by Ray Whitrod
The previous year had seen the unplanned break up of our group of lads at the Mission. All left school at age fourteen. Some found jobs as junior labourers in wool-scouring firms, sheet metal factories, or bakehouses; some went interstate hoping to find work. Along with one of my scout friends, Laurie Kitchener, who received support through Legacy, I moved up to the main church in Flinders Street to join its newly formed scout troop.
I can, with sincerity, begin this segment of these memoirs by repeating that traditional romantic phrase: “Long ago and far away I had a Dream one day.” It was quite long ago now — sixty seven years in fact — and “far away” in those motorless times that I met my future wife, Mavis Russell.
Just before I left school in September 1932, when I was nearly seventeen years of age, I went to Victor Harbour for a holiday. I had been teaching Sunday school at the Flinders Street Baptist Church and one of my fellow teachers was Brice Russell. With two of his friends, Brice and I set out to hike the 50 miles [80 kilometres] to the seaside holiday town. We took a train to the outskirts of Adelaide and started walking. I don’t remember sleeping, I remember joking and laughing and carrying on as we walked. Twenty-four hours after leaving town we arrived. You can do that sort of thing when you are seventeen. The four of us shared an inexpensive bedroom in a boarding house for about a week. Brice and I were then in our Matriculation year at Adelaide High School. Brice’s sister, Mavis, and her close friend, Gert, were also staying in Victor and we shared outings with them. My fairytale had begun and has continued to this day. Mavis and Gert had graduated three years earlier from the Adelaide Teachers College. Mavis was then teaching at a small country school in Tweedvale, some distance from the city. Neither of them appeared to be attached to a young man.
I can still recall that holiday together, Mavis was aged twenty-five and had blue eyes and fair hair, and wore casual clothes. She was active, healthy and had, to me, a most attractive personality. Privately I thought the other two non-sibling males in our party were either immature or stupid not to notice her obvious charm. But I was pleased, for their lack of interest in Mavis held no threat to our developing relationship.
By the end of the first couple of days I was already well on the way to thinking Mavis was the most wonderful person in the world. I remember how one morning the six of us went out in a fisherman’s boat to check the cray pots. We all succumbed to seasickness. We returned to shore and slowly recovered. I was left impressed by the way in which Mavis responded to the situation. I had had little previous contact with girls and none of those I knew would have behaved in the manner she did. With an obvious absence of self-pity and complaints, she saw much humour in our predicament.
I discovered that Mavis shared my enjoyment of the poetry of Tennyson and Browning. Also, she was familiar with the work of the Reverend Leslie Weatherhead, an English psychologist, who had helped her, as he had me, to gain some understanding of the principles of Christianity. (There were those he hadn’t helped, who regarded his teachings as anathema, and who referred to him as Leatherhead.) Brice and I had been teaching Sunday School at Flinders Street Church where Mavis and Brice’s father was a deacon and their elder sister the superintendent of the Sunday School. My duties involved teaching my class of eleven-year-olds about a number of miracles — water turning into wine, a few loaves and fishes feeding a multitude, that sort of thing. I was beginning to doubt the absolute truth of the Bible and tended to skip through these parts of the curriculum as fast as possible. But I kept my doubts to myself— it was heresy at Flinders Street to regard the Bible as anything but the literal word of God. Brice seemed to have no doubts at all and his sister the superintendent had been no help when I’d tentatively raised a few questions about Biblical miracles. With Mavis, things were different: doubts and queries could be discussed openly. And Mavis didn’t talk down to me, which I appreciated. She was the first teacher I had met who spoke to me as an equal. I immediately thought “here is someone on the same wave length as myself”. I enjoyed her company, for not only was she a person whom I admired, but she seemed to appreciate my jocular, male comments. As well, she appeared to give serious consideration to the odd theories I risked revealing in our discussions. Her interest was genuine, for there was no reason for her to seek out my company. I was young, still a secondary school student, a stage she had left well behind. I think that for a long time neither she nor her family saw me as a possible suitor. Yet since that holiday at Victor Harbour she had become the major influence in my life. I was unhappy when I was away from her so I exploited every opportunity to be in her company, and if possible, alone together.
