The People’s Force

5 Good Men are Needed at the Top

The police strike and the events that followed it highlighted the importance of having capable leaders in the senior ranks of the force. It was not enough that they had a sound record of police service; as well as being able to earn the respect and support of subordinates, they had to be at least receptive to new ideas and adaptable to pressures for change. After the strike, the government appointed Major General Sir James McCay as head of a Special Constabulary Force (SCF), to help maintain law and order while the regular force was rebuilt. The two forces co-existed for a few months before the SCF was disbanded, but it was long enough for McCay to overshadow Nicholson and show that there was a wealth of management skills available to the police from outside their ranks. Nicholson was not up to the task and, partly due to his failings, he was the last chief commissioner to be appointed from within the force for almost forty years. The three successive chief commissioners were all ‘outsiders’: Brigadier General Thomas A. Blamey, Alexander M. Duncan and Major General Selwyn H. Porter.

The role of the commissioner was one of the most important factors affecting the fortunes of the force—second only to the influence of the general community itself. This importance was evident not only in the era of Blamey, Duncan and Porter, nor only in the twentieth century, but it was during and after the police strike that the subject of police leadership became an especially important public issue, inflamed by Blamey’s controversial activities and the importation of Duncan from Scotland Yard.

Blamey, Duncan and Porter worked without the support of deputy or assistant commissioners and, aided only by small personal staffs, they shouldered enormous responsibilities. They were the force’s main public figures and spokesmen, and their decisions touched almost every facet of the force’s operations. In addition to superintending all manner of internal changes and duties, the personal influence of the three men was to be found in broader social issues, such as police attitudes and activities during the Depression, the police war effort and the force’s approach to changed juvenile behaviour during the 1950s.

When the chief commissioner was vibrant, introduced reforms and enjoyed public support, the force as a whole generally reflected it. When he waned, the force waned with him.

Reconstruction

The police of Victoria are still under the control of the Chief Commissioner. The special police, a special body, existing only for special purposes, and for a limited time, are under the control of Sir James McCay.

By 17 November 1923 the violence and mayhem that marked the early days of the police strike had passed, and the attention of many people turned to the ongoing need to maintain public order and the urgent need to rebuild the police force. Never before in Australia had a community been so ‘let down’ by its police and so obliged to take the protection of lives and property into its own hands. Such was the loss of confidence in Nicholson and his depleted force that many people in Victoria looked again to someone of Monash’s type for succour, and approved of Sir James McCay’s appointment as commander of the SCF, which was briefly the larger of Victoria’s two police forces and had the finest commander. Nicholson found the role of second fiddle an ignominious sequel to the strike, but McCay was a highly educated lawyer and an experienced military commander, and had added status in his knighthood; his knowledge of people and network of contacts were beyond the reach of the plain man from Ballarat. McCay fitted readily into the role of leader, and not only commanded the SCF but also joined his efforts with Nicholson’s to rebuild the regular police force. There were some expressions of concern that he had ‘superseded’ or ‘displaced’ Nicholson, but this was temporary. The SCF was only an interim force, and Nicholson was not destined always to work in McCay’s shadow: he remained in office until mid-1925, whereas McCay and the SCF had gone by mid-1924. Nevertheless, that short-lived special force deserves scrutiny.

The headquarters of the SCF was located in the repatriation building at Jolimont. Theoretically an independent adjunct to the regular police force, the SCF became the gateway to the regular force. By government decision, and much to the chagrin of Nicholson’s recruiting officers, no man could join Nicholson’s force without first serving in McCay’s. Officers from the regular force conducted an intensive statewide recruiting campaign that netted an average of one hundred recruits a month, but these men were not immediately available to Nicholson as they were all first inducted into the SCF. As McCay reminded Nicholson, ‘I will supply such number of recruits each week as you wish. But of course my supplying them to you is entirely dependent on your first supplying them to me, as we both know’. This arrangement existed to minimise the risk of SCF members being ostracised as a ‘scab’ minority when they joined the regular force, but it also inflated the importance of the SCF, which had its own corps of officers, its own uniform and its own code of police conduct, and which, with a strength of 1380 men, was the third-largest force in Australia. Unlike the thousands of men who rallied to Monash’s side and volunteered for service as special constables during the police-strike emergency, the men of McCay’s SCF were paid employees whose wage of fifteen shillings a day was higher than the twelve shillings paid to junior constables in the regular force.

The duties and arrest powers of the SCF were almost identical to those of the regular force, and men from both forces worked together at suburban police stations. The main differences between them lay in their degree of public acceptance and their levels of efficiency. The Labor Party viewed the SCF with distaste, and this view was matched by many people in working-class suburbs, especially Collingwood and Northcote, where it was not considered safe for ‘specials’ to venture alone. The authorities had trouble finding living accommodation for specials in these suburbs, and at certain times they were compelled to patrol in groups of four to ensure their personal safety. The labour movement generally supported reinstatement of the police strikers, and it was felt that ‘scabs’ of the SCF were thwarting that objective.

Some of the specials themselves did little to enhance their collective image. Complaints of officiousness and excessive use of force were common, and two of them were involved in a widely publicised case of attempted extortion. The Labor Party expressed alarm at what it regarded as a ‘large number of grave offences committed by special constables’ but, given the size and nature of the SCF, the extent and degree of Labor criticism were unwarranted. Ninety-eight specials (about 7 per cent) were discharged for misconduct, but thirty-six of them were for being absent without leave and twenty-one for being ‘undesirable’.

Much of the trouble with members of the SCF was due to their hasty recruitment and lack of training, and the transitory nature of their role that often saw them go from civilian, to special, to constable, all in the space of fourteen days. Members of the regular force were instructed to treat the specials ‘on the same basis as they would treat raw recruits’, and were advised that as ‘these specials have not had any training in police duties, mistakes and errors of judgment in the performance of their duties must necessarily arise’. Taken overall, the work of the SCF was creditable and, while Nicholson rebuilt his force, the auxiliaries added useful weight against further outbreaks of serious crime and violence. Opponents of the SCF levelled many criticisms at it but never suggested that it was ineffective. It was an expedient for putting ‘policemen’ on the streets and, on occasions like New Year’s Eve, the bolstering of regular police ranks with specials was the salutary difference between a night of rejoicing and a night of rioting.

Andrew Moore is one historian who has looked at the role of special constables, but he approaches the question in doctrinaire fashion and views them as the sinister manifestation of some secret right-wing movement. There is more point of view than hard evidence behind such a proposition, and Moore appears unwilling to accept as a real possibility that the formation of the SCF was a spontaneous and even natural reaction when a community was in crisis, and was forced by the unprecedented breakdown of its regular police force to take steps to secure the order and safety desired by most people. One review properly describes Moore’s argument as over-dramatised and his sources as ‘sparse’, and says of his secret army theory, ‘one needs something more substantial than suspicion of an “unseen hand”’. Certainly some working-class areas showed even more active dislike of the specials than they normally did for any policemen, and many unionists were resentful of them on good union principles; but probably most Victorians simply wanted to feel safe by having sufficient ‘policemen’ on the streets, which might be conservative but is hardly sinister. If police militancy suffered a sad blow, that was quite in harmony with the accepted views of a great many Victorians, including non-union wage-earners and their dependants. If it was a plot, it was singularly ill-planned: so unprepared for it was everybody that even the supply of boots and batons to the specials caused acute problems.

During the period from December 1923 to May 1924 a total of 694 men transferred from the SCF to the Victoria Police Force, which was thus brought back to full strength in only six months. The remaining members of the SCF, including McCay, were demobbed during mid-1924, and on 1 August 1924, a special meeting of justices of the central bailiwick formally disbanded the SCF when they decreed there was ‘no further cause to apprehend that ordinary constables and officers appointed to preserve the peace, are insufficient for the purpose’. From that date Victoria again had one police force and Nicholson stood alone as the state’s most senior policeman.1

Although at full numerical strength, the force was not regarded as being up to its pre-strike standard. The average length of service of the strikers was five years, and service in individual cases ranged up to twenty-five years, with 135 of them having served for more than ten years each. It was not possible in the space of a few months to impart this level of experience to new recruits, and although former officers were retained as instructors, it was not even possible to give each recruit the standard seven-week training course. The Monash royal commission acknowledged that one consequence of the strike was a ‘lowering of efficiency’ that would take ‘two or three years entirely to repair’, but it was also acknowledged that the general education level of the new men was higher than that of the police strikers they replaced. Reduced efficiency was a difficult variable to measure and was not at once obvious to many people. A matter of greater concern to the public was ‘the number of young constables of small stature to be seen on duty in the city’. In order to bring the force more quickly back to full strength after the strike, and to open the force to more returned soldiers, the minimum height requirement was reduced by 1 inch to 5 ft 8 in. Throughout efforts to rebuild the force, first preference was always given to returned soldiers, and they comprised 56 per cent of the SCF. A 1-inch reduction was not unreasonable but it did run counter to police tradition. Long before they introduced minimum education standards, police forces had minimum—and arbitrary—height requirements: in London 5 ft 7 in, in Victoria 5 ft 9 in, and in New South Wales 5 ft 10 in. In 1924 tradition dictated that ‘a foot policeman in uniform should by his obvious physical proportions and strength command a respect for his capacity to deal with every situation demanding a physique well above the average’. The post-strike recruits were criticised for being ‘jockey-size’, and their ‘small stature’ so worried many people that in April 1925 the minimum height was restored to 5 ft 9 in.2

Although the police strike may have had some damaging effects on the efficiency and physical appearance of the force, it did bring about significant improvements in the work conditions of Victoria’s police. (The only men not to benefit from the strike were the strikers.) In the wake of the strike, the government and the force administration introduced a series of reforms designed to attract recruits and to reward those men who remained loyal. The strike prompted more improvements in police work conditions than constitutional means had achieved in the previous quarter of a century, and these reforms served as the corner-stone of efforts to rebuild the force.

On eight separate occasions during the period 1903 to 1921, members of the force made formal representations to the government for the reintroduction of police pensions. All of these were unsuccessful, the best that the police could elicit from the government being Lawson’s 1920 election promise that was broken. However, within weeks of the strike, a Police Pensions Bill was rushed through parliament and became law on 1 January 1924, providing all police with comprehensive pension entitlements, including disability payments and allowances for widows and children. Also, police were given a small increase in pay that raised their minimum yearly salary to £220, and brought them closer to the New South Wales Police. A good-conduct scheme was introduced, so that ‘during the seventh to eleventh years of his service’ a constable could ‘twice receive an annual increment of £10 for good conduct, special zeal, general intelligence, general proficiency, or by passing a qualifying examination in education and police matters’. Promotion, too, was made quicker and easier; the service period for qualification was reduced from seven to two years, and some other short cuts to promotion became possible. There was a big stick in the background: no man dismissed for misconduct—including going on strike—was entitled ‘to any pension or gratuity’, and this could mean the loss of a pension of up to £250 a year for a man with thirty years’ service. Pensions, pay rises and promotion prospects gave police better career goals, a greater sense of personal security and more money in their pockets. Nor did the rewards for loyalty stop there. In May 1924 all loyalist police were granted seven days’ extra leave, and in 1925 and 1927 respectively the annual leave for all police was raised to twenty-one days, then twenty-eight days, a great advance on the previous entitlement of seventeen days, and one that brought the force into line with New South Wales.

The government improved police surroundings with a massive increase in spending on police equipment and buildings. A new depot was built on land fronting St Kilda Road, the Russell Street barracks remodelled, the Bourke Street West police station renovated and dozens of other lesser works completed at police stations throughout the state. Table 4 shows the scale and rate of this increased capital expenditure. Given the nexus established by the Monash royal commission between the squalid state of many police buildings and the propensity of men living in them to strike, it is unfortunate that the frugal Lawson ministry did not spend some of this money before the strike.³

TABLE 4
Capital expenditure on buildings and works for police

Financial year	Amount spent (£)	% up or down on strike year*
1918–1919	2891	–66%
1919–1920	2879	–66%
1920–1921	5752	–33%
1921–1922	6681	–22%
1922–1923	8597	*base year
1923–1924	20 997	+ 144%
1924–1925	20 109	+ 133%
1925–1926	24 565	+ 185%
1926–1927	31 637	+ 268%
1927–1928	39 292	+ 357%

Victorian Government Expenditure in Division 1 sub-division 2—Police Buildings (includes buildings and works for police, land, furniture, repairs and additions and fencing). (Source: Victorian Parliamentary Papers. Treasurer’s Financial Report for years 1918–1919 to 1927–1928.)

Buildings and manpower were not the only matters to occupy Nicholson in the last months of his career, and after the strike he resumed consideration of three developments that were initiated before October 1923 but temporarily pushed into the background by the strike. They were the use of dogs and wireless in police work, and an expanded role for women police. And that is the order of importance in which Nicholson viewed them. In 1922 the force acquired two ‘fine young liver-and-white pointers’ and during April 1923 they were taken on patrol to test their utility for police work. The trials were a favourite project of Nicholson’s and he was firmly committed to the idea that the dogs would prove a ‘great success’, reduce crime and save ‘police from being maltreated’. During 1924 he obtained information about the subject from a number of overseas sources, including the South African Police, and initiated a breeding programme at the Dandenong Police Stud Depot, using bulldogs, pointers and Airedale terriers. But their handlers lacked expertise: the dogs were not properly trained and were a failure. The scheme gradually faded from existence, but not before an Airedale–bulldog cross named P. C. Bully acquired considerable fame as a night rider with the Wireless Patrol. As a working police dog Bully was a flop, but perched on the running board of a police Lancia travelling at 50 miles an hour he was the meanest motor-car mascot in Melbourne.4

Nicholson’s keenness to give police dogs a trial set him apart from Alfred Sainsbury, who rejected the idea in 1914 as not worth ‘the time, trouble or money’. On another issue both men agreed: women had only a very limited role to play in police work. When women first entered the force in 1917 it was against Sainsbury’s wishes, and although many policemen, including Steward and Gellibrand, were pleased with the work of the women, Nicholson remained unimpressed. In 1922, after five years’ service as ‘police agents’, Victoria’s two policewomen asked if they might be paid equal money for doing equal work. It was a valid plea by women not subject to any entrance standards or training, but doing the same long hours and shifts as the men, and similar duties. The women took their own case to the chief secretary and the chief commissioner, arguing that they had all the usual living expenses to meet, plus special police ‘out of pocket expenses’, and the requirement to ‘maintain dignity’ and be ‘decently dressed’ at a time when ‘women’s clothing had increased in cost by leaps and bounds’. In August 1922 the policewomen were granted a daily plain-clothes allowance of 1s 6d, but this still left their pay at least five shillings a day below that of their male colleagues. Because they were not members of the Police Association that body did not support their claim, but the women did have a friend in John Cain, Labor MLA for Northcote, who aired their case in parliament. The moves by and for women police to improve their lot were accompanied by sustained lobbying from community groups like the National Council of Women, to increase their strength; and the number of policewomen was increased to four by the appointment of Mary Cox in September 1922 and Ellen Cook in September 1923. The movement to give policewomen greater recognition was gaining momentum and was given valuable impetus during the police strike, when the women loyally remained on duty throughout the crisis. After the strike there was talk of recognising the women’s efforts by extending the proposed pay rises and pension scheme to include them, but the moves were stymied by Nicholson. He publicly and privately opposed equal rights for women police and, at the height of discussions in December 1923, he wrote to the under-secretary:

The Wireless Patrol: P. C. Bully on running board and F. W. (‘Pop’) Downie at extreme right

If policewomen were made members of the force, they would be entitled to the pay and privileges of male members, unless special provision to the contrary was arranged. Their degree of usefulness to the government does not, in my opinion, justify their being placed on the same footing as the police, their sex hampering their usefulness.

