|
Norwell Roberts, QPM joined the Metropolitan Police as part of a recruitment campaign by the Metropolitan Police Service in the late sixties. In 1967 he became the first black police officer in Britain. After a 30 year career, he received three commendations, and was first black Metropolitan Police officer to be awarded the Queen's Police Medal QPM for Distinguished Service.〔http://historicalgeographies.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/biography-norwell-roberts.html〕 ==Early life== Norwell Roberts was born Norwell Lionel Gumbs on 23rd October 1945 in Anguilla, in the Leeward Islands in the West Indies. After constant misspelling of the name "Gumbs", he changed his name in 1968 by deed poll, taking his mother's maiden name of Roberts. His father died when he was just three years old and his widowed mother, lured by promises of job opportunities and a better life, sailed for England in 1954. Roberts was left behind, to be raised by his strict preacher grandparents. His grandmother was a Methodist deaconess. When he misbehaved, he recalled with some horror, his grandmother would send him to the local shops wearing her dresses. This was her way of punishing him, as well as being smacked as was the way it was in the West Indies at that time.〔http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ds-roberts-calls-it-a-day-1274881.html〕 He arrived at the port of Dover at age nine when his mother secured employment as a housemaid in London. Life in England didn't run smoothly. Like other fifties immigrants from the West Indies and Ireland, Roberts' mother struggled. The signs in landlords windows read 'No niggers, no Irish, no dogs,'. At home in Anguilla his mother had run several neighbourhood shops but in London she took any domestic jobs she could get, saving her money so her son could join her. Roberts eventually joined her in 1956. They went to live in Bromley, Kent where his mother was a paid companion to an elderly lady, for whom Roberts had the utmost respect, for her courage as she was shunned by her neighbours, whom she had known all her life. Her family also rejected her for allowing a black family to live with her. She remained supportive of her lodgers because of her resolve to be a good Christian. In 1956, Roberts was the only black child in his elementary school, and when he passed the 11-plus, the headmistress told his mother that Roberts would not be going to grammar school because he had to 'learn the English ways'. This was a way of saying that she was not prepared to allow a black child, however clever, to go to a grammar school in 1956, especially in Bromley, an affluent area. As a result Norwell instead went to the local secondary modern school in Bromley, where the older sixth form boys dropped him head first to the ground in order to see the colour of his blood. He still carries the scar on his forehead, but never once complained to his mother, because he understood that she had been powerless to act.〔/diduknow/anguillian_norwell_roberts_when_.htm〕 In 1959 his mother remarried and moved to Camden Town, North London, where Roberts went to the Haverstock Hill Comprehensive School. He did not have a good relationship with his stepfather, who mistreated his mother. Roberts was kicked out of his London home when he was just 15 years old. Having passed O-levels in Religious Knowledge and Chemistry, he started work as a scientific laboratory technician in the Botany Department at Westfield College, which is affiliated to the University of London. In 1966, while working at Westfield College, Roberts responded to a newspaper advertisement and completed the police recruitment application form. While on day release to Paddington Technical College, one of his fellow students who read the ''Daily Telegraph'' saw a headline which read ‘London to have first coloured Policeman soon’. The Metropolitan Police had not bothered to inform Roberts first. Roberts in applying to join the Met police force was continuing a family tradition. In Anguilla, his grandfather was sergeant and in various islands in the West Indies he had three uncles who were all high-ranking officers, one of whom was awarded the CPM (Colonial Police Medal) for his services. They all attended, on secondment, Hendon Police College during their career, where Roberts also trained. They were trained on a 12-week course on the familiarisation of police procedure, before returning to the West Indies.〔https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1504936043〕 Roberts enlisted on the 28th of March 1967. This intake also included Paul Condon, who later went on to become a Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and later, Lord Paul Condon.〔https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1846683041〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Norwell Roberts」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|