PIGGOTT WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN ESTABLISHING THE Victoria Police Association in 1917 and was voted vice president in its first election. He had firsthand experience of the hardships of the country constable as well as the constraints imposed on Victorian police by years of government neglect of their pay and conditions. ‘It will be my earnest ambition …’ he said, ‘to further the interests of members …’
However, it was an era in which change came only very slowly to the Victoria Police; it took until 1917, for example, for the first two policewomen to be appointed. They were ineligible for membership of the police association; their handicap, as one of them noted, being: ‘that we are not sworn in, as it needs an amendment to the [Police] Act by inserting the word “female”’. That amendment was still seven years away.
The world was in the third year of an enduring war.
At Russell Street, Piggott was highly commended for arresting Charles Goodwin—the ‘Prince of Swindlers’. Well known in Melbourne and Adelaide, Goodwin’s specialty was distributing valueless cheques for which he received large sums of money. He got two years’ jail.
The year was also significant for putting away the leader of the Gilmour Gang, responsible for some twenty safe-breaking incidents. Richard Gilmour was sentenced to twelve years’ jail and declared ‘an habitual criminal’. Piggott was highly commended for effecting the arrest with the aid of Detective Graham Ashton. The case involved fingerprint evidence. The left-hand thumbprint of Lester Simpson, Gilmour’s accomplice, was detected on a cashbox found inside a safe blown by him and Gilmour. Simpson confessed, inculpating Gilmour, who admitted the offences and pled guilty. In his scrapbook, Piggott pasted the photographic enlargements of Simpson’s thumbprint and the cashbox print side by side, noting: ‘Simpson being a first offender was allowed out after a short term of imprisonment.’ Of Gilmour, Piggott wrote, he was ‘a desperate man and should never be released. He is criminally mad’.
No crime is without its traces, Piggott later observed in an interview for the Herald. ‘Often, however, the lead is so slender as to be almost baffling. Those extra thin leads can entail a vast amount of work before they will unlock the secret. To follow them by painfully slow steps calls for tons of persistence day after day.’ Reflecting on the 1917 case of the Yarra baby killer, Piggott confided, ‘No detective who has regard for his peace of mind would desire a sole clue more slender …’ For behind it lay a dark and tragic tale.