In a separate press statement Nicholson even went as far as to suggest that if the women were to ‘be entitled to the same status as ordinary members of the force’ he could see ‘no alternative but to dismiss the four women’. A. J. O’Meara has generously assumed that Nicholson adopted this stance in the interests of women, ‘as a bluff to focus attention on the fact that, since they were not sworn in as constables, they could not be eligible for all the privileges to which that rank was entitled’. Yet such a claim is based on Nicholson’s tacit support for women police in a restricted welfare role. The truth is that Nicholson opposed the full entry of women into the force. His opposition to equal rights for policewomen, rather than serving as a ploy to highlight and remedy their plight, actually prolonged it. The conservative government of Harry Lawson accepted Nicholson’s recommendations, and it was not until after the Labor ministry of George Prendergast came to office on 18 July 1924 that Victoria’s four women police were sworn in, on 12 November 1924, and legally vested with the same powers of arrest, pay and pension rights as their male colleagues. O’Meara fails to mention the crucial change of government. The Labor Party had always supported efforts to improve the lot of women police, and when they used their brief spell in government to give legal effect to this policy it was not done with Nicholson’s concurrence.5

Women still had a long way to go. In 1924 there were only four of them among more than eighteen hundred men, and within the force were many sections destined for decades to remain all-male bastions. One of those sections was the newest and most exciting area of police work—the Wireless Patrol.

A powerful touring car slips along decorously in the early morning quiet of Melbourne. Externally it is the property of some eminently respectable suburbanite homewardbound.

Inside it, beside the driver, are a dog and four men, one of whom wears a leather helmet and wireless headgear.

The headgear buzzes … Dot-Dash-Dash-Dot-Dot … ‘Thieves in warehouse, Lygon Street, Carlton’, the operator reads. At a word the driver accelerates, and the rest of the message is taken at 50 miles an hour.

The wireless patrol, which nightly guards thousands of lives and millions of pounds worth of property, is on the job.

That is the style of journalistic eulogies of the Wireless Patrol found in the pages of Melbourne newspapers throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The ‘Patrol’, as it became more colloquially known, was the brainchild of Senior Constable Frederick William ‘Pop’ Downie, who was described in later years by Sir Thomas Blamey as ‘the most intelligent, uneducated man’ he had ever met. The hitherto unknown sight of six burly policemen together in a sleek motor car with a dog and a wireless set enraptured the public and proved a revolutionary turning point in modern policing. Members of the patrol were able to boast that ‘the average time taken to get to the scene of a crime is 4.4 minutes’, and their arrest record was unchallenged by any other police in Australia. Indeed, they were the envy of the international police community, and were the first police in the world to put wireless in a touring car.

Today, police use of sophisticated communications equipment is an essential feature of every force, but in 1920 the mere idea of police wireless was so novel that it attracted wonder, incredulity and sometimes scorn. At that time Downie was serving with the Motor Patrol, which used a Palm car built from Model T Ford parts to patrol at night, checking such places as post offices and railway stations. To receive and give information, this unit would call at police stations each half-hour and telephone Russell Street for news. It was an inefficient means of communication. Around 1921 Downie began working with the idea of providing wireless for police patrol cars, and by November 1922 had developed his concept to the stage where he was able to persuade Nicholson to take part in experimental transmissions. Initially, these experiments were conducted using wireless telephony but it was decided to switch to wireless telegraphy, which involved the use of morse code, and this remained the basis of the police wireless network until April 1940. The force’s first Marconi receiving set was hired from Amalgamated Wireless for £1 a week and fitted to the force’s one Hotchkiss car in May 1923, and this was followed by the purchase of two new Lancia patrol cars later in 1923, and the progressive purchase of a fleet of Daimlers from August 1926. In the space of five years Downie’s Wireless Patrol was a revolutionary reality. From these small beginnings the combined use of motor cars and wireless by police slowly developed, resulting in the removal of constables from suburban beats and their encapsulation in patrol cars. In the period before World War II it was not a problem, it was progress. However, by the 1970s a ‘revolutionary new direction’ in police work was Operation Crime Beat, a scheme to take policemen from motor cars and put them back on the streets to patrol on foot—with portable radios in their pockets. In 1921 when Downie developed his idea after attending the Melbourne Marconi School of Wireless, not even he could have foreseen the impact that his experiments would have on the future of policing.

Dot-Dash-Dot: telegraphist Constable F. W. Canning of the Wireless Patrol

The men behind the Wireless Patrol: Chief Commissioner A. Nicholson, front centre (seated), F. W. (‘Pop’) Downie, extreme right (seated), and Constable F. W. Canning (standing second from right).

What was Nicholson’s role in this? Downie’s son argues that Nicholson was unenthusiastic about the idea and forced Downie to ‘go it alone’, while Nicholson’s son, and the newspapers of the period, credit Nicholson with appreciating the full possibilities of Downie’s vision and with supporting it totally. The real position was more probably as surmised by two of the original wireless telegraphists who worked with Downie: that Nicholson was an ageing and conservative man, approaching retirement, beset by the problems and costs of the police-strike era, and confronted by an inventive senior constable with a bold but expensive plan for police wireless that had never before been tried in the world. In such circumstances, a cautious response on the part of Nicholson would not only have been reasonable and prudent, but would have been in keeping with his character.6 In any event, Nicholson did finally facilitate the introduction and development of the Wireless Patrol, and it served as his swan-song. Before Downie had completed his work, Nicholson became ill and was admitted to hospital in May 1925. He never returned to duty and was succeeded as chief commissioner by Brigadier General Thomas Albert Blamey on 1 September 1925. Post-strike efforts to rebuild the force were largely complete, but on the recommendation of the Monash royal commission, Blamey was offered a salary of £1500 a year, £600 more than that paid to Nicholson, and he was expected to consolidate Nicholson’s work of reconstruction. It was thus that Monash’s former chief of staff ‘embarked on the most tempestuous eleven years of his life’.7

On the Edge of a Volcano

One thing at least is certain about Thomas Blamey: he was complex. Sir John Monash said that Blamey ‘possessed a mind cultured far above the average, widely informed, alert and prehensile. He had an infinite capacity for taking pains … Blamey was a man of inexhaustible industry, and accepted every task with placid readiness. Nothing was ever too much trouble’. Yet David McNicoll is no less right in seeing Blamey as ‘without doubt one of the most controversial generals in history. During his lifetime he was accused of perjury, nepotism, larrikinism, faulty judgement, drunkenness, lechery, deceit and even—by a couple of his more dedicated enemies—cowardice’.⁸

Blamey, who was to become Australia’s first field marshal, is still heralded as its ‘greatest soldier’ and ‘unrecognised hero’; yet in 1936 his career was seemingly in ruins, when, ‘almost friendless’ and ‘widely vilified’, he was asked to resign from the police force. As chief commissioner, Blamey was a controversial figure, uniquely embodying the reformist generalship of Steward and Gellibrand, the fractious authoritarianism of O’Callaghan and the scandal of Standish. His commissionership spanned eleven stormy years, beginning in the wake of the police strike amid calls for an inquiry into police corruption, and ending during the 1930s, following a royal commission inquiry into the shooting of Superintendent J. O. Brophy. During his police career Blamey survived five changes of government and an unprecedented challenge to his tenure of office, and confronted—some would say precipitated—a series of personal and professional crises that included the notorious ‘badge 80’ affair, a provident-fund controversy, a running feud with the press, the shooting of demonstrators by police, the break-up of the Police Association, and several police inquiries. Some of these troubles were primarily of his own making, and others were largely political in origin, but rarely was Blamey an innocent bystander. He was an outspoken man—politically conservative, with a dislike of the Labor Party—and displayed an intense personal interest in the suppression of communism, working-class radicalism and public protest. His reactionary politics he shared with his predecessors in the office of chief commissioner, but Blamey served for several years under Labor governments. Against a background of economic depression and unemployment, his personality and politics made a difficult task even harder. In the words of John Hetherington, Blamey’s years as chief commissioner were spent ‘on the edge of a volcano’.

Blamey was initially appointed chief commissioner by the conservative Country Party ministry of John Allan, after Sir Harry Chauvel mooted the idea with the chief secretary, Dr Stanley Argyle, during an early-morning stroll in the Botanic Gardens. Blamey’s appointment was well received by the more conservative and propertied elements in the community, who had been so troubled by the police strike and the seeming inability of policemen like Nicholson to ensure the security of their lives and property. He was only forty-one when he arrived at police headquarters to take charge, but he was a graduate of the military staff college at Quetta who had earned high praise from Monash for his war work, and had already in the post-war period held such positions as Director of Military Operations, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Colonel (General Staff) at the High Commissioner’s Office, London, and Australian representative on the Imperial General Staff. When he swapped his soldier’s sword for the policeman’s baton, Blamey was Second Chief of General Staff and right-hand man to Chauvel, then Inspector General of the Australian Military Forces.9

Chief Commissioner T. A. Blamey

So highly was Blamey regarded in some circles that his appointment as chief commissioner was of itself enough to end moves for an inquiry into alleged police corruption and maladministration. In the months between Nicholson’s hospitalisation and Blamey’s assumption of command numerous allegations of corruption were levelled at members of the force, particularly the Licensing Branch. Mr H. H. Smith, MLC for Melbourne, moved for a select committee ‘to inquire into and report upon the administration of the police department’ because there was ‘no place on earth’ where licensing supervision was ‘so lax’. He added that sly-grog selling and two-up games flourished because certain police had accepted bribes. His allegations received some publicity and support, particularly from people concerned about illegal trading by hotels, so his calls for a public inquiry gathered momentum and prompted the government to demand explanatory reports from senior members of the force. Being then without a permanent chief commissioner, the force lacked its traditional spokesman, but the mere announcement that Blamey was to get the post was enough to undo Smith’s work. Government members conceded to Smith that there was a ‘great deal to deplore in connexion with our police force’, but they urged him to drop his calls for a public inquiry because ‘the right man’ had been selected and the force under Blamey would ‘be squared up and cleaned up’. The pro-Blamey lobby persuaded Smith to declare that he would not embarrass Blamey and to withdraw his call for an inquiry. Instead, he would place his evidence of lax liquor control before the new chief commissioner. There is no suggestion that the government hastily appointed Blamey with the intention of silencing Smith; the allegations were not as important as all that, and Blamey’s name had been connected with the top police post since 1922. The timing of the announcement was fortuitous, even though it was also fortunate for the government that the new chief commissioner was a well-known and respected general, not an ageing and obscure country police superintendent. The aura of Blamey took effect even before he had taken office.

Yet it was foolish to put such trust in Blamey. The new chief commissioner—to whom drinking was an innocent and indispensable element of everyday social life—openly flouted licensing laws, and his presence after hours at fashionable hotels provided fellow illegal drinkers with a guarantee against police raids. It is not known how his predilection for liquor after hours influenced his handling of Smith’s complaints, but it did highlight a grave flaw in his police command. He viewed the police force with a soldier’s eye, and never really understood the unique responsibilities and obligations attaching to his position as the state’s most senior policeman. In matters such as training, supply, personnel management and organisational planning, where his army background could be readily applied to the police, Blamey was a fine leader. Beyond lay many other aspects of police life, and here he ran into trouble. He publicly told implausible lies out of misplaced loyalties, he openly broke licensing laws because he disagreed with them, he smashed the Police Association because it disagreed with him, he disliked and openly haggled with newspapermen, and he never understood the ‘indivisibility of the private and official lives of the man in public office’.10

It was never more evident than during the ‘badge 80’ affair, which broke only weeks after Blamey joined the force and cast a shadow of doubt over his veracity and the force he commanded. On the night of 21 October 1925, three members of the Licensing Branch raided a brothel in Bell Street, Fitzroy, where one of the amorous male visitors produced to them a police badge numbered ‘80’ and announced, ‘That is all right, boys. I am a plain-clothes constable. Here is my badge’. Badge ‘80’ was Blamey’s. It took several weeks, but reports of this encounter gradually filtered along the passages of police stations, into the corridors of parliament and onto the pages of newspapers, fed all the while by anonymous letters to the government, such as this one:

Do you know that the Commissioner of Police was found in a sly grog shop at Fitzroy last month naked and in bed with a naked woman and that the police who found him there are in terror as to what he will do to them. How is the cursed drink to be put down if the head of the police is an adulterer and a drunkard? Good men are needed at the top, pure and honest (Rom. xiii XI–XIV).

The ‘badge 80’ affair was a daunting test of character. With such a spectre as the chief commissioner wearing naught but his badge, the press had a field day, and during debates in parliament it was suggested that Blamey had been framed (though no one suggested by whom or for what purpose), and calls were made for a full public inquiry. Such an inquiry was never held but, at Blamey’s direction, some detectives did conduct an investigation of sorts, the findings of which were inconclusive on all but one point. It was determined, to the satisfaction of Blamey and the government that had appointed him, that Blamey was not the man who produced badge ‘80’ in Mabel Tracey’s house of ill-repute. That man was never identified or located. The three raiding constables attested that Blamey was not the man, Blamey produced an alibi proving evidence of his whereabouts elsewhere at the crucial time, and Tracey agreed that Blamey was not her amorous customer. Beyond this point the police inquiries went nowhere. It was claimed by Blamey that his police badge had been ‘surreptitiously removed’ from his key-ring the day before the Fitzroy raid, and found by him three days later in his letterbox at the Naval and Military Club. Superintendent Daniel Linehan, the senior officer next in line to Blamey, disputed this story and claimed that he saw the badge on Blamey’s desk only seven hours before the Bell Street raid. Linehan’s candour caused considerable embarrassment to Blamey and the government, and prompted the chief secretary, Argyle, to brand Linehan as ‘disloyal’. However, some weeks later, Linehan reached the pension age and retired from the force, whereupon his statement was conveniently forgotten.

Many years later, credence was given to Linehan’s version by John Hetherington who, in his biography of Blamey, claims that Blamey privately admitted to making up the ‘surreptitious removal’ story. Blamey allegedly confessed that he gave his key-ring and badge to a visiting friend from Sydney on the night of 21 October 1925, but would not tell the truth when the furore finally broke because he did not want to implicate his old army colleague, who ‘was married and the father of three children’. If one accepts Hetherington’s account, and it is more plausible than the inconclusive police report released publicly at the time, then one accepts that Blamey lied and embroiled the force in a public scandal, out of a quixotic sense of personal loyalty to an old army mate. Enduring personal loyalty can be an admirable trait, but a man of Blamey’s intelligence should perhaps have appreciated that the office of chief commissioner, by its very nature, at times demanded a degree of public accountability and personal integrity transcending even that ordinarily expected of a general.11

Yet there were great strengths in Blamey. Like Steward and Gellibrand, he could motivate other men. He was frightened of neither change nor challenge, and he quickly applied his many ideas and talents towards improving the force. He gave unqualified support and encouragement to Downie and the Wireless Patrol team, which developed into a key branch of the force. Some years later he and Downie combined to create an information section, for the systematic collection of criminal records and modus operandi analysis. Without reservation Blamey supported the place of women in police work, and he was responsible for increasing their number and expanding their role. He sent two officers to Europe and North America to study the latest developments in criminal investigation and traffic policing; formed a bicycle patrol section for special anti-crime duties; reorganised the Criminal Investigation and Plain Clothes branches; and established a traffic control group, of sixty constables, equipped with thirty motorcycle–sidecar outfits. The formation of a statistics section, the greater utilisation of fingerprints and criminal photographs and a police mapping programme were all matters to which Blamey devoted his seemingly indefatigable energy. He pursued all these projects along with the routine running of the force, and during his first five years in office took a total of only six days’ leave.

