Join
the police for a world of glamour! Wear this fabulous new uniform designed by
the Queen’s own designer, Normal Hartnell.
In
1969 the world was changing. The previous year, feisty sewing machinists and
Dagenham’s Ford Factory had gone on strike to demand equal pay - as portrayed
in Made in Dagenham, and the Labour Party would soon be introducing the
Equal Pay act. But though women had dreamed of being part of the police force
since a militant young suffragette called Margaret Damer Dawson had set up the
Women’s Police Volunteers in 1914, their role had had remained strictly
limited, and equal ops was still a long way away. Effectively after World War I
women had edged into the role of being uniformed social workers dealing with
all the bits of police work the men didn’t want to touch - families and
children. And some of the bits that men couldn’t be trusted with, like
prostitution.
It’s
a shock now to realise how limited women’s roles were in the police, even in
the late 60s. When I wrote the first draft of the book A Song From Dead
Lips, I optimistically relegated my police constable, Helen Tozer to the role
of driver for my detective Sergeant Breen. Only after completing the
draft did I speak to women who had been in the same Division as Tozer would
have been in.
“Drive a car?” they said, eyebrows
raised. “No, we wouldn’t have been
doing that in
But
by 1969, when the final book in the trilogy, A Book of Scars is set, the first whiffs of change were
finally arriving. That was the year the separate Women’s Branch was finally
dissolved.
That
year, deciding that women police needed a new image - but terrified of them
losing their femininity - the Met commissioned Royal dress designer Norman
Hartnell to create this shapely new uniform (with convenient pocket in the
A-line skirt to conceal truncheons!). The one for the City of London Police
came with added polka dots and matching cravats that made the poor officers look
like flight attendants.
In A Song From Dead Lips, Helen Tozer
dreams of becoming a Detective Constable. The first woman wouldn’t achieve that
rule until five years later in 1973.
1969.
Five
years ago, teenager Alexandra Tozer was murdered on her family farm. Her sister
Helen Tozer will never forget. Returning home after quitting the Met Police,
she brings with her the recovering Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen, who slowly
becomes possessed by the unsolved case.
He
discovers the Tozers were never told the whole truth. Alexandra was tortured
for twenty-four hours before she died. But when he tracks down the original
investigating sergeant, the man goes missing. And so does Helen.
Suspicion
falls on her. But Breen is on a trail that goes far beyond the death of a
schoolgirl. For the two men connected to this case met in Kenya, during the Mau
Mau uprising; and the history that Britain has turned its face from is now
returning to haunt it.
So when another
innocent woman is abducted, Breen knows he has just twenty-four hours to save
her.
The third book in a
powerful deconstruction of the sixties, A Book of Scars tears strips off the Drug Squad, the Kenya
Emergency and the upheaval of society as we knew it - to lay bare forgotten
crimes, and tell the history of the losers.
A Book of
Scars by
William Shaw is published 4th June by Quercus, price £19.99 in Hardback
You can follow William Shaw on Twitter - @william1shaw and you can also find him on Facebook
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