Derek came from very humble beginnings. He was brought up by very loving parents who worked hard but had little. Aged 11, Derek gained a scholarship to Emanuel School, his proud parents taking on extra work to afford his uniform from Harrods.
He enjoyed his time at Emanuel, taking part in rugby and rowing on the Thames for the school team in the Putney Schools Regatta. He also credited the school for giving him a clear set of values to which he stuck all his life as well as a love of classical music.
By the time he was fourteen, he had decided that all he wanted to do was be a London “copper.” National Service was all that stood in his way. He elected to join the RAF for three years as a regular, in order to choose his path of expertise, rather than two years of compulsory service. He joined the Signals corps and was posted to Malta. He thoroughly enjoyed this time and became a corporal. He had an aptitude for rifle shooting and won several competitions and cups. He was offered further promotion, but as much as he loved Malta, he still wanted to be a policeman, so returned to London, passing out of Hendon Training school with honours in 1954.
He served first at Cannon Row police station, where he met Woman Police Constable, Eileen Olive Hughes, the daughter of another police officer, David ‘Spike’ Hughes. Romance blossomed and Derek and Eileen married on the 30 June 1956. They both transferred to ‘J’ Division, covering Chingford and Walthamstow, where Derek served until he retired after almost 39 years, on the eve of his 60th birthday. On that day, he was the longest serving officer in the Metropolitan Police Force and the whole police radio network was linked up across London for a farewell message. Eileen left the police when they started their family of two daughters, Elizabeth born in 1961 and Sarah in 1964.
Derek remained a very active policeman all his career. He never accepted promotion; he never wanted a desk. That is why he kept it a close secret that he could touch-type. He put his firearms skills to good use and even more, his excellent people skills. Perhaps because of his school days, Derek loved the poem, ‘If’, by Rudyard Kipling. The way he lived his life exemplified many aspects of the poem. At Cannon Row, his assignments to protection posts found him standing outside the door of No. 10 as Winston Churchill greeted Queen Elizabeth II at Downing Street; and on the veranda at Buckingham Palace as the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne rode up and down on their tricycles.
As Derek matured into his career, he was recognised as one of the best, and became a mentor to many. He kept his cool attending armed incidents, even when he himself was not armed. He was the first on scene at several murders, dealt with the aftermath of terrible road accidents, attended gruesome railway deaths, and was on duty during terrifying riots. He looked after vulnerable old ladies, backed up battered wives, reassured the distressed and injured, and did his very best to see justice done. His career spanned the 1970s, an era when London policing came under the spotlight for corruption and brutality, but he kept a tight grip on his integrity.
Highly trained as a police driver, Derek drove every sort of vehicle imaginable. He once wrote off a police car when another motorist pulled into its path on a high-speed emergency call. Taking a calculated risk, he deliberately crashed into someone’s garden wall, bringing the police car to rest on a pile of rubble. Everyone walked away without serious injury.
One day, he saved us, his family, when a jack-knifed lorry slid down a steep hill towards our family car. Deftly mounting the pavement, he drove us along it between garden walls and streetlamps, to return us to the roadway in safety. Due to his driving skills, he was selected as an occasional stand-in for the regular driver of the Head of Special Branch at the height of the Irish Troubles. This meant being vetted to the highest level, being trained to escape kidnap attempts, and being trusted to overhear and forget secret information affecting National Security. He won commendations from the Police Commissioner and from Crown Court Judges several times, he received a certificate from the Society for the Protection of Life from Fire, and he was awarded the British Empire Medal by the late Queen for his police service.
There is no doubt that, second to his love of family, being a policeman was the thing that defined Derek.
He wrote:
I look back on it all and think what a wonderful time I had as a police officer. I managed to do what I had wanted to do from the age of fourteen. To simply be a London ‘copper’. To be paid to do something I loved, and to enjoy going on duty every working day.
Derek didn’t believe in hiring people to do work and could turn his hand to any DIY tasks, including plumbing in our central heating in 1968 (with guidance from a library book). He maintained it until the last year, before being taken into a nursing home, asserting that the boiler, although now approaching sixty years old, would “see him out,” and it has!
Derek had two daughters and five grandchildren; he loved them all and took an interest in everything about them from the day they arrived until the very end of his life. He was thrilled when a great-granddaughter, Lily, was born in 2021. His only regret was that Eileen did not live to see how they all grew.
After Eileen died, quite suddenly, from cancer in 2002, life changed greatly for Derek. He was utterly devastated at first, but gradually he made new connections in his years as a widower.
Derek was a creature of faithful routine in the next years. Until Covid interrupted, on most weekday mornings Derek hosted elevenses for his neighbours and visiting friends, continuing to help out and do repairs for them.
The last year was incredibly tough for Derek. In May 2024, a very serious kidney infection led to emergency hospitalisation. He was not expected to recover, but he did, although in a drastically weakened condition. He passed the last 10 months of his life confined to bed. He received wonderful care at Springfields Nursing Home in Copford Green. The staff treated him with great kindness and did everything possible to keep his dignity intact. He enjoyed the views from his window of the lovely grounds and all the birds, including the peacocks and their chicks. Derek never complained. He considered it a badge of honour never to press the bell to call the nurse, and he was famous for his gentlemanlike demeanour. One nurse was moved by how he would say ‘Have a good shift’, like the policeman he always was.
Derek wrote:
Looking back on it all, if the ‘Good Lord’ decides my time is up, I have no real complaints, and consider that I have had a good life. I believe there is a God, but have been disillusioned over the years by the trappings of the church. It would be really lovely to meet all of one’s family and dear friends again in the ‘next’ place. I do really hope that is possible.
Every person who had anything to say about Derek has described him as “a true gentleman,” which he would say stemmed from his parents and his schooling.
Elizabeth Joslin and Sarah Good, daughters