In his approach to police administration Blamey had much in common with Steward, and in one particular area their combined efforts stand as a vital contribution to the force they helped to shape. Both men had an unwavering commitment to the need for police education. Steward began police training; it waned under Gellibrand and Nicholson; Blamey revived it, expanded it and set it on a course from which it has never deviated. Blamey, a former schoolteacher and a product of military discipline, extended the period of basic police training from thirty-five days to three months, and expanded the curriculum to include ‘lectures on sex hygiene, the way to live, hints on general behaviour, attitude towards the public, etc.’, as well as ‘instruction in general education including arithmetic, English, geography, civics, grammar, etc.’ He acknowledged that most police recruits were ‘young working men’ who were ‘not mentally fitted’ for an exclusive diet of law lectures, so he determined that one-third of all recruit training classes would be devoted to ‘general educational subjects’, and ‘a highly qualified teacher’ from the Education Department was appointed for the purpose. A qualified teacher from outside the force was unprecedented, and his presence exposed police recruits to the wider world of human knowledge existing outside the pages of their law books, and was vital in helping them understand the institutions and the people they would be expected to deal with.

In addition to this recast basic training, new regulations effective from 1 August 1926 required recruits graduating from the depot to enter a twelve-month probationary period, at the end of which they sat a retention examination; unless candidates obtained a 60 per cent pass they were not entitled to any increase in pay. The scheme was designed to encourage further study by working police, in their own time, and to facilitate it Blamey scheduled a series of free day and evening instruction classes, covering all the subjects tested at both the retention examination and the promotion examinations for higher ranks. Blamey later claimed that the result was an educational standard ‘considerably higher than it ever was before’, and an obvious ‘improvement in efficiency’. His mild boast was quite justified; some measure of his success is found in the fact that his basic concept of broadened and in-service police education has survived him and is the corner-stone of modern police training.

Blamey also acquired a deserved reputation as an irritable autocrat who ‘enforced his will relentlessly’, but his empathy with the welfare needs of the force was greater than that of his predecessors, save perhaps Steward and Gellibrand. In many things touching upon the morale and well-being of the force Blamey had a clear notion of sharing and fairness to all. An element of ‘equal opportunity’ was introduced into the procedures for filling vacancies in the CIB and Plain Clothes Branch, and into the general system of awarding commendations. Previously the plum jobs and the commendations were something of a ‘closed shop’, and many qualified members missed out because they had the ‘wrong’ contacts or did not have the ‘right’ boss. Blamey changed this for the general good of all members, with beneficial results in morale and efficiency. He also introduced a new grade of first constable, which ranked between those of constable and senior constable, and afforded constables with less than ten years’ service the chance to gain promotion and increased pay. It was taking constables up to twenty-six years to gain the rank of senior constable, and Blamey’s new intermediate grade sustained ambition and morale by providing a chance to earn increased status, responsibility and pay. Blamey also saw the police hospital as a place for treatment and caring rather than as a hospice for suspected malingerers, and he upgraded its facilities and staffing to include ‘three trained nurses with a matron in charge’, who took over from the one male dispenser who previously had sole care of patients. Blamey was also very keen on the idea of a police holiday home by the sea where members and their families could rest and recuperate, and he went so far as to purchase the necessary land at Mornington. Here Blamey was ahead of his time, and it was not until many years after he left the force that his concept was given effect.12

Healthy bodies, healthy minds and healthy wallets might well have been Blamey’s recipe for the making of a contented force: he devoted considerable energy towards these things. He encouraged the use of new gymnasiums at the Police Depot and the Russell Street police station, so that men could ‘keep themselves fit’, and he established a police institute ‘to allow members of the force to buy good articles at low prices’. Limited credit was allowed to police shopping at the institute and all profits were ‘devoted to police welfare objects’. In conjunction with the Police Institute, Blamey started a police provident fund to assist ‘policemen who were financially embarrassed owing to illness or other ill-fortune’ and to ‘prevent young constables from getting into the hands of moneylenders’. Blamey firmly believed that police were underpaid, and he was known to lend those in financial trouble up to £300 from his own pocket, repayable at the rate of five shillings a week, interest free. The provident fund scheme—modelled on similar funds in London—was an extension of this belief, and was a positive attempt to alleviate the financial difficulties of many policemen. After 1925 the post-strike improvement in police working conditions had lost momentum, and the pay of junior constables fell behind the basic wage. Blamey sought in particular to ease the plight of these men, without simply adding his voice to the never-ending and seemingly ineffective chorus asking for increased wages. The provident fund was started in June 1927 with a donation of £100 from the Commonwealth Bank, and was quickly added to when, in July, the philanthropic J. Alston Wallace made a gift of £1000 in recognition ‘of the hourly danger to which members of the police force are exposed in their work of protecting the lives and property of the citizens of this state’.

Wallace’s gesture, like that of Blamey’s in establishing the fund, was well intentioned, but their combined actions prompted a public outcry and drew severe criticism from both the press and the government. Both men were forced to publicly defend their actions, and for Wallace this meant disclosing his identity and motives, after initially making the gift anonymously. Considerable public pressure was exerted on Blamey to return the money, lest a ‘dangerous precedent’ be set of police accepting ‘gifts of dubious propriety’, which could ‘hamper them in the execution of their duties’. Blamey, however, proved that he was a man to be reckoned with. Much to the annoyance and embarrassment of Ned Hogan’s newly elected Labor government—sections of which labelled the gift as ‘practically bribery’—Blamey kept the money and the provident fund, and closed the subject by reporting that he was ‘unable to return the money’ as he had been legally advised ‘that the contribution became the property of every member of the force directly it was accepted’.

Blamey’s establishment of a police institute and provident fund were not uncharacteristic ventures into socialist co-operativeness but were typical examples of his paternalistic leadership style. He exercised firm control over both ventures. There were no committees, no elected office-bearers and no audits, the balance of accounts was kept secret, and disbursements were dependent upon the personal good will of Blamey. Incidents like this rankled with the Labor Party, annoyed the press, and kept Blamey on the edge of a volcano. In doing so he won the wholehearted support of many policemen and a common sentiment among them was that ‘all Blamey was ever guilty of was sticking to his men’.13

Not all Blamey’s troubles ended as resolutely and smugly as the provident fund controversy, nor were the issues in conflict always as straightforward. The most controversial administrative action of his police command involved the virtual destruction of the original Police Association, and the substitution of a puppet organisation, over which he retained control. Blamey’s attitude was that of a military man: there was no room for a ‘trade union’ in a disciplined police force. Almost from the time he assumed office, he embarked on a course destined to end in a showdown between himself and the association. For Blamey it was an immutable question of principle, and he was unmoved by the association’s claims that it had existed since 1917 as a properly constituted body, had not taken part in the police strike, and had over the years made a worthwhile contribution to the well-being of the force.

Before Blamey’s appointment the association had worked with Sainsbury, Steward, Gellibrand and Nicholson, and, although disagreements often arose, there was never any serious conflict of wills. Blamey had been in office for less than eight weeks when, on 26 October 1925, he wrote to the Crown solicitor seeking an opinion about the legality of certain of the association’s activities, including determination of the legal status of its secretary, who was ‘not a member of the police force’. The Crown solicitor decided in favour of the association and no prosecutions were made, but it was an early sign of things to come nearly three years later.

During August 1928 Blamey held the inaugural Victoria Police Conference at the Police Depot, where twenty-nine elected delegates, who represented all grades and branches of the force, discussed 120 agenda items ‘of importance to the force’, including pensions, pay, travelling and uniform allowances, accommodation, long-service leave, hours of duty, ‘bedding for troop horses’ and—a clear indication of Blamey’s personal influence on the proceedings—a recommendation ‘for the removal of the press representatives’ from the press room at Russell Street. One delegate represented the Police Association, but his was a token presence for Blamey had effectively established his own system: his conference duplicated a number of the association’s activities and gave him the basic structure of a forum that he later used to supplant the association.

Blamey’s conference was modelled on the English Police Federation instituted in 1919, after the English police strikes, ‘as part of the official campaign to destroy an independent union movement, by providing some measure of the right to confer’. The federation was designed to ‘act as a means of containing police dissatisfaction’, by allowing ‘elected representatives of each rank’ to ‘consider and bring to the notice of police authorities … all matters affecting their welfare and efficiency other than questions of discipline and promotion affecting individuals’. Blamey adopted the same sort of forum, even down to incorporating the same words into its charter, and providing for a disproportionately high level of representation by the senior ranks, to minimise the influence of constables, ‘the most numerous and militant rank’. Even so, the conference was a valuable arena for debate, encompassing a greater range of delegates and discussion points than did the association. Blamey’s system provided a forum for the previously unheard opinions of the policewomen (who were allowed a delegate of their own) and policemen who were not members of the Police Association. Initially only an annual event, the conference system still had serious implications for the future of the Police Association, so it troubled the Labor government, which first read of Blamey’s scheme in The Age. In his inimitable fashion Blamey again affronted the Labor Party by setting out to undermine a union of workers without telling his political masters.14

Shortly after Blamey’s first conference, the conservative McPherson ministry was returned to office and, in a favourable political climate, his conferences were no longer a problem. With the support of McPherson, Blamey then introduced new promotion regulations that placed emphasis on examination results and ability, rather than seniority. It was a sound idea in principle and had been spoken of by Blamey’s predecessors, but he was the first commissioner bold enough to try to shift the emphasis in promotion from seniority to merit. Among often reactionary policemen, Blamey’s scheme was widely viewed with disdain; it threatened not only the status quo but also the prospects of policemen of mediocre ability. Merit is hard to define, and Blamey’s plans were not fool-proof, but he had two good reasons for wanting to change a tradition dear to the hearts of many policemen. First, the many hundreds of men who joined immediately after the police strike were permanently disadvantaged by their lack of seniority. Secondly, Blamey wanted ability promoted. It was his view that:

The police force of Victoria today is suffering very greatly in its efficiency … It can never become a really efficient force until the most able men are given opportunity to attain the highest positions without having to wait for the passing on of men of poorer abilities. Since the rewards in the higher ranks are considerable, the state should have the right to the full value of the services of the men of greater ability in the higher ranks. The seniority system of promotion is the worst factor in the police system of this state.

Blamey had succinctly stated a strong position: a police-promotion system should give value to the public who pay for it, not sinecures to ageing and indifferent policemen. Many policemen regarded Blamey’s view as heresy, and it has been debated perennially.

The Police Association was quick to oppose his plans, and the subject rapidly escalated into a heated political issue. As the debates warmed up, the parties became increasingly polarised. The association and its supporters argued that ‘the regulations had created discontent, uncertainty, unrest, and suspicion throughout the force, and … were undermining the spirit of comradeship and esprit de corps’, whereas ‘long and faithful service was entitled to rewards’. Blamey, his supporters and even the newspapers reasserted that there ‘should be no obstacle to prevent the progress of the brilliant man, and no mechanical advancement for the mediocrity whose only distinction is length of service … Those who insist that promotion should be governed exclusively, or even chiefly, by seniority put themselves in the position of defending entrenched incompetence against the pressing claims of ability’.

The new regulations were first given legal effect by the McPherson ministry on 1 July 1929 but, before they had any real impact, the association succeeded in making them an issue during the November 1929 state elections. The association firmly believed that a change of government was its ‘only hope’ of having the new promotion scheme modified or abandoned, and during the election campaign it lobbied every candidate for parliament and urged all its members to vote for ‘candidates who have signified their intention of assisting us … make sure that all your relatives and friends vote as you intend to on polling day’. This stand came close to being an open endorsement of the Labor Party, and Blamey was so incensed at the association’s defiant and partisan display that he again sought the advice of the Crown solicitor as to the legality of the association and its conduct.

Before Blamey had time to take any further action, and to the glee of the association, the Labor Party won the election and the Hogan ministry again took office. The tables were turned on Blamey. The association’s honorary solicitor, Mr W. Slater, MLA, was sworn as attorney-general in the new ministry; the Hogan government agreed to defer and review Blamey’s promotion plans; and applications were invited for the position of chief commissioner. Blamey was told he could reapply for the job if he so desired, but he was—and remains—the only chief commissioner to have his position advertised, against his wishes and while he was still serving under contract. Blamey was paying for his alienation of the Labor Party.

The uncertainty of tenure attaching to his position diverted Blamey’s attention away from the promotion regulations and the behaviour of the association—for a time. A different man might have resigned, but Blamey successfully devoted his considerable energies to securing reappointment and, after months of haggling, he emerged battered but victorious. The Labor government, having caused Blamey undoubted anguish of an unprecedented kind, reappointed him on a limited three-year contract and on a Depression salary drastically cut by one-third, from £1500 to £1000 a year.

A Plain Clothes Branch muster on the occasion of the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York in 1927: Chief Commissioner Blamey in uniform; Policewoman Mary Katherine Cox, standing extreme right, and J. R. Birch, standing extreme left, second row. Birch later founded the Special Branch

Having secured his base again, Blamey sought full and swift retribution on the association that had so openly defied him. His new contract began on 1 September 1930; on 4 September he declared the association an ‘illegally constituted body’ and directed all members of the police force ‘to dissociate themselves from it’. His action was supported in a petition organised by his personal staff and signed by over three hundred policemen who, although constituting less than 15 per cent of the force, comprised its most senior members, and was backed by a legal opinion from the Crown solicitor that the existence of the association ‘in its present form’ contravened the Police Regulation Act. During October 1930 Blamey used his third Victoria Police Conference to form a new ‘legal’ police association, modelled closely on the lines of the English Police Federation. This association, with teeth drawn, was firmly under his influence and gave him ‘complete control of all the members in their sporting and social undertakings’. Some vestiges of the original association remained while the secretary and executive fought for its survival, and for a time the two associations, differentiated simply as the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, existed in spite of each other. Blamey, however, was also quick to end the duplication. Victor G. Price, the civilian secretary of the old association, was charged and convicted with ‘inciting members of the force to commit breaches of discipline’ and sentenced to one month in gaol. On appeal to the Court of General Sessions his sentence was varied to a fine of £10 but he was refused leave to appeal to the High Court. The police office-bearers of the old association were reprimanded and transferred from Melbourne to distant rural centres—known colloquially as Siberia—at Mildura, Tallangatta, Portland, Wangaratta and Horsham. By the end of July 1931 Blamey had accomplished the total destruction of the original association and supplanted it with a tame-cat organisation of his own making. Eventually, the new association returned to its ‘old’ mould and became a genuine union of employees, but that was not for many years, long after the iron-fisted general had left the force.15

And what of the new promotion scheme that sparked this affray? It disintegrated like the old Police Association. Blamey tried to develop his idea, but not even the new association and a return to conservative government could save it from the passive resistance of a force committed to promotion based upon seniority. The ructions between Blamey and sections of his force were conflicts that at times seriously upset the well-being of the department. However, for many people outside the force they were little more than internal rumblings, although they were symptomatic of more serious and violent activity directed by Blamey against trade unionists, suspected communists and others who dared engage in public protest. During Blamey’s commissionership police were involved in a series of conflicts with demonstrators, including one notoriously bloody, large-scale clash, and numerous complaints were made about alleged violence and harassing tactics used by policemen against the unemployed and unionists. The Depression years were tough, lean years for many thousands of Victorians—including the police, who voluntarily underwent pay cuts—and many people gave vent to frustration in public protests and violence. It was an unsurprising phenomenon in an age when many doubted that the meek would inherit food, clothing and shelter, let alone the earth.

