When the Palmerston North Squash Cub held a weekend tournament with a fancy dress cabaret in their clubrooms on the Saturday evening, the good-natured Masterton Police lent me two uniforms.
A story I recounted in a column a few weeks ago.
I have to point out ‘uniforms’ is a bit of an exaggeration; all we needed on a cold winters night were two great-coats and two helmets. We could supply the dark navy pants and substantial black shoes to complete the illusion.
My partner in crime was John Booth. Older residents who want to put a face to a name would be helped by knowing John’s father was well known stock agent Randal Booth and his mother was Sister Booth, for many years the matron at Glenwood Hospital. John had joined the navy and seen the world after leaving school, but back in the early 1960s, when this tale unfolded, he was managing the Masterton Metal Company at Waingawa.
Back in those halcyon 6 o’clock closing days, although serving alcohol after hours at sporting clubs was illegal police mostly turned a blind eye to this indiscretion. From time to time however they would raid a suspicious premise to maintain some semblance of law.
We drove over on the cold wet night in my Volkswagen with our two girlfriends who later showed exceptional taste by marrying us, and when we got to the club we sent them on ahead to mingle with the party goers. The club lounge was upstairs and we wanted to carefully time our arrival to give full effect to the pandemonium we were hoping to create.
Finally we braced ourselves, ran up the stairs and burst through the doors, notebooks in hand. People recoiled at the sight of us. Glasses were hastily hidden in a variety of places and many imbibers fled into the toilets which now became unisex, and were soon full to over-flowing. Some had glass-shaped bulges in the most unlikely parts of their persons. John started to take down the particulars of those nearest the door while I marched up to the bar, slapped my notebook on the counter and said authoritatively to the ashen-faced barman: “I want names!”
To be fair, and to avoid exaggeration this all happened in less than a minute or two before a Masterton club member recognised John Booth and knocked his helmet off. When mine was forcibly removed the cry went up, “It’s Long and Booth,” and after much relief-based hilarity, the party was back in full swing.
There was a prize for best fancy dress, which we won, and the evenings revelry might have ended there save for a conversation around the bar with a couple of Dicks that revealed a new opportunity. I use the word Dick in its true sense. These coincidentally were the Christian names of the two men who feature in this story.
To protect the innocent I can reveal that one Dick was the manager of Masterton’s largest insurance company and the other was the professionally qualified registrar of Masterton’s largest institution.
These two thoughtfully considered that rather than waste the uniforms we might go in to the city centre and have some real fun. They were both competitive squash players and had not brought fancy dress over as such, but had for the occasion dressed up as a couple of larrikins. They had blackened their faces with burnt corks and wore dishevelled clothing, the complete antithesis of the type of dress they wore, commensurate with the positions they held back in Masterton.
We agreed to motor on down to Broadway where the two Dicks would create a disturbance and John and I would arrest them; a fairly simple procedure. Marion and Judy accompanied us in the Volkswagen; the two Dicks travelled in Dick Insurance’s car. It was pouring with rain, but true to the era Broadway was a busy place thanks to the Saturday night picture-goers who were all just exiting the cinemas. Broadway had two theatres quite close to each other, the State and the Regent, which shows you how much imagination the people who chose the names for New Zealand’s picture-houses had back then.
We parked the Veedub about midway between the two theatres; Dick’s car was a few spaces down. John and I walked up the street nodding to the general public with our hands clasped behind our backs and ensuring that the doors of the retail premises were locked and secure. Archetypal police behaviour back then before gendarmerie on the beat became a rare sight.
Behind us the two Dicks started an altercation and we rushed back and attempted to break them up.
Onlookers did not realise it was play-acting. In fact the performance of the two Dicks would have rivalled anything the moviegoers had seen on the screen that night. They rolled over and over on the footpath as John and I tried desperately to prise them apart. They ended up in the gutter which was streaming with rain water. The illusion was complete. We ‘policemen’ tried to elicit assistance from the onlookers who were now literally in their hundreds, lining both sides of the footpath. We got no help. Even back in those relatively law-abiding times, the larrikins were the heroes and were being egged on by the baying crowd.
Dick Insurance decided to take off and I followed in hot pursuit, while my colleague struggled with Dick Institution. I yelled to the crowd: “Stop that man!” but they parted like the Red Sea to ensure him a safe passage and actually jeered at me! One lady did try to help. She attempted to trip Dick Insurance up with the hook end of her umbrella and very nearly succeeded, but he only half fell and then regained his balance.
Finally the last man to leave the confines of the Regent - he must have been sitting in the front row - came to my aid. He was well built, probably in his seventies and possibly even a world war one veteran, who said: “I’ll get him officer” and dive tackled Dick Insurance, spreading him all over the footpath. I got him, now half stunned, in a full-nelson and dragged him back to John who was struggling to get his charge into the waiting Volkswagen. By now the crowd was cheering, not the two successful policemen, but the two larrikins, who had put up such a good fight.
All this was witnessed by Marion and Judy who had to stay on the footpath while we drove the arrestees around the corner where we hid in the backyard of a closed service station until the crowd had dispersed. When we went back for Dick’s car and to pick up our potential fiancées they told us we had fled the scene at an opportune time. As we had pulled away the real police arrived in real police cars, apparently alerted by a member of the public who would have told them that two of their colleagues were in all sorts of trouble on Broadway. Reports of the arrest, and of their fellow policemen leaving the scene in a lime green Volkswagen, must have seemed surreal.
Marion just happened to work at Dick Institution’s institution. He didn’t want to hear a word of this back at work on Monday, he cautioned her, given that discipline was an essential ingredient in the smooth running of the organisation.
As far as I know, no other nurse was ever told.
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