The opening decades of the twentieth century produced some of the most far-reaching changes to police organisation ever. It was a time of social, economic, technological and industrial upheaval, and was marked and marred by conflict. The key event was World War I, which involved policemen to an extent and in ways that have long gone unnoticed. Just as the war touched the lives of many other Australians, so also it touched the police force and influenced attitudes, ideas, recruiting, duties, workload, and ultimately the direction of policing. The appointment of women police came about partly because of the war, while the advent of the motor car and the formation of a police union were other important innovations. Indeed, the motor car irreversibly altered the nature of police work and police community relations. While these broader events were taking place, the force had four chief commissioners, men whose leadership ranged from exceptional to mediocre. The pressures of war, command changes, unionisation, social conditions and political climate combined to create an environment in which a police strike was possible—and finally came in 1923. Conflict and change were the essence of this age, when policemen fought battles on many fronts, against foes that at times included motorists and motorisation, Germans, politicians and each other.
In 1912 a new mounted police depot was built at the corner of Grant and Dodds streets, South Melbourne. Costing £14 064, the complex was reputed to be the best in the southern hemisphere and included a riding school, horse-breaking yards and stables for seventy-five horses. The men of the force had a long and proud association with horses dating back to the 1830s, but the new stable complex was bigger and better than anything they had known in that time. Mistakenly, it was built in the twilight years of mounted policing, in an age when the automobile was about to take over from the horse. Instead of building stables the police should have been building garages. Motor cars were soon changing streetscapes across Victoria, revolutionising personal transport, and altering the nature of policing and community relations.
The first motor car in Melbourne was built locally in 1897 by the Australasian Horseless Carriage Syndicate and was described as having the appearance of ‘a stylish double-seated dog cart’. It was a time of swift invention and, by 1903, there were sufficient motoring enthusiasts in Victoria to form the Automobile Club of Victoria (ACV). In 1904 these motorists held their first rally and boasted that their ‘chariots race without horses’. In 1905 Dunlop held the first motor-car reliability trial in Australia and, also, the first Victorian motoring fatality occurred when a car collided with a cyclist. New expressions crept into common usage as cyclists and pedestrians spoke of ‘road hogs’ in motor cars, and motorists spoke of ‘police traps’. In only eight years the horseless carriage eclipsed the bicycle as the ideal mechanical hack and sped along the road of public acceptance to challenge the horse.1
Motor cars were generally faster, noisier and often smellier than any horse-drawn vehicle and, at an early stage in their development, displayed a potential in the hands of mere mortals to kill and maim their occupants, pedestrians, cyclists and animals. They also frightened children, horses and others not yet initiated into the new world. It was the motor car’s awesome combination of speed and noise that prompted moves to control its use. The need for controls loomed large in the minds of many people and, in 1905, Sir Samuel Gillott introduced the Motor Car Bill ‘to regulate the use of motor cars’. Gillott’s Bill was modelled on the English Motor Car Act of 1903 and proposed that all motor cars be registered, all drivers licensed, and a maximum speed limit of 20 miles an hour apply to motor cars on public roads throughout the state. Gillott intended that municipal councils would undertake the registration and licensing functions and that council officers would join with police to enforce the speed limits and other regulations. This was the case in England, where county and borough councils had traditionally controlled the use of locomotives, traction engines and motor cars. The ACV argued strongly against the controls proposed by Gillott, and parliamentarians divided for and against the motor car. During debates on the Bill the notion of police checking drivers’ licences was compared to ‘the old digger hunting days at Ballarat that led to Eureka’, and concern was expressed about the possible ‘over-officiousness’ of policemen enforcing speed and licence regulations: ‘Honourable members desired to be assured that the power of restriction in these matters would not be placed wholly in the hands of policemen’. The Gillott Bill did not become law, but it did promote considerable lobbying and debate, thus heightening public awareness about the potential of motor cars.
Opposition to the Motor Car Bill and the proposed police role served as a valuable indicator of things to come. The police in Victoria had always had a part to play in the regulation of horse riders and horse-drawn vehicles and it was a role in which their involvement and authority were rarely ever questioned. Constables kept a watchful eye over cabmen, lorry drivers and bullockies, and under the provisions of the Police Offences Act could prosecute larrikin horsemen and others who rode or drove ‘furiously or negligently’ through any public place. Cabmen, traction engine operators and other paid transport drivers were licensed by municipal authorities, but policemen were not involved there and confined their role to preservation of the public safety. Individuals who rode or drove horses or bicycles for private pleasure or transport did not need a licence, and there were no fixed speed limits. The motor car, however, introduced elements of danger, arbitrariness and class into this scene and from the outset hardened the attitudes of those involved.
A changing streetscape: Elizabeth and Collins streets, Melbourne, in the 1920s
The new standards, embodied in the 1903 English Motor Car Act and proposed in Victoria by Gillott, were not unduly restrictive but they were in some respects arbitrary, and they did impose general legal obligations upon motorists that had never been applied to horsemen. Laws intended to protect all road users might have stood a good chance of early acceptance but for the fact that they struck first and hardest at wealthy and influential people. Although the popularity of motor vehicles was spreading quickly they were an expensive luxury item, costing up to £2000 each when workers’ wages were only several pounds a week. The people who then owned motor cars were not the types usually checked or arrested by the police, and the thought of this occurring because they were motorists was anathema to them. Debates on Gillott’s Bill were punctuated by talk of wealth and class, with proponents of the new laws arguing that ‘the people who drive motor cars are usually well-to-do, and there ought certainly not to be one law for the rich and another for the poor’. Opponents of the Bill objected that ‘no constable should be at liberty to arrest a gentleman straight off the reel’ and that arrest ‘depended, of course, on the position the man occupied’. An indication of the exclusive state of motoring was the time devoted during debates to the question of chauffeurs and their wages, and whether chauffeurs or car owners would be liable for civil action or criminal prosecution under the proposed laws. It was a time when chauffeurs had their own club, and when Tarrants Garage in Melbourne provided a waiting room and a billiard table for chauffeurs waiting at the works while their employers’ cars were being repaired. Had the majority of motorists in 1905 been poor workers, rather than well-to-do gentlemen, there is little doubt that the Motor Car Bill would have had a speedy passage through parliament. However, the spectre of policemen stopping gentlemen and their chauffeurs for licence and registration checks was enough to stall it in its infancy. The prolonged period of estrangement between motorists and policemen had begun even before laws regulating motor traffic were enacted.2
The ACV and other influential motorists managed to defer motor traffic regulations until 1908, when another motor car Bill was brought before parliament, this time by Sir Alexander Peacock, with the introduction ‘that motors are being generally utilised now, not only for pleasure, but also for business … it is essential that there should be some legislation to deal with this new and increasing traffic which takes place throughout the metropolitan area’. In the few years since Gillott’s Bill was shelved, the cost of motor cars had steadily dropped, the number of cars and motorcycles in use had steadily increased and, almost as Peacock spoke, cars were being used in military exercises in Victoria and by the publishers of the Herald to deliver newspapers around Melbourne. The 1908 Motor Car Bill differed markedly from Gillott’s proposals in that it vested responsibility for registration, licensing and enforcement with the police and in its final form did not stipulate a set speed limit, but instead prohibited any person from driving a motor car ‘on a public highway recklessly or negligently or at a speed or in a manner which is dangerous to the public’.
Parliamentary and public discussions on the new Bill were couched in similar terms to those of 1905, but experience had removed some of the obstacles to enactment that had blocked the first Bill. There was still a great deal of debate about wealth, class, police power, speed and danger but all parties appear to have drawn upon the comprehensive finding of a 1906 English royal commission that had studied most aspects of motor-car regulation, including speed limits and police methods. The English experience was that fixed maximum speed limits were not feasible and that their regulation placed the police in open conflict with motorists, diverting valuable police manpower from other duties to traffic work. The English commission recommended that the ‘general speed limit of 20 miles an hour’ be abolished and, principally because of that recommendation, no general speed limit was included in the first Victorian Motor Car Act. When the legislation was being debated, the policing of speed limits was seemingly uppermost in the minds of many people. The practice of timing speeding motorists was described as ‘un-English’ and ‘rather humiliating’—indeed, as something that ‘detracted from the proper and dignified duties of the police’. The manner of enforcing speed limits overseas worried Norman Bayles, MLA for Toorak, motorist and member of the ACV, and he described them in the hope that they would not be adopted in Victoria:
They have a policeman stationed behind a hedge with a signal wire along a measured furlong. The policeman has a stop watch and he signals to a man at the other end of the wire when a car passes, and if a person drives only half-a-mile over the 20-mile limit he is a law breaker.
Some members of the House could see ‘nothing trappy’ in the police behaviour described by Bayles, and complimented the police for their ‘ingenuity in bringing to justice people who infringe the laws’. However, Bayles and the ACV won the day and, in place of a general speed limit, there was substituted the notion of driving to the common danger, whereby motorists could drive as fast as they liked unless it was proved to be dangerous to the public. This provision was analogous to that of ‘furious riding’, which was the principal and traditional legal control over horsemen who endangered public safety.
Although discussion about general speed limits was an important feature of the 1908–9 Motor Car Bill debates, considerable attention was also devoted to general police powers over motorists and the question of socioeconomic class. Concern was expressed about the move to give policemen full control of all registration, licensing and enforcement duties relevant to motor cars, and a number of people urged that municipal councils should undertake some of the work, as in England. Peacock, however, successfully pushed his proposals through parliament, arguing that a centralised system for recording licence and registration details was the most viable and that the police force was the logical government department to do the work. He also stressed that the police, unlike municipal councils, were ‘under the control of Parliament’ and that ‘administration will cost nothing’. The last facile statement was in reality a euphemism meaning that the cost of administration would be absorbed within the police budget. Sixty years later Colonel Sir Eric St Johnston inspected the force and reported that nowhere else in the world were policemen ‘responsible for the registration of motor vehicles. It is clearly not a police function and should be carried out by a different organization’, but in 1908 the force was a cheap expedient. Two members of parliament sought to raise the question of police manpower and suggested that ‘the proper control of the motor car traffic will require a great addition to the police force’, but the subject lapsed without further debate. It was not a topic that Peacock or his government were prepared to take up, particularly as they were going to administer the Motor Car Act at no cost.
Once the legislators had satisfied themselves about the questions of licensing, registration and speed control, the principal subject of contention was class: how would policemen deal with wealthy motorists? This big obstacle of 1905 was more readily overcome in 1908. John Murray, MLA for Warrnambool, and a man with some sympathy for Labor, argued without being contradicted that ‘far and above the luxuries of the rich man, far above the privileges of caste, is the safety of the general public’, and that ‘no duty is more properly the duty of the police than to protect the lives of the public’. Murray’s line might have met the fate of similar arguments propounded in 1905 except that even the wealthy could now see a need for regulation: ‘motor cars have come to stay’ and ‘cars will come within the reach of the man with moderate means’. There was even talk of cars coming ‘within the means of humbler individuals’, and of a time when ‘every poor person’ could drive a car. The motor car was confusing the class barriers. Rich motorists would need as much police protection from poor motorists as pedestrians would need from chauffeur-driven limousines. The Motor Car Act and Regulations came into operation on 1 March 1910, and the Victoria Police Force became the single statewide authority for licensing drivers, registering motor vehicles and enforcing all the provisions of both the Act and regulations.3
The new motor-car laws added to police work and altered relations between policemen and the steadily increasing motoring section of the community. During the first four months of the Act’s operation the force registered 2645 motor vehicles and licensed 3204 drivers. By the end of 1911 these figures had grown to 4844 vehicles and 5935 drivers; within a decade they had raced to 29 354 and 34 236 respectively. The annual renewal and maintenance of records, and the collection of revenue related to that work, in 1912 prompted the formation of a special group, the Motor Police, who operated a central office in Melbourne and were the genesis of the vast Motor Registration Branch. The Motor Police, however, performed only a small amount of the total registration and licensing work, most of which fell to policemen across the state. During the 1920s attempts were made to transfer responsibility for motor vehicle registration and record keeping from the force to the Treasury and Country Roads Board, because it was ‘a fruitful source of revenue’. However, these moves were successfully resisted by police administrators on the grounds that ‘the closest contact between the police and the registration system’ was essential ‘to ensure as effective a control as possible over traffic offences, burglaries, thefts of cars [and] movements of organised criminal gangs’. The full import of the awesome rise in vehicle and driver registrations is best shown in relation to other factors. The first ten years of operation of the Motor Car Act included the duration of World War I, and in the years from 1910 to 1919 the number of policemen per 10 000 population fell from 12.28 to 11.49. The number of horses actually rose in this time from 442 829 to 523 788, but, while the death rate in horse-drawn vehicle, tram, bicycle and railway accidents remained relatively static, together amounting to less than two a week, fatal motor vehicle accidents rose to an average of one a week, and from 1913 warranted specific mention in the Victorian Year Book. Traffic control, of both horses and motor vehicles, was just one facet of police work and a declining number of policemen still had to cope with special wartime duties and increases in general patrol and crime work.4
Motor traffic control also altered the relationship between police and large numbers of citizens. Horsemen and policemen had long experienced cordial relations. Although fruit vendors and drivers of hansom cabs were at times prosecuted, policemen regulating street traffic were expected to have ‘a knowledge of horses’, to ‘display intelligence, steadiness and discretion’ and to ‘assist the public’, by zeal and attention avoiding prosecutions rather than increasing them. This philosophy was epitomised by pointsmen at the intersection of Swanston and Flinders streets, Melbourne, who were directed to facilitate at all times the unimpeded progress of horse-drawn lorries and who were issued with a shovel and a box of sand, to be used if lumbering Clydesdales’ hooves were slipping on the road. The shovelling of sand was a service happily rendered by policemen, and one gladly received by drivers of struggling horse teams. At the other end of the spectrum, policemen also played a vital role in the stopping of bolting and runaway horses. It was dangerous work, requiring a special brand of strength, skill and courage, but was nevertheless a common feature of police life at the turn of the century. Many policemen were commended for such deeds and eleven of them received valour badges for ‘stopping bolting horses at great personal risk’.
