15/10/10
Two street fundraisers with PFRA member Gift Fundraising helped foil a raid on a jewellery store in London yesterday morning (Thursday 14 October).
Team leader Robert Dennis (pictured) and his colleague Scott Adams were fundraising for NSPCC outside a branch of Ernest Jones in Kensington High Street when a motorcycle gang attacked the shop with sledghammers. Robert and Scott were among the first members of the public to tackle the five-man gang, confronting a raider who repeatedly tried to strike them with a sledgehammer.
Robert told London’s Evening Standard newspaper: “Two of the men were hammering at the glass. I came in and tried to grab one of them, and he started swinging his sledgehammer at us.
“As he ran away, I tripped him up and his bag fell on the floor. I picked it up and a group of guys tried to grab him.”
Robert later told PFRA: “I didn’t really think about it. It was the right thing to do.”
As the gang tried to escape, one raider was knocked from his motorcycle and pinned down until police arrived. The other members of the gang got away, but dropped their bags containing Rolex and Brietling watches worth £400,000.
The PFRA secretariat congratulates Robert and Scott, who injured his arm in the incident, and all the members of the public involved, on their public-spirited actions.
However, PFRA can’t help but chuckle at how Robert is referred to in the Evening Standard story as a “charity worker” rather than ‘chugger’ – the word the Standard has used to describe street fundraisers on just about every other occasion it has written about them.
Finally, in the aftermath of the incident, as the crowd were milling about, one bystander signed up for a Direct Debit because he said he had been so impressed by the fundraisers’ heroics.
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