A TOP copper has stepped back in time.

Retired Chief Inspector Albert Wilson turned the clock back 60 years when he walked back into Elland Police Station.

He was posted at the station as a PC in 1951. Sixty years later he returned to speak to officers about patrolling the beat without technology such as radios.

He spoke of his first arrest, at Southgate, Elland, when he caught a burglar coming out of the window of a shop.

He said: “There weren’t any radios so the only form of making contact with the station was through an hourly point from phone boxes around the town back to the sergeant,” he said.

“Our main duties were walking the beat and at night we checked doors of premises to make sure they were locked and secure.”

The Wilson name is still holding strong within the force – with 67 years experience.

His son, Detective Superintendent Ian Wilson, is head of West Yorkshire Police’s Drugs and Offender Management Unit and his granddaughter, PC Rebecca Wilson, works in the Suspect Management Unit in Halifax.

Sgt Warren Pitman, of the Lower Valley Neighbourhood Policing Team, said: “There is so much we as officers and an organisation can learn from the generations before us”.