Blamey’s task was not easy, but he did not make it easier. In contrast to Chomley’s discreet policy in the 1890s depression, Blamey was quick to side with capital against labour and quick to crush public protest. He issued a direction that any unemployed people marching through Melbourne and causing a breach of the peace were to be ‘hit over the head’ with batons, and in a personal battle waged against suspected communists he formed the genesis of a special branch and regularly petitioned the government for special powers to ‘deal with communists’. In his loathing of working-class radicalism and communism Blamey was far from alone, but his repressive zeal was extreme. It prompted an officer of the Investigation Branch of the federal attorney-general’s department to complain that Blamey ‘more than any other’ was responsible ‘for giving the public something to talk about and exaggerate to hysteria and nonsense’.

Blamey’s campaign seemingly had as many supporters as detractors, being backed by a large body of public opinion and the conservatives in parliament. However, the particularly violent clash between police and strikers had even his most loyal backers groping for explanations to justify the shooting by policemen of four unarmed demonstrators. On 2 November 1928 a group of twenty-three armed police, under the command of Sub-Inspector Mossop, were detailed for duty at Prince’s Pier ‘to protect’ strike-breaking volunteers from possible assault and harassment by striking members of the Port Phillip Stevedores’ Association. The protection of strike-breakers was a routine police activity, but on this day a large group of strikers reportedly stormed the pier and the police line. In the mêlée that followed, the police fired their revolvers into the surging mob, wounding four unarmed stevedores. Three of them received only minor wounds but one, Allan Whittaker, was hospitalised with a serious gunshot wound to the face and died of his wound on 26 January 1929. Whittaker was an AIF veteran who had been shot and seriously wounded on 25 April 1915 during the Gallipoli landing, and his death at the hands of police on the Melbourne waterfront struck a note of cruel irony with those critical of the police actions. The storming strikers stoned the police with blue metal, seriously injuring two constables, one of whom ‘fell unconscious, and was kicked as he lay on the pier’.

Chief Commissioner T. A. Blamey addressing a parade at Russell Street police station

Blamey defended the shootings as being an act of last resort, and added that it ‘would have been a tragedy to have allowed the mob to gain possession of the pier’. The labour movement greeted Blamey’s statements with anger and derision. Many people harked back to the ‘Tom Price incident’ of 1890, and the waterfront was alive with the story that ‘Inspector Mossop had not adopted the command of Tom Price, “Fire low and lay them out”. He had told his men to fire high and be sure to kill’.

In 1873, when Standish’s men at Clunes drew their guns to protect Chinese strike-breakers from protesters, Standish was castigated by the government for intervening in ‘a dispute between employer and employed’. In 1928 there was no such censure for Blamey. No policemen or strikers were charged over the incident, and the conservative Argyle ministry resisted calls for a public inquiry into the shootings on the grounds that they were justified, and pointed out that Mossop’s men were heavily outnumbered by hundreds of angry, burly stevedores. Many people acknowledged that this last point had some relevance, but in the absence of a full public disclosure of the facts some questions remained unanswered. Why did the police not retreat instead of shooting? Why did the police have guns at the scene of a public demonstration? Why were there so few policemen on the pier, with no reinforcements in reserve, to contain such a situation without using firearms?

Blamey and the government remained mute in a stand that did little to help the image of the police or placate a seething waterfront population. Hetherington says that although Blamey was ‘authoritarian’, he knew that his force was ‘not at war with the citizens’; and yet Hetherington adds that in the ‘economic depression of the early 1930s the police had to maintain public order in Victoria when thousands of men who wanted work and could not get it were clamouring for the right to earn their daily bread. The problem of how to keep the peace without using violence now and then would have baffled Solomon’. There is truth in this defence of Blamey, but it could be said with equal validity that Blamey’s style of dealing with public protest was confrontationist, readily violent, and generally ruthless.16

In 1932 serious allegations of violence were again levelled at Blamey’s men after they used batons to stop a peaceful protest of 150 unemployed workers marching along Flinders Street. This time the Labor Hogan ministry appointed Mr A. A. Kelley, PM, as a one-man board of inquiry to investigate the incident. Kelley eventually exonerated the police and found—according to the newspapers (copies of the report itself seem not to exist)—that they were ‘justified in using force’. During the investigation Blamey defended the actions of his men and advised Kelley that ‘unchecked demonstrations’ were a ‘real danger’, and that to combat them he had formed a special section to ‘watch communist propaganda, and to attend to all matters, such as evictions, which tend to mass lawlessness’. Sergeant J. R. Birch was the head of this special section, and he told Kelley that the protest march was stopped because he had ‘heard from a reliable source’ that the marchers ‘proposed to demonstrate at Parliament House’. Not surprisingly, Kelley’s finding and the evidence of Blamey and Birch alarmed many working-class people, and the Central Unemployment Committee denounced the outcome as ‘white-washing’. The Hogan Government too was concerned at the train of events, and paid the legal expenses of the unemployed men involved, but before Hogan could take the matter any further his government was voted from office.17

Much to the relief of Blamey, May 1932 saw a return to office of a conservative ministry under Argyle, the friend who had appointed Blamey in 1925 and who now restored his salary to its original level and gave him security of tenure for life. Yet the volcano was not extinct. During 1933 allegations of corruption continued to be levelled at Blamey and some other members of the force, primarily in connection with the recovery and restoration of stolen motor cars, and Kelley was again appointed to investigate. The inquiry generated some bad publicity for the force but, after sitting publicly for twenty-seven days and examining 146 witnesses, Kelley exonerated all the police, including Blamey, and the matter ended.¹⁸

There is no evidence of impropriety on Kelley’s part, but he proved a good friend to Blamey when it counted most. In 1930 it was he who gaoled Price and finally broke the spirit of the old Police Association; in 1932 it was he who condoned the use of police violence to stop a peaceful protest march; and in 1933 it was he who dismissed thirty corruption allegations levelled against members of the force. The 1932 and 1933 Kelley inquiries have a relatively insignificant place in Victorian police history. All the police involved were exonerated and the matters were quickly forgotten. No published work on the force has even mentioned them.

During Blamey’s time the exoneration of policemen accused of wrong-doing was not unusual. It is also not unusual to find that the relevant reports and other important documents are missing. Large amounts of archival material from Blamey’s commissionership cannot be found; all the chief commissioner’s correspondence for the period 1921–34 is missing and registered by the force as ‘destroyed’. The chief secretary’s inward correspondence for the years 1933–35 is missing, as are the premier’s secret papers for the years 1929–37. Included among these papers are most of the documents relevant to Blamey’s anti-communist activities, the formation and work of his ‘special section’ and complaint files about alleged police corruption, violence and harassment during the Depression years. The destruction of such a large volume of police papers is unique to the Blamey era.

A key link in the chain of troubles leading to Blamey’s ultimate downfall was his bitter and constant battles with the press. He shared the opinion held by many regular army officers that ‘newspapers were irresponsible, mischievous and often ill-informed’, and he believed that they ‘ought to be regimented’. From the beginning of his police command Blamey took steps to thwart what many other people accepted as the legitimate activities of newspapermen. He stopped policemen giving information to journalists, he delayed and vetted crime reports that were released to the press, he had surveillance police follow reporters to check on their activities, and he closed the press room at police headquarters to all police roundsmen and prohibited their entry beyond the public inquiry counter. Blamey’s initial idea was the sound one of trying to bring some measure of control into the relationships between police and journalists, to stop policemen leaking information to favoured journalists—usually for payment—and to stop the lionisation of individual detectives by friendly journalists. Regulation of such practices has since been adopted as an important part of the relations between police and press, but Blamey went beyond reasonable control and embarked on an individual crusade against newspapermen, for their ‘insufferable disposition’ to intrude upon ‘strictly personal affairs’. Apart from the Star, which he sued for libel, Blamey did not single out any particular journalist or paper for his wrath, but labelled them collectively as the ‘Modern Moloch’. For their part, the newspapers responded with a range of journalistic retorts, including one prophetic line in an Argus editorial, satirically headed ‘Atten-Shon!’, that criticised Blamey’s position as that of a man in ‘the Indian summer of a fading autocracy’.

Blamey’s attitude has since been described as ‘resentment of press criticism carried to an extreme’, and although a number of his close friends warned him that his stand was unwise, he dismissed their misgivings with a gruff, ‘I’m not afraid of the press’. It was unfortunate for him that he was not. He had whipped the Police Association, the Labor Party, the communists, and anyone else who dared defy him, but in his battle with the newspapers was himself about to be whipped and pilloried by a united press, keen to see him squirm. Although he could not guess it in 1935—the year he was knighted—Blamey had less than twelve months to serve as chief commissioner and was soon to stand vilified and shamed at the hands of the press: living proof of Napoleon Bonaparte’s epigram that ‘Four hostile newspapers are more formidable than a thousand bayonets’.

Or, to revert to another metaphor, Blamey’s volcano was about to erupt.19

The Third Degree

Before it did however, in what was probably Blamey’s last noteworthy action as chief commissioner that was not shrouded in controversy, he was instrumental in creating a special police unit to guard the Shrine of Remembrance in Kings Domain on St Kilda Road, Melbourne.

Opened on 11 November 1934 by Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, before a crowd of 300 000 people, the imposing Shrine of Remembrance was built between July 1928 and November 1934, in remembrance of the 114 000 men and women of Victoria who served and those who died in the Great War of 1914–1918: 89 100 of them served overseas and 19 000 did not return.

Despite its great symbolic significance to the people of Victoria, from the time of its construction and opening, a number of acts of petty vandalism occurred in the precincts of the shrine, prompting the premier, Sir Stanley Argyle, to propose that military guards be employed to provide permanent guard duty at the shrine. Chief Commissioner Blamey was first approached by the premier in February 1933 to provide a police guard for the shrine ‘until the question of safeguarding it had been permanently settled’, and he initially detailed three constables to stand guard duty at the shrine from 17 February 1933.

After some deliberation between Argyle, Blamey and Defence Department officials, it was resolved that the Victoria Police would provide a permanent Shrine Guard Unit, staffed where possible by highly decorated ex-servicemen from World War I. Because there were insufficient men with the appropriate experience and military decorations, the Police Regulations were amended to enable the recruitment of older men specifically for shrine guard duty. More than two hundred and fifty men applied for the inaugural intake, from which Blamey personally selected fourteen highly decorated war veterans. These men were appointed to the force on 8 April 1935 and on completion of basic police training they commenced duty at the shrine on 21 August 1935. Among this first group of guardsmen the highest decorated officer was Lieutenant George Mawby Ingram, VC, MM, formerly a carpenter, whose wartime exploits included an action when his platoon ‘was held up by a strong point, he, without hesitation, dashed out and rushed the point at the head of his men, capturing nine machine guns and killing 42 enemy after stubborn resistance’. His status among the shrine guards was such that Ingram was the unofficial leader of the guardsmen, and he was the first of them to perform guard duty at 7 a.m. on 21 August 1935.

The Shrine Guard formed in Victoria is unique in the history of Australian policing, and quite possibly in the English-speaking world, and a prime reason for this is the fact that the guard was a permanent police unit, detailed to provide security and ceremonial duties at a war memorial, dressed in a military-style khaki uniform. Reminiscent of the AIF Light Horse infantry uniform, the first guardsmen were attired in a slouch hat, tan boots and khaki puttees, breeches and tunic, with accoutrements that included a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle. A Sam Browne belt and the distinctive emu plume followed much later.

For Blamey it was a merging of two important phases in his career, but his time as chief commissioner ended in relative disgrace and it was not until another world war that he salvaged his reputation and again made his mark as a soldier.

Amid the controversy that shrouded Blamey at this time, one ray of light was the formation of the Victoria Police Highland Pipe Band, which with Blamey’s support held its inaugural meeting at Russell Street Police Headquarters on 26 February 1936. Instigated by First Constable Jack McKerral, who presented the idea to Blamey, McKerral was the band’s first pipe major and was regarded as its ‘founding father’.

The stated objectives of the band were ‘to help charity [its main purpose]; to play in competitions; to foster Scottish sentiment’ and ‘to give charity concerts and to play at charity carnivals in city and country’. Comprised of eleven members, its initial task, with Blamey as inaugural president, was fundraising to purchase uniforms and instruments, a task that was greatly alleviated by the philanthropy of Mr J. Alston Wallace and Melbourne businessman Mr William Edward McPherson, the former donating £42 to purchase two uniforms and the latter donating £150 to also help with the cost of uniforms. In recognition of this ‘splendid help’ the band selected the red Clan Macpherson tartan for their uniforms.

Members were expected to own their own bagpipes, but drums were supplied. In 1937, equipped with uniforms and instruments, the band was relocated to the St Kilda Road Police Depot and the chief commissioner granted band members four hours’ time off for practice and parades. The first official public appearance of the band in full uniform was at the Coronation March at Olympic Park, Melbourne, on 16 May 1937.

From 1936 until 1988 pipe band members were largely drawn from the ranks of interested and dedicated operational police, who performed with the band on a part-time basis. In 1988 professional musicians were appointed to the force, among them being Inspector Nat Russell, who was recruited as pipe major from the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Under his tutelage the band was rated in the top five pipe bands in the world, defeating in international competition the then current world champions, the Strathclyde Police, as well as the notable Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and the Scots Guards.

Over time the band established itself as an emblematic and successful unit of the force, performing at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo and the Glasgow World Pipe Band Championships, together with numerous competition and charity performances throughout Victoria. Chief Commissioner Neil Comrie described ‘the stirring music of the internationally acclaimed Pipe Band’ as ‘an integral part of the Force strategy to establish positive contact with people of all ages and cultural backgrounds’. In 2014, when the other police bands were purged as a cost-saving measure, the pipe band alone was spared, giving it a continuous existence from 1936 to now.