When our holiday at Victor was over, Brice and I returned to school and Mavis returned to Tweedvale in the hills north east of Adelaide. Prior to the First World War, Tweedvale had been known as Lobethal, but anti-German sentiment led to its name change. Later it reverted to the name its original Lutheran settlers had given it. Mavis taught Grades 4 and 5 at the primary school. She lived with another teacher in a shared room and managed to return to Adelaide by bus about once a fortnight. On those weekends when she remained in Tweedvale, she would meet other teachers in the local library, go for walks and perhaps attend a local football match.
When Mavis came to Adelaide, she and I met as part of an extended group — to my considerable frustration. We played social tennis on Saturday afternoons, and frequently had musical gatherings in the evenings. Mavis contributed a great deal to making these gatherings at her home happy occasions for everyone present and, of course, this was especially so for me. On Sunday afternoons Brice and I were teachers at Flinders Street and, with typical Russell family generosity, I was always an invited guest at their Sunday evening meal, followed by church. We went and returned as a group. I was treated very much as one of the family but not until a very long time, as a special friend of Mavis.
Some authorities assert that men are likely to marry women who remind them of their mothers. Maybe so. My own mother sacrificed much to ensure I had a good education, that I could partake in school sports, and that I could enjoy and benefit from scouting. On reflection, I have wondered if on that fateful day when I met Mavis I had somehow discerned that she was that rare type who is less concerned about their own welfare than that of others. All through our long association, I never heard her complain, never heard her say anything adverse about someone else. She always put her family’s, and then the community’s, needs before her own. She lived with commonsense frugality but with generosity whenever others were involved.
The worst eight months of my life began in April 1933 — yet they should have been my happiest. I was an unemployed eighteen-year-old without any prospects or qualifications except an early Matriculation certificate. I was in love with a twenty-six-year-old teacher in a permanent appointment. In those days there were many unemployed people on the streets of Adelaide. I was just one amongst thousands. There were no monetary unemployment benefits, but ration cards were issued once a fortnight. These bought one some bread, sugar, flour, tea, and meat. The unemployed didn’t starve, but there were many evictions of families who could not pay their rent. I spent a lot of time reading in the State Library and helping the caretaker of the church. He couldn’t pay me, but sometimes he gave me lunch. As a matrimonial prospect, I didn’t rate.
I think I only gained Mavis’s acceptance because I was not at first seen by her or her family as a suitor. More by good luck than any kind of management, I had not pressed for that recognition. I rather think all three Russell girls were “man-shy”, yet I know they were greatly admired by male colleagues and acquaintances. Slowly it became apparent to the Russells that I hoped for deeper things than friendship with Mavis. And as our relationship progressed, under strict and by now less than approving family supervision, the atmosphere in Mavis’s home lost its former congenial warmth. Mavis, however, did not waver in her desire for my companionship. During the January 1934 school holidays, her parents thought it prudent for her to go to Port Augusta to
visit distant relatives. These included an eligible young man named Sam, a fisherman who was nearer Mavis’s age.
Desperate to achieve at least a little more status in the Russels’ eyes, I thought it might be possible to obtain casual work on some of the River Murray blocks picking apricots and later sultanas. So I left home on a cycle with eighteen pence and blankets and my ration card. I pedalled some hundreds of miles calling on blockies without success. I based myself in Barmera, sleeping in an unused shed at the back of the local scoutmaster’s house. As I cycled around I met many other unemployed people all seeking casual work picking fruit. The fruitgrowers would put one’s name on a list — you could be the twelfth name on the “reserve list” for a blockie who only had work for six hands. Mavis wrote to me but I couldn’t reply because I couldn’t afford the paper or the stamps. Her letters were warm and encouraging to a young man in despair about his future. I would visualise her being courted by Sam, under parental pressure to be polite. But she since told me that she never had doubts about choosing me as her life partner.
