A TALE OF TWO TRUNCHEONS (1966)
Brian’s Story
Late one night in 1966 my dad and his colleague Dave were on the beat in Barnes High Street when they noticed the door of Olympic Studios was ajar, so they decided to do a security check. Inside they found the Rolling Stones working on a recording of Let’s Spend the Night Together. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it was assumed to be a drugs raid. Had that been the case, the drug squad would have been sent in rather than two local bobbies. Jagger engaged them in conversation and asked if he could borrow their truncheons to use as percussion. Somewhat unwisely, according to the sergeant back at the police station, they handed over their truncheons.
Dad had his Metropolitan Police notepad handy and asked Jagger for an autograph for me. I was eleven at the time and a tidy child so I trimmed it down to fit in my autograph book, removing the ‘Metropolitan Police’ heading in the process. In an uncharacteristically generous gesture, I cut off the kiss and gave it to my friend Susan who was in the sixth form at the time. I thought Susan was wonderful. Susan thought the Stones were wonderful. I had barely heard of them. Fixed onto the page with some old fashioned Sellotape that autograph is now a sticky yellow mess, but it did survive. Let’s Spend the Night Together was released as a single early in 1967 and Decca kindly sent a copy both my dad and Dave. The distinctive blue and white dust sleeve had something along the lines of ‘To the Barnes Greek Bongo Group’ scrawled across it. Dad was delighted. He probably wrote them a thank-you letter.
Needless to say my parents didn’t belong to the generation embracing rock music. My mother swooned over Frank Sinatra and, like many who had served in the war, The Glenn Miller Band was top of Dad’s list. So he gave Let’s Spend the Night Together to me and I became a Stones fan. By the time I was sixteen I had earned enough from my paper round to buy the occasional LP and Sticky Fingers was my first purchase. My mother, by no means a prude, was utterly disgusted by the zipper. Alas, in spite of her Catholic faith, forgiveness never materialised for the Stones.
Mysteriously, that treasured single disappeared forever while I was away at university but I was keen to know that at least I had a recording of the clicking truncheons. The one on my digitally remastered Behind the Buttons sounded like the original but claimed to have been recorded in LA. Some years later I noticed that Bill Wyman was doing a gig at the City Hall here in Newcastle so I decided to go and pick his brains about the recording. Having heard that he was interested in Stones’ memorabilia, I thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that he might also be good at remembering things. On the evening of the concert I breezed into the box office during the show and confidently announced that I needed to speak with Bill Wyman afterwards. They sent me to the stage door where a burly security guard let me in to speak with the roadie. The roadie warned me that Wyman could be ‘a bit funny’ about that sort of thing but said he would ask. In the meantime he let me into the concert through the side door. After the applause had died down I slipped back as instructed and was surprised to discover a bunch of teenage girls clamouring to get in at the stage door. And even more surprised when someone came in and asked if I was the person who wanted to speak with Bill Wyman.
The band members were all flaked out in armchairs around the green room. I’m not quite sure what I had expected or indeed what they had expected. It wasn’t like that when my mother dragged me backstage after an Engelbert Humperdinck concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. I shook Wyman’s hand and introduced myself explaining that I was the daughter of one of the policemen whose truncheons had been used on the backing track of Let’s Spend the Night Together. I started to tell the tale but it was obvious before long that he had no recollection of the truncheon episode some 50 years earlier, or indeed what had been recorded where and when. Hardly surprising when I thought about it. While I was talking to him the other band members gathered round, quite possibly relieved to be told a bedtime story rather than subjected to another teenybopper encounter. All in all, it turned out to be quite entertaining although I was none the wiser about the recording. Some months later I found myself sitting next to a rock journalist on a flight to Cape Town and told him the story. He looked into the recording on Behind the Buttons and emailed me a few weeks later to say that, as far as he could tell, vocals had been added in LA but that the backing track was the original Olympic Studios recording. Satisfied, I put the matter to rest.
Dad died of a malignant melanoma in December 2000. I spoke at his funeral, not a traditional eulogy, just stories about what it was like to have had him as a father. From the sound of the brushes as he polished his boots every day, to the tale of that night at Olympic Studios. Many of his former police colleagues came to the service and as I was leaving the church somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘I was the other truncheon.’
One of Dad’s abiding memories of that night in Barnes had been a crate full of bottled Coke in the studio. Such extravagance! He’d never tasted Coke. Although we had a house in East Sheen, money was scarce and, like many people in those days, almost everything we owned came from jumble sales or adverts pinned up in a newsagent’s window. At Dad’s wake I learned from a close friend of his that when we were young he had taken on extra work carrying sacks of coal in the evenings to make ends meet. I cried inside. I hadn’t realised until it was too late quite how much he had struggled to put me through university and I hadn’t thought to thank him. I’d just assumed he would pay his contribution to my grant. He had hidden the hardship from me.
