Notable Events In Week Thirtyeight

Hertfordshire Police Historical Society.

This Week In History.

18/9/1922

At Hatfield Petty sessions 18 September 1922, the chairman Colonel Halsey OBE, commended Constable’s 306 Hussey of Hitchin, for initiative and courage displayed in boarding a moving motorcar, and affecting the rest William Holmes on a charge of burglary. The Chief Constable endorses the commendation and directs that an appropriate entry should be made on the constable’s record sheet. General order number 125 of 1922.

18/9/1987

Hi-tech Hertfordshire police will have villains under their thumbs with a new hi-tech fingerprint system. Hertfordshire Constabulary will be the first force to lay its hands on a new computer which can match prints in minutes. Boffins are perfecting the multi-million pound system which can flick through hundreds of specimens a second. At the moment police have to compare fingerprints themselves with their own eagle-eyes. This takes hours and is open to human error, but the new system will be hundreds of times quicker and less likely to make mistakes.

18/9/1987

Armed raiders had cuffed petrified workers while they helped themselves to more than £100,000 worth of gold and diamond watches at a Watford jeweller on Wednesday morning. The three masked men, two carrying semi-automatic handguns and the other a 12-inch commando knife, lay in wait for staff to arrive at TRC Jewellers, in Greenhill Crescent. They forced TRC director David Hedge and stock manager Susan Pizans to show them the firm’s vault and trays of rare gold watches, kept in an upstairs office, before handcuffing them to a loft ladder.

19/9/1986

Violent crime in Watford has risen by an alarming 35 per cent this year – well above the county average of 19 per cent. Watford police are appealing to the public to help them fight their increasingly difficult war against local law breakers. It is the increase in violent crime – 140 assaults, wounding’s and robberies, compared with 104 last year – that concerns police most. (Watford Observer).

22/9/1937

Times 23/9/1937 Bearing the postmark of Ware, Hertfordshire and stamped 7 PM Tuesday, a letter was received by the Chief Constable of Cambridge yesterday enclosing a cheque to the value of £15.15 shillings , which was taken from the house of Mr. Bates of Wrestlingworth, a village near Biggleswade by a burglar early on Tuesday morning. With the checked the burglar enclosed a note saying that in one house he had entered the sleepy occupant had asked “who’s there?” “I made no reply,” the burglar wrote, “but if it had been at Christmas time I should have said Father Christmas.”