Little girl who lost her hero PC daddy
GRIM-FACED, many in tears, nearly 1,000 police officers marched yesterday in tribute to a fallen colleague.
A pipe band led the sombre funeral procession, which brought the centre of Liverpool to a standstill as it filed past Merseyside Police headquarters and up the hill to the city’s fog-shrouded Anglican Cathedral.
They had come to honour PC Dave Phillips, the brave officer and loving family man who went out on a routine shift – but never came home.
He was knocked down and killed last month while trying to stop a stolen pick-up truck following reports of a burglary in Wal-
‘He was a sheer force for good’
lasey. The 34-year-old officer’s widow Jen, 28, and their daughters Abigail, seven, and Sophie, three, led the mourners. Wreaths were placed either side of his coffin in the hearse, one reading ‘Daddy’ and the other his collar number, 6554.
It took nearly an hour for the ranks of police – who included officers from across the UK – to file into the cathedral behind the six uniformed pallbearers carrying the coffin. Inside they were joined by hundreds of members of the public to hear family and colleagues pay tribute to PC Phillips.
The order of service carried a message from his family thanking the public for the ‘tidal wave of love, sympathy and support’ which had helped them through their ‘ time of abject misery and pain’.
PC Phillips’ sister Hannah Whieldon, 31, spoke following the hymn The Lord’s My Shepherd – which he stored on his phone so his loved ones knew he wanted it sung at his funeral.
‘But that was Dave,’ Mrs Whieldon said. ‘Everything organised, nothing left to chance. But in the end some things were beyond his control.’
She told the 2,000 mourners – among them policing minister Mike Penning – that PC Phillips would have been ‘pretty astounded’ that so many peo-
ple had come to pay their respects. ‘So many people here to celebrate the sheer force for good he was in his too short life, and to say goodbye to a man who was far too self-effacing to claim the title hero,’ she said.
‘He would never boast or brag about himself... but I will proudly claim that title for him, for no man embodied the spirit of a true hero more.’ Mrs Whieldon said her brother had been ‘called to be with God, where I have no doubt he is happily mowing the golf greens of heaven in preparation for a game, whilst keeping an eye out for us all’. She told of her ‘profound pride’ at how people had ‘saluted his unflinching dedication to his duty’.
‘They’ve shed tears at the loss of a devoted family man who revelled in the ordinary bliss of a warm and loving home. And they’ve rallied around a broken family for whom the days have never seemed so desolate and dark.’ But her brother had never dwelled on the darkness, she said, and a fitting tribute would be to ‘always seek that light and the good in this world that he saw with such perfect clarity’.
PC Phillips’ other sister, Kate, 28, read a poem she had written in which he asked the family to ‘remember me for my smile, the one you put on my face; remember me for my strength, the courage I always gave’.
Colleague and close friend PC Dave Lamont described his ‘genuine love of action’, adding: ‘He was front and centre of everything we did.’
Delivering the eulogy, Merseyside Chief Constable Sir Jon Murphy
‘A loving, devoted family man’
recalled a comment from an officer at a bravery awards ceremony that ‘the important thing is, at the end of the watch everybody came home’.
He said: ‘On that terrible night Dave showed dedication to duty, he did everything in his power to keep the public safe, he acted in the finest traditions of the police service. He too was brave. But Dave didn’t come home – and the police service of the United Kingdom and beyond is here today to honour him.’
The Bishop of Birkenhead, the Rt Rev Keith Sinclair, described PC Phillips as ‘one of Merseyside’s finest policemen, a gentleman, a true friend’. There was applause at the end of the service, which also featured a song from his favourite musical, Les Miserables.
Clayton Williams, 18, will go on trial next year accused of the murder of PC Phillips and other offences.