In late January 1934, the Russells got a telegram through to me. The Police Department was advertising thirty vacancies for men under twenty years of age to join the Force as trainee constables. I got back to Adelaide, applied, and joined the 300 applicants who had survived the rigorous medical examination. We then sat for a written paper. I understand I topped this test and was the first of the intake to be appointed.
3
The South Australian Police Force
(1934-1940)
I joined the South Australian Police Force in February 1934 as a police messenger, a kind of cadet. I was on twenty shillings a week, and I lived at home. I wore a uniform that allowed me to ride on the trams for nothing. Life took on hope, meaning, a promise of happiness. I had emerged into bright light at the end of a very dark tunnel. My naive impressions of a policeman’s lot were still based on those bedtime stories of the Birdsville sergeant that my mother had told me. It seemed to me that a person could get paid for just doing a daily good turn over and over. And my social life blossomed as I became accepted as a possible son-in-law to the Russells. Mavis was most happy with my appointment and I now became her “steady boyfriend”. We entered upon a more customary courtship of regular Saturday nights at the pictures on our own, shared Sunday activities with her family, and occasional weeknight meetings.
But “the job” as it is called worldwide by all manner of coppers, did not turn out the way I expected. About two years earlier, Commissioner Leane had decided to develop a more educated force by recruiting lads with intermediate and matriculation certificates at a younger age than the customary twenty-one years. They would fill in the years with clerical work until they turned twenty-one and could be sworn in as officers. By rotating the cadets within the various branches of the force, it was hoped that they would acquire a working knowledge of each. I believe that Commissioner Leane did not succeed in selling this concept and that he failed to achieve the active cooperation of his officers. Most officers were content with the status quo and saw no personal advantage in the scheme. Perhaps they believed that it would affect their chances of promotion, and perhaps they lacked sufficient commitment to the ideals of British policing. The idea that an individual constable should receive his authority from the community and exercise it on his own initiative ran counter to the easy assumption that all a young policeman needed to do was follow orders from on high. As well, most of the twenty cadets and messengers were mediocre material by secondary school standards; they were certainly inexperienced in leadership roles. A number of lads were from the country and lacking in urban sophistication. However, we were welcomed into the various branches at headquarters in Angus Street — though this welcome, I think, was mainly because we took the position of “the lowest man on the totem pole”.
Instead of receiving systematic instruction on procedures, we became the gophers, the typists and tea-getters. This was especially true when we were supervised by civil servants. The young trainee became an assistant to the civilian office boy, relieving him of his more mundane tasks. A few of our number were already touch typists. They possessed a skill so valuable in a force where one-finger typing was the rule that they were kept at this task for their entire traineeships. I arrived full of enthusiasm for community servicing and was immediately made dockets clerk in the commissioner’s office registry. All day long, five days a week, I picked up big bundles of dockets in the main office and took them to a small, airless room to file away, or I began the reverse process of finding dockets to match a list I was given. There were five copies of every document, the result of copious use of carbon paper. I managed a reasonable morning’s filing, but by early afternoon I was bored stiff. I took to reading the more interesting dockets and so, I suppose, I did learn a little — especially about rape, and murder.