The end of Blamey’s police career began in the darkened precincts of Royal Park on the night of 22 May 1936, when Superintendent John O’Connell Brophy, head of the CIB, was allegedly shot and wounded by bandits while he was seated in a chauffeur-driven motor car, in company with two lady friends. He was shot three times—in the right arm and the cheek, and above the heart—but notwithstanding the seriousness of his wounds, there was no immediate flurry of urgent searches and inquiries as would normally be expected to follow the shooting of the state’s most senior detective. Instead, a cabal of senior police, including Blamey and Brophy, set about deceiving the public by concocting and releasing to journalists an untrue announcement that ‘Superintendent Brophy was accidentally shot in the right forearm whilst handling his revolver’. Given the nature of Brophy’s wounds, this account was implausible and, under pressure from incredulous journalists, police officials later altered their public position and announced that Brophy had been shot by bandits. In this version of events it was claimed that Brophy went to Royal Park to meet someone with information about ‘hold-ups that had taken place in that locality recently’. No mention was made of Brophy’s two female companions. Brophy was a famous detective, immortalised—along with another—in the underworld ditty ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; if Brophy don’t get you then Piggott must’, and this degree of personal notoriety guaranteed more than average public interest in his shooting. The awkward police posturing on the subject inflamed rather than suppressed public curiosity and provided Melbourne newspapermen with their long-awaited opportunity to vilify Blamey. Melbourne’s four main daily newspapers—The Age, Argus, Herald and Sun—pursued the subject relentlessly and within days several state politicians added their voices to the chorus, all wanting to know what really happened to Brophy and why lies were told. The ruling Country Party ministry of Albert Dunstan was called upon to investigate the incident at cabinet level, and sections of the Labor Party wanted a royal commission to inquire into what they regarded as a public scandal. The parliamentary position of Dunstan’s government was not as secure as Allan’s had been at the time of the ‘badge 80’ crisis, and Dunstan could not afford to shield Blamey from a full public inquiry as Allan had in 1925. Dunstan was dependent upon Labor Party good will for continued political survival and knew that a royal commission would ease the pressure on his government and please many of Blamey’s long-time adversaries in the Labor Party. On 5 June 1936 Judge Hugh Macindoe was appointed as royal commissioner to investigate the alleged shooting of Brophy, and the subsequent statements issued by Blamey and his officers.21

Macindoe opened his inquiry on 10 June and sat for eleven days, taking evidence from forty-four witnesses, including Blamey and Brophy. Much of the inquiry’s time was devoted to routine matters and to refutation of suggestions that the ‘scandalous’ Brophy was shot by an enraged husband, and was guilty of improper conduct in taking female companions with him to meet an informer. The actual evidence, allegations and counter-allegations do not warrant repetition or analysis here. Of singular significance is the fact that the royal commission provided Blamey with a public forum to honestly explain his own position and restore faith in his administration. He did not. Macindoe has since admitted that he was impressed with Blamey and that he tried during the taking of evidence ‘to steer him to the true story’ but could not ‘save him from himself’. Macindoe’s partisanship is shown in his euphemistic report that Blamey ‘gave replies which were not in accordance with the truth, with the sole purpose of secreting from the press the fact that women were in the company of Superintendent Brophy’. As at the time of the ‘badge 80’ affair, Blamey again failed to satisfy the standards of public accountability and personal integrity that his position demanded, and this time he did not have unqualified government support. Macindoe submitted his report on 2 July 1936 and within a week the Dunstan ministry asked Blamey to resign. He did so on 9 July and was replaced immediately by Superintendent W. W. W. Mooney, who was appointed acting chief commissioner. Blamey’s police career ended abruptly, in the controversial and public fashion that was the hallmark of his commissionership, and he then entered what was for a time ‘the bitterest, and most sterile, period of his life’.22

Fact and fiction

The Brophy incident was not, of itself, anywhere near as important a social issue as some of the earlier crises Blamey had survived, such as the waterfront shootings and his anti-union activities, but it nevertheless became a vital test of personal credibility for him, and he failed. His supporters argued that his behaviour was not ‘unchristian’ and that he treated Brophy sympathetically because, in the words of Macindoe, he was ‘jealous of the reputation of the force’ and thought that it ‘might be endangered if the whole truth was disclosed’. Although the Brophy case was the second occasion on which serious doubts were publicly cast over Blamey’s veracity, his supporters’ pleas might have succeeded but for the case of the ‘third degree’. On 18 June 1936, while the Macindoe royal commission was still sitting, another exposé further shook public faith in the police when Sir Frederick Mann, chief justice of the Victorian Supreme Court, denounced improper police practices, known colloquially as the ‘third degree’. Published accounts of Blamey’s police career attribute his resignation exclusively to the Brophy shooting and Macindoe’s inquiry, but the ‘third degree’ was a second, much less publicised but far more socially significant matter that undoubtedly figured in Blamey’s forced resignation. Mann described the force’s criminal investigation work as the crude and unbridled doings of untrained investigators who depended too much on informers and physical coercion, and who too often failed to give due regard to the rights of suspects. Mann’s calls for police reform were supported by many others, including lawyer groups and the newspapers, and were studied by the government. The timing of Mann’s allegations placed added pressure on Blamey and almost certainly blocked any chance he had of continuing as chief commissioner in the wake of Macindoe’s report.

The original contingent of Victoria Police Shrine Guard formed 8 April 1935

Mann and the ‘third degree’ controversy are not mentioned in several works touching upon Blamey’s resignation, yet when he resigned he did not mention Brophy or Macindoe, but said that he was standing down ‘to give the government freedom of action’ to undertake ‘re-organisation of the police department’. Blamey’s insistence that he was simply clearing the way for reform was probably not genuine: Brophy, Macindoe and political pressure had to be key elements in his decision. However, important reforms to criminal investigation procedures did follow his resignation, and the Mann denunciation of third degree tactics clearly added weight to the pressure exerted upon Blamey to resign, and added stimulus to moves towards reform.

The third degree is epitomised by that bullying style of police interrogation often depicted in movies. In a dingy, smoke-filled room, lit only by a bare globe and minus windows or home comforts, several large, mean detectives badger and bludgeon a suspect for hours, until the innocent wretch breaks down and confesses. In Victoria things were not usually as bad as the celluloid image, but Mann was concerned about people being interrogated in a way that ‘might elicit false confessions of guilt’, and about detectives being allowed ‘to cross-examine suspects in private, in their own way and for an unlimited time’. In the absence of departmental guidelines to regulate the conduct of criminal investigations, individual policemen were left to their own devices: under pressure to solve crimes and apprehend criminals, but not specially trained for the work nor provided with forensic science assistance. In the words of an Argus editorial, it was ‘a temptation to inefficient police to procure convictions by the rough-and-ready method of extorting confessions rather than ascertain the truth by painstaking investigation’.23

That members of the force were using third degree tactics was not so much an indictment against individual policemen as an indicator that the force as a whole, and the community it served, had not kept pace with overseas thinking and developments in the fields of criminal law reform, criminal investigation techniques, detective training and forensic science. In Europe and North America the combined forces of scientific knowledge and humanist thought were forging a new police professionalism that saw academics, scientists, lawyers and policemen working together to improve the quality of police investigations, while safeguarding the rights of suspects. By modern standards, the technological aspects of this police reformation—such as comparative ballistics—were still at a primitive stage and Victoria was actually not so far behind, but the level of community awareness and debate about the humanist aspects was much higher overseas. As early as 1918 the judges of the Queen’s Bench in England formulated the Judges’ Rules for the guidance of police in an effort to eradicate practices like the third degree, and a decade later a police commission again reviewed the question of police investigations and individual liberties.

The Victoria Police did have a fingerprint branch founded by Lionel Potter in 1903, a photographic section started by Fred Hobley in 1930, and an information section established by Frederick Downie in 1934, but these were small, nascent units, heavily dependent upon the skills of a few self-motivated individuals, and were not typical of the force or generally available to it. In major cases Hobley did call upon the ‘big three’—Dr Mollison, the government pathologist, Pat Shea, the government surveyor, and Charles Taylor, the government analyst—but these specialities were not reflected in the everyday work of ordinary policemen. In Victoria, as in England, ‘the idea that science could aid [police in solving] the more ordinary crimes … was slow to develop’.24

The force’s crude criminal investigation efforts might have centred on the third degree indefinitely if Blamey’s resignation had not opened the way for reform, and Mann pinpointed one area where it was urgently needed. Scotland Yard was then renowned as the home of the world’s finest detectives and it was to it that the Dunstan Government turned for assistance. Previous governments had looked to military men—Steward, Gellibrand, Blamey—to reorganise the force, but in 1936 the need was different. It was no straightforward task of organisational efficiency but the need to transform a force of antipodean John Hops into something like a professional body of investigators. No doubt many young boys would have preferred Corporal King of the RCMP, but on 12 October 1936 Chief Inspector Alexander Mitchell Duncan, head of Scotland Yard’s famous Flying Squad, arrived in Melbourne with the daunting task of inspecting and improving the Victoria Police Force.

A native of Scotland, and forty-eight years of age, Duncan had behind him an illustrious police career spanning twenty-six years, during which he had received forty-five commissioner’s commendations for solving murders and other major crimes, and he had taught at the Scotland Yard school for detectives. His forte was criminal investigation, a fact that adds weight to the suggestion that Mann’s public statements about the third degree had influenced the government at the time of Blamey’s sacking. Duncan’s brief from the Victorian government included the specific request that he examine Mann’s criticisms and the question of the third degree. Duncan began by looking closely at the criminal investigation work of the force and, one month later, he submitted an interim report to the government. He was not prepared to wait until he had completed a full appraisal of the general force because he was ‘convinced that certain changes … should be put into effect as soon as possible’. Duncan was critical of all aspects of the force’s criminal investigation work. It was his view that detectives were not ‘playing the game’, but were ‘free and easy’ and took the view that ‘tomorrow will do’. Their methods were ‘crude’, and untrained men were ‘left more or less to their own resources’. Even more troubling were the numerous ‘serious allegations made against members of the police force’, and the instances of police being successfully sued for damages. Duncan suggested extensive changes to the CIB, and emphatically proposed detective training courses and scientific investigation.25

Chief Commissioner A. M. Duncan

Mooney made some sort of start on these reforms while Duncan went on to inquire into the administration and operations of the general force. Duncan completed this job and submitted his final report on 22 January 1937, with recommendations for changes ranging through the promotion system, buildings, equipment, supervision and the Traffic Branch. Like those ‘outsiders’ before him—Steward and Blamey—he stressed the need for police education.

Mooney was only acting chief commissioner and due to retire. As had been the case with Nicolson and Heathershaw, many years earlier, Mooney was not a serious contender for the permanent position of chief commissioner. Duncan himself, his plans for reorganising the force made and submitted, was offered the job and, after resigning from the London Metropolitan Police, he took up the position on 7 February 1937. The Labor Party, with a history of opposition to the appointment of ‘outsiders’, was again vocal in its criticism of Duncan’s appointment, mockingly wanting to know why Charlie Chan—a fictional policeman of some fame—had not been offered the job. The Laborites wanted a local man promoted, and suggested that there was ‘ample talent available in the Force’. They were wrong. The police system of promotion by seniority, the lack of any formal management training, and the shabby state of the force generally, all meant that the chief commissioner had to be an ‘outsider’.26

In the years preceding World War II, the former Flying Squad commander lived up to his popular image as an envoy from Scotland Yard. He possessed the drive and organisational ability of men like Steward and Gellibrand, but it was enhanced by twenty-six years with the London Metropolitan Police. He implemented many of his own recommended reforms, but was most noted in the pre-war period for his efforts to make the force’s criminal investigation methods professional. He introduced a comprehensive set of instructions to regulate ‘the questioning of prisoners and suspected persons, methods of identification and interrogation of women and children’. These new standing orders were not all original, since they embodied both the Judges’ Rules and other instructions complied with ‘throughout the British Isles’, but as a code of conduct they were unprecedented in Victoria. Not only did Duncan introduce rules designed to ensure that suspects were treated fairly, he also introduced procedural safeguards to give police a measure of protection against untrue allegations, and provided guidelines dealing with the special needs of children and female victims. It would be naive to suggest that Duncan’s instructions put an end to police malpractices, and indeed such allegations have proved an omnipresent feature of police life right up to the present. However, Duncan did provide a procedural framework within which police could work and which, if adhered to, did afford a greater measure of fairness and protection to victims, suspects and police.

In 1938 Duncan obtained special government approval to promote Hobley to the rank of brevet sub-inspector, and gave him the task of establishing a scientific section and a detective training school. The government then spent £750 to equip the force with scientific and photographic equipment that included an analytical lamp, an optiscope, a cine camera and several microscopes. It was basic stuff, but Hobley was a police pioneer in the true sense and Duncan boasted that his scientific section was then equal to any police laboratory in the world.

Detectives are now taught that ‘physical evidence is the best evidence’, and this dictum was first stressed to Victorian detectives on 17 October 1938, when Duncan opened the inaugural course at Australia’s first detective training school—known disrespectfully as Bonehead College. Located at the Police Depot in Melbourne, the school provided instruction in chemistry, physics, ballistics, photography and other subjects relevant to the ‘scientific detection of crime’. The school was modelled on courses overseas and was a significant advance on the rudimentary detective training that Steward had introduced for a short time in 1920. Hobley was the senior of three police lecturers at the new school, and guest lecturers included the government pathologist and analyst, the Crown prosecutor, and the chief officer of the fire brigade. Duncan also lectured at the school and was always present on the oral examination boards. As with the instructions governing the conduct of investigations, the Detective Training School (DTS) could not guarantee that all its students would work in accordance with its teachings, but it did expose detectives to the philosophy of scientific detection and provided them with a basic knowledge of its workings.

The reformation that had so altered the course of policing in other parts of the world had arrived in Victoria, and scientific analysis was permanently adopted as an integral part of the force’s operations. The police scientist has never supplanted the street policeman as the key figure in criminal investigation work, but science has afforded detectives the support of highly credible physical evidence, not easily discredited by allegations that it was produced by the third degree. Indeed, in a fit of journalistic euphoria prompted by Duncan’s work, The Argus labelled science as ‘the most efficient and effective member of the Victoria Police Force … the one unimpeachable witness’.27

In only three years Duncan had indelibly made his mark on the force and silenced those critics who originally claimed that his lack of local knowledge rendered him useless as chief commissioner. He was a principal agent of change and the efficacy of his work was recognised in the public press, which moved from a position of vilification of the police to one of support for the ‘scientific policeman’. A great deal of reorganisation still remained to be done when in 1939 Duncan was forced to lay aside his blueprint for police reform and don the helmet of chief air raid warden for Victoria. Australia entered World War II in September 1939 and all things—including Duncan’s plans—were rendered subservient to the war effort. During the next six years Duncan and his force went to war on the home front, while former Chief Commissioner Blamey emerged from bitter sterility to become commander-in-chief of the Australian Military Forces, and operational commander of the Allied Land Forces, South West Pacific Area.28

The Home Front

Your work is not spectacular, but let there be no misunderstanding of the fact that it is a national service appreciated by the community … We should regard it as a privilege to be permitted to give the best that is in us, knowing we are making a contribution of incalculable value to our national war effort.

This Christmas message from Duncan to his force in 1941 gave police work in wartime its due importance without resort to the euphoric orations of Sainsbury during World War I. It hinted at the problems Duncan encountered, convincing his men—most of whom were young, fit and disciplined—that police duty performed in the relative safety of the home front was an appreciated national duty as essential as combat in the front line. In World War I police had been allowed to enlist in the armed forces, and Sainsbury had roused his men with talk of ‘fighting to the death’ to prevent the ‘Germanising’ of Australia. Almost 10 per cent of his men did enlist, and the force became dangerously depleted because able-bodied young men were not recruited as policemen while the army wanted them. Certainly the police who were left were encouraged to feel that they were direct participants in the war, and were afforded opportunities to work with the secret service, watch for enemy agents and secure Australia from ‘the enemy within’, but the emphasis had been different in 1914 from that in 1939.

