Carry on policing

Alex Rennie is not your ordinary 91-year-old. He met Winston Churchill, who personally briefed him on a secret assignment during the Second World War (PR, 29 May), and made the leap from a farmhand in Aberdeenshire to chief constable of West Mercia Constabulary.

But he also has some non politically correct secrets from his early days of policing at Durham Constabulary.

'In the warm evenings of 1938, when I was a rookie probationer in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, men leaving the many public houses in the town would loiter, chat and then urinate in shop doorways.

'Our supervising officers chastised us for failing to get the offenders convicted. The problem, as I recall, was that the mayor of the town asked the chairman of the magistrates' court to dismiss most cases, as he wanted to be popular and win the votes to retain his seat.

'Another young constable and myself decided to take action and around 2 am one night, we each urinated through the two letter boxes of the tobacconist shop owned by the mayor.

'The plan worked and everyone appearing at court thereafter on a charge of urinating in shop doorways was found guilty and fined the maximum - £2, which was about the week's wages of a labourer.'