Dad was a straightforward man who always saw the funny side of life, very often at his own expense. He was a people person and loved his job which provided him with camaraderie and a seemingly endless supply of stories. As a young man he survived a near fatal motorbike crash which left him unconscious for a week and, according to his friends, somewhat slower. He wasn’t ambitious, never progressed beyond a bobby on a bicycle, and was much loved by all his colleagues. His final school report from 1943 stated, ‘He is a boy on whom one can rely.’ Praise indeed from a teacher in those days.
Finding Dave (2025)
As I mentioned earlier, at my dad’s funeral I told a few entertaining stories about him and, needless to say, this included the Olympic Studios tale. And after the service someone tapped me on the shoulder as I was walking out of the church and announced he was ‘the other truncheon’. That was Dave.
A friend of mine told me she had been to Olympic Studios cinema and prior to the film they had shown a clip of its previous life as a recording studio. Never having ventured inside myself I went to see if I could have a look around. The receptionist gave me a tour of the building and, having heard the story, she suggested I went across the road to Olympic Studios Records and have a chat with Roger who she thought would be interested. I did. And he was. He explained that they were constructing a new recording studio on top of the old one and that they were planning to include some memorabilia. He thought that we might be able to incorporate the Let’s Spend the Night Together story. We discussed how it could be done, pondering on what I had and how we might get hold of truncheons (which are meant to be handed in when you retire). The single Dad had been given was gone forever and all I really had to offer was a photo of Dad using a local police phone box back in the 1960s and that rather sticky autograph from Mick Jagger that Dad had given me.
Wondering about truncheons, my first thought was to contact the Metropolitan Police Museum. I had been there shortly after Dad died to see if they had the station logs from Barnes police station documenting the fact that Dad and Dave had been reprimanded for handing over their truncheons. The museum had all sorts of Metropolitan Police paraphenalia including uniforms, whistles, canteen crockery etc. Apparently they used to loan items for film sets to ensure historical authenticity. My plan was to go there again and ask them about getting a couple of truncheons for Olympic Studios but, when my sister contacted them to arrange a visit, it was clear that times had changed. We had to provide identification documents and there were no appointments for weeks. Before abandoning that idea completely I decided to call them, ostensibly about a photo of my dad using the phone at the East Sheen police box back in the 1960s. At the time of my previous visit the museum was putting together a collection of police box images and they asked if they could copy of mine. It wasn’t a very good copy but I now had a good quality digital image so I called them on the pretext of offering it as a replacement. While chatting to the curator I emailed the photo and related the tale. I explained that I had visited back in 2001 to see if the Olympic Studios incident had been reported in the station log book but all they had been able to find was a record of Dad’s service to which they added a note in the margin saying that his truncheon, together with Dave’s, had been used as percussion on Let’s Spend the Night Together. Without actually raising the issue I got the feeling that truncheons from the Metropolitan Police Museum were not going to make it into any memorabilia box in Olympic Studios.
Back home in Newcastle I had a another look at that note on Dad’s police record. I hadn’t looked at it for 25 years and realised it named ‘the other truncheon’ as Dave Hardman. I hadn’t remembered his surname. The detective in me wondered what had become of him and whether, if I could find him did he still have that single? If he did, what was actually written on the dust sleeve? Reading through the letters Dad’s colleagues had sent to me after the funeral I found one from Dave and it was clear that they had often worked together. My sister Jane had recently retired as a communications officer in the Met and decided to run a search for Dave Hardman online in NARPO NEWS (Nat Assoc. of Retired Police Officers). There was a letter sent in by him in 2014 which mentioned that he had retired from the Met in 1992 and that he was a member of Ham & Petersham Rifle and Pistol Club. I looked up the club on the government companies’ website and it listed Dave as director from 1992 to 1997 together with his address. Dad would have been in his late nineties by now and I guessed that, if Dave was still alive, he would be about that age too. I thought it was unlikely he would still be at the same address so I checked Zoopla and, to my surprise, found no evidence that the property had been sold in the last 30 years. In the meantime I contacted the pistol club to ask if they had any information about him. Just to cover all bases I thought I had better see whether it was possible the property was social housing which would explain the absence of any sales data. I called the housing department for the area knowing that they wouldn’t be able to give me any personal information but thinking that they would be able to let me know if the property was social housing. The woman said she couldn’t tell me that. I asked if she could tell me if it had ever been social housing but she couldn’t tell me that either. Before I rang off I asked whether she would like to know why I was trying to find this person. She said, ‘No.’ I asked her if she was quite sure about that because it was an interesting story. Again she said, ‘No.’ Rather exasperated by such a lack of curiosity I told her I was going to tell her anyway and launched into the whole story. I didn’t do that hoping she would break any confidences, I just thought she would enjoy the story. She did. We spoke for 20 minutes.
