IT looks like a very large goldfish bowl with a couple of rotor blades pinned to its roof and some snow skis stuck to its underside, but this was Britain’s first police helicopter.

In fact, Durham boasted the country’s first “heli-cop”.

He was light years ahead of his time, but he was brought down to earth with a bang by cost-cutting.

Last week, we met Alec Muir, Durham’s Chief Constable from 1950 to 1970 – you will remember that he created a furore in 1965 by claiming that friends of the Great Train Robbers were preparing an atomic assault to bust them out of Durham Gaol.

As well as being a controversial copper, Mr Muir was a pioneering policeman. In 1962, he ensured that Durham was selected to trial the first police helicopter – a yellow Brantly, made in the US, which touched down at Aycliffe on November 5.

The machine was owned by Heliconair, of Darlington, which was run by Alistair Craig – businessman brother of Butterflies actress Wendy, whose schooldays Memories has been investigating recently. It was piloted by Dick Dorman, a Canadian, who would be accompanied in the air by Sgt George Jack Blair – the man The Northern Echo described as “Britain’s first heli-cop”.

The Echo said: “After having his first look at the inside of the machine, Sgt Blair eased his lanky six-foot frame from the cockpit and said: ‘It’s just fine’.”

The helicopter was connected to the Aycliffe police headquarters and patrol cars by radio, but it had no other gizmos, such as searchlights or thermal imaging cameras.

Indeed, Sgt Blair was armed only with a 35mm camera and a pair of binoculars.

The helicopter flew operationally two days a week – Thursdays and Fridays – and the rest of the time it hovered over the region’s main roads.

IN those days, before the cheque or internet banking, most transactions were done in cash, causing vast sums of money to be transported in road or rail vehicles which, as the Great Train Robbers had proved, were extremely vulnerable.

The helicopter watched over the cash vans – Mr Muir called it the “airborne bank guard patrol” – and in the four years of its trial, there were no vehicle robberies in Durham or North Yorkshire. The cost of the helicopter – £17 10s an hour – was shared by the Home Office and Durham Constabulary.

Perhaps because of its success and its cheapness – it worked out the same as running two patrol cars – the Home Office employed a chopper to police the growing M6 in the west of the country. This, though, proved so expensive that the Home Office had to switch its money from the Durham trial to pay for it.

So in 1964, Durham was grounded.

Only when the force could find a few extra shillings could the helicopter take to the skies.

Mr Muir thought it would be good to invest in some flying time for January 16, 1967, when Home Secretary Roy Jenkins came north to lay the foundation stone for the new police headquarters at Aykley Heads.

As he was helicoptered from Teesside Airport to Durham, Mr Muir arranged some in-flight entertainment: Mr Jenkins’ helicopter was involved in a dummy bank job, and gave chase to a hijacked security van along the A689.

Having landed, Mr Jenkins told The Northern Echo that the helicopter was “an operational tool that may have great potential in the police force”.

A classic politician’s words offering support without giving any real support, particularly the sort of support – financial – that really matters. Without money, Durham couldn’t afford to fly, and the helicopter trial collapsed.

It was an idea literally decades ahead of its time. In 1989 at Newcastle airport, Northumbria Police began another helicopter trial which was so successful that, in 1995, the three North-East forces joined forces to create the North-East Air Support Unit, and Durham and North-umbria still work together to keep their Eurocopter in the skies.

  • With thanks to Ian Forsyth of Durham, Ken Thurlbeck, of Stockton, who was with the Durham Force Communications Unit in the 1960s, which was in charge of making radio contact with the helicopter, and especially to Alan Watson, the editor of the Durham Peeler magazine and chairman of the Durham branch of the National Association of Police Officers. They, and many others, spotted the helicopter in the background of a picture in Memories 191 and told us the story.