Picked up by a policeman 1960s
1964
Trevor talks about the time he unknowingly picked up a Policeman. “I was always called Trevor (not a nickname). You used to worry whether to give your name, ‘Shall I tell him?’, but you never gave your name in writing, you didn’t write letters. We came out the pub one Saturday night and they all went down to the Silver Slipper, but I didn’t go down, I wandered a bit down the road, and there was this car parked, and there weren’t many cars in those days, and the door opened and I said ‘Hello’ and got in, and he took me way back to Five Ways, there used to be the Skin Hospital and the Children’s Hospital in one of the roads. He was nice and we got on quite well together, and I said ‘I would very much like to see you again’, and he said, ‘Yes, I’d like to see you’. He said ‘Give me your name and address’, and like a fool, I did. But nothing sinister came of this, we had arranged to meet, and a letter came by post, cancelling this meeting, he said ‘I’m very sorry, I’ve had a car accident, so I shall be without transport and I will see you soon and I’ll let you know what’s happening’, but there was an imprint of another letter underneath the letter that I got, so me being nosy, I got a pencil and shaded it in, and that was a letter addressed to the Chief Constable of Steelhouse Lane, and he was describing how he’d had a car accident, and it was signed Chief Inspector XXX - I’m saying no names….. and that was just before the murder (in 1964) and I never saw that man again. Had not the murder happened I think he would have written to me. I was very friendly with a Police lady who used to come in the Troc (Trocadero) and I told her about it, she said, ‘I know him, quite a nice man’. He was genuinely interested, he was not trying to set me up, I had no idea he was a Policeman, he was just a very nice man, who I got on well with, and that was the only clash with the law that I had apart from the murder!”
Contributed by: Trevor Hall, 76