The advent of the motor car gradually altered this picture, and the policeman with sand and shovel was replaced by one with a stopwatch and notebook. Soon after the passing of the Motor Car Act, police methods for regulating motor traffic were described as ‘the veriest moonshine’, and Chief Commissioner O’Callaghan was forced to publicly defend the traffic work of his men, claiming that they were ‘not after scalps’. Although the Motor Car Act did not contain a general speed limit, much of the traffic duty done by policemen centred on the detection of motorists driving at a speed that was considered dangerous to the public, which thrust the force and motorists headlong into conflict. The ACV started a legal defence fund to fight police cases, and there were constant suggestions that police methods were defective, their stopwatches inaccurate and their attitude to motorists jaundiced. Police in Victoria adopted the English system of using stopwatches to check the speed of motor cars over a measured distance, but—as with their later use of speedometers, amphometers, breathalysers and digitectors—they were continually accused of making inaccurate readings or using inaccurate chronographs, and policemen found themselves locked into vitriolic legal arguments with motorists and their solicitors. Heated and difficult court cases were not new to policemen but, whereas they had traditionally been contests between policemen and criminals, they were increasingly becoming disputes between policemen and ordinary motorists. The class element still played a part, and the Prahran Court was the venue of the most public and hard-fought cases, when the bench heard charges against wealthy speedsters, booked while travelling along the road to Toorak. The press found that reports of motor accidents and traffic cases were popular with readers, so they became regular features. So frequent were such reports that indexes to The Argus included special entries on motor prosecutions and accidents. It had not happened in the day of the horse.
The estrangement between motorists and policemen, first coming to light in l905, increased in scope and intensity as motor cars became more common. It was a seemingly irreversible trend and one succinctly described by T. A. Critchley when writing of similar events in England:
to a growing number of citizens for whom any dealings with the police would have been exceptional, the policeman of every village and town became a man to be reckoned with … a figure of authority … the town policeman was showing more interest in catching speeding motorists than in his traditional weaknesses for rabbit pie, plump cooks in basement kitchens, and pretty parlourmaids.5
There were other consequences. Thefts of and from motor cars constituted a new and lucrative form of criminal activity and, soon after numbers of motor vehicles appeared on Melbourne streets, advertisements appeared for steering-gear and ignition locks to prevent misuse and loss by theft. Motor vehicles also offered the criminal classes greater mobility, the speed and adaptability of motor vehicles having many advantages over horses, trains and boats—although plans could still be upset. In 1916 William Haines was found shot dead in a hire car at Doncaster, allegedly murdered by Squizzy Taylor in a quarrel after they had rented a Unic open tourer in the city and driven towards Templestowe with the intention of robbing a bank agency.
The same features that attracted criminals to cars also caught the eye of others. Before the outbreak of World War I motor cars were being used in Victoria for commercial and military purposes, and as mail vans and ambulances, but the men who administered the Motor Car Act were slow to utilise motor cars in their own work. In 1904 it was suggested that policemen swap some of their horses for motor cars to ‘lend wings to the feet of the law’, but the proposals were filed without comment. So policemen were motorless in an increasingly motorised society; by bicycle and tram they pursued motor cars. It was a source of derision, and it heightened friction between motorists and policemen, sections of the motoring community regarding non-use of the car as clear evidence of police prejudice against motor vehicles and their drivers. This contrasted sharply with the situation in some overseas police forces, most notably in Paris, where policemen were ‘trained as motor car drivers and specially allocated to supervising motor traffic’. When eventually the Victorian force did use motor vehicles it was at first only for the transport of people and property, and it was some years later (in 1922) that policemen actually used motor vehicles for traffic and patrol work. Yet policemen were among the earlier motoring fatalities: two constables from the police band died in December 1911 at Camperdown, when a Rolls-Royce in which they were passengers lost a wheel and crashed during a band visit to the district. The first fatal accident involving a police patrol vehicle occurred in 1926 when a Lancia car overturned near the Alfred Hospital, killing the wireless operator, Constable Arthur Currie.6
The intensity of the hostility between policemen and motorists abated but never disappeared. Regulation of motor traffic was a new and ongoing duty that increasingly occupied police time and distanced the force from large sections of the community. Many traffic laws were absolute, and people were liable to prosecution and conviction even if they did not know they were doing wrong. Constables had traditionally pursued bushrangers, footpads, vagabonds and others of similar ilk, and few honest people questioned that police role. With the coming of the motor car, constables were also required to pursue the likes of the local magistrate, mayor, bank manager and parson. To the policeman anyone who drove a motor vehicle was a potential lawbreaker, and to the motorist all policemen were potential prosecutors. The rules had changed. Something was lost in police and community relationships when the sand boxes disappeared from busy street corners.
Nationhood and federalism were developments of little direct significance to the Victoria Police Force until World War I, when the police of all states were inextricably caught up in the national war effort. The Great War, like the advent of the motor car, altered the relationships of policemen with large sections of the community and forced policemen to alter their thinking and their methods in order to meet the mixed demands of the domestic policing needs of a state and the pressing federal needs of a nation at war. In a rousing and patriotic oration at the Melbourne Town Hall on 15 August 1914, Chief Commissioner Alfred George Sainsbury plunged the force into the war effort by declaring that ‘we were fighting with the gloves off a deadly and determined enemy, fighting to the death … we were fighting—not for the sake of Jingoism or even patriotism but for our national existence’. The loss of the war, he went on, would mean ‘the establishment of a German Police Force, and in fact the Germanising and controlling of all city and country institutions by the enemy’. Sainsbury advocated the formation of ‘a regiment of one thousand well-disciplined and drilled men, comprising police and police pensioners’; and boasted that ‘if the police had to face the foe they would show that they were as courageous and game as any’. Although Sainsbury offered his services as commander of such a unit, and suggested that ‘the Commonwealth arm us and the State pay us’, it was not a practical proposition: he was in effect pledging more than half of his men to the expeditionary force. The idea was not accepted, but the government did allow policemen to volunteer, and the first to enlist did so within days of the outbreak of a war in which 138 members of the force enrolled for active service, twenty-seven of them either being killed in action or dying of wounds. Military promotion was earned by seventy-nine members, and decorations conferred on some of them included the Distinguished Service Order, Distinguished Conduct Medal, Military Medal and Croix de Guerre.7
The number of policemen who went to war fell well short of Sainsbury’s envisaged regiment, and when the fervour of his oration began to die so too did the level of support given to those men who enlisted—a failure of action to match ardent rhetoric that was not confined to the police. Nevertheless, policemen contemplating enlistment were beset by a confusion of bureaucratic haggling over wages, life insurance premiums, reinstatement rights and other entitlements. Many people, including policemen, were unprepared for the onset of war and in the absence of contingency planning the precedent for decision-making was often the Boer War. So the first policemen to enlist were discharged from the force by compulsory resignation, paid in full, instructed to hand in their kits, requested to pay increased life-insurance premiums in advance and docked as much as 5s 2d a day in wages. Representations were made to the government on behalf of policemen wanting to enlist and, as the war progressed, conditions of enlistment were made clearer and more attractive. In 1915 it was decided that the positions of all policemen who went to war ‘would remain open for them on their return to Victoria’. If, under ordinary circumstances, they would have been granted increased pay during their time in the army, that was granted to them on their return to police duty: they were ‘simply regarded as being on leave’. The government also agreed to maintain the compulsory police life-assurance policies for those who went to war, but this was not matched by insurance companies, who demanded higher premiums paid in advance because policemen were engaged in active service abroad, not just for the defence of Australia. The government refused, when asked, to follow the lead of ‘private firms and banks’ in making up the difference between the 7s 6d a day paid to constables and the five shillings a day they earned as privates in the expeditionary forces. Patriotism had its price: at least one constable returned from service overseas to be refused reinstatement in the force because his pre-war police record was not good. But sometimes patriotism was rewarded: 178 civilians who went to war, and returned home fit and well, were given preferential recruitment into the police force for serving King and Country.
In Sunday at Kooyong Road Brian Lewis suggests that for young boys like him in 1914–18 ‘The police are enemies for they are Irish and the Irish are opposed to the war … The Irish police show a reluctance to change the dark-blue uniform of the State for the khaki of the Commonwealth; the police become more and more Irish as the war goes on’. He is both right and wrong. Only one Irish member of the police force is known to have enlisted in the army during World War I, but of 250 men who joined the police force during that period only six were Irishmen, the only perceptible increase in the Irishness of the force being in the minds of those harbouring prejudices.
For many policemen the most important battle was fought on the home front where a depleted force served both a state and a federal master, with a variety of added wartime responsibilities. The routine work of policemen escaped the notice of many people, including the war historian Ernest Scott who, apart from one favourable passage of seven lines, spares the police only several curt mentions in his 922-page tome, Australia During the War. The essential nature of much police work was not overlooked by everybody, however, and Major General Sir John Gellibrand drew on his military experiences when he wrote, ‘It cannot be too strongly urged that police are in a sense a force on active service in a continuous campaign …’8
The man who headed the force during its ‘continuous campaign’ from 1913 to 1919 was Alfred George Sainsbury, who succeeded Thomas O’Callaghan as chief commissioner on 1 April 1913. O’Callaghan’s retirement, like much of his police career, was topical and public—being debated in parliament and featured in the daily newspapers, The Argus in particular urging his resignation and applauding its acceptance. According to that paper, the force under O’Callaghan was ‘utterly demoralised’, ‘suffering from a kind of moral dry-rot’ and lacking ‘morale and tone’. It is true that police pay and work conditions had deteriorated, fostering discontent throughout the force. This was due more to a lack of government funding than to O’Callaghan’s administration, yet his rigid discipline and brusque manner made him a focal point for disaffection. The moves towards police unionisation that he sparked and extinguished in 1903 were again ignited in 1913. At the age of sixty-seven and after a decade at the top, his administration was stultified, lacking innovation and a sense of direction. He did leave the force in a rundown state and the men in it disenchanted, and he continued his enigmatic ways during retirement: he visited police departments in Europe and North America and, on his return, encroached on Sainsbury’s administration by submitting a report to the government suggesting police reforms of a sort that he should have implemented himself while chief commissioner. He then went on to sit regularly as a justice of the peace at the Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions and became a prominent local historian, serving as president of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria and publishing several articles about early Victorian history. In 1923 he made a searing public statement denouncing the police strikers in Victoria, whose refusal to work was largely rooted in decisions taken under him.9
Sainsbury was a moderate achiever, although generally overlooked by historians. In each of three works touching on Victorian police history, Sainsbury rates a scant paragraph and is generally squashed between O’Callaghan and his successor with comments like ‘Sainsbury’s administration, possibly due to the war, was not particularly distinguished’. On the contrary, because of the war and the social and industrial turmoil of those years, his term of office ranks among the most testing of the pre-1939 era.