‘Materially and spiritually’ the Australian people—including the police—were ‘unprepared for war’ in 1939, and in the wake of the Depression there was evidence of ‘some bitterness, resentment, and a cynical lack of enthusiasm’. Police were openly discouraged from enlisting; there was no jingoism, no euphoria and no talk of death or glory. Instead, official policy decreed that police ‘should take no part in hostilities’, and even in the event of enemy invasion police were not to take up arms but were to ‘act as intermediaries between the enemy and the civil population’ and ‘alleviate the position of the latter’. Police were not permitted to leave the force to enlist for military service unless the Defence Department requested the services of specific men, and only then if they were ‘essential for military purposes’ and ‘of more value to the Empire as such’. As a result, during the six years of war, only fifty Victorian policemen were granted extended leave to join the armed forces. Another fifty-six did enlist, but they did so against the wishes of Duncan and were compelled to resign from the force, forfeiting their pension entitlements and having no guarantee of re-employment. Indeed, Duncan required each of them to give the statutory three months’ notice of resignation, in order to maximise their services and in the hope that during that time they might be dissuaded from leaving. A number of policemen who enlisted gave false occupation details, for fear that the armed services would reject them if they knew their true occupations. Many found police duty on the home front irksome when the nation was at war, and many policemen who enlisted made it clear that they wanted to be combatants, not ‘coppers’. Of the first eighty-one Victorian policemen to enlist in the armed forces, well over half refused to serve in the Provost Corps. Less than 5 per cent of the police force went overseas on military service.29

As the war progressed, police throughout Victoria assumed responsibility for a wide variety of wartime duties that became more numerous, more pressing and more earnest from December 1941—when Japan entered the war. Shortly before the outbreak of war Duncan was appointed chief air raid warden for Victoria, whereupon the technical and manpower resources of the force became key elements in the state’s air-raid precautions (ARP) organisation. The National Security Regulations vested police with duties that included alien registration and supervision; control of firearms, explosives, rubber and liquid fuel; impressment of motor vehicles, boats and guns; counter-subversion work and the guarding of vulnerable installations; enforcement of lighting regulations and ‘blackouts’; and the investigation and arrest of escaped internees, prisoners of war and military deserters. The police became society’s wartime odd-job men. They did everything and anything that other people could or would not do. With a network of 397 police stations, the force was well placed for this type of work and it was to these stations that people went if they wanted such things as authorisation for urgent petrol supplies, permission to obtain new rubber tyres, advice on ‘blackout’ methods, or the registration of motor vehicles fitted with charcoal gas-producers.³⁰

Many hundreds of policemen also voluntarily assumed responsibility for tasks that were often foreign to them in peacetime, and neither obligatory nor measurable. As women and men from across Victoria left home to ‘do their bit’, their public positions in local communities were sometimes filled by police, who were also encouraged to spend their annual leave working as paid labourers ‘handling the wool clip or assisting with the wheat harvest’. First Constable James Chester Draper, of Heyfield, was regarded by his peers as the model local policeman, and during wartime he became the hub of the community he served. Friend and confidant to all who would have him, his list of wartime community activities grew to include the role of Sunday School teacher, scoutmaster, fire brigade captain, school bus and ambulance driver, school committee secretary, shire delegate, and a host of other ad hoc positions. He drilled the local Volunteer Defence Corps unit—which paraded with broomsticks because there were no rifles—and on Sundays, by special request, he gave a ‘unit’ of fourteen local, ageing farmers a course in light-horse drill: a task that provided him, as a mounted trooper, with both satisfaction and mirth. It was a time not only when you went to the police station to get booked, bloodied or browbeaten—for that still happened to some—but when to ‘ask a policeman’ took on new meaning. Whether the worry was about God, tying reef knots, or light-horse drill, his door was usually open. This work later earned Draper a Chief Commissioner’s Certificate for ‘excellent policemanship’, and a street in Heyfield was named after him.31

The police force also legitimised the covert work of the Special Branch and—along with the war itself—gave it a degree of public acceptance and permanence that it had never before had. This branch and its work were the antithesis of the friendly local constable: a body of faceless bureaucrats, working behind closed doors on who knew what, a continuation of the section established by Blamey in 1931, and originally part of his crusade against communism and working-class radicalism. Labelled by its detractors as the ‘political squad’—which it was—the branch worked in the shadows of police and political life, gathering and collating ‘evidence against subversive elements in the community’. Now the original squad of three men was given branch status and, under the supervision of Inspector J. R. Birch, grew to number twenty-one police and twelve public servants, handling almost 20 000 ‘files’ a year. Much of the branch’s war was routine and involved the control of aliens, investigating applications for the transfer of land, and ‘the checking of the suitability of applicants for enrolment in the various armed forces and their auxiliary services’. However, Special Branch’s heavy involvement in supervising ‘foreign clubs’, watching ‘persons of enemy origin’ and investigating ‘persons with alleged anti-British sympathies’ was not necessarily routine work. In 1942 the branch became an adjunct to the Commonwealth Security Service, a move largely due to the influence of Duncan, who had worked in the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, and who in 1941, at the request of the prime minister, Robert Menzies, undertook a secret investigation of both the Military Intelligence Service and the Commonwealth Security Service, and assisted in their wartime reorganisation. From that time the Special Branch in Victoria never returned to its earlier position as a fringe element of the force. After the war it retained branch status and continued its ‘special’ work: a source of concern to many people—especially communists, political activists and civil libertarians—until it was finally disbanded in 1983.³²

To support the 2200 members of the regular police force in their war work, the government recalled all able police pensioners and also formed two separate auxiliary police forces. The first of them, the Police Auxiliary Force (PAF), was formed in July 1940 and numbered 2718 men over military age—preferably between forty-five and sixty years—who were attached to police stations throughout the state, ‘issued with a badge, baton, arm-band, book of instructions and a note book’, and trained in ‘police and ARP work’. These men were drawn from all sections of the community—labourers, tradesmen, bankers, merchants, agents, salesmen—and all were nominated by regular policemen, who became responsible for their on-duty activities. The spare-time work of the PAF not only freed regular police from the responsibility for many routine tasks, but also ‘had the effect of creating more friendly co-operation between the regular police and members of the public’. Initially, many regular policemen were sceptical about the worth of amateur auxiliaries, but soon the Police Association hailed the PAF as a ‘tower of strength—2500 real friends … willing and anxious to share our difficulties and labours, to be in the thick of whatever has to be done’. The PAF enabled many men, who would not otherwise have had the chance, to experience at first hand the working world of policemen. The auxiliaries, who previously ‘had very little knowledge of the police force and its doings’, appreciated their new insight into the force and often took the force into the community in a way that regular police had rarely done. The association was aware of it, and reminded its members that the auxiliaries ‘occupy all kinds of positions in life … they all have friends and those friends will be our friends’. Auxiliaries did spread the word, and it was not uncommon to hear them speak of their ‘surprise’ at the ‘wonderful service’ the taxpayers got from the police: ‘The amount of advice, help and protection … has to be seen to be believed’.

Few records of the PAF remain and little else is known of their actual work. Although the group was ‘specially formed to give assistance in the event of air raids and blackouts’ (and had no air raids to cope with), R. G. Menzies had a slightly different view of the possibilities. In a secret telegram he said that bodies of ‘loyal citizens’—like the PAF—could ‘assist in combatting fifth column and subversive activities in Australia’, and ‘would afford justification for prohibiting formation of voluntary bodies whose existence or activities might and almost certainly would become embarrassing’. There is no evidence that they were ever used as such. In Great Britain the auxiliary police (full and part time) numbered 35 000, and their exemplary work during German bombing raids earned them a noted place in British police history. The Victorian PAF worked in relative safety and obscurity and it remained obscure, but its formation probably produced a mutual respect and understanding between regular police and auxiliaries, with a useful flow-on among their families and friends.33

The other arm of the auxiliary police was the Women’s Police Auxiliary Force, which also fostered a spirit of co-operation and understanding between the regular police and sections of the community. The WPAF was formed shortly before Japan entered the war and, along with other groups like the Australian Women’s Legion, Country Women’s Association Land Army and Women’s Auxiliary Service Patriots, offered Victorian women a clear and active part to play in the national war effort. The WPAF was comprised of two hundred sworn volunteers and fifty full-time paid members, trained in police communications and ARP work, and available in the event of an air raid or other emergency. However, like their male colleagues in the PAF, most female auxiliaries were never fully put to the test, and little is known of their work. The fifty full-time members worked as car drivers, clerks, typists, receptionists, telephonists and lift and weighbridge attendants, so releasing ‘male members of the force for active police duty’. They were also different in that they were not disbanded at the end of the war, but continued working within the force until 1953, when many of them joined the force as regular women police and public servants. Throughout their service these women operated as a distinct body within the force and were issued with a uniform and badge. It was the first time that women employed by the force appeared in uniform, and it was done to the chagrin of the regular policewomen who, from their inception in 1917, had always worked in plain clothes. The regulars objected to uniforms for ‘auxiliaries who were doing clerical work’, and described the paid auxiliaries as a ‘glamour force of heroines’. So intent were they on glamour that ‘the wearing of the uniform had come to be more often honoured in the breach than the observance’. The rationale for putting auxiliary policewomen in uniform when regular policewomen worked in plain clothes is not known. The historian of the women police, A. J. O’Meara, suggests that it was done as a ‘recruiting aid’, and it is a feasible idea because women who formed or joined wartime auxiliary groups did show a penchant for wearing uniforms, and competition between groups to attract recruits might have necessitated a ‘police’ uniform. When it came to ‘social life’, however, many young women preferred to wear something more ‘feminine’ than a uniform; so, if the grumble was true about the auxiliaries not wearing uniform on duty at all times, it was due to a simple conflict of interests.

O’Meara has suggested that ‘the war seems to have retarded the development of the [regular] women’s force’, and he attributes this, in part, to the formation of the WPAF. But, in fact, it was during World War II that women in the force notched up several firsts, and the notion of retarded development is more a matter of unfulfilled expectation on O’Meara’s part than a lack of actual achievement on theirs. During the war the number of regular women police was increased from eight to twelve, and between 1945 and 1949 was further increased to eighteen. The wartime increase was the first since 1928, and was especially significant because those four recruits were the first women to undergo the regular four-month police training course. Also during the war, women were allowed for the first time to undertake promotion examinations for sub-officer rank, and Katherine Mackay was subsequently promoted to senior constable. She then not only headed the force of regular women police but also worked as counsellor to women in the WPAF.

Women police in the post-World War II years

Before the war, women were not permitted to drive police vehicles, but they moved quickly from being allowed to drive in 1942, to being issued with their own motor car shortly after the war. Similarly, in 1947, the regular women police were issued with a uniform and commenced working foot patrols and performing other preventive police work. The gains made by women police during and in the immediate wake of World War II were not temporary wartime measures but were lasting developments. In view of this, it is not accurate to describe the war as retarding their development. As O’Meara’s own analysis shows, the acceptance and development of women police from 1917 onwards was a slow process, but the 1939–45 war was far from making it slower. O’Meara clearly has as his basic premise the fact that during the war women made major inroads into the general workforce and entered ‘hitherto all-male preserves’, but women had broken into that all-male preserve, the police force, as early as 1917 (during World War I) and, for them, World War II was a time of modest consolidation. Indeed it could be said that the war, rather than retarding the development of women police, gave some of their sisters outside the force a chance to catch up.34

The war certainly had a big effect on two other important aspects of police activity. The first was in the field of communications technology, where wartime demands precipitated a lasting revolution. The other was in the field of police–community relations, where the police assumed new attitudes and social responsibilities that they have been developing—slowly but inexorably—ever since.

The war and the appointment of Duncan as chief ARP warden for Victoria produced a massive and costly transformation of the police communications system. Police were responsible for all the precautionary air raid warnings issued in Victoria and for public lighting control. Armed-service police units, essential services and lighthouses were all connected to the police control room, which was even used by the navy to recall their ships’ personnel on leave. At the outbreak of war only six police vehicles, from a fleet of more than eighty, were equipped with wireless and operated by the special Wireless Patrol. Apart from an increase in the number of calls and arrests, things had changed little since the 1920s. All transmissions were made using morse telegraphy and Wireless Patrol crews were heavily dependent upon the skills of wireless telegraphists who were their ‘ears and voice’ to the outside world. The force did not use wireless telephony, and there was no central police control room or emergency telephone number.

From 1939 to 1946 things changed spectacularly: £19 000 was spent on communications equipment for the force, and the world of wireless—for seventeen years the sole preserve of the élite Wireless Patrol—was opened to the police, and the public, generally. On 5 December 1939, modelled on a control room at Scotland Yard, the now famous police communications centre—D.24—was established, and in April 1940 the force switched from wireless telegraphy to wireless telephony, making trained wireless operators unnecessary. Once this switch was made, two-way and one-way radios were fitted to almost seventy police vehicles, putting detectives, traffic police and general duties men, as well as the Wireless Patrol, in constant radio contact with D.24. In addition, mobile units from all Australian and United States armed forces were linked to D.24, and those citizens of Melbourne with a domestic radio receiver were also able to ‘twiddle the dials’ and hear the police at work. The D.24 broadcasting call sign was VKC, and its popularity came to rival that of the commercial radio stations. For many people the voice transmissions from D.24 were an exciting link with crime and adventure, while to many lonely and elderly people they served as a source of personal comfort. D.24 took the police force to the firesides of thousands of Melburnians.35

It was a time of swift invention, and radio communication was not the only police technological advance of the war era. Other developments included the successful radio transmission of fingerprints between D.24 and Scotland Yard; the establishment of an interstate police wireless service with Sydney and Brisbane; the introduction of direct telephone lines to D.24, including a free emergency number; the purchase of two mobile wireless vans fitted with transmitter–receiver equipment, for use in rural areas during searches, floods and bushfires; the installation of direct telephone lines to metropolitan police stations; and the provision of radio receivers to those in the country. The war years also witnessed the opening of a new ten-storey police headquarters at Russell Street, part of which housed an enlarged D.24 complex. The headquarters and the Melbourne skyline were dominated by a 146-ft radio tower, on top of and equally as high as the actual building. The building and the mast still stand, symbols not only of the force itself but of the cataclysmic war years that permanently transformed the force’s communications system and its approach to policing.³⁶

Before the war, members of the force were not noted for their community activities, partly because their one rest day a fortnight gave them limited spare time, but mostly because the force was prepared to ‘stand aside and merely keep the peace whilst other bodies—business, private and governmental—promoted the social welfare of the community’. Some individual policemen did involve themselves in local community groups, but apart from the community work of the police bands and the police carnival, they were not actively encouraged to do so, and there was no co-ordinated police–community relations effort. In the decade before the war the force severed relations with the press, Special Branch monitored the activities of unemployed people, and policemen chased young ‘footballers’.

The years after 1939 saw a steady development in the official police position and a favourable shift in the state of police–community relations. One area where this was most evident was in the field of youth welfare work. In the 1930s police involvement in boys’ clubs was virtually non-existent, and it was much more common for children to feel the toe-cap of a size-ten police boot on their rump than to meet its wearer at gym class. The war changed that, and policemen were implored to remember that ‘every man was once a boy’. Members of the force became actively involved in the National Fitness Council and were encouraged to undertake youth leader courses of up to five months’ duration. The government supported police youth workers by recognising any injury received in the course of youth work as being on duty, and the Police Association joined in by publishing a series of articles on boys’ clubs and related community activities. The theme was reiterated that police should offer children ‘assistance and guidance’ because ‘prevention is better than cure’. They were encouraged to act as paternal counsellor and friend to children whose fathers were away at war, and to show ‘these lads that we are human and feel as they feel’. The Police Journal put it this way:

The home front, Russell Street headquarters

Give them a place for innocent sport

Give them a place for fun,

Better a playground plot than court

And a gaol when the harm is done.

It was a notion in striking contrast to the football rewards of earlier years.

