1936–1937
In May 1936, an inebriated Blamey was in the back seat of a Daimler with a prostitute in a street known as ‘lover’s lane’ near Melbourne’s zoo in Royal Park. John Brophy, the head of Victoria’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, was in the front seat with another prostitute.
Blamey had just stripped his companion and was in the process of going down on her when three men surrounded the Daimler. Brophy alighted from the car and pushed one of the men to the ground. Fortunately for Blamey, he was so drunk and engrossed in his sex act that he did not come up for air as shots were exchanged between Brophy and the three men.
Brophy collapsed, having been hit by three bullets. The assailants rushed away. Blamey fell out of the vehicle and was in no state to administer aid to his fallen comrade. One of the women ran to a nearby fire station and raised the alarm.
Brophy was taken to hospital with a shattered right arm, and wounds to the cheek and above the heart. He survived, and two days later was declared ‘stable’, with superficial wounds. Blamey was escorted home in a police van and was once again not quite sure what he had been through after an evening of heavy drinking.1
He spoke to Brophy in hospital and was given the full picture. They both agreed on a ‘story’. According to their somewhat ill-thought-through, even panicky narrative, Blamey had not been anywhere near the scene of the crime, or involved in any acts with a sex worker. They claimed that Brophy had accidentally shot himself.
But when Blamey put this story out, scepticism quickly mounted. Journalists heard about the incident and asked questions, including: how could anyone, particularly an experienced officer like Brophy, accidentally put three bullets into himself?
Blamey reacted and changed their story, now admitting that Brophy had been shot by criminals. Yet, just like the unfortunate Brophy, the story was still full of holes. A decade after his escapade in the Belgrave brothel, reporters sniffed another Blamey scandal.
Blamey thought he had got away with another unfortunate incident arising from his crude sexual proclivities, but press coverage now urged the State Government to hold a royal commission. Country Party premier Albert Dunstan needed the Labor Party’s support, and it wanted the Blamey incident investigated. A royal commission was set up.
Brophy and Blamey were both cross-examined. Brophy now changed his narrative a third time and claimed that he had been driven to Royal Park to meet a police informer. In the car with him were ‘two women friends and a chauffeur employed by one of them’. Brophy said that two (down from three) masked and armed men had tried to hold them up. Brophy had drawn his pistol and fired two shots. The attackers had fired back and he had been wounded.
This third piece of fiction had even more holes in it than the first two. Why had he been meeting a police informant in the company of two women and a chauffeur? The fact that there had been a chauffeur present implied that the women were of some standing and avoided the suggestion that they were prostitutes.
No one believed the fabrications, especially not Hugh Macindoe, the presiding judge at the enquiry. A Scot, he had been Victoria’s senior crown prosecutor for seven years before moving to the County Court bench. He knew much about police methods.
Macindoe found that ‘Blamey gave replies [very similar to those of Brophy] which were not in accordance with the truth’.2 Even Blamey’s style of police command was called into question. Macindoe found fault with his support of overreaching police tactics in pressuring suspects to elicit sometimes false confessions, and in detaining suspects over extended periods for this purpose. Blamey liked applying the so-called ‘third degree’. It was an extension of his no-nonsense approach to military command, which eschewed civil rights and favoured the cosh.
The press criticism in the wake of this sex scandal put Blamey under pressure to resign. He was 52, and his life was at its lowest point. In typical chin-out Blamey fashion, he decided to tough it out. ‘If [the government] attempts to sack me,’ he told Savige, ‘I’ll counter-attack them in the press.’3
This kind of defiance had worked in 1925, but times had changed. The press had more power, and were prepared to use it in pursuit of stories they perceived were in the public interest. Politicians and others in public life needed to keep them on side. While Blamey counted press barons among his friends, he had limited influence over the journalists who worked for them, and whom he had too often treated with contempt.
Savige and others urged Blamey to stay put. But his King’s Counsel friend Eugene Gorman talked him into resigning. Gorman believed that Blamey’s reputation would suffer if the press kept badgering him. Better to act with apparent honour and get out now than to hang on, Gorman advised.
On the morning of 9 July, the Cabinet met to consider the Macindoe Royal Commission’s report.
Blamey waited with Savige at the Naval and Military Club. ‘I think the Cabinet will support me,’ he told Savige, ‘because I have always had the Force’s reputation at heart.’ Gorman had Blamey’s letter of resignation in his pocket. If Blamey was criticised by Cabinet, Gorman would tender the resignation.
Blamey answered a call from Gorman that had been put through to the bar at the club. Savige scrutinised Blamey’s face as he took the call. There was no joy in his expression.
He returned to their table. ‘My resignation has been accepted,’ he said to Savige, ‘let’s have a drink.’4
Blamey felt he had been ‘framed’. Savige did not know what he meant. Was he thinking of the attack on the Daimler? Was he talking about the way Labor had lined up with the rest of his enemies? He had more than most because of his sometimes brusque manner.
The now former Police Commissioner was angered for months after his removal from office.
‘It was the bitterest and most sterile period of his life,’ biographer John Hetherington would write. ‘Men who had been eager to dine and drink with him in the palmy days melted away and some of them looked past him in the street.’5
But Savige proved a real mate (in the Australian vernacular) through thick and thin. The two men went shooting, hunting, fishing and horse-riding together, and were still regular drinking companions at the Naval and Military Club and the Athenaeum Club, both bastions of conservative male recreation in Melbourne.
Savige must have wondered what Blamey’s dumping would mean for his own career. He was in even more of a quandary when Blamey told Savige that he was ‘at the end of the road’ with the militia too, and that he would retire as Commander of 3rd Division at the end of his current term in May 1937. With Blamey’s star apparently in rapid decline, their relationship did not change. This demonstrated to Blamey that their link was not based on what Savige could gain from their association in the material sense.
From Blamey’s perspective, it built considerable trust.