Transcript

Transcript

1st Video (Duration: 00:48)

I’m Phil Armstrong, I have been a serving police officer for 30 years. Been retired nearly 22 years now, but err although I have worked in Brighton it wasn’t when this was an active police station. I joined the same year activities moved from here.

2nd Video (Duration: 01:21)

00:15 –

Yes, having been retired for quite a long time, it was err somewhat refreshing in a way to come back to see everything that’s in the museum here and to think in many cases ‘Oh my goodness I use to use one of those’ and then I’d find it in a museum.

So, it also gave me another opportunity to meet friends who I had worked with and I am now sharing my interest in the museum and what it represents and telling people about how things were when we were in service.

One important thing to say about it is a lot of people come down to visit thinking they’re going to look at prison cells, but that’s not the case. These are simply police detention cells between the times of a person’s arrest and being finally processed and err determination made to release them or not or take them to court. They would’ve been in prehab’s over a long weekend probably at the very most.

3rd Video (Duration: 09:11)

Our visitors, well now, they have come literally from all over the world. We operate a system where members of the public can book for a tour starting at half past 10 in the morning. In the summer it’s from Tuesday to Saturday, and in the winter it’s only on Saturdays. They can also, Organisations can organise a private tour as well at times and days outside of those parameters but yeah, we get requests from local schools who are interested in things like the history of the Victorians, history of crime and punishment, history of Brighton. And policing and its position in that.

We also get groups of interested people; I think we had ex police groups who are of course particularly interested and also people who genuine interest looking very often on tripadvisor. ‘Where should we go in Brighton?’ and finish up coming and enjoying a tour down here and recommending us to other people.

1:30 – Stories

Sollaman – 01:30

Well the one I tend to talk about first and I spend most time on is the murder of Henry Sollaman who was our first chief construal. He was appointed in the early 1830s, he had been working for corporation and got himself a good reputation as being an honest and well liked, respected man. He developed they, should we say, a habit of interviewing prisoners when they were brought in this was to lead to his eventual death.  When he took him into his office on the ground floor of the town hall, a young thief who had been in prison before, had been caught stealing a bit of carpet for an address in st James street here in Brighton. And he had been in prison before this young man, and he had no intention of going back to prison if he could possibly help it in fact one point he actually asked for a knife to cut his own throat, that’s how desperate he wasn’t to go back to a Victorian prison, this was in 1844. A time when prisons were deliberately made to be as unpleasant as possible with the hope that the message would be sent out to people – ‘behave yourself or this is where you’ll finish up’ – Unfortunately during the interview in Sollamans office, Young John Lawrence decided to make a - we think - a rather foolish career choice for a thief. He went to the fireplace and picked up a poker and bent it across the chief constable’s head, resulting in injuries which that lead to his death the following day. So, in a way we think john Lawrence almost got his wish, he certainly didn’t have to spend a long time in prison. He was the last prisoner to be publicly hanged in front of a ground of some 3000 people in front of the prisoner of Horsham. The last prisoner to die outside that particular prison before it was demolished.

Ghost Stories – 03:35

I’m one of those people that want to see or feel or hear some evidence before I decide to believe. But a lot of people do come down here and they’re records of number of deaths that could – if spirits did exist- lead to them haunting the place. If ever you do a ghost tour in Brighton the first place they all start and talk about is the town hall because its built on the site of what was once the market garden of effectively a monastery in the corner of Bartholomew square and when the French raided in the year 1514 and burnt down the small fishing village of Brighton to the ground they slaughtered practically everyone they could find including the monks. It is said that one of those monks still haunts the place and Henry Sollaman whose murder I’ve described; he too is said to haunt the place he can’t get it out of his system. There are a couple of other ghosts who are reported to be here, one poor unfortunate son of one of the care takers in the 19th century fell to his death in the foyer and the mysterious grey lady but I always think she hires herself out to whoever wants to be haunted.

I, slightly uncomfortable occasionally, but I’ve gotten use to the noises, the background noises and so on. But when people do come down here, they’ll spend the whole night down here sometimes and they’ll bring their thermometers and sound recorders and infrared cameras in the hope of going away with some evidence. I never get to hear if they actually have but I suspect it’s the sort of thing if you get a reading then it is proof if you already believe, but I, as I said, am sceptical.

Files – 05:36

I have, I’ve got myself a large pack of paper work which I use to answer, frequently ask questions that I don’t know the answer to. But yes, we have donated tourist acres of paperwork. It would be dickens of a job to actually go through every item but I have sort of cherry-picked interesting things and it helps me with my research into the history of policing of Sussex and Brighton.

Equipment – 06:15

Well if you look at the history of communication for example in the police. The first way of communicating and calling for help for an early policeman was the adoption from the old watchmen of the rattle, very much like a football rattle. Which would’ve made a limited amount of noise, perhaps in the middle of the night it would’ve been effective but in the middle of the day time in a Victorian street where it was busy and people shouting and horses in carts running up the roads. They developed in the mid 1800s, the use of whistles but you can’t be very specific with a message with a whistle or rattle. So, it was a world leading moment in 1933 when Brighton was the first to introduce pocket radios for their walking policemen. It went on, it was a large pack which had to be installed in the tunic and it was basically on a telephone have a little bell inside that a officer know he’s being called but it was only a one way system so an officer would’ve raced to a telephone if he needed to respond. But nonetheless it was a great advance and it's now reached the stage were an officer and his pocket can keep a small item, which is a radio and telephone which does a lot more inside. And it was interesting to see in one of the cabinets, not far from where I’m sitting now, and seeing the old fashioned two piece pie pocket phone that I first used when I first joined and that brought back memories, definitely. Its progress since then but we’ve got samples on display of a lot of these early forms of communication.

Extra – 08:16

The time I joined, that was early 1967, there were 5 individual police forces in Sussex, east and west had there on constabularies and the burrows of Brighton and Hastings and Eastbourne each had their own, So I joined east Sussex police in 1967. But I was only in it for a few months before the 1st of January 1968 they maculated the remainder of Sussex to become just one constabulary. And, I wasn’t stationed here in Brighton until 1971, by which time this was no longer an active police station.