mag 1210.pdf - Holybourne

Holybourne Street Watch
Holybourne is a safe, clean and pleasant village in
which to live so why do we need Street Watch? Street
Watch is a national police and community partnership
initiative that empowers communities through high
visibility civilian patrols and good citizenship and it
started here in Alton. Holybourne was one of the first
communities to take on this scheme. The concept has
now spread to other parts of the country and I suspect
that the recently announced cuts in Police Budgets will
accelerate this expansion.
We are all volunteers in the scheme and we each give
up to 2 hours per month to go on a patrol in Holybourne.
Many will have seen us on the streets of the village in
our fluorescent yellow jackets with « Street Watch »
emblazoned on the back. Now the dark nights are here
we patrol in twos carrying a torch and keeping our eyes
open for anything untoward. We can alert the Police if
we see anything suspicious and we know they will
appear within minutes if it is urgent. So far on my
patrols there has been nothing to report which is great
and what you might expect in a safe village like
Holybourne. Our aim is to keep it like that.
Street Watch has been attracting the media lately with
articles in The Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express as well
as appearing on « The Politics Show » and radio 5 live.
The Daily Telegraph reported :
Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern policing, would
also have approved. When he established the
Metropolitan Police in 1829, he said, ‘The police are the
East Hampshire
www.street-watch.org.uk
public and the public are the police’, describing his
‘bobbies’ as merely ‘members of the public who are
paid to give full-time attention to duties which are
incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community
welfare and existence.’
More than 180 years on, Peel’s belief in a society
policed by all of us chimes not only with Government
ministers, but also with the volunteers taking part in
Street Watch, who believe that it has the power to
rebuild communities and wind back the clock to an age
when people knew their neighbours and kept crime in
check through such old-fashioned concepts as looking
out for each other. »
The future of Street Watch is what we make of it. Here
in Holybourne we have a very low crime rate and we
want to keep it that way. Anti-social behaviour which
has wrecked some communities has not been a real
issue here (except for one Friday night at the end of last
summer term !) and we want to make sure Holybourne
remains a safe, clean place where everyone can
confidently walk anytime, day or night.
If you would like further information on Holybourne
Street Watch or if you would be interested in becoming
a patroller then go to www.street-watch.org.uk or
please get in touch with me.
John Halliday
Coordinator Holybourne Streetwatch
Email: halliday_john1@sky.com
Tel: 01420549928
A Ring by Betty Jones (The Lawn)
Broad band of gold on old arthritic hand,
not once removed in more than fifty years.
My Mother’s wedding ring; but understand,
I could not take it, for it still was hers.
Within its circle lay her married life,
the symbol of her duty and her state,
enclosing half a century as wife
and mother, bound by love inviolate.
The Holybourne Village Magazine - Winter Issue 2010
Yet, the thought haunts me, did some stranger try
to wrest it from that unprotesting hand
after I’d knelt and said my last goodbye?
It should have stayed upon her finger, and
I choose to think it was consumed in flame
And strewn on earth, returned to dust again.
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