After six months I was moved to the fingerprint/photographic section. I was delighted: at last I would be involved in some real police work. I should have known better. This section was run by civilian photographers who had taught themselves fingerprinting from a classic textbook by Henry Dalton. There were only three photographers and they were jealous guardians of their status as experts. I was assigned to a disabled ex-serviceman, a former policeman who needed a crutch to move. He maintained the criminal records, which were the responsibility of the section. These were all on 10 x 8 inch ruled cards; details of crimes and convictions were recorded by pen. My job was to obtain the daily list of court appearances and verdicts, find the corresponding cards in the drawers and hand these to the clerk, who would record the details. He would then hand the cards back to me for refiling. I did this for nearly a year. It was deadening. I would try to sneak into the darkroom to watch film being developed, but I received no encouragement. On a few occasions, I got hold of a copy of Dalton which had been left out during the lunchbreak. I read through it quickly. It was easy to follow and the fingerprint classification procedures were well illustrated. But if I was discovered with the book I was shooed away — the secrets it held were only for the initiated. However hard I tried, I could not muster any enthusiasm for my chores with the record cards. Even when the clerk went on his four weeks’ annual leave and I was allowed to enter the details myself, I still found the job boring. My wage of twenty shillings was well-earned. The man I replaced earned seventy shillings.
That year there was to be a World Scout Jamboree in Frankston, Victoria. I had kept up my scouting and was now acting as the scouter in charge of the Flinders Street Church troop. I was keen to go to Frankston but decided that I couldn’t afford it on my twenty shillings a week. Then I learned that all of the Russell offspring would be going, including Mavis who was in charge of a girl guide troop. This was at a time when I could barely let her out of my sight lest some handsome prince come along and sweep her off her feet … and she was now bound for ten days in far-away Victoria. I was some pounds short of the fee but I had access to scout funds which had been entrusted to me for another purpose. Against all my moral principles, I borrowed the money without consent. I was only twenty at the time, but I was put in charge of the entire Adelaide contingent of scouts: four troops. At Frankston we had a wonderful time, mixing with scouts from all over the world. My contingent put on a display of boomerang throwing before the entire jamboree. Mavis and her sisters stayed with friends in Melbourne, but journeyed to the Jamboree by train every day. I kept as close to her as I could, neglecting my scouter responsibilities. I gave no thought to my misdeed until I returned home and the realisation of what I had done sank in. I went to the person who had entrusted the money to me and ashamedly told him what I had done. He was an old friend and covered for me until I was able to replace the money. I learnt a very hard lesson which has remained with me ever since.
In the following year, April 1935, I was posted to the Police Depot at Port Adelaide for my last year as a cadet. There were forty junior constables living at the depot, receiving basic training before being sworn i
n at age twenty-one. By this time the creation of the rank of junior constable had replaced Commissioner Leane’s cadet scheme. In the main, the junior constables were lads with even less education than the cadets.
We paid for our food out of our twenty shillings a week wage. One of us was appointed cook. The food was mainly edible. We sat in crowded, makeshift classrooms (former dockside sheds) and wrote down in longhand the sixteen Acts and Regulations we would be called upon to enforce after we were sworn in. These were read out aloud by one of the more senior lads. No explanations were given, no demonstrations provided. We were supposed to learn the Acts and Regulations by heart. This was training at its most primitive, but we were all glad to get it for the alternative was unemployment.
Conditions in the depot were equally primative. The kitchen was right next to the stables and hoards of flies migrated between the two buildings. As we were all poor and had to buy our own food, we bought the cheapest possible.
At the depot, we were each allocated a horse — mine was an aged chestnut gelding named Ripple. He was a friendly animal and my anxiety about sitting on his back — sometimes without stirrups — soon dissipated. I was lucky: some of the horses were anything but friendly, they would give you a quick nip or a kick if you let your guard down for an instant. I cleaned out Ripple’s stall each morning and groomed, fed and watered him before I had breakfast myself. I saved apple pieces and other titbits for him. After breakfast we carried out riding drills, with and without swords. We did some PT ourselves. After lunch we had lessons in law and police procedure. In the evenings we cleaned saddles and bridles and did some study. I enjoyed my association with Ripple but not much else. There is a lot to be said for the responsibility of looking after a large animal. For the first time in my life, I had a genuine dependant. We were left in no doubt: if our horses became lame, it was our fault.