Police warn surgeon over ‘snipping twigs’

A RETIRED plastic surgeon was warned by police after a row escalated with a neighbour over “snipping three twigs” covering his parking mirror.

David Tolhurst, 81, installed the curved safety mirror on a telephone pole outside his home after his late wife, Sonia, had her car written off in a crash.

Mr Tolhurst, who has two children and practised at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said: “I was instructed by a highways engineer to take down the mirror. I had to go to hospital for 36 hours for treatment for my heart condition and when I returned the mirror was gone.”

Mr Tolhurst, whose wife died from cancer four years ago, then put the mirror on the opposite side of the road in a neighbour’s hedge with their permission.

He added: “The hedge grew up so I trimmed away three little twigs and some ivy. Two policemen in a very large van turned up to tell me off for ‘vandalising the property of a neighbour’.

“The hedge was shared by two neighbours and one had complained to police about me deforming their hedge.

“I told them I am not a vandal and they seemed awfully sorry but they reminded me of the statutory requirements that I must not interfere with the property of other people.” He has now put the mirror up in the garden of his own property.

Mr Tolhurst, from Edwardstone, Suffolk, lives on a blind corner that makes it difficult for him to drive out safely. “If you exit my property my view of oncoming traffic is blocked by two big telegraph poles and the road can be rather busy,” he said.

Nicholas Tribe, 49, the neighbour who allowed Mr Tolhurst to put the mirror in his hedge, said: “The mirror could help to prevent a nasty accident so I can’t understand why anyone would have any issue with it.”

A spokesman for Suffolk County Council said: “We received a complaint about the mirror. We asked Mr Tolhurst to remove the mirror and when he refused, we took it down.”