FREDERICK JOHN CHARLES PIGGOTT WAS BORN AT Cowes on Phillip Island, Victoria, on 1 April 1874. His father, also Frederick, was a butcher from Beaconsfield, England. His mother was Margaret Dickins, daughter of John Dickins, a farmer from Bulla, Victoria. His parents had married in May the previous year.
Completing state school, the young Piggott pursued a technical training and won a scholarship to attend the Working Men’s College in Melbourne. He graduated in 1893, becoming a joiner and cabinetmaker. While working at his trade, Piggott also served five years parttime with the Melbourne Garrison Artillery. This force comprised army regulars recruited from the citizenry for homeland defence. Such service was favoured for entry to the police, a career Piggott wanted because he was ‘of an adventurous turn of mind’ and because ‘the trade [was] not giving him sufficient scope’. The depression of the mid-1890s was probably also a factor.
Recommended by Artillery Commander John Monash, Piggott joined the Victorian Mounted Police on 13 May 1898. At twenty-four years, he was 176 centimetres tall, had grey eyes, light brown hair, and was of pale complexion and ‘respectable’ appearance.
Piggott eagerly signed his attestation paper but accidentally wrote his name on the line reserved for the inducting witness, the man who held highest office in the Victoria Police and before whom he had just sworn his oath. Chief Commissioner Hussey Malone Chomley was forced to put his signature in the place of the newly sworn trooper and then with a pair of arrows show the true situation was, in fact, the reverse.
Piggott became officer number 4713 of the Police Force of Victoria and his pay was 6 shillings a day.† His first five months were spent at the Melbourne police depot, where he impressed as ‘a well conducted, intelligent man’. In the late spring he received his first appointment—to the town of Rutherglen in the state’s hot northeast.
In April 1899 Piggott took some of the handful of days’ annual leave allocated to a country constable and, obtaining the necessary permission from police command in Melbourne, visited the city to marry his sweetheart, Matilda Holland, twenty-eight. The couple’s first child, Freda, was born at Rutherglen in February 1900. In September that year Piggott received a new posting and, as the Rutherglen Sun and Chiltern Valley Advertiser reported, after only two years he had left a mark on the town:
It is our pleasing duty to chronicle the promotion of Mounted Constable F. J. Piggott, who … has just received word that he has been promoted to the charge of the Harrietville police station … During his residence in this town, Constable Piggott has proved himself a capable officer, and by the gentlemanly manner in which he performed his duties gained the esteem and respect of the residents, many of whom will deeply regret his departure. He has also taken an active part in public matters, and only recently was elected captain of the Rutherglen rifle club … We join with Constable Piggott’s many friends in wishing him success and prosperity …
While the newspaper flatters the constable with the word ‘promotion’, it was a promotion in responsibility rather than in rank: there was a minimum qualifying period of seven years before a constable would even be considered for promotion.
The young Trooper Piggott demonstrating the use to which his trooper horse could be put in an emergency.
Piggott served three years as constable in charge at Harrietville, where his second child, Hilda, arrived in 1902. After a short stint at Eldorado, he was moved to Glenrowan where, in 1904, his son, Frederick, was born. Later that year Piggott was again transferred—to Avenel, 130 kilometres north of Melbourne. Here Piggott and his family were to remain for the next eight years, leaving the district only when, in June 1912 at the age of thirty-eight, he undoubtedly felt his potential was being overlooked. Piggott was still the constable in charge, although he had passed his exam for the rank of sergeant in 1903—almost nine years previous.
The first two decades of the twentieth century were stringent times for Victoria’s police, with Chief Commissioner O’Callaghan (successor to Chomley) denouncing the formation of a police association and bowing to the political expedience of successive conservative governments who kept him in office and whose cost-minimisations in policing he was responsible for administering. Blocking promotions was one very effective way of keeping costs down.
Nevertheless, the stay at Avenel allowed the family a chance to settle and bring some stability to the education and upbringing of its three children.
Piggott was a keen amateur photographer and photographed whenever he got an opportunity. His scrapbooks double as photo albums, documenting both his personal and working life as a Victorian mounted constable in the earliest years of the twentieth century. There are views of Harrietville; the snow on Mount Feathertop; the homestead of bushranger Edward (Ned) Kelly at Greta, near Glenrowan; and later there are snapshots of Ellen Kelly, Ned’s (by then elderly) mother. There are photographs, too, of Piggott the trooper, mounted and in full uniform, and of Fred junior, aged about three, feeding a lump of apple to Piggott’s trooper horse, Jack.
In the winter of 1912 the Piggott family moved from Avenel to Melbourne, taking up residence at 4 Godfrey Avenue, St Kilda, a house they named ‘Leneva’—the reversed spelling of Avenel.