Sainsbury was a native of Heidelberg, Victoria, and after working as a farrier he joined the force as a mounted constable on 17 May 1878 at the age of twenty-four. He worked his way through the ranks, serving in different parts of the state as a detective and in uniform, and along the way he amassed twenty-six commendations, including a famous one for ‘elucidating a north-eastern mystery, in which a baby was murdered and the body was thrown to the pigs to eat’. Unlike O’Callaghan’s record, Sainsbury’s was exemplary; he was never charged with misconduct, nor made the subject of an inquiry. When appointed chief commissioner, he held the rank of inspecting-superintendent and, at fifty-seven, was the oldest man in the force. An unassuming type, he always wore ‘a battered hat’ and ‘spurned the use of cars’, preferring to ride to work in trams. He was the first chief commissioner to have been born in Victoria and, following Chomley and O’Callaghan, the third successive career policeman to be appointed to the senior post. Sainsbury was selected for the position from an initial list of seventeen applicants that included policemen, soldiers and lawyers, but only three serving members of the force.
The decision to appoint Sainsbury ‘was received with marked approbation by practically every member of the force, as it was recognised that the order of seniority was being maintained’. Indeed, not only did most of the force approve of Sainsbury’s promotion, they held meetings prior to his appointment and publicly lobbied on his behalf. In unprecedented fashion, policemen of all ranks were party to the passing of resolutions that ‘the position of Chief Commissioner of Police, in the event of such office becoming vacant, should be filled by the appointment from within the force of the officer next in rank and seniority’.
Chief Commissioner A. G. Sainsbury
It was indicative of the times and the moves towards employee combinations that policemen organised to press home a demand such as this. It was also indicative of the conservative nature of the force, in that rank was their guide, and seniority their yardstick, in seeking to maintain the status quo through all levels of the force. The Argus had strongly urged the appointment of an eminent young administrator from outside the force, but that was not to be. Adherence to the seniority system was good for morale, enhancing promotion prospects and fuelling ambition. However, it did not necessarily secure the best available person to head the force, and a preoccupation with seniority meant that good luck rather than good management made Sainsbury the force’s wartime leader. Luck, however, this time produced an acceptably solid commissioner.10
Against a background of world conflict, Sainsbury experimented with motorcycle patrols, training classes in lifesaving, first aid and ju-jitsu, purchased a motorised prison van, phased out many troop horses and replaced them with bicycles, and supported the introduction of Sunday rest days for police. It was also during his command, but not due to it, that the Victoria Police Association was formed and two women were allowed to join the force. He was also the first chief commissioner to make statements about the inadequacy of some criminal laws and to suggest legal reforms. He criticised the role of juries in criminal trials and commented ‘that what was an excellent thing in the time of King Alfred the Great, possesses no virtue at all at the present time’. Sainsbury, like his immediate two predecessors, was a conservative leader but, unlike Chomley, was not reactionary and, unlike O’Callaghan, was not fractious. He was a cautious man who often, as with the introduction of women into police work, adopted a ‘wait and see’ attitude and watched closely the course of such experiments when they were tried interstate and overseas. He was not destined to be in the vanguard of police reform but neither was his always a rearguard action. Most of Sainsbury’s reforms reflected broader changes in technology and social values within the Australian community, such as motorisation and the suffragette movement, which is true of almost all police reform.
Still, senior police administrators in Victoria had a record of resistance to change, and Sainsbury was in a position to encourage or reject new ideas. It is to his credit that he ventured to accept the changes that he did. His principal errors lay in his rejection of two new policing ideas that later gained almost universal acceptance throughout the police world. He refused to use police dogs because he felt ‘man could beat the dog every time … I do not think their services as a whole would be worth the time, trouble and money’; and he decided not to introduce electric patrol boxes because they ‘might mean undue interference with promotion, for if constables mechanically record their own movements it would be hardly worthwhile keeping Senior Constables to watch them too’.
Mostly, though, Sainsbury recognised the changed needs of the community and the necessity for the force to offer new skills and services. Under his leadership there began a gradual shift in the emphasis of police work. Instead of focusing almost exclusively on brawny beat constables and distant mounted troopers, the operations of the force were adapted and extended, so that police—men and women—applied new skills to traditional roles and became more active in community welfare work. Less emphasis was placed on the physical size and equestrian ability of recruits, and more attention was given to preparing police to deal with twentieth-century problems. After thirty-five years’ experience, and at fifty-seven years of age, Sainsbury coped well with the stresses of war and proved a loyal servant to both the state and Commonwealth governments, for the horizons and loyalties of the force were extended beyond the traditional geographic boundaries of the state and, in some respects, police work on the home front did become a fight for national existence.11
Before the outbreak of war, work undertaken by policemen in Victoria on behalf of the Commonwealth government was limited and passive, deriving principally from the presence of federal parliament in Melbourne. There was no Commonwealth police force, so state policemen provided security at the Federal Treasury, federal Parliament House and other Commonwealth offices. War quickly transformed this picture and, in addition to those Victorian policemen who went overseas on active service, most members of the force at some time found themselves engaged on Commonwealth duties. Ernest Scott described the wartime role of policemen as one in which they worked as ‘useful police allies’ to military authorities. Such a description understates the nature and extent of the role of state police who, rather than being merely ‘useful allies’, were the key front-line element in Commonwealth efforts to safeguard Australia from the ‘enemy within’. It was the scattered presence of ordinary policemen that made the nation’s internal defences operative. The threat from within was often more imagined than real, but counter-espionage work, intelligence work, translating, surveillance, alien registration and internments were some of the duties undertaken by police on behalf of the Commonwealth. In an air of wondrous expectation, police in the remotest corners of the state were alerted to ‘watch for aerials of enemy agents transmitting messages’, and to watch for and report by telegraph the flights of any aircraft. These duties were different, and were seen as important enough to be tinged with excitement; certainly they were national duties done for the people of Australia.12
The main Commonwealth duty that fell to the lot of policemen was the registration of aliens under the War Precautions Act 1914. Police were appointed registration officers, and a proclamation by the governor-general ordered ‘all persons who are subjects of the German Empire and who are resident in the Commonwealth’ to report themselves to their nearest police station, and to notify immediately any change of address. Several days later, Austrian subjects were included. Duties in connection with the registration of aliens meant ‘a large amount of work’ that was ‘greatly increased by the aliens constantly changing their addresses’. By 1917 the number of registered aliens in Victoria was twelve thousand.
Policemen were also required to ‘arrest and detain all German Officers or Reservists as prisoners-of-war’, and to effect the internment of enemy subjects. A total of 6890 people were interned in Australia, and in Victoria 889 were allowed on parole under police supervision. These duties drew a mixed reaction to and from policemen, who were often required to investigate or arrest local residents of long standing. It was sensitive work that could easily cause offence and policemen sometimes erred or over-reacted, letting suspicion supplant fact. Generally, however, they trod warily and Scott suggests that:
The cool, good sense of an experienced police sergeant with a knowledge of the people living in his district, saved many a person of German origin from interference, or even from removal to a concentration camp, when reports tinged with hysteria or malice might otherwise have brought discomfort upon him.13
Some policemen worked in sensitive areas on secret work. Constable F. W. Sickerdick and a number of detectives were transferred to the Military Intelligence Section for duties that included translating documents and undercover investigation. Sickerdick proved so adept at this type of work that the Defence Department asked for his retention at an increased rank and higher wages. Another policeman whose services the Commonwealth sought to retain after the war was Detective R. P. Brennan, who was sent to Egypt and London on ‘special duty’. The Egyptian authorities had requested the services of Australian police, and after consultations between the acting prime minister, G. F. Pearce, and the premier of Victoria, Brennan sailed aboard the RMS Malwa on 21 March 1916. He remained in Egypt until July 1916, when he transferred to England, and he did not return to Victoria until 1920. Brennan was selected for work overseas because he had a ‘full knowledge of Victorian criminals’, and most of his time abroad was spent tracing Australians who were wanted for criminal offences committed in Australia or while serving abroad with the AIF. For this duty he was specially mentioned in despatches.
Defence work undertaken by policemen was shrouded in varying degrees of secrecy, but undoubtedly the most clandestine was the part played by policemen in founding the Australian secret service. First formed in 1916, and called the Counter Espionage Bureau (CEB), the secret unit was directed by Major George Steward and staffed by one agent and a detective from Victoria. Steward was then private secretary to the governor-general and the CEB office was reputedly located in Government House, Melbourne. The secret service was established ‘at the request of the Imperial Government’ and was ‘worked in co-operation of [sic] the British Counter Espionage Bureau’ as ‘an important link in the Imperial scheme for countering enemy activities within the Empire’. Sainsbury was made a member of the bureau, and direct communication was established between him and Steward, but not even the superintendent in charge of detectives was told of the bureau’s existence or of the fact that one of his men was a CEB operative. In a secret despatch, W. M. Hughes acknowledged that the success of the bureau ‘must always depend in a very large measure upon the co-operation of the State Commissioners of Police’, and to this end Steward organised a wartime conference of all Australian police commissioners in Melbourne, where an ‘efficient system of interchange of information’ was developed for such matters as:
the control of traffic through the sea-ports of Australia; investigation of cases of espionage; the circulation of warrants and descriptions of suspects; the countering of the activity on the part of hostile Secret Service agents and the tracing and recording of the personal histories of alien enemy agents and suspects.
The CEB was the ‘central point’ for Australian counter-espionage activity, but ordinary policemen were its principal source of intelligence data and served as its eyes and ears in the community. In The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia, Frank Cain comments, ‘The police forces were essential to the carrying out of surveillance … The police possessed the skilled investigators, they knew how to maintain comprehensive record systems, they had skills in conducting prosecutions and getting convictions … They were important cogs in the machine of the political observation of Australian radicalism’. The integral involvement of policemen with the CEB heightened the national consciousness of disparate state police forces and brought them together on a united front that transcended state boundaries. It also set a precedent that served as the forerunner to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and state police special branches, taking police clearly into the realm of secret agents, clandestine operations and political surveillance. Early targets of the CEB were politically disaffected individuals and groups such as ‘the Revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World’, and Irish Republican Brotherhood sympathisers.14
The hunt for enemy agents was a secret, exciting but small part of the total police war effort. Policemen performed a wide variety of other federal duties like the investigation and arrest of military deserters (which earned them a bounty of £1 a head for each capture), passport and naturalisation inquiries, amusement and betting tax investigations, questions relating to maternity allowances and soldiers’ allotments to dependants, checking federal electoral rolls, manning federal polling booths, providing money escorts and guarding the prime minister. These extra duties combined with the absence of men overseas to make the force short of manpower, and this difficulty was aggravated by a lack of recruits. Sainsbury was under considerable pressure not to appoint ‘men who will not enlist in the Expeditionary Forces’, and eventually he made a public announcement that such men would ‘have greater chance of getting struck by lightning than of getting into the police force’. It was good stuff to please the State Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, but not even Sainsbury’s patriotic rhetoric could placate the true zealots, who criticised the police retiring age of sixty and argued that it would be better ‘if the policeman could be left at his usual necessary occupation, and that the recruit who seeks his position should go straight into the Expeditionary Force’.
They were difficult times for Sainsbury, who was clearly committed to the war effort while still bound to hold his police force together and maintain peace at home. He closed quiet police stations and transferred men to areas of great need, and actively sought to fill vacancies by recruiting returned soldiers. Yet circumstances were against him. As his shortfall of men moved into the hundreds, those policemen still on duty worked extended hours, and as late as 1920 were owed 1600 days in leave and rest days accrued during the war and armistice periods. Men were refused leave to assist with the harvest on family farms, and police pensioners were employed as guards to release policemen (and soldiers) for other work. At war’s end an influenza epidemic in Melbourne further taxed the force’s resources so that the city ‘was being guarded by a body of men less than one-half of the minimum recognised strength’. In government papers marked ‘strictly secret’, ‘secret’ and ‘urgent’, the under-recruiting and undermanning of the force was described as ‘very grave’, and secret steps were taken to bolster the strength of the force so as not ‘to create any alarm’ and to prevent ‘a very serious outbreak’ of crime. Policemen were indeed fighting a battle.15
The involvement of state police in the national war effort exposed policemen to a kind and degree of federalism that they had never before experienced. Most of their wartime duties were not lasting but, even when W. M. Hughes formed his own token Commonwealth Police Force, the new-found police nationalism did not dissipate. A great deal of what policemen actually thought and did during the war was clouded in secrecy, and somebody’s subsequent culling of the wartime files has added to the density of that cloud. Cryptic index entries tell us that a census was conducted of policemen of enemy birth, but that file is missing, along with many others relevant to the police force at war. Because of the absence of so much important archival material, any account of police activities during the war is impressionistic and sketchy. Nevertheless, sufficient traces have survived to show something of the force during war, certainly enough to show that the 10 per cent of policemen who went to war were a very small part of the police war effort. Duty on the home front did not carry with it the mortality rate of duty abroad, but neither was it a haven for the fearful or indolent. Sainsbury himself shouldered enormous responsibilities, and in the shadow of war few people could have realised the many fronts on which his battles loomed. While the sights of many people were fixed on events in Europe, Sainsbury was fighting at close quarters with elements at home who wanted to unionise the police. It was a legacy inherited from the days of O’Callaghan on the eve of war. Compared with world conflict it was a minor domestic crisis, but to Sainsbury and his force it was a turning point of perhaps greater lasting significance than world war itself.16
… a policeman is not supposed to desire beauty. At all events, he does not get it … Still, he is thankful for small mercies—he obtains free some 20 1b of straw with which he may stuff his mattress. He feels that the Government has not entirely forgotten him when he hears that straw crackle under him at night.
