Learning to be Nottscops

There have always been chapters in your life that you never forget and for Nottscops the time they spent at District Training Centres on initial courses stay in the mind forever. Most of us will even be able to quote the number of nine o’ clock parades we were given.
I learnt the job in 1974 at Pannal Ash, near Harrogate. Although many look back on their initial course with fond memories I found the whole thing quite depressing. Less than a year previously I had got married in the Buckinghamsire town of Amersham and immediately moved up with my new wife to live in Nottingham, getting a transfer from the High Wycombe branch to the Nottingham branch of Dixons where I worked as a shop assistant. Ten months later, after a short spell with Jessops, I joined the police. Being relatively new to Nottingham and still finding our feet, my wife and I dreaded the idea of me being ten weeks apart with just short weekends back at home. When the course was over it took me months to break the news to her that I would have to go back up there in eighteen months to go on the utterly pointless continuation course.

In those days the discipline at DTCs was a lot more intense than it is now – “Shame!” I hear you say! In fact it was a bit of a culture shock for many, resulting in a few instances of some recruits, suitcase and helmet in hand, doing a U-turn on their first arrival and reconsidering the whole option of joining the police after all. It was all a bit military I suppose, rather like doing National Service. In fact when I applied to join Notts Police the recruitment sergeant, Graham Marsden, did say that if I had been in the armed services I would find the discipline easier to accept. I never had that sort of discipline at Dixons so I did wonder what I was letting myself into.

Getting up to Pannal was a feat in itself, not having a car myself. However, after a few enquiries at the place it was a case of finding someone who had a spare seat in their car and making arrangements to be dropped off on Friday night and picked up again Sunday afternoon to go back. The weekends were so short. Everyone had to be checked back in Sunday night ready for restart on Monday morning.

Life at Pannal Ash was a bit like Harry Potter’s training at Hogwarts only more scary. There were periods of classroom training and practical exercises including dealing with road accidents on Yew Tree Lane, the main road on the campus. At the time I did my training there, the Central Planning Unit had recently done away with the need for students to learn every definition off by heart which made things easier, although we did have to know the definition of theft word perfect. I still have my “Students’ Lesson Notes” binder which formed the syllabus for the course. Each Monday morning we had to do slip tests which was a multi answer exam test based on last week’s lessons.

Drill was a right pig. Marching on to the square each morning with the dread of being picked out on parade and given another “Nine o’ clock” for having less than perfect turn-out. I still hear “King Cotton” by John Phillip Sousa ringing in my ears. In wet weather the outside parades were cancelled and we were inspected in the dormitories instead, together with our regulation-folded bed packs. Happy days! In the evenings we all socialised in the Red Lion, which was the Centre’s social club. It was often a case of supping a couple of pints, eating a hot steak pie and then going back to get changed in time for another “Nine o’ clock” parade. I understand that initial training now is completely different with hardly the discipline that I had back in the 1970s. Whether for the better…….?