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In which District Constable James Squire makes Australian police history
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When it came to policing the colony, the Night Watch only lasted 10 years before it was scrapped due to a rise in “nocturnal robberies” as Governor Hunter described them. He figured the convicts in the Night Watch were either fat and hopeless or actually the ones engaging in the nocturnal robberies.
The job of protecting the colony then fell to the district constables, a rank that had been set up in 1796 to work alongside the Night Watch. And it wasn’t without its dangers, as evidenced by the fate of Constable Joseph Luker – the first police officer in NSW to be killed in the line of duty. Constable Luker was a convict who came to Sydney on the Third Fleet in 1791 and who joined the force in 1796 after serving out his sentence.
In the early hours of August 26, 1803, Constable Luker had been patrolling a recent hotspot for robbery known as Back Row East (the area now bordered by a trio of streets named for former governors – Phillip, Hunter and Macquarie – and Martin Place).
That morning, the constable’s body was found in the area. It was a gruesome sight indeed; “a breathless corpse, shockingly mangled, and with the guard of his cutlass buried in his brain,” reported the Sydney Gazette.
“On the head of the deceased were counted sixteen stabs and contusions; the left ear was nearly divided; on the left side of the head were four wounds, and several others on the back of it. The wretch who buried the iron guard of the cutlass in the head of the unfortunate man had seized the weapon by the blade, and levelled the dreadful blow with such fatal force, as to rivet the plate in the skull, to a depth of more than an inch and a half.”
That same night, the home of prostitute Mary Breeze has been broken into. Figuring there was a connection, police rounded up suspects. One of them, a Joseph Samuels, admitted to the robbery and named his accomplices, which included two constables; Isaac Simmonds and William Bladders. Samuels, Constables Simmonds and Bladders, and two other crims named Richard Jackson and James Harwicke, faced trial over the murder. Samuels and Harwicke were found guilty of the murder and sentenced to hang.
On the scaffolding, Harwicke was reprieved but not Samuels – who used his last words to claim Constable Simmonds confessed to him that he had killed Luker. When it came time for the hangman to do his work, he did it very poorly. The rope broke in the middle on the first attempt and Samuels crashed face-first onto the ground. A new rope was brought in but that came loose and Samuels slowly slid down until his feet reached the ground. A third rope also snapped and Samuels fell again. The crowd watching this farce grew angry and demanded a reprieve, which the governor eventually gave.
In the end the murder of Constable Luker went unpunished. This case was well-known in the colony but it didn’t seem to stop Squire from signing on as the district constable at Kissing Point. Perhaps he needed the extra cash. He was in the role in January 1805, which was when his law-enforcing exploits made the local paper.
In what was obviously a slow news day for the Gazette, it chose to report on Squire’s pursuit and capture of “a couple of modern Egyptians” on the “vehement suspicion of sheepstealing”. Later that year, there was another somewhat mundane case, where Squire caught an Abraham Smith for thieving from the house of a J Newton. The homeowner seems to have been a repeat victim of a gang of burglars who had “taken themselves to the woods from an aversion to labour, and a preference to a life of profligacy under perpetual apprehension and anxiety”. In other words, they found stealing stuff to be easier than working.
Of Squire’s cases recorded in the pages of the Sydney Gazette, the one that appeared in the edition of July 21, 1810, was the high point of his policing career. It marked the first recorded instance of an Aboriginal tracker helping to track down the bad guys.
Early on the morning of Saturday, July 14, a trio of “armed ruffians” – labourers Patrick McKane, John White and Edward McHugh – broke into the house of Kissing Point resident Richard Jenner. Finding only Jenner’s wife and a servant at home, the gang “exercised much violence” towards them before tying them up and then ransacking the house of clothes, cash and “sundry other property”.
Squire was called to the scene and could not make any headway for the first two days. At a loss, he brought in a young Aboriginal man by the name of Bundle to see what he could uncover. After walking around the house and the property, Bundle found a footprint with two prominent marks in the sole. Following these prints, Bundle led Squire to a nearby hut where they found a pair of shoes, one with two nails in the sole that were the source of those distinctive marks.
The owner swore he had nothing to do with the break-in and assault; he had loaned his boots to McKane the night before. Squire, with Mrs Jenner and her servant in tow, then went to McKane’s hut in Lane Cove. As soon as she laid eyes on him, Mrs Jenner identified McKane as one of the men in her house that night.
McHugh and White were caught soon after and the trio were found guilty. They appealed and, in October 1810 the appeals court said “Nah, you’re still guilty”. McHugh, “the most atrocious offender” in the eyes of the court, was sentenced to 100 lashes and two years’ hard labor while McKane and White received 50 lashes and a year’s hard labour.