Kevin Holland’s Pig in Shit book. This was a weird one. I heard a snippet of a news story this week about a Copper called Kevin Holland. Blimey, surely not the Hobby Bobby of SE17 from around two decades ago? I thought he had retired and moved on? It turns out that the name Kevin Holland isn’t unique amongst the Met.
But anyway, it got me thinking about Hobby Bobby. He was a well known - and hugely popular - face around Champion Hill a quarter of a Century ago. We’re talking the days when you could have a conversation with a member of the Rabble whilst you were sitting up in the stand on the other side of the ground.
PC Kev use to stage various events around the Hamlet involving young school kids. It was the very early days of club and community engagement, before it even became a thing.
A Pig in Shit is his memoir of policing the Aylesbury. It was around this exact same time that I was first introduced to the Aylesbury and its many characters through work. In the twenty or so years that I spent working around Walworth, I always felt safer there than I did in the West End.
I’ve had a brief flick through the book. It looks like a real page turner with some interesting local stories. I’m not sure about the dodgy geezer on the front cover though who came to SE17 for one his first photoshoots.
