y’ Division at Wood Green police station in 1960 but she had been very unhappy in the local police section house – a woman sergeant, a strict disciplinarian, had made her life a misery – and after a short ten-month posting she had been transferred to ‘E’ Division in the heart of London’s West End and had thoroughly enjoyed her two and a half years there. She was comfortably settled at Ede Section House, Mare Street, Hackney and had taken part in undercover and plain-clothes duties; just seven months previously, she had been commended by the commissioner for her initiative and devotion to duty in connection with offences under the Licensing Acts. But no such excitement was anticipated as Margaret walked the beat and a chill wind blew across Gray’s Inn Gardens on that quiet Wednesday afternoon; it never is. However, just over a quarter of a mile away to the west in Marchmont Street, the problems of a thirty-one-year-old Cambridge garage owner, who was with his twenty-two-month-old son, were spiralling out of control and about to reach breaking point.

Thomas French had spent the previous night in a Bloomsbury hotel with his baby son Stuart. His wife Irene, eight years younger than him, had left him three weeks previously and he was desperate to find her. French had eaten lunch in a café in Coram Street and had fed the baby from his plate. Barbara White, a sixteen-year-old waitress who served him, later said, “The little boy was crying a lot.”

A little later Miss White left the café, and as she reached the junction of Coram Street and Marchmont Street a voice called out, “You know me, love, don’t you?” She looked round; then she looked up. Over forty feet above her, on the flat roof of a building scheduled for demolition, was the man to whom she had served lunch. Thomas French was sitting astride a single iron railing, about two feet above the surface of the roof; in his arms was his baby son. A card fluttered down from the roof; it was picked up by sixteen-year-old Annette Harris, who was passing. “It asked me to phone a number to see if the man’s wife had been traced,” she later said. In fact, Miss Harris tried to telephone the number on the card but was unable to get through; instead, she sensibly dialled 999. Two ambulances and two fire tenders arrived; so did a clergyman, as well as several hundred onlookers. The fire brigade called on members of the public to assist them in stretching out a huge net in the street below. Meanwhile, Thomas French was becoming more and more distressed; he shouted that he had been evicted from his flat, he chain-smoked and he called out that he would jump from the roof with the baby.

And then, within fifteen minutes of French first being seen on the roof, at 4.10 that afternoon, the crowds in the street below fell silent, because they saw WPC Margaret Cleland walking out on to the roof. She took off her cap in an effort to put French at his ease and when she heard his voice she realized he was a fellow Scot; in fact, his family came from Tollcross, Glasgow, just sixteen miles from her home in Twechar. She called out, “Will you let me speak to you, Jock?” and her accent was so broad that ‘Jock’ almost sounded like ‘Joke’ – but there was nothing remotely amusing about the situation; the guard rail upon which French was sitting was insecure, and he was becoming so agitated that at any moment he could have overbalanced – or jumped – and fallen with the baby to the street below.

Between the steeply pitched slate roof and the parapet was a foot-wide gully, and it was along this channel that Margaret started to advance steadily towards French. With the cold wind blowing through her wavy auburn hair, she began quietly and earnestly talking to the desperate man, telling him not to let his baby son die; but as French wept, he gestured wildly and swayed backwards. The crowd in the street gasped; a woman in the crowd cried, “Oh, merciful Mother of God, save the baby!” and the sobbing child called out, “Mamma!”

Margaret offered a bar of chocolate for the child, then a bottle of milk, but as she edged closer French screamed that he would jump. “It’s not the first time I’ve been fed up with everything,” Margaret told him quietly. “I’ve just sat down and thought it out.” French showed her a photograph of his wedding and said he was trying to find his wife. By now, two hours had passed since French had ascended to the roof, and the crying baby gave Margaret the excuse she needed to suggest to French that the baby was cold. Seeing the child’s discarded coat, she asked, “Do you mind if I pick up this coat and put it on the baby?” She had got within six feet of French; now, holding out the coat, she had advanced to within four feet and knew it was now or never.

Margaret placed the coat around the child’s shoulders on top of his light-blue siren suit with pixie hood and, as French lifted his arm from the child to assist her, she dived forward, grabbed the child and at the same time with her other hand seized hold of the sleeve of French’s coat. Throwing herself backwards, she wrenched the baby from French’s grasp, pulling French in towards the roof. Cradling the baby in her arms, she fell sideways on to the pitched roof. The crowd forty feet below gasped at the sheer courage of her actions; then Benjamin John Eagle and Maurice Alfred Charles Jewby, both ambulance driver attendants, dashed forward and seized French, who was lurching towards the parapet; their actions would later result in both of them being awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct.

Amidst cheers from the crowd, Margaret descended to the street where she was hugged by one of the women onlookers. “I felt like kissing her,” said Margaret.

Strapped to a stretcher, French was taken first to St Pancras hospital (and later, Friern Barnet hospital), where he received the treatment which he so badly needed; the baby was initially taken into care, and no charges were proffered by the police. Irene French was traced to a supermarket in St Aubin, on the Channel Island of Jersey; separated from a senior aircraftsman who was arrested on suspicion of having absented himself from the RAF, she sobbed, “Please bring my baby to me – I can’t live another moment without him.”