That evening, much to my surprise, a woman from the rifle club called to say that she knew Dave’s family but sadly Dave had died not long ago. In my original email to her I had mentioned I was trying to find Dave regarding an incident he and my dad had been involved in when they were stationed at Barnes. She assured me she had heard the story about ‘the tree’. I explained that it wasn’t about ‘the tree’. We didn’t speak for long as she was frantically busy organising a shooting competition but she forwarded my email to Bob, a close friend of Dave’s from the club. Next morning, delighted with my progress, I rang the woman at the housing department and told her I had found the person’s family. She told me I had made her day.
Dave’s friend Bob quickly got back to me and he also thought it was about ‘the tree’ business. Dad and Dave were first on the scene the night Marc Bolan died when his car crashed into a tree on Barnes Common. That story was clearly etched in people’s memory. Bob was still friends with Dave’s wife and also had an email address for one of his children although I didn’t succeed in getting a reply from them. I considered just dropping in on Dave’s wife but decided perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to turn up unannounced on the doorstep of someone who was probably in their nineties. Instead I asked Bob if he could arrange for me to visit her. Firstly, I wanted her permission to use the photo of Dave as part of the exhibit and of course I hoped to discover if she or her family still had the single and possibly an autograph on Metropolitan Police notepaper. As for the photo, I’d been through Dad’s albums and found a great one of him standing with two colleagues, all dressed in less than pristine uniforms, looking like something from the Keystone Cops. On the back Dad had written: ‘Dave on the right’. I cut it down so that it only showed Dad and Dave and took it to London together with a photo of the Let’s Spend the Night Together single in its blue and white dust sleeve. Not the original record of course but one which an ex-boyfriend, much to my astonishment, had taken the trouble to find for me knowing how upset I was about not having the one the Stones had sent Dad.
Armed with these images on my phone I went to see Dave’s wife. I showed her the photo of Dad and Dave and asked if she would like a copy of it and whether it would be okay to use it for the exhibit. ‘That’s not my husband’, she retorted! Wow, what a good job I went to see her. Fortunately, Dave was well represented in the many photos on her wall so I was able to take a photo of a photo of him in uniform. Regarding the single, she said it looked vaguely familiar but she thought her son Stephen would be the one mostly likely to know about it. I chatted with her for a couple of hours and left all my contact details as she was having a family party that weekend and would be able to ask them if they knew what had happened to the single. As soon as I got back home I wrote and thanked her for agreeing to meet me using one of the cards that I’d had made years ago of Dad at the East Sheen police box. It’s a great photo and I hoped that it might catch someone’s attention amidst all the excitement of a family party. Needless to say I wrote all my contact details inside and a note asking if anyone could shed light on the single.
Meanwhile my thoughts drifted back to truncheons. Having abandoned the Metropolitan Police Museum as a possible source I searched ‘Metropolitan Police truncheons 1960s’ and found an article written by a former Met policeman from that era which included a photo of his truncheon. Dad’s had looked just the same. I’m pretty sure that you were supposed to hand them in when you retired and, if you were, my dad would have handed his in. During my online search I noticed a website for Manchester Vacs apparently selling replica police truncheons made from Malaysian oak for £15.99. Manchester Vacs, as the name would suggest, is a company selling parts for vacuum cleaners. I must say this struck me as a rather strange sideline and I was quite surprised that selling weapons was legal. I called Manchester Vacs and yes, they were agents for Smiths Tools and Smiths Tools sold replica police truncheons. So I bought two and went to work modifying the colour and having the lanyards replaced with leather ones to match those used by the Met in the1960s. I even rubbed olive oil into the leather for several hours to age it. And I stamped Dad’s division number into the wood of one of them for good measure.
Alas, several weeks on I had heard nothing back from Dave’s family. Making one last attempt I sent a hand written letter to his wife including a self addressed envelope hoping that might elicit a response and I might at least find out one way or another if any of the family knew about that single. Unfortunately I didn’t get a reply to that either and I had to admit defeat. I dropped Bob an email thanking him for putting me in contact with Dave’s wife. Thanks to him at least I had a photo of the right policeman!
One Sunday afternoon back in May I called in at Olympic Studios Records and handed over what I had. Two photographic prints, one of Dad and one of Dave, the sticky remains of my Mick Jagger autograph, two replica truncheons and the Let’s Spend the Night Together single in its dust sleeve the former boyfriend had bought for me. Although that autograph is a treasured possession I decided, after much thought, that it had originated in Olympic Studios and that was the most fitting place for it to end up.
A couple of weeks later an email dropped into my box from Dave’s son. To my astonishment it included a photo of the single. It did indeed have ‘Barnes Greek Bongo Group’ written on the dust sleeve. The email included a photo of a compliments slip from Decca Record Company Limited, ‘With compliments from the Rolling Stones’. It must have been sent to Barnes police station with the two singles. The following day another photo arrived, this time of a rather battered old truncheon which had belonged to his dad…