PC Tom Clough once joked that almost no one would come to his funeral. On Thursday in Redcar, that private fear met a public answer he never lived to see
The 38-year-old Cleveland Police armed response officer died in the early hours of 22 August on the A66 at South Bank, near Middlesbrough. He was in a marked police car travelling the correct way along the dual carriageway when a Volkswagen Passat, travelling against the flow of traffic, struck the vehicle head-on. His colleague PC Matthew Blades, 37, was killed with him. Five young men in the Passat — Michael Robert Cahill, 23, Jakub Matusiak, 23, Makai Saddington, 18, and 17-year-olds Theo Rae and Cole Robert Worthy — also died at the scene.
Investigators have said a police pursuit of the Passat, linked to cloned plates and earlier reports of dangerous driving, had been aborted about ten seconds before the collision. Clough and Blades had not been part of that chase. They were in the area to help search for the car after an automatic number plate recognition alert.
That sequence of minutes has left Teesside with seven families in mourning and a community trying to hold two truths at once: the scale of a single crash, and the particular weight of losing two officers on duty.
Clough’s life was longer than a single night on the A66. Before Cleveland Police he served in the British Army, including in Afghanistan, then with the Civil Nuclear Constabulary at Sellafield and with British Transport Police. Colleagues remembered a professional who also carried humour into every room. His family called him their hero: a man who jumped into action for anyone, who stayed on public duty for most of his short adult life. Those closest to him also knew a quieter identity — partner, son, brother, and devoted owner of a sausage dog named Frank.
The joke about an empty funeral sat inside that mix of service and self-doubt. Federation representatives later said he used to insist few people would turn up. The streets after Blades’s funeral in Hartlepool the day before suggested otherwise: officers from forces across the country lined the route, some wearing both men’s collar numbers. A fundraising appeal for the two families closed above £1.2 million. Condolence books opened in civic buildings. Flowers gathered at police headquarters and near the crash site.
None of that restores the man. It only measures how far his life reached beyond what he allowed himself to imagine.
Thursday’s farewell in Redcar is where that gap becomes almost unbearable. Those who knew him describe a service that is both ceremonial and intimate: a police funeral for a colleague, and a family goodbye for a son. The most haunting moment, those present say, is not the uniforms or the silence on the road. It is his mother reading the last words of farewell. The sentences are simple. They do not try to explain the A66. They try to speak to a boy who became a soldier and then an officer, and who still wondered whether anyone would notice when he was gone.
That is why the old joke now feels cruel. He was wrong about the crowd. He was not wrong that a life of duty can still leave a person unsure of their own worth. Teesside’s gathering is an answer to the first fear. His mother’s voice is an answer to the second — and it is the part people say they will not forget.
Seven people died on that stretch of road. Two of them wore the same uniform. One of them spent years serving strangers and still expected an empty church. The church is not empty. The words his mother reads make that fact harder, not easier, to bear.
