Alison Halford, who has died aged 84, became Britain’s highest-ranking female police officer when, in 1983, she was appointed assistant chief constable of Merseyside. In her frank and celebrated memoir, No Way Up the Greasy Pole (1993), she described in detail the battles that women officers encountered in the decades before Cressida Dick became commissioner of the Metropolitan police in 2017.
During her time in the service, Halford fought and won a sex discrimination case against Merseyside police, and obtained a ruling from the European court of human rights that led to a change in the law.
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