The activities of hundreds of policemen like James Draper, the youth work of many of his colleagues, the influx of more than three thousand auxiliaries into the force, and the broadcasts of D.24 were all part of a broader move that brought the force closer to the community it served. The increased range of police wartime duties, the pressures of war, the increased contact between police and ordinary people and the policeman’s position as a pillar in many rural towns all combined to create at last a general police awareness that they had to participate ‘in the efforts of other bodies and authorities working for the general uplifting of the moral, physical and social well-being’ of all. It is difficult to quantify this metamorphosis in terms of pounds spent or souls saved, but at war’s end it was claimed by the police, with some justification, that the wartime transition in the character of the police service rendered ‘any isolation of this civilian in uniform from the rest of the citizens retrograde and out of date’.37

Tenez le Droit

The years following World War II were one of the most paradoxical times in the history of the Victoria Police. The force ended its involvement in the war effort on a seemingly positive note: only three policemen were killed on active military duty, and most returned home to adulatory greetings, two even with the rank of lieutenant colonel. The police communications system was at its most sophisticated and efficient level ever, and relations between police and community were at an all-time high. The force, with a changed character forged by the pressures of war, stood optimistically on the threshold of a new peacetime era. Between 1945 and 1959 it adopted a new motto, badge and uniform, and introduced important changes in the fields of public relations, recruiting, training and traffic control. The police were on the move—changing, adapting, experimenting and generally coming to grips with the social and technological advances of the mid-twentieth century. Or was it quite like that? Behind a façade of ‘development’ lay more cramped and cramping conditions. Limited wartime recruiting had left the force grossly undermanned, and after the war candidates for the force were scarcer than they had been at any time since 1850; the force in fact remained understrength well into the 1960s. Suitable young men found a police career ‘unattractive’, and it was ‘disturbing’ to police recruiters that 75 per cent of all men who did apply were unacceptable because they could not meet educational or physical requirements. Police pay and work conditions—though substantially improved from 1946—were still the poorest of any force in Australia and New Zealand, and lagged well behind those of the general workforce.

One example serves to illustrate this point. In 1946 the state public service and the Board of Works staff were granted a five-day working week. At the same time it was announced that the police would get one extra rest day each fortnight, giving them a six-day working week, ‘when the exigencies of the service permitted’. Indeed, much of what might be called ‘development’ in the post-war years was in reality a desperate bid to keep the force functioning: the focus on ‘police image’, the improvement in work conditions and the introduction of junior trainees and a police reserve were not the experiments of an enlightened administration so much as the actions of officials struggling to recruit, train and retain police. In buoyant employment times the police force was not an occupation to which educated young people aspired, and the waiting lists of bygone days were but a memory in the minds of ageing police who reminisced about the pre-war years. The pressures of modern policing, built up by ever-increasing numbers of migrants, motor cars, traffic accidents and crimes, together with shift work, weekend duty, poor pay and long hours, were part of the paradox of the force that was ‘on the move’ yet deteriorating under strain. The new badge and uniform were symbolic of a progressive front, behind which often lurked the troubled minds of policemen with deep concerns about their personal security and destiny. Dressed in blue, with new badge and motto, their updated public image belied much about the true nature of the force they served, and the service they offered.38

In 1939, before war was declared, the force was 2333 strong and had a police to population ratio of 1:816. It was then the most undermanned and lowest-paid police department in Australia, and lacked the leave, rest day and uniform entitlements of many interstate and overseas police forces. The Police Association was negotiating with Duncan and the conservative Dunstan Government for work conditions on a par with those of other forces, but progress was slow and by the outbreak of war the association had not been successful in its bid to have police pay rates raised to the pre-Depression level. An allowance of sixpence a day, which was voluntarily surrendered during the Depression, was never restored. No adjustment was made in police salaries from 1933 to 1941, although the cost of living during those years rose by 18 per cent. It was a situation that prompted many sympathetic people to reiterate an Argus theme that the force was awarded ‘first place in efficiency’ by ‘many competent judges’, but remained ‘the lowest paid in Australia and New Zealand’. As a ‘wartime gesture’ the Police Association followed the precedent set by police during World War I and agreed not to harry the government over such matters as long-service leave and hours of duty. For six years the association limited its action to moderate requests for cost of living adjustments. The combined result of police industrial passivity and wartime austerity was that Victorian police were worse off in 1945 than they had been in 1939. The police strength had dropped to 2131, and the police to population ratio had worsened to 1:946. They were working harder and longer on less real pay and without the benefits enjoyed by police in other states—more rest days, long-service leave, uniform allowances and access to an independent industrial court or similar body. The result was a spate of resignations not matched by recruits. The post-war economic climate provided returned servicemen and others with a different El Dorado from that of the nineteenth-century gold rushes, but the 1940s were like the 1850s in that the police administration could not match the lucrative incentives available to potential and serving policemen outside the police force.39

A Labor government led by John Cain came to office in November 1945 and was quick to appreciate and act upon the problems besetting the force, a quickness of action no doubt aided by the fact that the honorary solicitor of the Police Association, William Slater, MLA for Dundas, was also chief secretary, attorney-general and solicitor-general in the new ministry. The Police Association—as distinct from the police administration—justifiably saw the Labor government as an ally, and expressed disillusionment with the string of conservative ministries that, for more than a decade, had neglected the policeman’s lot. It was a neglect that aroused working-class sentiments in the police ranks, even prompting occasional public claims by their union leaders that policemen were ‘only workers’ who served as ‘the guardians of “big business”’ while ‘“big business” denied them so much as one crumb from their table of plenty’. In a tone that would have made former chief commissioners like Blamey wince, association leaders spoke ill of capitalism, proposed police affiliation with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and talked of ‘doing away with the old order’. It was heated and radical rhetoric of a sort not heard since the days of the police strike. And it worked.

Within a year of taking office the Labor government met many of the Police Association requests. Among other things, the Labor government established an independent Police Classification Board ‘to determine the wages and general conditions of service of members of the police force’; it established an independent Police Discipline Board ‘to provide for inquiries into police misconduct’, and included provision for appeal to a County Court judge if a member was dissatisfied with a decision of the chief commissioner or the board; all police were provided with long-service leave of six months after twenty years; section 81 of the Police Regulation Act was repealed to allow the Police Association ‘to affiliate with any federation of police associations or police unions of Australia’; and all police were granted a weekly rest day. These conditions most other Australian and New Zealand police forces already had, and the Police Association had been asking for them since the 1930s, but their introduction in Victoria was not taken for granted by the Police Association executive, which was generous in its praise of the Cain Government and described Slater as ‘a man’s man’, and urged all police to make themselves known, ‘give him your hand’ and ‘thank him for yourself, wife and family’.40

Governments in Victoria had so long denied police the privilege of a weekly rest day because of its cost to the taxpayer. When introduced in 1946 it required an increase of 380 men in the authorised strength of the force just to maintain police service to the community at its existing level, but this number of recruits could not be found, so many policemen were compelled to work extra duty to compensate for the loss of those who were on days off. Two years later this shortage was worsened when the Police Classification Board granted an association claim for a forty-hour, five-day working week, following New South Wales, Tasmania, the Federal Capital Territory Police and the state public service. It was a radical improvement for those many men still serving who had joined in the 1920s when they received one rest day a month and worked alongside ‘old hands’ who had joined before 1913, when policemen worked the full year without any rest days. The forty-hour week resulted in an increase of 299 men being permitted, and also in a revised classification of stations and police members throughout the state. Duncan hoped that it would stimulate police recruiting, but it did not. Despite the most massive recruiting campaign in the force’s history, the police to population ratio worsened, and at the end of 1948 the force was 390 men under strength. Duncan anticipated it would take three years to make up the leeway, but the loss of manpower caused by the introduction of the forty-hour week was still a problem in the 1960s.

The shortened working week placed further stress on the ability of the force to meet the public demand for its services, and prompted Duncan to observe that ‘the true conception of police duty—the prevention of crime and protection of life and property—is being lost sight of and, as a matter of expediency, police duty to the public has tended to become simply a matter of attendance at the spot after an offence has been committed’. Duncan was right. The forty-hour week, even after allowing for an increase in the size of the force, meant that fewer policemen were available for duty at any given time, forcing a change in the level and style of police service, from the traditional system of patrol and prevention to one that increasingly focused on responding to calls for assistance and investigation. Given that shorter working hours were generally available to other workers, their extension to policemen was to be expected. However, few people have realised the negative impact that this reform has had, not only on police availability but on the nature of police services generally. The universality with which this factor has been overlooked is highlighted by its omission from S. K. Mukherjee’s pioneering study Crime Trends in Twentieth-century Australia, which discusses the correlation between police staffing levels and the crime rate without reference to the fact that during the period spanned by his study, the time that policemen spent on duty in Victoria dropped by more than one-third, a reduction of 976 hours a year for each member of the force.41

Nevertheless, it was not working hours but the formation of the Police Classification Board that produced a furore. Since the 1920s the Police Association had pressed for the creation of an independent tribunal to determine police wages and work conditions, and cited forces in other states as evidence that access to an independent body was the rule, not the exception. Police in Victoria had always been forced to go ‘cap in hand’ to the chief commissioner and the government of the day for any alteration to their pay and conditions, and as a ‘loyal’ body were not affiliated with any union group or prone to industrial action. So police claims were not judged on their merits but were neglected while governments considered demands from larger, militant, unionised groups. Determination of police pay and conditions had to be removed from the partisan and capricious arena of state politics and entrusted to an independent tribunal. The Labor government agreed with the Police Association on that, and one of the first acts of the Cain administration was the extensive reform of the Police Regulation Act to set up a three-man Police Classification Board, made up of a County Court judge as chairman, a representative of the government and an elected representative of the police force. The board handed down its first determination on 13 November 1946 and has had continuous existence ever since—although now known as the Police Service Board. It gave the missing element of dignity to police wage bargaining, and ended the days of policemen lobbying in the corridors of parliament for an extra sixpence a day or the right to wear beards. The Classification Board responded quickly and favourably to claims for higher pay, special duties allowances, and compensatory allowances for weekend, night and public holiday duty, thereby bringing the benefits available to Victorian police closer to those offered interstate and overseas. The board was also quick to approve of a new police uniform and, in a common-sense gesture that set the board apart from the old system, with its stuffiness from a past era, authorised policemen to remove their heavy woollen tunics in summer. It took an independent board to do it, but finally—after 110 years—police were allowed to appear in public in shirt-sleeves. It symbolised the sense of relief with which many policemen in the street greeted the arrival of the Police Classification Board.⁴²

Until the creation of the board, police wages and conditions of work in Victoria almost always lagged behind those of other Australian police forces. No comparative research to determine why this was so has been undertaken, and the answer, perhaps entwined with the reasons why the only strike by policemen in Australia occurred in Victoria, lies well beyond the scope of this study. The Police Classification Board went part of the way towards giving Victorian policemen parity with those interstate, but it was not a panacea and the previous absence of such a tribunal could never be regarded as being the main reason why Victoria lagged behind. Policemen in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia had access to independent arbitration boards well before they did in Victoria, but policemen in New South Wales did not and they were the national pace-setters in attaining higher pay and better conditions. There is no simple explanation why Victorian policemen—Australian leaders in such things as the use of wireless, fingerprint analysis, forensic science and detective training—trailed the nation in matters of pay and conditions, but key elements in a complex answer appear to be the conservative nature of policemen and Victorian politics. For most of its existence the force was subject to the rule of conservative governments that exploited police conservatism and loyalty, and relied upon the police force’s ingrained reluctance to affiliate with or support trade unions. The police force was the last group of government employees to be allowed to vote in parliamentary elections, the last to be permitted to form a union, and the last to be granted access to an independent board for the determination of salaries and conditions. Such factors as these kept many policemen subjugated for a long time and made them dependent upon the personal interest and good will of politicians for improved conditions. Paradoxically, it was usual during the time of Labor governments for significant improvements to be made, and the creation of a Classification Board was one of these.

The marked improvement in police wages and work conditions was associated with a recruiting campaign and, for the first time, police recruiters used a whole repertoire of devices to attract candidates. Recruiting drives were conducted in all suburban and country areas; advertisements were placed in newspapers; police broadcast shows on commercial radio stations; a press liaison officer (later a personnel and public relations officer) was appointed; police processions and exhibitions were held; and all serving police were told to ‘approach the prospective recruit’. All these efforts met with such limited success that the police force widened its pool of prospective recruits by reducing the minimum joining age from twenty to nineteen, and raising the maximum age for returned servicemen from twenty-seven to thirty-three. Still only a trickle of recruits resulted, so the police training period was reduced by seven weeks to get constables more quickly on the streets. The government was not prepared to reduce the height limit for recruits because of ‘the nature of the duties they are called upon to perform’, even though many men of 5 ft 8 in who joined after the police strike were then working successfully as policemen. The lack of suitable local applicants for the force so worried Duncan and the government that they looked overseas and sought to recruit trained policemen from England and Palestine. The Victorian agent-general in London was hired to recruit English policemen, and Duncan went on a personal tour of English police forces to tout for likely candidates. The overseas campaign netted more than three hundred men, but doubts were expressed about their worth when almost one hundred resigned after arriving in Victoria—including fifty-eight of the first 129 to sign up. Many of those who resigned did so because they were disappointed with police wages and conditions in Victoria and could earn more money doing ‘seasonal work, such as wheat harvesting’. Indeed, the high rate of ‘desertions’ by English recruits—who had their full fare paid to Australia—so alarmed Victorian authorities that migrant ships with English police on board were met in Port Phillip Bay and the Englishmen were taken ashore as a group to be sworn in, lest they ‘jump ship’ to find work elsewhere.

The importation of such a large number of police from the United Kingdom had not been undertaken since the recruitment of the ‘London Fifty’ in 1852, and the two distant instances provided a parallel. In both cases the Englishmen were imported to bolster an ailing force, and both times many of the new arrivals were disillusioned with what they found in Victoria. In 1853 two of the English recruits were charged with insubordination for refusing to cut firewood and procure water for the cook. The men refused to do this work because they were experienced police and, although their refusal had some justification, they were chided and told that ‘soldiers were not degraded by doing fatigue duty’. In 1948 it was declared in parliament that recruits from overseas with up to ‘six years experience in the London force’ were put to work ‘cleaning floors’ and ‘peeling potatoes’. Many people wondered how a force that was so undermanned could afford this luxury, but at least one observer aired the sentiment of 1853 and remarked, ‘recruits in the army are called upon to do menial jobs’. The comparison between police recruits and those in the army was not altogether unfair. Both groups underwent training in drill, self-defence and the use of firearms, and in both cases the training process, including fatigue duty, was used to initiate young civilian men into a disciplined and hierarchical work environment, where uniforms, parades, salutes and barracks were part of everyday life. However, though the Englishmen were undoubtedly in need of some introduction to Victorian laws and police procedures, they were not callow rookies in need of an initiation into disciplined police life. They were experienced policemen who had trained and served in forces overseas. More efficient managers might perhaps have devised a means of integrating the Englishmen into the force without subjecting them to basic police training, in every respect identical to that given to rookies. A more enlightened approach might perhaps have got urgently needed policemen on to the streets quicker and minimised their disenchantment with things in Victoria.43

Notwithstanding such problems, the administration tried to promote a sense of esprit de corps internally and to improve the external image of the police. Much of this was a flow-on from wartime community work, some of it as internal staff relations and much of it as part of the recruiting campaign. A key element was the introduction of a motto and badge, and a change in the style of uniform. The Police Association had lobbied for several years for a change of uniform, particularly something more suited to the Australian climate. Several patterns were studied, including one of a khaki uniform, to be worn with a white helmet and tan boots, but it was not until 1946 and the creation of the Classification Board that a final decision was made to introduce a lapel-fronted tunic of blue cloth, to be worn with a collar, tie and cap. This outfit replaced the old high-collar tunic and polished black leather helmet, on issue since 1877, and was a popular choice with all but a few men, who were worried that the tie would give assailants something to throttle them with in a brawl, or who lamented that the summer uniform had a belt but no braces. There is, however, no record of any constable being strangled with his tie (often clip-ons, anyway), or losing his trousers in a fight.