The daily regimen for many hundreds of policemen was a spartan one and, in real terms, their work conditions deteriorated as the first years of the twentieth century advanced. Sainsbury inherited a sub-standard, under-manned and demoralised force that was suffering from years of inadequate government support. Most of the responsibility for this lay with a succession of conservative governments, but Sainsbury’s predecessor was also culpable, in that he was quick to crush signs of agitation in the ranks and slow to seek increased pay and improved working conditions on behalf of his men. O’Callaghan was a loyal servant of the governments that appointed and kept him in office. He labelled press accounts of the standard of the force and its work as ‘newspaper tripe’, and vigorously sought to identify and obtain the resignations of any policemen who publicly complained about their lot. A decade of his style of management left the force the poorest of any in mainland Australia, with the result that immediately preceding and during World War I, Sainsbury was engaged in a constant effort to hold the force together in the face of sub-standard working conditions, employee dissatisfaction and, eventually, police unionisation.17
In 1913, when Sainsbury took command, policemen in Victoria still worked a seven-day week and each day shift was divided into two four-hour reliefs spread over twelve hours. Men who went on duty at 5 a.m. did not go off duty until 5 p.m. There were no rest days or public holidays, and the annual leave of seventeen days could not be taken at Christmas or Easter. Ordinary workers subject to Wages Board determinations were paid double for Sunday work, time-and-a-half for overtime and holiday work, and an allowance for working certain night shifts. None of this was paid to policemen: the starting pay of constables was 7s 6d a day, plus sixpence a day for rent or quarters, and after twenty years’ service constables were paid a total of ten shillings a day. Promotion to the ranks of senior constable and sergeant took twenty-four and twenty-nine years respectively. With little short-term prospect of promotion or incremental pay rise, junior constables were paid less than tram conductors and a sum equivalent to the minimum wage paid to labourers. However, as well as facing the usual living expenses of a labourer, policemen had to buy and maintain a uniform worth about £12 and pay five-pence a day in compulsory police insurance. On top of all, policemen were expected to ‘live in a house better than the house which an ordinary labourer occupies’ and ‘to keep his family respectably’. The paradox of paying policemen as one class and expecting them to live as another was recognised by some members of parliament, who urged that policemen be paid a ‘living wage’. A. A. Farthing, MLA, whose electorate of East Melbourne included the Russell Street barracks, warned of the dangers of ‘placing these men in the greatest temptation’ and pleaded that ‘they should be paid sufficiently well to enable them to act honestly, and live and bring up their families respectably, educating their children as we expect reputable citizens of Victoria to do’.
Although many people could see the point, the problem was compounded by the fact that constables were still drawn from the working classes. Within the public service the force was regarded as ‘the bottom of the ladder’ and educational standards for entry were ‘not so high as for other branches of the Public Service’. Men who had not progressed beyond fourth grade were accepted as policemen because the main prerequisites were physical rather than educational. Similarly, the eight-week induction period focused on drill and physical activity to prepare men for a constant round of foot-slogging on beat duty. Entrance standards and working conditions in the force prompted the view that it was a ‘dumping ground’ and that the rewards ‘were not sufficiently liberal to attract men of high character and ability when such qualities are in so much demand elsewhere’. Society wanted a force of respectable police, but ‘respectable’ men of educated and middle-class backgrounds did not join the police force. Of 250 men who joined the force during the years 1914 to 1918, almost 70 per cent were formerly labourers, or rural workers employed on such chores as shearing, dairying, mining, timber-cutting and farm work. Most of the others came from service industries where they had been employed as storemen, salesmen, gripmen, drivers and clerks. Eleven recruits had been tradesmen, one claimed he was an engineer, two claimed to be schoolteachers and one gave his occupation as ‘foot-runner’.
Although people seeking to determine the appropriate status and pay for policemen compared them with labourers, teachers, railway workers and public servants, none of these comparisons proved useful. Eventually all parties began to view the police as a distinct occupational group and to look at police forces in other states for realistic comparisons. This was a trend that suited policemen but worried the government; notwithstanding the boast of the premier, W. A. Watt, that Victorian policemen could ‘eat the New South Wales men for breakfast, without pepper or salt’, the policemen of his state received the lowest pay and benefits of any in Australia. Per capita expenditure on the police was higher in all the other states, police to population ratios were better, and policemen received more holidays and uniform benefits. Because of its comparable size, similar policing problems and proximity to Victoria, the New South Wales force was the obvious one with which to make comparisons. In New South Wales, policemen received twenty-eight days’ annual leave, were granted a rest day every second Sunday, worked continuous eight-hour shifts, were provided with free uniforms and were paid an average of two shillings a day more. Per capita expenditure on the police in New South Wales was 6s 7d and the police to population ratio was 1:698. In Victoria the equivalent figures were 5s 1d and 1:795. Because per capita expenditure and police ratios are closely linked to population dispersal, and New South Wales was much larger than Victoria, those ‘unfavourable’ comparisons are less significant than they might seem. However, the differences in pay and holidays were very real, and they rankled with policemen south of the border. That they were worth as much as schoolteachers in their own state was debatable; that they were worth less than policemen in New South Wales was untenable.18
For many decades a succession of governments relied upon the conservatism and ‘loyalty’ of policemen for industrial harmony. They did not unionise, strike or affiliate with the Victorian State Service Federation (VSSF), nor were they subject to Wages Board determinations. If policemen wanted increased pay or improved conditions they sent a deputation direct to the government, and if a government wanted to restrict or prevent protests by trade unions they sent in the police. It was an informal but traditional relationship, and government members spoke often of police loyalty. It was reinforced by the hierarchical and disciplined nature of the force and the large body of regulations that governed it. Those policemen who did publicly complain were quickly labelled as ‘agitators’ or put down as ‘younger and more impetuous’. In 1912 an unsuccessful police deputation did approach the government for increased pay and Watt, like many government leaders before him, imposed upon their loyalty when denying their claims, saying in parliament that ‘whilst they would like to get higher pay, they are not adopting a disloyal stand’. Such an understanding could continue only as long as the government was reasonably responsive to police deputations. It was at a time of increased worker unionisation that the Watt Government refused the police pay request, while agreeing to retrospective pay increases for railway workers and a pay rise for teachers, both of which groups had employee unions. A letter published in The Argus warned an ‘obdurate’ government that ‘perhaps the police association about to be formed, will bring about reforms and redress; but on the other hand, it is sure to create a fighting spirit in the ranks’.19
Apart from that letter, and some parliamentary talk about police ‘dissension and revolt’, there is no evidence of policemen attempting to form an association in 1912. The first concrete signs of such a movement occurred on 20 August 1913, when Sergeant Michael O’Loughlin of Albert Park submitted a report requesting permission to convene a meeting of police ‘to consider the questions of approaching the government for an increase of pay and the formation of a Police Association’. O’Loughlin was a seasoned veteran of thirty years’ experience in the force, so he could not be disregarded as ‘younger and more impetuous’. On the contrary, he was qualified for a full police pension and promotion to officer rank, and he put both at risk by seeking to unionise the police. His action, like that of Costelloe and Strickland nearly a decade before, was a bold one, but in 1913 the suggestion was not totally radical and did have precedents in police unions formed in South Australia (1911) and Western Australia (1912).
Even so, Sainsbury was caught unawares by O’Loughlin’s request and, in a letter marked ‘very urgent’, wrote to the commissioner of police in South Australia that he was ‘anxious to learn’ if the Police Association ‘tends to the welfare of members of the Force without clashing with the best interests of the Service’. The South Australian commissioner declared to Sainsbury, ‘Personally I am not very sweet on Police Associations’, and he heartened the Victorian chief commissioner when he reported:
The Association was formed during the regime of the Labor Ministry … immediately a Liberal Ministry came into power the Chief Secretary, our Ministerial Head, intimated he was not in sympathy with the movement, and in fact made it clearly understood the Government did not intend to recognize the Association in any shape or form, and though still in existence I have not since heard much of it. When first formed it rather looked as if the Association was to manage the Department, but now of course all that is a matter of the past.
Sainsbury liked the South Australian Liberal approach to police unions and, in a memo dated 1 September 1913, informed the under-secretary that ‘it would not matter much if a police association existed as long as the government took the view which the South Australian Government has taken’. O’Loughlin’s report, together with the correspondence from South Australia and Sainsbury’s comments, went before state cabinet on 4 September 1913, but if a decision was reached on that day, it was not then made public, nor was the urgency with which Sainsbury and the government treated O’Loughlin’s request intimated to him. Although he submitted additional reports in September and December, he was not given the courtesy of either an acknowledgment or reply. It was not until 10 February 1914, when the subject was raised in the Legislative Assembly by John Lemmon, a staunch Labor man and MLA for Williamstown, that the matter was publicly aired for the first time and O’Loughlin got his reply. The chief secretary, John Murray, told Lemmon that he had considered but not answered the application from O’Loughlin because it ‘was addressed to the Chief Commissioner of Police’, and that in any event he ‘did not think it was advisable to grant the application’.20
The curt and seemingly confident manner in which Murray dispensed with O’Loughlin’s application and Lemmon’s questions belied the trepidation with which the conservative government viewed the formation of a police association. O’Loughlin’s reports had not simply prompted a flurry of urgent activity behind the scenes, followed by intransigent silence, but had provoked the government into doing something. In the months after O’Loughlin submitted his first application, and before Murray gave his answer in parliament, the government sought to defuse the issues behind police moves to unionise by easing two long-standing grievances. On 5 September 1913 Murray announced that ‘members of the force are to be given one Sunday off in every four on full pay’. This announcement was made only four days after O’Loughlin’s report went before cabinet, but the rest-day issue was one that had been under government consideration since 1911, when Murray had said, ‘If we could only persuade the wicked in our midst—and there are not very many—to cease from troubling on Sunday, the police then might have the day off.’ Given that the wicked had not ceased troubling on Sunday, it would seem that Murray was more troubled by O’Loughlin than by evil-doers on the Sabbath. The rest-day scheme started on 1 October 1913 and ended the practice begun in 1836 of policemen being on duty every day of the week. The monthly day of rest fell well short of the weekly rest day granted to policemen in England since 1910, but it was an important concession, a milestone in the quest for improved working conditions. There was still a way to go, however, as the system devised by Murray and Sainsbury was introduced without employing any extra men and at ‘no increase in cost to the State’. It was made workable by those men on Sunday duty who, as well as walking their own beats, patrolled those of men on a rest day.
The introduction of a monthly rest day was met with general approval from politicians, policemen and the press, and it allayed some of the dissension within the force. O’Loughlin, however, was not silenced by a day off each month, and his reports of 19 September and 7 December pressed for a pay increase. Perhaps Murray and the government were influenced by O’Loughlin’s doggedness; at any rate, on 5 February 1914, Murray announced a police pay increase of 6d a day. Then five days later, on 10 February, he announced that he was not prepared to agree to O’Loughlin’s application for permission to form an association. As with the rest-day announcement, Murray’s moves of February 1914 were a timely piece of political work, clearly designed to stifle police unionisation. By partly satisfying the immediate needs of many policemen, Murray sought to remove O’Loughlin’s basis of support and to shore up the eroding, tacit understanding that policemen would be looked after.21
Still the efforts to unionise policemen did not stop. In April 1914 the annual conference of the Political Labor Council resolved to ‘take steps to form the police into an industrial union’, but members of the force were unanimous ‘that, while a union similar to the Public Service Association would be welcomed, any affiliation with the Trades Hall or other political body would be in every way inimical to the police and the public generally’. Policemen were wary about an alliance with the labour movement because they feared it would jeopardise their role ‘in preserving order’ at industrial disputes, and they were also concerned at the prospect of being called to strike in sympathy with trade unions. It was not an unexpected response from an occupational group as loyal and conservative as the police, but it was one that might well have troubled many thinking labour leaders. Policemen—those brawny toilers drawn from the working classes, and whose work conditions lagged well behind those of the general labouring community—were ready when on duty to intervene on behalf of capital in dispute with labour but unwilling off duty to join with other workers in trying to improve work conditions. In the early years it was a stance voluntarily adopted and maintained by policemen, but since the police strike of 1923 it has been a position reinforced by law. Either way, the division between policemen and the labour movement has proved enduring.
