BOOK REVIEW
WPC CROCKFORD BY RUTH D’ALESSANDRO
CALLING A daughter chronicles her mother’s journey as
a police officer in post-war Britain from 1951 and brings to life her struggles and achievements
Calling WPC Crockford is the opening novel of a trilogy that follows the career of a policewoman over the 1950s and 1960s. Calling Detective Crockford and Calling Sergeant Crockford the second and third books of the trilogy respectively. Ruth D’Alessandro’s account of her mother’s career in policing is entertaining and absorbing, following her mother’s career as she rose to become the country’s first female detective serving as a Sergeant in Berkshire Constabulary. It was her mother’s hard work and commitment to the job in the early days of her career, covered in Calling WPC Crockford, that saw her recommended for detective training at Hendon Detective Training School in 1957.
The novel follows a 21-year-old Gwendoline Crockford as she signs up to Berkshire Constabulary in 1951 with little foresight of what was awaiting her in the career she was about to embark upon.
It is post-war Britain, and the nation is uniting to rebuild itself from the ruins of World War II, during which women had played a pivotal role on the home front, filling in where the men had left for the battlefields. This new working environment, one driven by the feminism reborn out of the war, is the background to the challenges of the young policewoman’s career. Adventures and strangeness abound, from carrying a human skeleton out of the woods, finding a missing child, investigating thefts, or chasing an escaped zebra, every day brought fresh challenges and revealing insights into attitudes of the time. In this heartfelt account of a woman breaking down barriers and defining herself in a man’s world, we witness a reflection of the country’s wider change as woman fought to level the playing field. Often tender and heartfelt, the reader is carried through the early career of
WPC Crockford as she
progresses from mundane traffic duties to unravelling the dark secrets of the families below the breadline of 1950s Britain. There are moments of great joy and thrills to ones of despair for the poor and their struggles to survive; this is a brilliant account of the realities of life in the 1950s and of policing for women in 1950s Britain.
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