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Stella Emmanuel
"Oh I became quite a famous policewoman. I made an arrest when I was, soon
after I joined the police, for a long time nothing much happened and
people were always saying, you know, 'you must get an arrest, you can't
never arrest anyone'. And then as soon as I started to arrest people, I
always seemed to get my name in the paper. And I arrested a man in
Picadilly Circus, someone just came up to me and said 'that man has stolen
the van', and I said 'would you get out, sir', and when he didn't I just
pulled, and it wasn't difficult to pull him out, but I put a judo hold on
him and sat on him. But I got a big picture of myself in the paper, with
'PC Stella gets her man'. Well that had lots of repercussions. Because
certainly I think a lot of the men at that time, I don't think I realised
the full implications, they must have been very threatened, because I got
a police commendation, and it wasn't fair really because I'd done very
little, this wasn't dangerous. And when you think what men do, and what
some women did later. Certainly there was some resentment, especially
among older men, 'this isn't a suitable job for a woman, it's too
dangerous', there was a lot of that, 'this isn't a right job for a woman'.
But we were a specialist branch, and we worked slightly shorter hours, we
didn't work as many nights, we certainly wouldn't have been allowed to go
out patrolling at night, and we earnt lower pay. And most of us were
willing to accept that. Because we didn't do a lot of nasty jobs the men
did. So we didn't want to be the same job as the men, most of us didn't
anyway."
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