Although policemen resisted efforts to align them with industrial unions, they still wanted a union of their own. Later in 1914 a proposed meeting of policemen ‘to consider matters in their own interest’ was prohibited by Sainsbury because ‘practically it was for a political purpose’. This last movement to convene a meeting had barely gathered momentum when war was declared, inducing a pause in agitation as policemen threw their energies behind Sainsbury and the war effort. Apart from the two concessions granted at the time of O’Loughlin’s stirrings, the government had done nothing to improve conditions for policemen, so that even after the outbreak of war there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. National expectations of loyalty and personal sacrifice during the war rendered open agitation by policemen imprudent, but during 1915 city policemen interested in improved work conditions held secret meetings to plan the formation of an association. To avoid infiltration by ‘the other side’, notice of these meetings was spread by word of mouth and the meeting place was frequently changed. Usually they met in a hotel, but on at least one occasion their meeting was ‘held in a timber yard in South Melbourne at nearly midnight’. To this day the identity of the activists has remained secret, but the clandestine gatherings ended on 13 July 1916 when over two hundred policemen openly attended a meeting in the Guild Hall, Swanston Street, Melbourne. They elected Constable F. C. Murphy, of the Little Bourke Street police station, as secretary of a movement to press ‘for permission to form an association for the general improvement of the Service’.
Details of the Guild Hall meeting were reported in The Argus, and Sainsbury immediately ordered an investigation to ascertain ‘who called and authorized this meeting and who were the speakers at it’. Officers interviewed both O’Loughlin and Murphy as suspected organisers but, in a style befitting the classic coterie of conspirators, not one of the policemen who attended the meeting admitted knowing anything of its organisation. Using a statement obtained from the caretaker of the hall, Sainsbury’s investigators advised him that an unidentified ‘tall dark man engaged the hall and paid for it … He said he required the hall for a meeting of the Police Union’.
Although those men who attended at the Guild Hall were tight-mouthed about the original organisers, they went boldly into subsequent action. On 13 July 1916 Murphy wrote to the chief commissioner, asking him to receive a deputation ‘of the Members of the Force with a view to forming a Police Association … Such association to be non-political’. Sainsbury refused this request and Murphy wrote again on 7 August, appealing to the chief secretary to receive a deputation because ‘the police have always been a loyal body and are not now endeavouring to show any disloyalty’. Murphy pointed out that the penal warders and state school teachers had their association, and the police wanted one ‘for their own mutual improvement and defence’. Murphy’s second request was approved, with the proviso that ‘only members of the force will be heard’—a clause no doubt intended to exclude former policemen, politicians, the VSSF and other union organisers.
Policemen filled the Guild Hall on 21 August to elect the members of their deputation, and a conference with the chief secretary, Donald McLeod, was held two days later. McLeod viewed the prospect of a police union with the same disdain as had his predecessors and, after raising spurious objections to the police proposals, agreed only to ‘consider the matter of allowing the Police to form a Club for their own “Social Improvement and Mutual Benefit”’. Not surprisingly, Murphy and his colleagues were unhappy with such a response; then, just as their movement began to falter, they were given new and added impetus. On 28 December 1916 the Constitution Act was amended to give all public servants, including policemen, the right to ‘take part in the political affairs of the State of Victoria’. Generally termed the Political Rights Bill, the amendment was ‘highly prized by the service’ and, in giving policemen ‘full citizens rights’, promoted a surge of interest in state, political and union matters. This legislation enabled policemen to be far more open in political and industrial matters, and soon the VSSF joined with a Police Executive Committee to agitate for the right to form a police association.
By 1917 the force was the only sizeable section of government employees without an association, and Gordon Carter, general secretary of the VSSF, acted on behalf of policemen as ‘Honorary Special Representative’ to press for parity. Under his guidance the police committee lobbied with renewed vigour and framed a model constitution and rules for their proposed association. On 3 April 1917 perseverance was rewarded when McLeod agreed ‘to permit of a social club being formed, and to assist it as far as possible’. Some men spoke of a union, some of an association and the government of a social club; but that was all semantics. What policemen had attained was the right to form an employee organisation to protect their interests. On 10 May Sainsbury presided over a general meeting of six hundred men who ‘decided by a unanimous vote that an Association be formed’, and on 27 June an executive committee was elected.
One man who no doubt derived a great deal of personal pleasure from the events of 1917 was Michael O’Loughlin. He was prominent in all police agitation from 1913 to 1917 and, after being promoted to officer in 1917, was elected president of the association on 31 January 1918.
The objects of the association at the time of its formation were: to affiliate with the VSSF; to conserve and further the interests of the Victoria Police Force; the promotion of good fellowship and social intercourse among its members; and the promotion of efficiency and assistance to the administration. They were benevolent objectives suggesting that the government was successful in restricting the role of the association to one of a benign social club. It was a false impression. Behind the façade of smoke nights and billiards was an active and growing police union. Within months the association, supported by Sainsbury, was successful in obtaining government approval for policemen to work continuous eight-hour shifts and, from 14 January 1918, police hours of duty were 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. and 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. This change removed a long-standing grievance of metropolitan policemen and brought their hours of work into line with those of policemen interstate and overseas. Some months later the association added to this success with a surprising coup, when the government responded to its wage deputation by granting all policemen ‘an increase in pay of sixpence per day and an allowance of another sixpence per day for uniform’. At a time of national austerity, and with war still raging in Europe, these were considerable achievements. Other matters dealt with included travelling and mountain-station allowances, extra leave, pensions, a khaki uniform for summer wear and the individual grievances of policemen regarding transfers, sick pay and legal expenses. The prospect of paying legal fees was a source of concern to most policemen, and the association was active in seeking compensation on their behalf. A typical case in 1917 was that of Constable Matthew Burke, who was charged by the Kew Council with misconduct ‘in not removing disorderly persons from a referendum meeting as instructed by the Mayor’. At a cost of £20 Burke engaged a solicitor to act on his behalf, and the board of inquiry that subsequently heard his case dismissed the charge and found that Burke had acted with ‘tact and forbearance’. Though he was innocent of an allegation that arose directly from his duties, the government adhered to normal policy in not providing Burke with legal counsel and refused to pay his legal costs of £20 because ‘he could have conducted his own defence’. Burke’s expenses in this case were equivalent to almost two months’ pay, and highlighted the injustices that existed, in spite of the presence of a concerned union.22
Although the association was much more than a social club, it was not a militant union and did pay heed to its stated objects of promoting efficiency and providing assistance to the administration. In this regard the association was instrumental in having a board appointed ‘to investigate the alteration of ages of members of the force’. It was an issue peculiar to police, and involved men who gave false birth details to gain admission to the force and then, at the other end of their service, tried to have those details corrected to improve their retirement prospects. The board devised a satisfactory solution and reported that the alteration of ages was due in large measure to ‘the connivance of those who had to choose the future members of the Force’, and who ‘winked at’ incorrect statements of age ‘in order that they might not have to reject the best material offering’. The board’s findings highlighted an irregularity in police recruiting methods dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, and in the light of these findings the system was changed. The decisions reached by the board were in the best interests of the force and met with approval from the association, even though some individual policemen lost retirement advantages. It was an early indication of the potential of the association to influence the administration of the force.
Another important action taken by the association was the monthly publication of the Police Journal. A modest publication of sixteen pages, it quickly became established as essential reading for all policemen and, as well as association news, it included law notes and items of general interest. The journal was particularly aimed at men who were ‘remote from a friendly comrade’, and articles on police topics of current interest reached the ‘back-block constable’ and filled an important need that had never been met by the department. After receiving his first issue, Constable F. A. Rawlings, stationed in the mountains at Walhalla, wrote to express his appreciation and approval. In doing so he articulated a common sentiment and gave a hint of how the force had unwittingly isolated many of its members by failing to provide them with police news and comradeship. Rawlings wrote: ‘we in the back parts seldom meet the city men. As for myself, I seldom come in contact with adjoining stations. My nearest neighbour is some 26 miles distant, through bad roads and hilly country’.
More than social intercourse: the Victorian Police Association journal in 1918
The gratitude felt by Rawlings for the association was not shared by his chief commissioner. At the association’s first annual meeting a letter from Sainsbury was read, in which he put the view ‘that what was intended was bringing into existence of a social club only, and not a body formed to work together towards securing justice for itself’. His lament was, however, too late and although he and the chief secretary tried to restrict the association’s activities by censoring its business papers, it continued to gain strength. Years of government neglect had left policemen ripe for unionisation, and the substantial early gains made when they did combine served to increase their enthusiasm. The association ended its first year of existence with an ‘optimistic outlook’ and 1346 financial members, who had attained better hours, increased pay and a uniform allowance: ‘There were only 70 to 100 members of the whole police force who had not thrown in their lot with the majority.’23 Not included in this minority were two new additions to the force who might have joined the association if they could, but were not eligible. They were women. While O’Loughlin fought officialdom and Sainsbury fought unionisation, the Trades Hall Council was among those groups that had successfully supported the entry of women into the police force.
In his early resistance to police unionisation, Sainsbury displayed a real fear of having his power and authority usurped by an association that wanted to ‘manage the Department’. It was a fear that proved groundless, as did his fear that, if women were appointed to the force, ‘trouble could be expected and the question of deciding who is “the boss” might soon have to be determined’.
The first women police were conservative and steady workers who proved loyal despite the facts that they were not given uniforms or vested with powers of arrest, and were paid less than male members. Miss Beers and Mrs Madge Connor were a token female presence in a force of more than fifteen hundred men and were regarded as police agents, rather than as police constables. Their appointments were nevertheless generally regarded by women’s groups as a watershed that ended an eighty-year tradition of total exclusion of women from the police ranks.24
Since 1902 the National Council of Women had pressed for the appointment of female warders and searchers, and from 1914 their plea for women police was supported not only by the Trades Hall Council, but also by such proponents as The Argus and the Women’s Political Association, who all agreed that women police were an ‘absolute necessity for the protection of women and children’. The suggestion was met by senior policemen and conservative government members with the same loathing with which they viewed the prospect of a police union. In 1915 Sainsbury wrote of ‘self-advertising and self-seeking females’ wanting to be police, adding that it was ‘no time for innovation and increased expense anyway, and I would hasten slowly’. Much of his ire was directed at activists like Adela Pankhurst and Vida Goldstein, and it was expressed in time of war, but at no stage was he enthusiastic about women police. The closest he came to being positive was the suggestion that, if it was decided to give women police a trial, they should be ‘relatives of our soldiers who have fought for their country’. In 1916 the police mood had not changed, and in separate memos three senior officers reported tersely to Sainsbury: ‘women police would be of little if any use’; ‘grave danger is to be apprehended from such an innovation’; and ‘I cannot bring to memory any instance in which a woman could have done more than what has been done under the present system’. The police position was clearly negative. Policemen did not even concede that there was a place in the force for women to perform such duties as the care and interview of female rape victims. The political position, dependent as it was upon the electoral process, was slightly more positive; the chief secretary, Donald McLeod, promised to appoint women police on a trial basis, but deferred doing so because ‘the need for economy is greater than the need for policewomen’.25
But the tide of change was against that view and, as with the unionisation question, the authorities were dealing not with a situation peculiar to police but with a strong international movement towards extensive social reforms. In addition to successes in the fields of education, the arts, the workplace and politics, women’s lobby groups adduced evidence that women were working successfully as police in South Australia, New South Wales, England and North America. For a time the Victorian force stood as a conservative all-male bastion but, in the face of mounting pressure, it was decided to employ policewomen as an ‘experiment’. Over ninety women applied even before the positions were advertised, but such was the uncertainty about the role women could or should play in the force that no physical, medical or educational standards were prescribed for applicants other than the desire that they ‘must be physically capable, in good health, and be possessed of good sound common sense’. Similarly, no effort was made to define the duties of policewomen in the way that the Police Code defined them for men, and upon the appointment of Beers and Connor on 28 July 1917 it was decided that their duties were to ‘undertake enquiries and take action in cases in which women and children are immediately concerned and generally to supervise public places with a view to the protection of women and children and the prevention and detection of offences by or against females’. So the work of women police was to be restricted to dealing with females and children, in a welfare capacity; it was not intended that their duties would be interchangeable with those of policemen in general police duties. Beers and Connor did not get the rudimentary drill and self-defence training given to male recruits, nor were they incorporated into the police seniority list. In all respects they were unique.
