The Five Stone Steps

Book excerpt: Tom Duncan, a Scot, joins the South Shields Police fresh from the trenches after the Great War. Little does he realise, when he first walks down the five stone steps into Keppel Street Police HQ (pictured opposite), that fifty years later he will be writing his memoirs at his desk by the fire, a glass of malt at hand. He tells of his early days as a bobby on the beat in Shields - tales of life and love in a major seaport, shipbuilding, and coal mining town where people liked their beer, their bets, and stuck together in the face of poverty and adversity. South Shields born John Orton brings to life the memoirs of a Shields bobby in the 1920s and gives an authentic picture of his home town, its character and its characters nearly a century ago.