Flowers piled up on the counter at Gray’s Inn Road police station, recruiting for policewomen doubled overnight and Margaret received eight proposals of marriage. Her parents, John and Margaret Cleland, were enormously pleased. Speaking from their home at Merryflats, Twechar, her mother said, “I am very proud,” adding, “when she was young, Margaret was always very daring.” This was the twenty-three-year-old who later told the first of many press reporters, “I’m dead scared of heights!”

The incident had certainly attracted the interest of the press. The following day, the headline of the Daily Mirror was ‘Don’t let your baby son die’, and the Daily Express revealed, ‘Terror on the Roof’ with the subheading ‘Policewoman saves baby’, together with the most dramatic photographs. The news flashed around the world. The Boston Herald informed its readers of ‘A desperate man, a baby’s life, a long hour in London’. The Waco News Tribune in Texas showed the moment Margaret seized the baby with the subheading ‘Dad’s leap with baby foiled’ and the Evening Outlook, Santa Monica, California informed its readers, ‘Policewoman risks life, saves baby’. On the other side of the world, New Zealand’s Christchurch Star revealed, ‘Policewoman rescues baby from death in London drama’.

Showing a photograph of a relieved agent WPC 232, surrounded by smiling, admiring members of the public, the French press reported:

“I was terrified of falling,” remembers Margaret. “I was on the edge of the roof; the weight of the child could have caused me to fall.” Suddenly police officers and paramedics, who had been waiting at a distance on the roof, rushed past and succeeded in grabbing French just as he was about to jump. The incident had lasted for over one and a half hours, but eventually, both the father and the child were saved.

The heroine, Margaret, has been a police officer for three and a half years. It has been her dream to be a police officer since she was a child. During the rescue, she only lost her composure once: when the crowd, who had been watching in Coram Street welcomed her with tremendous applause. “I just did my duty,” she later told journalists.

Three weeks later, Margaret was awarded a commissioner’s high commendation for ‘outstanding courage and perseverance’ and on 12 May she was awarded £20 from the Bow Street Metropolitan Magistrates’ Court Reward Fund by Mr K.J.P. Barraclough, who described her as ‘a very brave young woman’.

But when three months later Margaret discovered that she was to be awarded the George Medal, she admitted she was ‘stunned’. “I don’t know why they’ve done this,” she told reporters. “I’ve already had a £20 reward – I never expected anything else.” Margaret’s mother stated, “This is the proudest day of my life,” and now, discharged from hospital, Thomas French praised her as well. “It was a very brave thing,” he said. “She saved my son’s life and mine, too.”

All good things come to an end. Having collected her medal from the Queen at Buckingham Palace and just before Christmas, on 20 December 1964, Margaret Cleland voluntarily resigned from the Force. She had served with the Metropolitan Police for just four years and twelve days. Due to her brief service, her Certificate of Conduct was shown as ‘very good’. But on her Central Record of Service this was crossed out. Instead, it was amended to read ‘exemplary – by direction of the commissioner’.

Margaret’s early departure from the Metropolitan Police was at the behest of her father. Margaret’s mother had suffered poor health all her life; now, her father asked Margaret to return to Twechar to help look after her. Margaret must have proved to be a most competent nurse; speaking to me in 2010 at the age of seventy, she remarked wryly, “She died last year – she was ninety-one!”

Within six months of returning to Dumbartonshire, she rejoined the police as part of that county’s constabulary and there she worked as a woman police constable for two years. A daughter was born in 1967 as the result of a relationship which sadly failed to last. Margaret was later employed as a civilian at the front counter of one of Lanarkshire Constabulary’s police stations; it was there she met her future husband, one of the constabulary’s serving police officers, and they married in 1977. Her spouse was not one of the original eight suitors who proposed marriage following the events which won her the George Medal, and that was a pity. It was, as Margaret told me, ‘a most unhappy marriage’, which came to an end when her husband died of cancer in 1988. She now lives alone, still in Scotland, close to her daughter and her daughter’s family and still close to her roots.

Following his discharge from Friern Barnet hospital, Thomas French was reunited with his wife and he returned to his garage at Station Road, Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire. Susan Raif, who knew the Frenches prior to the marital breakup, described Thomas French as being ‘a really nice, kind chap’. She last saw him in the late 1960s when he was running a stall at Cambridge market. Stuart French, now a forty-eight-year-old office worker, told me in 2010, “Having initially been put into care, we had to go to court in Cambridge for me to be officially returned to my parents,” and the family was increased by two daughters. In 1980 French sold the garage business and moved to Linwood Road, Cambridge; Irene French died of an aneurism in 1990, and Thomas French followed her to the grave when he died of cancer in 2007.

And in 1965, the year following Margaret’s departure from the Metropolitan Police, Gray’s Inn Road police station closed for operational purposes. During its sixty-seven-year existence, it had produced some outstanding police officers – but few as courageous as Margaret Cleland.