The success and ultimate place of women in the force surpassed the expectations of both their supporters and opponents. Their work was rated by their superiors as ‘highly satisfactory’, and the women themselves as ‘most valuable’. Equipped with a warrant card and lapel badge, the women were attached to the Plain Clothes Branch and worked day duty. At first most of their time was spent tracing women with venereal disease, escorting female lunatics and Aborigines, helping families in distress, and rescuing ‘young women who were either leading immoral lives or verging on immorality’. Gradually they gained the confidence of their male colleagues and, by building upon personal successes, extended their range of duties to include the detection of brothels, illicit liquor selling, abortionists, unregistered dentists and Chinese herbalists posing as doctors. The women were cast and fitted readily into the role of police de moeurs. They did not undermine Sainsbury’s authority, but successfully accepted the challenge of working in an organisation that had been comprised solely of men since its inception.26
The appointment of women police and the formation of a police union were the last significant changes of the Sainsbury era, and both were made in spite of Sainsbury’s reluctance. They were not reforms that he rejected totally, but were ideas that he regarded as a threat and a diversion from his unerring commitment to the war effort. He coped well with the strains imposed by World War I, but as that conflict drew to a close it became increasingly clear that he was experiencing difficulty adjusting to social changes at home. His sentiments lay in another era that was fast vanishing. A policeman since 1878, and chief commissioner since 1913, the bulk of his career preceded the age of the motor car, unionisation and women’s rights movement. Always loyal, he agreed to a government request to remain in office after he turned sixty, and retired in February 1919 at the age of sixty-two, fading from public life with neither fanfare nor accolades. In many respects Sainsbury is a forgotten man, overshadowed by his times.
Like Chomley and O’Callaghan before him, Sainsbury fought hard to maintain the status quo and appeared not to notice much of the changing world around him. Sainsbury and his two immediate predecessors in the office of chief commissioner were career policemen who served in the force for fifty, forty-six and forty years respectively. They had all been above-average policemen and were able administrators, but none of them was an outstanding leader. In each case they had attained the top post by virtue of seniority, and all three had spent almost their entire adult lives working seven days a week as policemen. Their formal educational levels were low, their personal knowledge of interstate and overseas police operations was negligible, and none of them had graduated from military command colleges, or had what is now called management training. Their style of leadership was what the American writer Bernard Cohen classifies as ‘tradition-oriented’: men ‘successfully indoctrinated into the police subculture’ who continued ‘to identify with traditional aspects of the job’ and were ‘apt to defend the status quo in most areas, to fear and stubbornly resist change’.
Thirty-six years of ‘tradition-oriented’ leadership was not good for the force, and left it bereft of a sense of future. There was no overall scheme and no notion of preparing for the years that lay ahead. Growth had been ad hoc, change often forced and the decision-making process autocratic. The practice of using the police seniority system as a basis for appointing chief commissioners was not designed to secure the best men available. Chomley shied away from big undertakings, O’Callaghan was a difficult autocrat who bore the stigma of corruption, and in all things but patriotism Sainsbury hastened slowly. Each in his own way had performed the task adequately, but that was all. There was nothing of the dynamic leadership shown by their contemporaries, like August Vollmer in America or, to a lesser extent, by Sir Edward Henry and Sir Nevil Macready in England, and James Mitchell in New South Wales. Those men were innovators who dared to reorganise police forces and who, with an eye to the future, established police training schools and introduced into their forces such things as the study of modus operandi, criminal statistics analysis and specialist policing. By comparison, the Victoria Police Force was a languid victim of its own seniority system.27
When Sainsbury resigned in 1919 the conservative government led by Harry Lawson saw what was wrong and, without advertising the vacancy created by Sainsbury’s retirement or opening it to members of the force, appointed Lieutenant Colonel Sir George Steward, the wartime director of the Counter Espionage Bureau, as chief commissioner. He was the first outsider appointed to head the force since Standish was appointed in 1858, and his appointment was opposed by the Labor Party on the grounds that he ‘did not possess qualifications for the position’. This argument was probably a pretext, a more likely reason for Labor opposition being Steward’s close ties with the secret service and its political activities. A number of policemen also objected to Steward’s appointment, but their opposition, based on the view that the position of chief commissioner was their own preserve, was quickly dispelled by Steward’s performance.
Steward was the most highly qualified and successful public administrator ever appointed to the force. His background included service as under-secretary for Tasmania, secretary to the Federal Executive Council, official secretary to the governor-general, twenty-one years’ continuous service in the Australian Military Forces, and he was founding director of the Australian secret service. In that last position, Steward made a study of police operations in a number of overseas countries, and had regular contact with all police forces in Australia. He was an eminent candidate for the position of chief commissioner, yet personally humble. Steward described himself as ‘simply and solely a public servant’ who revelled in his work, but who ‘from a social point of view’ was ‘a comparatively unknown man’.28
Steward’s difference was apparent from the start. He exuded leadership qualities, and his communicative style quickly won the confidence of the force. In all his dealings with policemen he abided by the motto, ‘I do not want you to take me on trust; I want you to allow me to prove myself.’ Shortly after assuming office he held a conference with superintendents from all over the state and actively encouraged their participation in the formulation of departmental policy. He also welcomed discussion with officials from the Police Association and met with them regularly. These meetings were not an idle placatory gesture and, when necessary, he was quick to either admonish or support the association’s stand. On several occasions he personally championed the cause of improved working conditions for his men, and a popular action taken early in his administration was the decision not to accept anonymous complaints about alleged police misbehaviour. Steward set about meeting with as many policemen as he could; on one country tour spanning fourteen days he travelled 1500 miles and visited fifty-seven police stations. He was keenly interested in the welfare of the force and on his initiative were formed a Police Amateur Athletic Association and a Police Life-Saving and Swimming Club. He was also instrumental in promoting the provision and use of a police gymnasium, and in securing new police hospital quarters. These efforts to rally the force were not hollow acts of showmanship but genuine attempts at leadership by consensus, and they were underwritten by a realistic and substantial plan for reorganising the police. Steward accurately sensed the traditionally conservative mood of the force. Without being apologetic, he offered policemen support while urging them to accept that it was impossible for him to be innovative and ‘please everybody’. In a supportive climate he exposed policemen gently to his basic idea that ‘Any great public organization had to keep abreast of the times, and, in the case of the police force they had to anticipate it’. To a man of Steward’s background this notion was fundamental. To the men of the force it was unheard of.29
Steward’s plans for reorganising the force made it clear that he envisioned a future built upon youth and education. His reports were punctuated with terms like ‘new blood’, ‘new methods’ and ‘the Young School’, and he expressed a conviction that ‘good education and a natural aptitude are more desirable than athletic proportions … We shall have to provide courses of instruction on a scale not, so far, anticipated’. In his brief time as chief commissioner, Steward instituted many important changes, including the expanded use of fingerprint analysis and formation of a fingerprint bureau, decentralisation of the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB), promotion based upon merit, expansion and restructuring of the Plain Clothes Branch, and the introduction of a caseload management scheme for detectives, which divided reported crime into major and minor categories.30 These were all innovations that placed him in the vanguard of international police reform, but he is best remembered for his outstanding contributions to police education. Although only in office for fifteen months, he is rightly regarded as the founder of police training in Victoria.
Chief Commissioner G. C. Steward
Before Steward’s appointment the training of police recruits ‘consisted of about a fortnight’s drill and an occasional lecture by an officer on police duties’. There was no training for women police, and no in-service training for detectives or members of the higher ranks. O’Callaghan and Sainsbury had toyed with the concept of police training but never tackled it in earnest. Steward raised the educational entrance standards for police recruits, then personally supervised the implementation of a seven-week training course at the Police Depot that included classes in law and police procedure, ‘squad and section drill, physical culture, instruction in the care and use of rifles and revolvers, first aid, swimming and lifesaving, and how to manage a boat and drag for a body’. He also introduced a second phase into this training, where recruits who successfully passed the Depot examinations were assigned to work with experienced beat constables at Russell Street to determine their ‘fitness for duty’. The Argus applauded Steward’s efforts with the announcement that ‘Brute strength is no longer the primary qualification for admission to the police force’. This type of training was not new, just new to Victoria. Steward, however, went further and introduced a four-week in-service training course for prospective detectives where they were instructed and examined in methods of detection, the taking and analysis of finger and foot prints and the making of clay casts at crime scenes, which in 1920 placed the force to the fore in the field of police training. It was not to last.
On the morning of 11 May 1920 Steward collapsed and died while driving to work. His death not only left the position of chief commissioner vacant in a tragic manner but also drained from the force much of that collective vision and motivation with which he had imbued it. Basic training for police recruits has continued as a feature of police life since 1919, and serves as a vital monument to Steward’s faith in youth and education, but much lapsed after his death, including in-service training for detectives, which was only reintroduced by Alexander Duncan in 1938. In many respects Steward was a man ahead of his time.31
The void he left was not an easy one to fill, and in the interregnum the government appointed Sydney Arthur Heathershaw as acting chief commissioner. Heathershaw was chief clerk of the Police Department and its most senior public servant, but he had never been a policeman. His appointment was clearly a stopgap measure while the Lawson Government again tackled the vexed question of whether the chief commissioner should come from the force or be appointed from outside. The fact that the government had opted for Heathershaw, and not one of the senior policemen, was perhaps an indication of a want of capacity among them. After four months it was finally announced that Major General Sir John Gellibrand would be the next chief commissioner.32
Gellibrand was of a similar stamp to Steward but, whereas Steward was ‘a comparatively unknown man’ who had fought his war in the obscurity of the secret service, Gellibrand ‘was one of those officers whose bravery was conspicuous even according to the standards by which gallantry was judged in the early days at Anzac’. A well-educated man and a graduate of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, Gellibrand has been described by C. E. W. Bean as having ‘one of the brightest intellects’ in the AIF and with being ‘the finest trainer of young officers’ in that force, although ‘unconventional in the extreme’, with tastes ‘entirely Bohemian’. He was also blunt.33
Gellibrand, as chief commissioner, would not wear a police uniform, did not mince words and always led from the front. It was a style that made him immediately popular with policemen and moved the Police Association to observe: ‘the same ideas of discipline and comradeship which he carried out in France are being applied to the lesser army which he now controls’. With widespread support from his men, Gellibrand sought to consolidate the work started by Steward and prepared his own plans for reorganising the force. It was his abiding belief that all changes needed to form part of a ‘considered whole’, and he was positively opposed to piecemeal reforms. In this regard his plans were an advance on and refinement of Steward’s work. They began with the determination of a realistic police to population ratio, followed by determination of the proportions of ranks required for supervision and control. Gellibrand was alarmed at the shortage of police, and asked that an extra 250 men be recruited so that he could match the national average of 133 police for every 100 000 of population, and provide a control span of ‘one officer to seven sub-officers to thirty constables’. Even had the government acceded to his demands for more men, however, recruits were not forthcoming because the conditions of police service compared ‘unfavourably with those of private life’. The force was paid below the national police average and was the only one in Australia and New Zealand without a comprehensive police pension scheme. In the interests of recruiting, industrial peace and quality of life, both Steward and Gellibrand strongly urged the government to reintroduce a pension scheme and reiterated the theme that:
Chief Commissioner J. Gellibrand
it is hopeless to anticipate recruiting this Force to its proper strength while the existing rates of pay obtain, and in the absence of a general pension scheme. Counter attractions within the City are such that even unskilled labour carrying with it practically no responsibility, eight hours work a day performed wholly in the daylight, and quite immune from the personal dangers which are inseparable from the life of a police constable, are so strong as to entirely preclude desirable individuals from entering the Force.
The balance of Gellibrand’s planning took two directions as he tried to rectify the ills of past years and introduce innovations on which to build the future. Along with Steward, he was one of the earliest police administrators to regard motorisation, extensive street construction and changed social values as variables to be considered in police planning. He inherited an antiquated armoury, a lack of remounts and an excessive number of low-standard, rented police buildings, and he set about trying to update equipment and premises, while also seeking funds to buy motorcycles and cars for traffic and patrol work. He formed a successful Wharf Patrol to prevent pillaging in the docks area, devised a supernumerary scheme to offset the numbers of men working on extraneous duties, and planned the restructuring of the Melbourne Police District, to provide a more equitable distribution of the workload among officers. Gellibrand was also a firm believer in the future of women police and approached the government for a tenfold increase in the number appointed. It was not to be.
