NOBODY has ever had to tell Roy Pattinson to brush up on his job because keeping the highways and byways and busy streets of Keswick spick and span has been more than his employment, it has been a labour of love for a man with real sense of pride in the task.

Roy retired  on February 19th, his 65th birthday, after covering many miles picking up litter from alongside the A66 and, latterly, patrolling Keswick’s town centre streets to ensure the town always looked neat and clean by the time local residents and tourists were up and about their daily business.

In 1998 Roy’s pride in the job was recognised when he won the silver broom award for the best litter picker in the North West.

He also won a certificate in 1999 from the Tidy Britain Group, one of just a handful of recipients of an award to mark the Queen Mother’s Birthday.

Brought up in Braithwaite, where he has lived his whole life, Roy went to Braithwaite village school and Lairthwaite School in Keswick, before going to work for his father who was a painter and decorator.

They had a workshop along the Little Braithwaite road and also did metalwork, his father Robert having served his time at the School of Industrial Art in Keswick.

For a few years Roy worked for himself prior to joining Allerdale Council in 1989 based in Workington helping to keep the beaches clean.

He then worked in Keswick for about five years until, when Focsa took over, he got the job of litter picking along the A66. “It was a one man job and everyone knew me,” said Roy. “All the passing trucks and cars used to pip their horns.”

He said: “I had the job of clearing along the A66 and other roads in Allerdale. I walked from Workington to Thursby a few times and along the A66 from Workington to Threlkeld.”

Changes to health and safety regulations didn’t fit in with Roy’s well practised routine so, rather than lose him, his employers sent him back to Keswick where he has meticulously kept the town litter free for the past four years.

Roy used to keep a book detailing the number of bags of litter he collected. He started the diary in 1996 and, in one two year period collected 1,686 bags including four or five colour TV sets from the verges around Keswick.

On a really busy day he would gather up 22 bags of litter plus various dead badgers, deer and foxes that were killed in road accidents.

Even when off duty, Roy picked up litter in the street rather than see it make the place untidy. He worked four days a week in Keswick and a couple of days on the wagon at weekends.

On one occasion when emptying the bin outside Fisher’s outdoor shop in Borrowdale Road, Keswick, Roy spotted a handbag which he put to one side until the mobile phone in it started ringing.

Not being a fan of mobile phones, Roy let it ring until he went home for his bait. It turned out the caller was the owner who had left the handbag in the Dog and Gun pub. Roy got a surprise when he started counting out the cash in the bag—about £360 in £20 notes, plus a host of credit cards.

“It was a visitor who had only just arrived in Keswick and it was all their holiday money,” he said. “How the bag got left in the pub and found its way into the dustbin, with all the money intact, is a mystery. The owners were going to have to go home as they had no money so that was one occasion where I saved the day.”

Another time Roy was on the Lakeside car park with a transit van fully loaded with rubbish when a man drew up in his car and said he thought his wallet was on the wagon. By mistake it had been put into a bin on the lake shore and was part of the rubbish that had been collected that afternoon.

“The van was full of rubbish. The only thing to do was empty it out. We were going through it when all of a sudden there was a shout to say he had found the wallet.”

Roy has picked up all sorts of strange items during his time as a litter collector, including a bag full of fishing gear from a roadside ditch. It belonged to a woman from Oxford who sent him a grateful letter after being reunited with the equipment.

Not all the items have been claimed by their owners and Roy has passed on a good few of his finds to the local Oxfam shop.

Ever since he was a schoolboy Roy has had the nickname of Smiler. Appropriate in view of his cheerful nature and the pride he has taken in the job. He admits it has been a labour of love as well as his work and said he had “mixed feelings” when it came to retiring.

However one aspect of the job he won’t miss is the tired, battered feet which came from treading the hard surfaces of Keswick’s street. He once strapped a pedometer on his ankle and found that, in a six and a half hour shift, he trod 26,000 steps or something like 8 miles a day.

With jobs to do around his home and garden at Little Garth in Braithwaite Roy has plenty of work to be going on with although he admits that, if he’s out and about and spots any litter, it’s going to be a temptation for a while to pick it up.
 

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