HERE are three photos for York City fans with long memories. No, not City players lifting a trophy (it is, incredibly, only six years since Gary Mills' men did that extraordinary Wembley double) but mounted police on duty outside a City home game at Bootham Crescent.

We don't know the date of these photographs, but they're possibly from the 1970s. They certainly date from a time when police chiefs felt the size of crowds at Bootham Crescent justified the presence of mounted police.

Today, the North Yorkshire force no longer has its own mounted police section: it was disbanded about 20 years ago, just before the start of the new millennium. If mounted police are required in York or North Yorkshire - usually to 'enhance our high visibility policing', as a police spokesperson put it - they will now be brought in from either West Yorkshire or South Yorkshire.

But up until 1998 or 1999, the North Yorkshire mounted police branch, which used to be based in Harrogate, was very high visibility indeed.

We have dug several photographs of mounted police officers out of our archives. They date mainly from the late 1960s and the 1970s and 1980s, and show mounted officers on patrol or on parade in York, Selby and Malton.

These days, mounted police are most often called upon to keep public order when there are large crowds. That would explain the mounted officers on duty at Bootham Crescent. But they clearly played a ceremonial and PR role, as well.

Mounted officers seem to have visited schools quite often (two of our photographs show school visits) and took part in parades (such as the one in 1979 when North Yorkshire Assistant Chief Constable Alfred Parrish was photographed on horseback outside York Minster saluting Princess Alice, the Duchess of Gloucester and daughter-in-law of King George V).

At least one of the photographs - that taken in Malton in 1982 - shows officers on horseback in what is explicitly described, in the caption, as a 'public relations exercise'. The two officers in that picture - PC Roger Kidd mounted on Solderge and PC Ken Davison mounted on Kilburn Lad - left their horsebox at Malton railway station and then 'rode around the shopping streets and housing estates for about three hours, talking to people along the way'.

If you want high visibility policing, that's a great way of doing it...

Stephen Lewis