Islington Nick

While with the Special Patrol Group I passed the promotion examination, and after spending a few weeks at Enfield Highway as an acting sergeant in 1969 I was promoted to sergeant, and sent to Islington nick (NI). Working with two other sergeants, Denis Prendergast and Percy Rush I worked on ‘C’ Relief. They were good days. Denis was a kind-hearted Irishman who helped me enormously, and we spent a lot of time together. Denis was a Station Sergeant, then a rank higher than an ordinary PS, and was always the Duty Officer, with Percy and me taking turn about to be Station Officer one day, and Section Sergeant the next.

Percy was an amiable rogue, and fortunately I didn’t have to spend much time with him as he always managed to get into scrapes. At that time single officers lived in Section Houses, I’d been in an horrible one above Tottenham nick, then moving to the luxury of Elizabeth House in Highgate. During my early days at Islington there was a section house in a building at the rear of the station yard. Later there was a new, purpose-built, building in Canonbury.

Just after the old Section House building was cleared, and before the builders moved into to convert it to offices, I drove into the yard late one night to see Percy trotting across the yard towards the Section House with a cell mattress under his arm. Beside him a young woman tottered along on high heels. She was undoubtedly a prostitute. ‘It’s OK,’ said Percy, ‘she hasn’t got anywhere to stay tonight. Can you look after the Front Office while I see her settled down?’ I smiled at his huge wink, and Percy came back with a smile on his face, having taken an hour to settle his young lady down for the night.

In those days we wore blue cotton shirts that were real pigs to iron, with detached collars with the studs leaving small bruises on the front and back of my neck. I walked into the front office one hot summer Sunday, to be grabbed by Percy, who asked me to look after the station while he went to the new Section House at Canonbury. I agreed and off he went to have a shower, to cool down.

He’d been gone about 15 minutes when our Chief Superintendent walked in. In those days that meant I jumped to attention, calling out ‘All correct Sir,’ even when it wasn’t. The Guvnor checked the Duty State and demanded to know where was Percy. Mumbling excuses I went to the Reserve Room (the station’s communication centre) and told them to get Percy back to the station as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile the Guvnor was checking the books, with intense concentration, and finding more and more errors and I was getting the butt end of his rancour, and I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Percy was going to get it in the neck when he did turn up, from me as well as the Guvnor.

Percy finally arrived. It was clear that he’d taken a shower at the Section House, and that was an heinous offence (don’t ask me why, but that was the way it was). As he marched in I burst out laughing because he’d clearly rushed out of the shower, dressed, jumped in the car and driven back to the station. He hadn’t bothered to towel himself dry, and his pale blue linen shirt, now dampened, had turned a much darker shade of blue. With his hair still dripping wet he looked a real sight.

For the Guvnor it was all too much, and Percy was dragged off to his office to be told off. The disciplinary regime under which we worked was really stupid, as someone like Percy could run rings around the system, and in so doing show that these senior officers really had little control over our activities.

In practice sergeants ran the service we gave to the public, and senior officers were little more than an encumbrance, doing simple administrative jobs, such as checking the books. Task that anyone could have managed.