Ruth D’Alessandro is the author of Calling WPC Crockford, a recently published memoir of her amazing pioneering mother, Gwen Crockford. Gwen was one of the Berkshire Constabulary’s first women police officers in the 1950s and went on to become its first woman detective in 1957. Here, Ruth talks to Paul about how and why she wrote her mother’s story; the incredible variety of work a 1950s-woman police officer would have done: extracting a human skeleton from the woods, finding a missing child, investigating thefts, chasing escaped circus animals, and unravelling a dark secret at the heart of an impoverished family; and how policing has changed over the last 70 years.
