Bobbies, Bombs and the Blackout (Pt 4)
by Roy Ingleton

It must not be thought that the enemy were the only problem for the police. Our own troops and those of our Allies were a constant thorn in the side. Drink was the main source of trouble, particularly where the Canadians and New Zealanders were concerned. The Maoris of the 6th New Zealand Field Army, stationed near Faversham, were great drinkers and accomplished poachers. They also had the annoying habit of pinching the locals’ bicycles to get back to their camp after a hectic night in the local pubs and then dumping them in a nearby ditch. It was impossible to catch them and so the local constabulary tried diplomacy and asked these soldiers to kindly leave the cycles where they could easily be recovered, which they did. Accused of stealing whole boxes of fruit left at a farm gate for collection by the wholesaler, they agreed to lift the whole of the farmer’s potato crop by way of recompense.

The Canadians were often from remote areas where the concept of the British pub was totally alien to them. Their idea of a great night out was to get as drunk as possible and as quickly as possible, with a fight thrown in for good measure. Not that the British troops were all angels. They appeared to fight with all the foreign troops, the other Armed Services and even other regiments of the British Army. But this is perhaps typical of the Tommy, as any reader of Kipling will appreciate.

If the British and Commonwealth troops were a handful, they were nothing compared to the GIs who invaded the country 1942. Problems were particularly acute in East Anglia where huge air bases were set up and the sleepy villages were swamped by these gum-chewing, cigar-smoking brash young airmen.

GIs were often accused of sexual assaults, sometimes quite unjustly. One 14 year old Kent girl returned home late and claimed to have been raped. She was questioned by a detective who, sensing something was not quite right, asked her if she had ever been raped before. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘often!’

Apart from the frequent punch-up, crimes of violence were comparatively rare in wartime England, despite the fact that deadly weapons were readily available, although two US soldiers were convicted of the murder of a young girl in Ashford and were duly hanged.

But other crimes continued to occupy the police, including purely wartime ones, such as looting and black-marketeering. In fact, looting was never a really serious problem, although one must be careful how one defines this crime that carried the death penalty. Even helping oneself to a packet of cigarettes from a bombed tobacconist, or a bottle of milk from a shattered front step, could be construed as looting. It is nevertheless true that not a few victims of air raids found their homes stripped of everything of value in their brief absence – even Christmas presents and their meagre food rations. At least one bomb victim felt a looter trying to remove the rings from her fingers, as she lay trapped in the rubble of her home.

Unfortunately, some of most accomplished looters were in the various civil defence bodies – including the police. In fact, a whole gang of Folkestone Borough Policemen were convicted of burgling some of the many unoccupied houses in the town.

The war had a serious effect on many of the no longer young policemen in the worst affected areas. There was no counselling or debriefing in those days and many bear the scars of their experiences to this day. The police were no alone in suffering, of course, and it was this shared misfortune that forged bonds which would have been unthinkable in more peaceful times. In fact, relations between the police and the public by the end of the war were probably at an all-time high.