Police Medal Found.

While out looking for places to clean up the environment and magnet fish in my local area, I came across a massive illegal dumping site next to, and in, a stretch of the river Nene that needed to be cleared as soon as possible. I’m the sort of person who can’t ‘unsee’ something once I’m aware of it and action needed to be taken. So I put the call out and some friends and subscribers responded and came to help me. After 3 hours of non-stop moving a mountain of trash, including fridges, sofas, bikes and other assorted items and over 50 bags of rubbish to a pile by the road ready for the council to collect, we were ready to put our magnets in the river to see if there was anything else hidden in the water that we could add to the pile.

Then…..

 Ryan, one of my subscribers from Nottingham, who had come down with his father Dean for the day, asked me where i thought he should throw his magnet next, so i pointed to a part of the river and said “How about there?” Within a few minutes he called me and said “Whats this?”, he handed me a small box which upon inspection contained a Police long service and good conduct medal with a name engraved around the outside edge. I quickly realised that this was a ‘one-in-a-million’ discovery and so I suggested that, as it was found in Northampton, i should clean it up and try to find the owner. Ryan and his dad happily agreed to this as they live to far away to really do such a thing.

So after a quick clean and polish, my partner Dawn and myself hit the internet and after some searching, managed to locate the 82 year old owner Geoffrey and his wife Maureen. I also managed to find a telephone number for them and gave them a call. Maureen, who took the call, thought I was trying to sell her something at first and nearly hung up on me! I managed to get across why i was calling though and she was over the moon to hear that we had found her husbands medal.

She informed us how it came to be missing after a burglary at their home a year before, and Geoffrey, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and struggles to remember most things but remembered his medal, was devastated every time he asked for it and she had to remind him it was gone.

Within 2 weeks we had arranged for Ryan to come back to Northampton so that we could go to Geoffrey and Maureen’s house to return the medal to him. It was lovely to see him reunited with his medal and very emotional for all involved. You could tell it meant so much to them and I was delighted to have been a part of it.

The media had found out about the story and we were met at the house by a reporter and from there it hit the headlines in the local and national newspapers, such as The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Mirror and many others as well as the BBC radio and online newspapers.

About 4 months later when I thought all the excitement had died down, I was shocked to receive a call from BBC Crimewatch Live inviting us all down to Cardiff to be interviewed live on TV on the Crimewatch sofa and tell our story to millions of viewers. What an exciting time that was!

If you haven’t already seen it, pop over to our YouTube channel and watch the videos, ‘Stolen memories returned and severe river cleaning’ and ‘Our day at the BBC Crimewatch interview’

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