IMAGE CREDIT: Jack Warner as Constable George Dixon
NEW SECTION: Evening all: Retired police officer joins Bay Life to keep tabs on new crime prevention in the community
Retired Brighton policeman, Paul Smith joins Bay Life this week, posting about security and crime matters and his research into the genealogy with specific reference to World War One soldiers and their regiments.
Paul also has a specific interest in the military service. He served for 24 years in the Police in Brighton and was a Scots Guards musician.
Paul was a well known bobby on the beat in Brighton and moved, with wife Annie, to Beachlands in Pevensey Bay,
The couple are now based in Eastbourne, but a regular visitors to the Bay on a weekly basis, the place they say is their first love, in particular Beachlands.
Dividing his time between a part-time position working at a local Express superstore and his passion for research into genealogy, he could often be seen in our local library.
Paul is also working on his first novel for children, which is to be dedicated to his two sons, which he describes as a kind of ‘Watership Down’ based in Sussex Downland near Brighton with the working draft name “Sweet Hill’.
Paul says “in the absence of a community beat officer here in Pevensey Bay, I am posting a kind of crime prevention section, one of my jobs was to give crime prevention talks to various bodies.”
Here in the first of his posts, which also form part of his ‘blue pencil notebook’ in the Pevensey Bay Journal, he turns his attention to the question of garages. On Saturday, he considers garden sheds and stolen bikes.
In reverence to his sense of public duty as a policeman, and with his characteristic wit, he posts to Bay Life at 6:25pm on Saturdays, the same time Dixon of Dock Green was broadcast on BBC1. The programme was voted second most popular programme on British TV in 1961.
The Bobby on the Bay Life Beat is available to browse online and to read in the Pevensey Bay Journal.
Here are his thoughts on garages, to offer a flavour of what he will be doing by keeping tabs on his new crime in the community section
This weekend, at Saturday tea time, he looks at sheds and stolen bikes.
Garages
A thief will break into a garage to steal a car or to steal property.
He will break into a garage or shed to find tools he can use to break into a home.
But other than cars we store some amazing stuff in our garages other than cars.
Motorcycles, bicycles, tools, electric garden equipment, sports gear such as golf clubs and bags.
Are you a biker and store expensive leathers and helmets in there.?
Freezers packed with food especially at Christmas including expensive presents to hide from partners and children. If a thief will break into a home and steal presents from around the Christmas tree he will certainly steal them from the garage or shed.
Padlocks on doors and locked windows with even wire mesh inside the windows.
Most people have a simple lock on the door of the garage, he goes in that way and unlocks the garage from the inside and exits with your goods and/or your car unless you have a sturdy bar in front of the garage door.
It’s all about what is important in the garage or shed and slowing the thief down and hoping he makes a noise or maybe gives up.
Bobbies 100 years ago said “the best copper is when it rains” and that is still true today.