Also, the force for the first time adopted an official badge. Designed at the request of Chief Commissioner Duncan by Robert Peacock, a heraldic artist who had been a Defence Department librarian, it incorporated the service number of the wearer and a motto in French: Tenez le Droit. The six constituent elements of the badge have symbolic significance. The crown symbolises royal authority and leadership, the laurel wreath signifies courage, the five-pointed star denotes the multi-directional nature of police duties, the centrepiece represents the Southern Cross, the circular title band with its blue background symbolises the police service and the motto expresses their aim. No longer were the Victoria Police ‘the only force in Australia and the Empire’ without a distinctive symbol, and the adoption of the badge from 1946 onwards—when it started to appear on clothing and, as a logo, on publications, correspondence and elsewhere—had a real effect on the outward image of the force, and helped promote a sense of identity. It is not known why Peacock selected a French motto but in 1986—the 150th anniversary year of policing in Victoria—Chief Commissioner Miller and his fellow commissioners decided after considerable deliberation that the motto should be anglicised to Uphold the Right.44

Duncan, who superintended most of the changes to the force in the post-war decade, was due to retire in September 1953 at sixty-five years of age, but his term as chief commissioner was extended so that he could head the force during the royal visit of Queen Elizabeth II, during 1954. The Police Association was eager that Duncan be succeeded as chief commissioner by a career policeman from Victoria, and well before the time of Duncan’s retirement the association wrote to the Cain Government and lobbied publicly for the appointment of a ‘serving member of the Victoria Police Force who has come up through the ranks’. The member that the association clearly had in mind was Inspecting Superintendent A. A. Webster, the man next in seniority to Duncan.

Webster had joined the force in 1915 and had risen through the ranks with an impressive record that included interchange duty in New South Wales and South Australia, service as a foundation lecturer at the DTS, several stints as acting chief commissioner in the absence of Duncan, and successful completion of the executive training course held at the British National Police College, Ryton-on-Dunsmore. The Police Association lobbying was to no avail, however, and Webster was superannuated on 9 October 1954, his sixtieth birthday, and Major General Selwyn Porter was appointed to succeed Duncan from 1 January 1955.

At the time of his appointment Porter was staff manager for the large Melbourne-based retailing firm of Myer, but he had a distinguished military record and this was his principal qualification for the top police post. The association was disappointed about the appointment of another ‘outsider’ to head the force, describing it as a ‘bombshell’ that ended the ‘hopes’ of career policemen. Porter was appointed by John Cain’s Labor ministry and it was reported that only ‘two ministers out of thirteen supported the appointment of a man from within the force’. It was a bitter blow to the association, which strongly censured the government and expressed concern about a general tendency towards the promotion of men on the basis of ‘merit’. Even so, the association pledged its loyalty to Porter, who was ‘deserving of co-operation’ as a man who had ‘served his country with distinction’, although the strong contrary feelings never entirely disappeared during Porter’s period in office. He was a generally popular leader—and one who devoted considerable attention to internal and public relations—but his personal emphasis on police training and the establishment of a police college prompted a meeting of one thousand police to pass a vote of no confidence in his ‘administration of the police force, and his system of promotion’. He was the first chief commissioner to be made the subject of such a motion, which was largely the work of reactionary elements within the force. These men were worried that ‘any member wanting to become an officer would have to attend the college for seven months and live-in away from his wife and family’, and were also concerned that higher education requirements would favour younger men. Porter easily survived the trials of the no-confidence vote and, in a volte-face, many of the men who were party to the vote later supported a Police Association communication to the government asking that Porter be given a pay rise because: ‘As a result of the many training schemes and other programmes initiated by the Chief Commissioner since the 1st July 1955 … the efficiency of the force as a whole, individual standards of education and the capacity to perform exacting duties have advanced to a marked degree’.45

Chief Commissioner S. H. Porter

Porter worked as understudy to Duncan during the last months of 1954 and assumed sole charge in January 1955. Duncan left the force in much better shape than he had found it, particularly in the areas of criminal investigation and detective training, but it was still a force with big problems. On the eve of Porter’s appointment the force had a worse police to population ratio than it had in 1939 and, although the authorised strength of 3100 was the highest ever, the combined effect of the forty-hour week and an inability to recruit men was that the actual strength was only 3021 and the total hours police were available for duty in 1955 were less than in 1939. Porter estimated that the force was two thousand men below the level needed to attain optimum efficiency and was also of the opinion that his men had a ‘pushbike age’ approach to policing, and failed to match the ‘accelerated tempo of living’, increasing mobility and ‘general advance’ of the Victorian people. He undertook his police command with zeal and was quick to appraise the force, determine its shortcomings and, in systematic fashion, set out about instituting positive changes.

Porter’s opinion of the force and his quickness to change it were not surprising. It had happened before. In common with those other ‘outsiders’—Steward, Gellibrand, Blamey and Duncan—Porter was a strong leader, and a thinker whose ideas on the force were not blinkered by previous service in it but were enhanced by overseas travel and a knowledge of people gained by working and living outside the police environment. When first appointed, each of them firmly took command. They were dissatisfied with the force as they found it and quickly put many of their own ideas into effect. There was an element of the ‘new broom’ in much of this and even mediocre leaders—Chomley, O’Callaghan, Sainsbury and Nicholson—displayed that trait, but Porter and the others were chosen especially for their management skills, and with considerable fanfare were appointed on the understanding that they would significantly improve the force. However, none of them completed the job and it is primarily for this reason that the pattern of police organisational development was a recurring sequence of a change in command leading to a spate of reforms followed by a period of relative stagnation and decline. Each of them in turn left for his successor an organisation that was in need of rejuvenation and new ideas, and these needs were seemingly incapable of being filled by the general run of policemen themselves, who suffered from a collective lack of desire and ability to work in that direction. It was a perennial problem and one that eventually engulfed Porter. He started with a burst of ideas and energy but his drive waned and he later died while still in office.

During his commissionership, Porter paid considerable attention to recruiting, training, public relations and the road toll, and in addition was openly critical of the way political considerations—rather than legitimate public need—had traditionally determined the location and level of police services. Porter was the first chief commissioner to adopt a business approach to public relations, recruiting and personnel management, and he linked these previously separate areas of police activity and co-ordinated efforts to improve police performance in each area and promote a better police ‘image’. He cultivated good relations with all sections of the news media and fostered police appearances on radio and television. Lasting innovations he made in this field include the appointment of a senior member as personnel and public relations officer, publication of an official monthly police magazine, Police Life, and the introduction of a Chief Commissioner’s Certificate as an award for sustained good service, filling the gap between the formal commendation of members and the issue of a medal or bravery award.46

Porter dropped the minimum height requirement for police recruits by 1 inch to 5 ft 8 in, and further extended their maximum age, from thirty-three to thirty-five years for ex-servicemen, and from twenty-seven to thirty years for other men. Like the earlier concessions of Duncan, they were insufficient to fill the police ranks, so Porter obtained government approval to form both a corps of junior police trainees (cadets) and a police reserve. The force had not recruited cadets since the manpower crisis of the 1850s, when Sturt had recruited ‘educated young men from the upper classes’ as the nucleus of an officer class. Porter’s scheme was aimed at preparing youths aged sixteen and above for entry into the force as constables when old enough. He hoped to attract those who ‘at the time of leaving school, have ambitions to become members of the police force but cannot do so until they attain the age of nineteen years’. Porter argued that many potential policemen were lost as youths by being absorbed into commerce and industry. In the years between the cadet schemes of Sturt and Porter, both Blamey and Duncan had tried to introduce cadets, only to fail because of government indifference in Blamey’s case and Police Association opposition in Duncan’s. The first squad of thirty cadets recruited by Porter began training on 2 May 1955 and the scheme proved a successful and prolific source of police recruits. From 1955 to 1982—when the scheme ended—almost three thousand young men joined the force as cadets.47

As an alternative means of easing the personnel shortage, Porter also formed a police reserve comprised of ‘able and experienced’ retired constables and first constables, to be used for ‘sedentary tasks’, thereby ‘freeing fit men for active police duty’. For almost a decade, first Duncan, then Porter, supported by many parliamentarians and members of the public, had pressed for the formation of a permanent police auxiliary force. The work of the PAF during World War II, especially its positive influence on police–community relations, had left an indelible mark in the minds of many people, who envisaged a permanent reserve of trained civilians to assist in such major emergencies as floods, bushfires and riots, by relieving regular police of administrative and communications work for active duty. Duncan had believed, as had Menzies during World War II, that if ‘loyal-minded citizens’ were denied the ‘active expressions of their citizenship’ they might ‘be attracted to other unauthorized organisations whose professed aims have a specious appeal’. He regarded an auxiliary force as a realistic alternative for men who otherwise might join vigilante groups or private armies. Yet the prospect of civil auxiliaries alarmed the Police Association, which declared the proposed reserve a ‘fascist strike-breaking body’, inimical in every way to the interests of the regular police. From the end of World War II until 1956 the debate about auxiliary police raged, until the government, Porter and the association finally agreed on a modified scheme, using retired Victorian police in a restricted capacity, simply to free younger policemen from clerical and administrative work. Porter’s ‘reserve force’ was not a reserve at all, and was a far cry from the civilian auxiliary force proposed by Duncan, but it did allow some flexibility of manpower deployment and, during its first year of operation, almost one hundred retired men were recruited. The ‘retired police reserve’ has continued as an adjunct to the regular force ever since, and more than five hundred men and women have joined. It provided some relief for the manpower shortage confronting Porter in the 1950s, but in a later time of high unemployment probably denied young people potential careers in the force and public service.⁴⁸

This implementation of a cadet corps and police reserve was Porter building on foundations laid by Duncan in the 1940s, and Porter’s efforts to combat the rising number of deaths in motor accidents also followed Duncan, who had been the first chief commissioner seriously to consider the mounting road toll as a joint community–police problem. In an effort to counter it, he had increased the number and range of traffic patrols and formed a special squad to give lectures on road safety to school children. For Duncan the ever-increasing road toll had been ‘one of the major problems’ of the time. Porter agreed, and quickly consolidated Duncan’s work of making police more professional in traffic work and alerting the community to the carnage on Victorian roads. During Porter’s first year in office 540 people were killed and 13 182 injured in 22 672 vehicular accidents, while reported assaults and other criminal offences ‘against the person’ numbered 3442, including twenty-four murders. Deaths and injuries due to car accidents of such epidemic proportions troubled Porter, who commented that ‘loss of life occasioned by behaviour while using a motor car is not looked at in the same light as loss of life occasioned by other behaviour’. Porter steadily increased the police resources devoted to traffic control work, formed a road courtesy squad, with the objective of promoting good will between motorists, and introduced driver-education lectures, known as the ‘motorists hour’. Within the force he established a Vehicle Safety Testing School, Motor Driving School and Accident Appreciation Squad, to improve police traffic expertise and capabilities, and he appointed as police surgeon Dr John Birrell, who pioneered Australian efforts to curb death and injury caused by drunk drivers.49

Porter is generally regarded as being a police leader who was ‘adept at innovation’, and his list of achievements in the fields of public relations, recruiting and traffic policing supports this notion, but it should be recognised that Duncan was the progenitor of many ideas later successfully implemented by Porter. It was so in the field of education, where Porter exerted his most telling and lasting influence on the force by transforming Duncan’s vision of a police college into a reality. Before he retired, Duncan secured premises at Mornington for use as a police college, obtained funding for selected police to attend specialist training courses overseas, arranged for police instructors to attend teacher training courses conducted by the Education Department, enrolled suitably qualified police from the communications section in courses at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and actively supported individual police who undertook relevant tertiary courses. (Most notable among the last was the police scientist, Norman McCallum; as a serving policeman, he attended the University of Melbourne and obtained a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in science.) Duncan’s efforts to foster higher education levels within the force were a marked advance on anything undertaken by his predecessors, although it was not to be in his term that the police college finally opened.

Chief Commissioner S. H. Porter, who was the last chief commissioner to ride a police horse on duty

The Mornington property acquired by the government for a college in 1950 proved unsuitable for its intended purpose and the introduction of officer training courses was delayed until 1958, when the first officers course was conducted at a newly acquired Police College, the South Yarra mansion known as Airlie. The course was a residential one of seven months, and its aim was ‘to give broadening training to potential officers with the object of equipping them for their administrative and executive roles as police officers’. Airlie was modelled on the English and Scottish police colleges, and was the last link in Porter’s three-tiered training system that included ‘primary training’ for recruits and cadets, ‘secondary training designed to fit sub-officers for all postings up to and including station officer’, and ‘tertiary training’ for potential officers. The structured courses introduced by Porter have been retained ever since as central elements in the training system. Porter’s changes put the force in the vanguard of Australasian police education development, and the Police College played host to visiting students from other Australian forces and nearby international neighbours, including New Zealand, India, Kenya, Fiji and Malaysia. Indeed, Porter’s contribution in this area is the hallmark of his commissionership and marks a turning point. Porter himself aptly observed that ‘the task of the modern policeman’ had ‘progressed beyond recognition as that of P.C. 49’. When Porter was appointed chief commissioner—from outside the force—the Labor government gave him as one of his specific tasks responsibility for training his successors from among serving policemen. Some evidence that he did this is found in the fact that the six chief commissioners appointed after him—Arnold, Wilby, Jackson, Miller, Glare and Comrie—together with almost all the deputy commissioners, assistant commissioners and commanders, were career policemen, and all but the earliest few were graduates of the Police College at Airlie. The mould was broken with the appointment of Christine Nixon as chief commissioner in 2001 and since then only one of her three successors has been a graduate of Airlie.50

Although the 1950s was primarily a time of introspection for the police, when a preoccupation with image, recruiting, training and work conditions produced important internal changes, the decade ended much as it had started and Porter reported in 1959 that ‘the staff shortage was desperate’. The authorised strength of the force was then 3772 but the ratio of one policeman to every 733 Victorians was worsening and in some of the rapidly expanding eastern suburbs the ratio was 1:1662. But the seemingly perennial manpower crisis was not simply a question of numbers. It was a dilemma compounded by the nature and rate of social change in an increasingly motorised and mobile society. Those two ‘old standards’—the crime rate and the road toll—were steadily escalating but an unprepared police force also had to contend with a range of other problems, reflected in the changing police idiom. Expressions such as ‘New Australians’, ‘espresso bars’, ‘bodgies’, ‘the liberty of the subject’, ‘joy-rides’ and ‘drug bureau’ crept into police parlance. The force still had more pushbikes than it did motor cars. Assaults on police were a rising cause for concern. The incidence of sickness and overtiredness among harried detectives was commented upon. And Porter warned of signs that youths were ‘behaving more aggressively and using more violence than in recent decades … some of the group violence of earlier days is threatening’. It was an age when Porter prophesied of worse to come and lamented that in too many instances, ‘both parents in a family go to work during the day and spend their evenings … watching a television programme in semi-darkness, while their children roam the streets’.⁵¹ It was the dawning of the 1960s.