A Policeman’s Lot

Firstly, my apologies for things being rather quiet on the Broadland Memories front of late. I won’t bore you with my catalogue of excuses, but I hope to get back to working my way through the backlog of website submissions and will also try to update the blog a little more regularly once again.

The River Police launch at Malthouse Broad in the 1960s - by courtesy of Ray Spinks

The first new addition to the main website has been uploaded today and comes courtesy of Ray Spinks who initially contacted me regarding the whereabouts of the old, wooden River Police launch which was used by the Norfolk Constabulary to patrol the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads. The launch had the registration number A2 and was built by Jack Powles at Wroxham in the late 1950s – it can be seen in the photograph on the left at Mathouse Broad in the early 1960s (by courtesy of Ray Spinks). Ray spent three seasons working on the launch in the early 1960s and has kindly written down a few of his memories of that time for me which can be found on this page. Ray would love to know what happened to A2  as the last known sighting, according to the entry for the launch on Craig Slawson’s Boats of the Norfolk Broads database, was in 1999 when it was up for sale with the Norfolk Yacht Agency. Did she stay on the Broads or move elsewhere?

I still have quite a large number of photographs from various contributors to get onto the website, and it can be quite a time consuming process to remaster these, research the images and then lay them out on the website. Please bear with me if you are still waiting for your photos to appear! I’ve also got quite a few new “Then & Now” photographs to add when I get the chance, however, I really think that the Then & Now pages could do with a redesign to include a town and village directory. In the meantime, I have been sorting these out and uploading higher resolution copies to my Flickr photostream and they can be found within the Then & Now set on there.

Right … back to work!

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