Piggott’s service record shows that on 19 June that year he commenced his new posting at the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) in Melbourne. If it was investigative detective work Piggott was seeking, he certainly got it. His first decade of experience with the CIB introduced him not only to a more extensive range of policing duties, but also to a more diverse range of criminals and intensities of crime.
Piggott’s first six months were marked by a number of night raids in the back lanes of Melbourne. Running a ‘Chinese lottery’ made one’s premises susceptible to such an event, as Ah Pong, greengrocer, of 66 Little Collins Street, discovered when charged with keeping a common gaming house; his sixteen guests were charged with being found in one.
By 1914 Piggott had hit his stride and was bringing charges against swindlers and shopbreakers. His service record shows him laying charge after charge of larceny, receiving, false pretences … There is even one charge of ‘larceny of a dressed fowl’ (when a fowl dressed for the oven was tossed out the back window of a butcher shop) and a charge of ‘receiving a dressed fowl’ (when it was picked up by a chap waiting in the back lane).
Country investigations continued. During 1915, aided by the local constabulary, Piggott investigated claims of sheep-stealing at Kaniva, in Victoria’s far west. This involved stake-outs of sheep runs and weeks of camping in the bush. Piggott’s photographs document the experience: ‘A salt lake,’ he annotated one, ‘teeming with insects like centipedes. Was unable to bathe in it.’
Another image shows Piggott crouching over an injured dog with a skinned animal carcass in the foreground, its hide hung over nearby scrub: ‘A kangaroo chase by Detective Piggott and Constable Lloyd. The dog was badly torn by the kangaroo shot and skinned by Piggott … The main artery in the neck of the dog was laid bare. [The wound] was pinned together with ordinary pins and in a few days the dog was okay. A real exciting chase.’
A kangaroo chase while investigating sheep-stealing at Kaniva in 1915. ‘The main artery in the neck of the dog was laid bare. [The wound] was pinned together with ordinary pins and in a few days the dog was okay. A real exciting chase.’
The Kaniva sheep-stealing case was tricky to prosecute because some graziers—during times of inadequate feed—had released sheep into an area of Crown land to fend for themselves. Flocks became mixed and not all sheep were adequately branded. When flocks were reclaimed, a significant shortfall in sheep implied—probably rightly—that one of the graziers was claiming more animals than was his due. While charges were laid, the case was dismissed, as the limited evidence available was deemed not sufficient for conviction.
For Piggott, it was an object lesson in the need to adopt a more determined forensic approach. Henceforth he would do so with vigour.
Admired by tourists from all parts of Australia, the stalactites and stalagmites of the Murrindal cave in Buchan, Gippsland, were being systematically broken off by a vandal during the winter of 1916. Piggott was sent up to inquire and observed that the marks of large boots and the impression of knees had been left in the mud. Piggott tracked down a man whose boots exactly fitted the mud prints; and the knee marks were such that they could have been made by the fabric of his trousers. Confronted with the evidence, the suspect admitted his offence, implicating an accomplice, and the pair was handed to the local police for ‘further proceedings’.
In September that year a further opportunity presented itself.
At Combienbar in the state’s east, fourteen-year-old Leslie Thompson boarded with a family with whom the town’s solitary schoolmaster, John Ward, bachelor, also boarded. Ward suspected Thompson, who was one of his pupils—there being no school where Thompson’s widowed mother lived—of having stolen £1 from the school’s Patriotic Fund collected to support the war effort. Thompson resented the suspicion.
Curiously, the family’s dog and pig died and Ward became seriously ill—all on the same day an obtrusive paper satchel was noticed on the roof of the school. It was found to contain strychnine, an ingredient of rat poison. More suspicion fell on Thompson, who told the local constable he knew nothing about the poison or the missing £1. As it was a possible case of attempted murder, however, Melbourne CIB was notified and Piggott dispatched to inquire.
The detective noticed the schoolmaster’s habit of biting the end of his pen and on examining it, traces of strychnine were detected. Piggott questioned Thompson, who repeatedly denied involvement. Unfazed, the detective explained that attempted murder was a capital offence—it incurred the death sentence. Then he waited calmly for the boy to respond. After a pause during which the lad appeared to think deeply, he said, ‘If I tell the truth will I be hanged?’
Thompson made a full confession. He had not only stolen the money and smeared strychnine on Ward’s pens but he had also stirred the poison into the family’s breakfast porridge, endangering the whole household. Fortunately for the family, its youngsters, who breakfasted earlier than Ward, had complained of the unusual taste and the porridge was thrown out to some animals, two of which died.
As Piggott knew, Thompson, being a minor, would be spared the death penalty. He was sentenced instead to three years imprisonment with hard labour. In Piggott’s Record of Conduct and Service, Superintendent Davidson wrote: ‘Highly commended for zeal and ability.’
But the most challenging case in this period of Piggott’s career now lay ahead.