Dockside Bobby

Press, Volume C, Issue 29436, 11 February 1961, Page 3

Dockside Bobby

Dixon Of Dock Green. By George Dixon. William Kimber. 192 pp.

Human interest can always be aroused by the life-history, simply related, of an ordinary unassuming individual. On this premise "Dixon of Dock Green” could well become a best-seller. Its central character is a policeman who has spent nearly all his life in a London dock area, and whose varied adventures have become popular on television.

Dixon’s own story is as colourful in its way as the ones he has brought to life on the screen. Born in the 20’s he is the son of a painter and decorator, who, during those precarious years, was often out of work. Young Dixon was intelligent, but not outstandingly so, and after leaving school was in and out of a number of jobs until persuaded by an uncle, who was a village constable jn Essex, to try for the police force. Once enrolled his way was clear before him and he refused promotion at the beginning of the war so that he could trudge the beat in his own beloved district of London for the rest of his service.

Apart from his account of his domestic life which has been fraught with tragedy owing, first to the death of his mother in a flying bomb “incident”, and then of his young wife in an accident a few years later, his reminiscences lack nothing in thrills. His lucky arrest of an armed criminal with the fortuitous assistance of a flying bomb which landed uncomfortably close, and the story of a young boy, who was saved by a freakish circumstance from the charge of killing his brutal father, have the quality of strong drama. “The Rotten Apple” tells the tale of a policeman of his own acquaintance who turned out badly. The marriage of his only daughter to an up-and-coming member of the C.I.D. provides the lighter and happier side of his life-chronicle.

George Dixon acknowledges the help in writing this book of his script-writer Ted Willis, and also that of Charles. Hatton, but the story is his own, and will be read with interest by a public which admires the qualities of a good end worthy citizen.