Ex-city PC with a handle on facial hair!
THE St Ann's policemen growing moustaches for charity are not the first squad in the city to have sported an upper lip appendage.
Ex-PC Peter Swanwick, from Woodthorpe, and his former central division colleagues grew moustaches 50 years ago to annoy their chief inspector.
A long-standing member of the Handlebar Club, a group of moustache wearers who take part in countless charity events, he still has a "dirty top lip", as his old boss called it.
"To be a member of the club you need to have 'hirsute appendage of the upper lip, with graspable extremities'," Mr Swanwick explains. "In other words you can get hold of the ends."
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Now 80, Mr Swanwick grew a Poirot-style curled and waxed moustache in the Army.
When he joined the then Nottingham City Police, his chief inspector had been an army Sergeant Major in the Second World War and hated moustaches.
"In central division we decided that we would have a joke and we would all grow moustaches," said Mr Swanwick.
"We had asked the duty inspector to judge the competition. The chief inspector walked into the parade room at central division and we were all lined up.
"He walked along and checked the handcuffs and gloves, and he decided to go upwards and check the faces, and of course everybody had got a dirty top lip.
"He threw his book on the table and said 'I'm not parading this dirty shower'.
"Everybody was bursting, except the poor sergeant, and he had to do an inspection of sorts and march us out into the streets."
Mr Swanwick said some kept their moustaches, though some shaved them off under orders from their wives.
He claims, however, that facial hair is popular with the ladies and quotes a Handlebar Club chant that says being kissed by a smooth face is like "meat without the salt".
Mr Swanwick was a policeman from 1948 right up until 1993. "I finished up as the chief's driver and radio operator for the last ten years, to the old chief constable, Rex Fletcher," he said.
caroline.lowbridge@nottinghameveningpost.co.uk
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