AFTER helping bring justice for the past 30 years, Gordon Berlyne is bowing out into well-earned retirement.

Mr Berlyne OBE (70), from Prestwich, will leave the bench at Bury Magistrates Court on Monday (January 12) to pursue his many hobbies including caravanning with his wife Carol.

The couple are now busy moving house to Radcliffe, but Mr Berlyne says he will miss his life as a Justice of the Peace.

He said: "I will miss all my colleagues so much. It's amazing how attached to them you become. The one thing I will take away with me is the respect that you have for each other's opinions and the decisions of other magistrates."

Mr Berlyne became a magistrate in 1973 after his name was put forward by a colleague.

He recalled: "I was a special constable at the time, and was up for promotion along with a work friend. He put my name forward to become a magistrate because it wasn't possible for me to take on both roles. He eventually won the promotion, and we have both progressed: but I think I was the one that came off better!"

On his first day sitting as a magistrate in the old Radcliffe courthouse, Mr Berlyne remembers being bundled into the ladies' toilets by the Justices' Clerk to swear out a summons, and on his second day, taking the chair in the juvenile court because of a lack of magistrates.

During his time on the bench in Bury, he has also been deputy chairman of the family, youth and fines enforcement panels, rota chairman, as well as serving on the probation liaison committee, the licensing, betting and gaming panel and the standing orders committee, among others.

He was also on the chairman of the board of visitors of HMP Risley during the transformation from remand centre to category C training prison, and chairman of the prison service building committee when HMP Forest Bank was designed.

Mr Berlyne has become known among his colleagues for his no-nonsense approach and dislike of form filling.

And he recalled a time when he told the leaders of two rival gangs who were due to be bound over: "My gang is bigger than either of yours; I have twelve thousand members and they are the Greater Manchester Police. If I ever come across either of you again, I will see you get a minimum of 12 years each."

Both were bound over, but Mr Berlyne added: "If a case was disposed of today in that manner, the Lord Chancellor would have a fit. Sometimes common sense and justice seem to have been forgotten."

As well being awarded with an OBE, Mr Berlyne has also received an honorary Doctor of Law in recognition of his contribution to the magistracy, the prison service and the police.