Beginning with Gellibrand’s first proposals for reform in October 1920 the conservative Lawson Government adopted a niggardly and obdurate stand. His requests for funds, decisions and policy formulation were denied, delayed and obstructed. During his first year in office Gellibrand submitted no less than seven comprehensive proposals to the government and invariably the Lawson ministry responded with delaying tactics, such as the request for him to justify his ideas by providing detailed statistical data for the years 1913–14, 1917–18 and 1920–21. The government’s other tack was to suggest ad hoc reforms that were politically expedient and designed to meet particular pressures from the electorate, such as increased police control over street hawkers. Steward had also been obstructed in this way, even though the early stages of his reorganisation of the force were not costly and reflected credit on the government. Steward, a career bureaucrat accustomed to the machinations of governments, quietly reminded the Lawson ministry that without their assistance his ‘endeavours to give the State an efficient and satisfactory service must be proportionately defeated’. The forthright Gellibrand could not conceal his frustration with the government’s intransigence and did not bother with subtle language. He wrote to the chief secretary, ‘If my proposals are not accepted as a matter of policy I ask that I may be informed in what respect they are held to fail’. The chief secretary remained mute. For Gellibrand, the government that appointed him was the most reactionary obstacle to his work of reform and, in December 1921, he took his leave and returned permanently to Tasmania.34
When Gellibrand resigned, fears were publicly expressed that his successor would be ‘an officer already in the department’ and the force would ‘go back further from the standard aimed at’ by Steward and Gellibrand, and an editorial in The Argus proclaimed that ‘The duties of the commissioner are such that they cannot be adequately filled by an officer of police, who in the ordinary way of promotion has reached the rank of superintendent late in life’. The worst expectations of the pessimists were more than fulfilled. Although personages like brigadier generals T. A. Blamey, T. H. Dodds and J. Bruche were mooted as candidates for the job, Gellibrand’s successor was the oldest and most senior policeman in the force. Alexander Nicholson, a 59-year-old superintendent and lay Presbyterian preacher from Ballarat, was appointed chief commissioner on 11 April 1922. After experiencing the generalship, strength of character and reformist zeal of the Steward–Gellibrand era, the conservative Lawson ministry chose to return to the malleable mediocrity of the police seniority list. It was a decision that proved to be a prelude to disaster.35
Nicholson … would show that it was only men in the service who could perform the work attached to the duties of Chief Commissioner … if he made mistakes it would not be the fault of the head, but of the heart.
The appointment of Alexander Nicholson as chief commissioner was greeted by many police and the Police Association with a rash of laudatory remarks and an unwarranted degree of smug optimism. They anticipated—wrongly—that he would better understand their needs and complaints, and would be an influential ally in their quest for improved conditions of service. It mattered not to them that he was an ageing country policeman of mediocre ability. What mattered was that he was one of their own—a career policeman. Although on the surface it appeared to be an attitude at odds with the earlier popularity of Steward and Gellibrand, and the support given to them by policemen, it was not. Most policemen shared the belief that chief commissioners should come from within the force, because such appointments not only created opportunities for promotion and helped maintain the status quo, but were seen as the ultimate reward for many years of loyal service. This belief did not blind policemen to the worth of men like Steward and Gellibrand, or diminish the level of support and respect given them when they were in command of the force. However, it did lead many policemen to openly express a preference for the appointment of one ‘of their own’, when the opportunity presented itself. Nicholson for his part encouraged this sentiment and resurrected the ‘baton in the knapsack’ theory, explaining that although Gellibrand was ‘a perfect gentleman’ there was a ‘deep feeling in police circles’ that the position of chief commissioner ‘should be filled by a member of the force’. Remarks of this sort were a veiled criticism of Gellibrand’s abrupt return to Tasmania, and there was a feeling among some policemen that ‘one of their own’ would not have abandoned the task in the way Gellibrand did. Nicholson’s comments might also be regarded as an oblique rejoinder to Gellibrand’s statement, when chief commissioner, that the system of automatic promotion by seniority was ‘indefensible’, and that although it was ‘supported collectively and publicly’ by policemen, he had not ‘met a member who believed the system to be sound or fair’. Given the undoubted leadership skills and administrative talents of Steward and Gellibrand, and the energy expended by them to improve the lot of policemen, the smug view that Nicholson would better their efforts was naively ingrown.
Nicholson was a country policeman who had spent almost his entire service in the Ballarat district, at stations such as Wendouree, Sebastopol, Ballarat East, Ballarat and Beaufort. His city experience as a policeman was limited to unavoidable sojourns lasting only a matter of months, and none as an officer. He did not complete primary school; he had never worked as a detective or performed other specialised duty; he had no experience of police operations outside Victoria; and he had not been a military commander. He was, however, an active Freemason, a prominent member of the Australian Natives’ Association, a much-publicised recipient of the Valour Award and a good friend of Major Matthew Baird, MLA for Ballarat West and the minister responsible for the police force.
In canvassing reasons for Nicholson’s appointment, The Argus ventured to suggest that perhaps ‘Nicholson’s police experience’ and ‘knowledge of Victorian conditions’ gave him a ‘decided advantage’ over applicants from the Australian Imperial Forces, Scotland Yard and the Royal Irish Constabulary. But his main advantages lay in being the personal friend and local superintendent of the chief secretary, and the intention of a conservative government not to be again subjected to pressure from a progressive and demanding chief commissioner. Steward and Gellibrand had both made many changes, repeatedly requested more men, money and equipment, and queried government decisions. Nicholson was not the sort of man to make demands of his political masters or to query their actions.36
When Nicholson left Ballarat the mayor presented him with a gold-mounted umbrella, but the new chief commissioner needed more than that to shield him from the storm lying ahead. In the manner of many conservative disciplinarians, Nicholson swept into power in an autocratic and forthright manner and generated his own turbulence as he went. He did not agree with the principle of participatory management and scrapped the regular conferences of superintendents because he ‘found the time was wasted’ and the conferences of ‘little utility’. In addition, Nicholson’s early plans for the force marked a return to the prosaic style of Chomley. He prepared his own recommendations for improving the efficiency of the force, and they included absurdly small requests for one car, one camera, two extra women police and thirty extra constables, which were all approved by the government within a month. Nicholson’s proposals were not only inexpensive when compared with those of Steward and Gellibrand, whose plans included an extra two hundred men, but they also avoided politically sensitive matters such as a want of pensions, low pay, sub-standard accommodation and insufficient horses. Steward and Gellibrand had tried to remove some of the root causes of police grievances, in order to lift morale and make the force more attractive to recruits. Nicholson elected to avoid fundamental questions of this sort and merely put forward proposals for short-term, piecemeal changes. He did not delve into the long-term needs of the force or attempt to formulate police to population or supervision ratios. Gellibrand had aimed at a ratio of one sub-officer to every four constables; Nicholson felt the ideal was about 1:7, but actually worked with ratios ranging from 1:2 to 1:25, with a city ratio of 1:10. The undemanding nature of Nicholson’s proposals, and the rapidity with which the government agreed to them in full, suggest that, if his friend Baird did not have a hand in drafting them, Nicholson framed them to please his political masters.
Chief Commissioner A. Nicholson
On 12 May 1922 Nicholson assured the government of his confidence that he could ‘meet all legitimate demands which will for some time to come be made for police protection, and, in addition, raise the standard of efficiency in the force’. It was not long, however, before his confidence began to wane and he expressed concern about a want of supervision and a lack of men. He was also confronted by considerable unrest in the ranks as neither he nor the Lawson Government had taken positive steps to improve conditions for ordinary working policemen. At the end of Nicholson’s first year in office his force was the only one in Australia without a pension scheme, his police to population ratio of 1:902 was the worst in mainland Australia, and expenditure per head of population on police in Victoria was the lowest in Australia. His men worked a seven-day week of forty-seven-and-a-quarter hours, for which the base pay rate for constables was twelve shillings a day, rising to 14s 6d per day, with allowances. Victorian policemen were not paid for overtime, were granted one Sunday off in every four weeks and received seventeen days’ annual leave. Although the starting pay of constables was less than that paid to labourers, the government felt that general police wages and conditions compared favourably with other ‘lower grades of employment in the trades and callings’. This view was disputed by policemen and was of little solace to them, anyway, as they did not aspire to the wages and conditions of lower private employment but wanted wages and benefits equal to those of the New South Wales Police, who received 3s 6d a day more than their Victorian counterparts, and enjoyed twenty-eight days’ annual leave and two Sundays off each month.
The lack of a general pension scheme was one matter that particularly upset younger members of the force and produced much discussion and lobbying. After the scheme was abandoned in 1902, Chomley, Steward and Gellibrand all—at different times—argued for its reintroduction. Over a period of twenty years deputations of policemen unsuccessfully presented their case for pensions to successive governments, and it was a perennial agenda item at Police Association meetings. The closest they came to succeeding was in 1920 when the premier, Harry Lawson, promised pensions for all policemen in his election policy speech. He broke his promise. In 1923 the force comprised 1808 men, of whom all the officers (thirty-nine), all the sergeants (101) and 84 per cent (179) of the senior constables were entitled to pensions from the pre-1902 fund. Of the constables, 1308 (90 per cent) were not. Unlike Steward and Gellibrand, Nicholson was entitled to a police pension and did not move for the reintroduction of a general scheme. The issue simmered.37
Another subject of contention, tackled by Steward and Gellibrand but ignored by Nicholson, was the dilapidated state of many police buildings. For many hundreds of men, police stations were not just their place of work but their home. Single men were compelled to live in barracks and were governed by strict regulations that forbade visitors, smoking, drinking liquor, card playing, and ‘conversations in relation to nationality, religion or party polities’. They were allowed to play dominoes. These rules hardly made for ‘a home away from home’, but some stations too were squalid, men often finding the food inedible and the ablution facilities so inadequate that they washed at the City Baths. Neither Nicholson nor the Lawson ministry did much about the squalid conditions and it was later observed by a royal commission:
At the St Kilda Road Depot … the horses are much better served than the men … none of the most ordinary comforts or graces of home life are permitted … The whole effect was one of repelling cheerlessness …
If the conditions at the depot were repellent, those found to exist at the station at Bourke Street West were shocking … the residential portion … is unfit for human habitation …
Shabbiness and congestion were the features most in evidence when we visited the Russell Street Barracks … Many of the rooms are badly in need of renovation … while the overcrowding of others is serious enough to constitute a menace to the health of the occupants …
A first essential to a spirit of discipline, a smartness of bearing and a dignity of demeanour, is the environment in which a man has to live and work, and the habits of order, cleanliness, and tidiness which satisfactory conditions engender … The conditions prevailing in those buildings of the Victoria Police Force which we inspected were found to be the very antithesis of these.
The plight of the force was not so much the fault of Nicholson as of frugal governments, nestling comfortably in the knowledge that police pay and conditions were not election issues, and that the police themselves could not lawfully strike, even if they had not been too loyal a body of men to think of doing so. Nicholson’s culpability lay in his acceptance of the conditions and his failure to follow the example of Steward and Gellibrand in pressing the government to improve the policeman’s lot.38 Instead of taking action to settle the general unrest of his force, Nicholson aggravated it on 14 November 1922 when he appointed four senior constables to work in plain clothes and operate in pairs throughout the city and suburbs, supervising men on the beat. Nicholson’s justification for introducing the special supervisors was that there was an urgent need to exercise stricter supervision because he had seen ‘men idling about the streets, leaning against lamp posts, gossiping and actually smoking in uniform in daylight’. He had also seen policemen ‘drunk at night’, and one constable had been detected in uniform committing a warehouse burglary. Given the ratio of sub-officers to constables, and the working conditions generally, some slackness and dereliction of duty are not surprising. Nor is it strange that Nicholson should choose to appoint four special supervisors with a roving commission, rather than press the government for the necessary thirty additional sub-officers.
The special supervisors soon became known as ‘spooks’; in parliament they were described as ‘pimps’, appointed to ‘secretly watch and report on constables’; and in some police circles their work was denigrated as ‘humiliating espionage’. Although the presence of the special supervisors upset many policemen, their work was confined primarily to the covert supervision of beat constables in the city and inner suburbs, and did not directly affect more senior men, policemen in rural areas, or those engaged on clerical or administrative tasks. Even within their sphere of activity the ‘spooks’ reported fewer men than did uniformed sub-officers working in the traditional way, and the animosity directed at them was due more to their secretive mode of working, than to any actual cases of injustice or a dramatic rise in the number of discipline reports. The special supervisors performed an important and legitimate function but the question of their appointment was an emotive one, inflamed because Nicholson’s choice of men for the task was ‘in some cases injudicious’, and included the appointment of his brother-in-law as well as another man who had recently been convicted of being found drunk on duty. The ‘spook’ system struck a serious blow at police morale, and cost Nicholson dearly among those men who had originally welcomed his promotion to chief commissioner.39
It is difficult to determine whether or not Nicholson’s long spell in Ballarat had left him out of touch with city work or whether he was just a misguided martinet, but soon after launching his ‘spook’ fiasco he purged the Licensing Branch and set in motion a train of events that ended with the police strike. On 8 February 1923 Nicholson summarily transferred seventeen plain-clothes licensing police to uniform work, and among these men was Constable William Brooks, a normal enough member of the branch, who had never been convicted of a discipline offence and who had three commendations to his credit, including one in the preceding two months ‘for displaying zeal and tact in partaking in 846 licensing prosecutions and sly-grog cases in twelve months’. Although Nicholson did not know Brooks personally, he had heard that Brooks was ‘unfit’ for licensing work, and in spite of the recent commendation, he decided that Brooks had to go. Nicholson’s decision incensed Brooks and had the effect of transforming him from a loyal and quiet employee into a vocal dissident. Early in April 1923 Brooks circulated a petition, headed ‘Comrades and Fellow Workers’, among constables in the metropolitan area. It demanded the restoration of police pensions, the immediate withdrawal of the special supervisors and the granting of conditions enjoyed by police in New South Wales. Almost seven hundred men signed the petition and it established Brooks as unofficial leader among many metropolitan constables.
