Skegness Magazine

TWO BOYS, aged 16 and 14, defied police and firemen trying to get them down from a 40-foot-high roof in Lumley Road, Skegness, for about 1 1/2 hours in August, 1972. Several thousand people watched the drama, which ended when a soldier on leave from Ulster climbed a fire escape at the rear and took the boys by surprise. He grabbed them and whisked a knife off one before handing them to the waiting police.
There was a big cheer from the crowds packed solid on the opposite pavement as at 10.35 pm Pte John Cockshott appeared suddenly over the top of the roof and ran swiftly down the roof to the two lads.
He handed one down through a skylight and passed the other to Det Con Doyle, who had climbed to the top of a ladder from the balcony above the shops on the south side of Lumley Road.
Pte Cockshott, (pictured above) who has been serving with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in Northern Ireland, was brought up in a children’s home in Harrogate Road, Bradford, and had been adopted by the master and his wife.
He had been coming to Skegness on holiday with the home since he was 10. They always stayed with Mr and Mrs Walter Winfield, at 36 Lumley Avenue and he was spending part of his leave there at the time.
It was his last night in Skegness and he was on his way back from seeing the wrestling at the Festival Pavilion.

COULDN’T STAND IT
He said afterwards : ” It made me mad to see those kids mucking about when my mates in Norther Ireland are fighting for something serious.”
After watching for some time he took action without consulting ing the police.
Mrs Kath Winfield said “He couldn’t stand it any longer so he went and did it himself. When you’re in Ireland and you’re seeing your mates killed every day, you believe in action
” He thought they had waited quite long enough. He gave them nearly an hour, then used the tactics they used in Ireland.”
The rooftop drama took place on top of the shops between Beresford Avenue and Drummond Road. The boys reached the roof through the Marine Hotel skylight shortly after 9. pm.
The older one kept running to and fro along the tiles between the chimney stacks, in his stockinged feet. He was limping, having been hurt when he slipped and fell at the beginning.
The police trained a searchlight on the stationary boy from a patrol car and kept the rear of the roof continually swept by powerful hand lamps from Arcadia Road.

Westbound traffic was diverted from that section of Lumley Road and people were  asked to stay clear of the western side.
At one point the police tried to persuade the crowds to go home in the hope that the boys would then come down. But despite repeated orders over loudspeakers from a Land Rover, the spectators refused to move.
A waiting ambulance drove off but returned shortly afterwards and took the injured boy to hospital when he came down.
Skegness Fire Brigade sent a snorkel to the scene and this took police officers to the roof.
Through loud hailers the police tried to persuade the boys to go along the roof to the snorkel platform.
For over an hour, Mr Frank Toplis (pictured right) shouted up at the boys in an equally vain bid to get them along to the snorkel.
He shouted to them “Let’s sort this out then. It’s no use sitting up there all night. Make your way to that end and the firemenwill take you off. No one will hurt you.”
Later when the police tried to clear the whole area, Frank shouted : “Come on, bring your mate down. Let’s talk it over.
PROVED POINT
“They’re all going away now. Don’t be silly, you’ve proved your point. You’ll freeze up there.”
While the older boy was running along the roof, the other boy remained on the ornamental spike at the top of the gable end above Spall’s shop. At one time he clung looking outwards, but later he lay down in the angle between the two sloping roofs and appeared to be going to sleep.
Once the boys lit cigarettes.
FRIGHTENED
Mr Toplis said afterwards: “I’ve got a kid of my own of the same age.
“They were frightened, stuck up there. They couldn’t get away because everyone had surrounded them. They were that frightened they wouldn’t come down.

“Sooner than get caught, I think they would have done a dive.”
The boys had absconded from a children’s home et Cambridge and, after a night at Skegness police station, were sent back. One had to have stitches put an a cut foot at Skegness Hospital.
Chief Supt Frank Yeadon, who watched through fieldglsses, said there was no significance in the knife, which was an ordinary pocket knife. He had not seen it being brandished at any time.
The police were prepared to starve the boys down. All the officers had been warned not to go too close to them in case they carried out threats they were believed to have made that they would throw them off.

There had been no truth in rumours that the boys , were drugged.
“You usually find these people are seeking sympathy and attention and they were certainly getting it,” he said. “Deprived of that, there would have been no point sitting up there. We were working on the theory that it was exhibitionism. That was why we tried to get the crowd to disperse.
“We would have been quite content to wait until they came down on their own accord.
“Pte Cockshott did something we would not have done for valid reasons but at the same time you have to admire his courage. What he did was certainly courageous.
“I think by that time the younger boy had got terrified.”