LIFE on Mars - Warrington style! The popular TV show follows the adventures of a modern policeman transported back to 1973.

John Simm's character DI Sam Tyler finds a world of hard-drinking police with street knowledge but the subtlety of a boot in the face.

If a Warrington police officer went back in time what would he find?

The world of Warrington Borough Police before amalgamation in 1969 was like life on another planet.

Officers walked set beats, did school crossing patrols, while whistling for help was a sign of weakness.

Most policemene lived in Warrington and only wanted to work in Warrington. Many were ex-servicemen.

"They knew what life was about, they had seen death and really suffered as well," said Bert Gordon, the most senior Warrington Borough Police officer still alive, who retired as a Superintendent.

The 82-year-old from Loushers Lane, who served with the Royal Marines in Burma during the Second World War, said: "As far as I am concerned, they were the best men we ever had."

Mr Gordon is one of four former officers the Guardian has spoken to about their memories of working on the force. We'll be sharing some of their views and memories over the next few weeks.

The Boys in Blue of the 1960s cycled to work each day in uniform and their addresses and house numbers were given in the Guardian.

Today's police prefer to keep their addresses secret, ask for their faces to be blurred out of newspaper pictures, and don't necessarily live in Warrington.

Until the advent of pocket radios in 1967, the only items an officer carried were a wooden truncheon, a pocket book and a whistle.

"In 30 years I never heard a police whistle - a sign of weakness if you had to use it," wrote Harry Hayes, from Cawthorne Avenue in Grappenhall, in his memoirs of being a policeman from 1955 to 1985, which he supplied to the Guardian.

You could get your head kicked-in in Technicolor - khaki, navy blue and air force blue'

Police officers had to be at least six feet tall (later reduced to 5ft 10.5ins).

Officers patrolled fixed areas on their own and if a fight broke out they had to deal with it on their own.

Derrick Lodge said: "When I first started there were 12,000 Yanks in Burtonwood. There were three Army barracks, there was the RAF at Padgate and Houghton Green, and the Royal Navy at Stretton and Culcheth. Warrington at that time was a garrison town and you could get your head kicked in at 3am in Technicolor - khaki, navy blue, air force blue and so on!"

But fun and games were also a recurring story in the policemen's tales.

Gordon Hill, now aged 76, lived in Loushers Lane and joined in 1950 before retiring as a sergeant in 1976.

He remembered how a cyclist would wake up the railway workers in Sankey Street at 4am so they could fire up the engines in Dallam sheds.

So, in the darkness, one bored policeman, who was around 6ft 3ins tall, asked another to get on to his shoulders, cover up his face with his rain cape - and the cyclist would get the scare of his life when the 8ft apparition stepped out.

BOBBIES WERE BIG, STRONG MEN'

Officers feel the six years before amalgamation with Lancashire in 1969, under Chief Constable Ronnie Rowbottom, were the best years of the force.

Chf Con Rowbottom joined the Army as a private who came out a colonel. "He was brilliant," said Derrick Lodge a former Grappenhall resident from Knutsford Road, who was in the police from 1956 to 1990, and who now lives in Ainsdale.

Those six years combined the experience and discipline of the post-war recruits, the new advances in technology, like cars and radios, and the local knowledge of the borough structure.