It was about this time that the Melbourne Truth expressed the view that:
At no time in the history of the Victoria Police Force has there been so much discontent as there is at present … The men not only complain of being underpaid, but of the treatment they receive from the Chief Commissioner, who has won for himself the unenviable distinction of being the most unpopular officer who has occupied the Commissioner’s chair.
It is doubtful that this last piece of journalese accurately reflected the opinion of the force, for although Nicholson’s popularity, as well as his confidence, was on the wane, he did have his supporters. At one point during 1923 he received widespread acclaim—including a congratulatory letter from the Police Association of New South Wales—when he flew with the police surgeon, Mr G. A. Syme, in an open-cockpit aeroplane to Swan Hill in a desperate but unsuccessful bid to save the life of Mounted Constable Joseph Delaney, who had been shot while making an arrest. Nevertheless, the rundown state of the force produced festering discontent of a sort not seen for many years, and during April 1923 there was open talk of a police strike. Nicholson defended his position by describing the strike talk as ‘moonshine’, and an unmoved government simply pointed out that ‘there are 948 applications from men to come into the service’. Brooks’s petition and its reference to the ‘Prussianism’ of the supervisors received wide publicity, with the result that he was capriciously transferred to Geelong ‘for special work’, and on his arrival at Geelong was further ordered to proceed to Colac for licensing duty. In the light of Nicholson’s earlier decision about his fitness for such work, Brooks disobeyed the order in Geelong and returned to his wife and family at Prahran, where he was suspended from duty and charged with insubordination. The public hearing of this charge again thrust Brooks into the limelight and into an open courtroom confrontation with Nicholson. Brooks won. In a court decision divided two to one in his favour, he was cleared of the charge on the grounds that he was ‘under the impression that the chief commissioner of police had given instructions that he was not to be employed on licensing duty’, and returned to uniform duty without loss of pay or position.40
Brooks’s personal animosity, and the general discontent among sections of the force, remained near boiling point throughout the winter and into the spring of 1923. The special supervisors were still prowling, there was no pension scheme, and work conditions lagged well behind those of the New South Wales Police. The Lawson ministry and Nicholson had done nothing substantial to improve conditions for policemen or to ease their discontent, and because the Police Association was a loyal and patient body, this situation could have gone on for months, but it did not. Authority’s hand was forced on the night of 31 October 1923, when Brooks led twenty-eight other constables on strike in protest against the system of special supervision. That night, at 10 p.m., the beatmen at Russell Street refused to parade for duty unless the special supervisors were removed. It has never been disclosed why Brooks chose that night, but it was the eve of Gala Week, when thousands of visitors were expected in Melbourne for a week-long festival of social attractions, one of them the Melbourne Cup, and Brook’s timing—whether by accident or design—guaranteed him much more than average interest and impact. It was the first and, to this day, the only police strike in Australia.
The strike was not organised or supported by the Police Association but was organised by Brooks, who, only minutes before the men were due to parade, called a meeting in the barracks and had them elect him as their spokesman. The majority of these men were young, unmarried constables with less than twelve months’ service, and their only strike demand was that the special supervisors be removed. The effect of their action was immediate and salutary: the system of special supervisors was abandoned and has never been reintroduced. On the morning of Thursday 1 November the four supervisors were reassigned to other duties, thereby eliminating the single ground on which Brooks and his followers had refused duty the previous night. This action by the police administration, however, was kept secret and not communicated to Brooks or the other strikers. Instead, Brooks met with the premier and Nicholson that day and was advised that cabinet supported the chief commissioner; the special supervisors were to be retained and the men were to return to duty unconditionally. The outcome of this Machiavellian approach was that the strike continued into a second night, when Brooks and the same twenty-eight constables again refused to parade for duty. Again their one and only demand was that the special supervisors be removed: an action that, unbeknown to them, had been taken as a result of their strike the night before, but which was never communicated to Brooks nor made public until it emerged during evidence given to a royal commission late in 1924. Nicholson never fully explained his reason for adopting this course, and even when questioned about it by the royal commission was evasive and vague. One can only speculate as to why he did it. The two most feasible explanations—perhaps in combination—are that it was a negotiation tactic that went awry and was then kept secret, or that Nicholson was painfully aware of the ill-feeling that his supervision system had caused and abandoned it, but did not tell Brooks lest he be seen as capitulating to the demands of a small group of dissidents led by a renegade constable.
Nicholson’s decision cost more than six hundred policemen their careers. On the night of 1 November the commissioner simply told Brooks and the others to return to duty. When they did not, he curtly told those men present, ‘You will all be discharged—you can hand in your kits tomorrow’. He then summarily dismissed Brooks and one other constable from the force and discharged the remainder of the men. A later inquiry described Nicholson’s behaviour as ‘a surprising dénouement’ and ‘an undignified proceeding … calculated to cause resentment and to imbalance the judgement of other policemen, who would soon learn, possibly in an exaggerated form, of this theatrical happening’. On being dismissed, Brooks announced that a meeting would be held at the Temperance Hall the following morning, then departed on a tour of suburban police stations to rally support for the strike.
The Bulletin’s view of the police strike
During his visits to stations Brooks grossly exaggerated the extent of his following by stating that ‘all the men at Russell Street are out’, and by noon on 2 November he had rallied some six hundred men. The initial stages of the strike were a confused tangle of frantic activity, hopeless inactivity and poor communication; many constables were caught up in the strike movement due to a lack of guidance and leadership from Nicholson and officials of the Police Association. Many of the 634 discharged constables did not refuse duty but ‘merely hesitated to report for duty or intimate their willingness to do duty while seeking to ascertain what the situation really was, but honestly desiring to do the right thing’. Many men were dealt with unfairly, one so unfairly that he was taken into the police force in South Australia, but regardless of any injustices not one of the 636 men dismissed or discharged by Nicholson and his officers was ever allowed back into the Victorian force.
The absence of so many men from their posts unleashed a wave of violence and looting on a scale never before witnessed in Melbourne. Two men were killed and hundreds more were injured as mobs of roughs fought and looted in an orgy of violence. A tram was stopped and set on fire, and dozens of shop fronts were shattered by brazen looters who tried garments for size before clearing shops of all stock. The uniformed constables still on beat duty were helpless against the unruly mobs, and were themselves jostled and manhandled; while the detectives, who all remained on duty and hovered in the darkness on the outskirts of the city, could not cope with the swarm of laden looters fleeing to the suburbs.41
The frenzy of lawlessness that accompanied the police strike so alarmed the Lawson Government that, in seeking rescue, it by-passed Nicholson and turned to those men it had overlooked when appointing him in 1922. Lieutenant General Sir John Monash was given the task of restoring order to the beleaguered city, and the famous soldier soon surrounded himself with a cadre of loyal and outstanding officers from his army days and formed a Special Constabulary Force (SCF) numbering five thousand men. Monash recognised the ineptitude of Nicholson, and the paralysis that afflicted his diminished force of regular police, and chose to establish and maintain the SCF as an independent peace-keeping unit. When the ‘specials’ were sworn in each man was equipped with a baton, a brassard and a hat band with the letters SCF, and the motley force of amateur policemen moved in to quell the rioting mobs. They were successful. By Melbourne Cup Day, Tuesday 6 November, relative calm had returned to Melbourne and the people of the city went about their business. For most of them the police strike was over.42
The strike in Victoria followed seven other police strikes that had occurred overseas between 1918 and 1921, including major strikes in England and Boston, USA, during 1919, but there is no evidence linking these events overseas with the strike by Victorian policemen and no suggestion that Brooks or his supporters were knowingly copying an international trend. If they were, the overseas experience was a poor precedent for them to follow. The issues in dispute overseas were different from those in Victoria, and in England and Boston they centred on police demands that governments recognise their right to form and join unions. Although both strikes were the final phase in organised and protracted disputes, they were quickly crushed. In England and Boston, a combined force of loyal policemen, special constables and soldiers soon restored order and every policeman who went on strike—2300 in England and 1117 in Boston—was dismissed and never reinstated. The English experience led to the formation of a police federation, which was an official substitute for a police union and was dubbed ‘the goose club’ because of its ‘incapacity to do anything but march in step with the authorities’. In the United States a national backlash against the striking policemen in Boston resulted in ‘the complete destruction of the policemen’s trade union movement’. In the aftermath of the Victorian police strike the Police Association escaped such retribution because it did not organise or support the strikers, nor was union recognition or affiliation then an issue.43
The strike cost the state Treasury £78 263 and 636 policemen their jobs, one-third of the force’s manpower. Many hundreds of serving and former policemen were left reeling in bewilderment as they tried to comprehend the whirlwind of events that was the strike. Many of the discharged men formed themselves into a Police Strikers’ Association and lobbied for reinstatement in the force, while others simply obtained alternative employment and put the strike behind them. A high level of public and political interest in the force culminated in the appointment of a royal commission on 28 August 1924 to inquire into:
1. (a) The general state, efficiency and condition of the force prior to November, 1923;
(b) As to whether any and what grievances were complained of by members of the Force prior to the month of November, 1923;
(c) The cause or causes moving certain persons then members of the Force to refuse duty in the month of November, 1923;
(d) The consequences arising from such refusal of duty;
2. The present standard of efficiency of the force and the best method of securing efficiency, if found to be impaired;
3. As to whether further and better police protection throughout the State, or any part thereof, is necessary; and, if so, what would be the most effective means for ensuring such protection.
The commission was appointed by the Labor government led by George Prendergast, who came to power on 18 July 1924. When in opposition the Labor Party had promised to reinstate all 636 police strikers. It was a promise easily made by a political party in opposition and without the means to fulfil it, but the subject was so contentious and hotly debated that when they were elected to govern, the Labor politicians shied away from the issue and used the appointment of a royal commission as a stalling tactic. The chairman of the commission was Sir John Monash, who had so astutely broken the strike and restored order to Melbourne. He was assisted by Superintendent John Martin, an officer subordinate to Nicholson and a former president of the Police Association, and Charles McPherson, chairman of the Public Service Board. Before these three completed their inquiry the Labor government was voted from office and saved the anguish of making a decision about reinstatement of the strikers. The new conservative Country Party government of Premier John Allan amended the commission’s terms of reference to exclude the reinstatement question. The restricted scope of the inquiry diminished the value of its findings accordingly and few people except historians have derived any benefit from its work.
Although the ostensible reason for the strike was the presence of special supervisors, the commission found that ‘if pensions had been restored, there would have been no refusal of duty by any considerable section of the force’. Of the 636 men involved in the strike only two had the contingent right to a pension. The lack of a general pension scheme created a situation ‘in which, and in which alone, a general strike in the police force became a possibility’. However, notwithstanding the importance of the pension issue, the commission found that ‘the immediate cause of the strike was the agitation engineered by ex-constable Brooks, using as a pretext the system of Special Supervisors’, and that ‘the generally unsympathetic attitude of successive Governments to the rectification of grievances within the force created a feeling throughout the force which predisposed it to exploitation by an agitator such as Brooks’. The commission was also severely critical of the actions and administration of Nicholson, who by then was sixty-two years of age and past the normal police retiring age. His autocratic behaviour and abandonment of conferences, his introduction of the special supervisors, his behaviour during the strike and his age were just a few of the issues which worried the royal commission.44
They were not, however, matters of such grave concern to the succession of conservative and Labor Party ministries that held office from 1923 to 1925. Notwithstanding Nicholson’s mismanagement before and during the strike, he was permitted to remain in office and he served as chief commissioner while efforts were made to rebuild the force. Unlike 636 other policemen, he survived the night the police went on strike with his source of income—if not his reputation—intact.
