Did I perhaps miss my vocation?

Back in the days when I was single belonging to a sporting club was a necessary adjunct to life given that the pubs closed at six. The clubs adhered to no such closing regime and stayed open till late so you could refresh yourself after a gruelling game of whatever it was you were playing. The police tended to turn a blind eye to after-hours trading most of the time, but had to make a raid on the odd occasion to keep their hands in.

My chosen sport was squash and we often visited other squash clubs to play in weekend competitions and would invariably join them in a social cabaret on the Saturday night of the tournament. One such outing was to occur in Palmerston North and a friend and I and our girlfriends decided to give the tournament itself a miss, but attend the Saturday night function.

The event was to be a fancy dress. No doubt an illegal bar would be in full swing and we thought if we were to arrive dressed as policemen we would cause quite a stir. There were no costume-hire companies in town in those days so on Friday night I went cap-in-hand to the Masterton Police station and asked if I could borrow a couple of uniforms for the following evening.

Back then the tiny police station was on the corner of Lincoln Road and Chapel Street. I think the total complement of police personnel was about seven or eight and the CIB section served the whole Wairarapa. I was politely told by the pleasant gendarmes manning the station that it was illegal for them to lend out uniforms. This was Brian Maude and Geoff Russell and they seemed genuinely sorry they couldn’t help. I was about to walk out when they had a curious change of heart.

Over the road a Wairarapa Car Club rally was leaving from the old H. J. Jones Garage premises and had drawn a crowd of well over a 100 people who were overcrowding the footpath adjacent to where the cars were leaving from. Passers-by were having great difficulty passing by. My two gregarious police persons said I could have the uniforms if I put one on now and went over the road and dispersed the crowd.

It seemed like a fair swap to me, so I donned a navy great-coat (it was raining) put on the helmet and feeling somewhat drunk with power marched over to the madding crowd. “Move on” I said in the best PC Plod manner I could muster and moved the crowd back from the gutters edge allowing those wanting to use the footpath an uninterrupted passage.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

I looked back at the station and saw constables Russell and Maude peeping over the half white frosted windows showing sheer admiration and all would have gone swimmingly to plan if someone hadn’t recognised me.

That someone was my old scoutmaster and he told me later he would not have known it was me except I was wearing shoes with pointed toes. We used to call them winkle pickers, fashionable for young men at the time, but hardly the attire for a policeman on duty.

Using blasphemous language that would have made Lord Baden-Powell blush he blurted out who I was for all to hear and the crowd instantly lost respect for the uniform and swarmed back to their previous untenable positions.

Mob rule returned to the streets.

Sole Times-Age photographer at the time was Norman Daken and he shot a picture as I turned to grin at his greeting. I rushed back to the sanctuary of the police station and found my two policemen in fits of laughter, well pleased with my performance and agreeing wholeheartedly to lend me the two uniforms. 

“By the way,” they wanted to know, “Who was it that took the photo?”

When I told them it was the Times-Age photographer the colour drained visibly from their cheeks. Lending a police uniform was a sackable offence. If the picture was published they could both lose their jobs. I was reminded too that my own role was a hangable felony, or something akin to that.

I was sorry I had placed us all in such a position. They invited me back to the station at nine the next morning to see if the three of us could somehow convince Norm that it would be in everyone’s best interests not to publish the photo. 

By the time I got there the hapless photographer had been interrogated under a powerful white light in a darkened backroom that didn’t really exist and had reluctantly handed over the negative and the print. There were no distinguishing marks on his person to suggest that the photos had been beaten out of him. I suspect he had probably been promised an exclusive scoop on the next major crime in the town as a reward for his co-operation.

This would likely have been someone caught drinking after hours.

Anyway, Norm was his usual cheerful self as he left the station and seemed not too fazed at having lost the opportunity to print the picture.

Messrs. Maude and Russell will have been well-retired by now or perhaps have even gone to that great police station in the sky so I doubt there is any risk of Police Minister Ann Tolley withholding their pensions.

Meanwhile I’m relying on the likelihood that the statute of limitations for being charged with impersonating a police officer will have well passed.

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” 
- Margaret Thatcher.