by Ray Whitrod
The senior instructor was an ex-Indian Army Sergeant-Major, very pukka and proud of it. He wore the Mounted Police uniform of a navy blue jacket with a high collar and silver buttons, white riding britches and spurs. We called him The Rajah, although not to his face. He called us all “boy”. He could bellow across the rough, gravel parade ground like a wild bull. But he understood men and he soon had us doing things on horses we wouldn’t have dreamed possible. We rode bareback without stirrups. We learned to mount our horses on the run, while they cantered beside us. Out of the saddle we marched and spent a lot of time on drill. We were proud of our marching and worked hard to do our best, even with the local wharfies lined up along fence for a bit of free entertainment.
The depot was residential with two weekends off each month and no evening leave. We were allowed leave on alternate Sundays to attend a nearby church service. For this, Mavis would catch a bus from Torrensville to the city, then another to Port Adelaide, a rough area, where she would meet me outside the church. We would then sit together in a pew holding hands until the end of the service when I would escort her to the bus stop and she would return home. There was no shelter outside the church or at the bus stop. We had only a brief hug when the bus came. For this, Mavis left home early and undertook an hour-long journey alone. No trainee policeman would accept conditions like these today. Except for a small staff to feed and water the horses we could all have been released at noon on Saturday. There were no set duties for the rest of the weekend and we were left to our own devices. It is now interesting to record that none of the lads sneaked off to nearby hotels, nor did we devise any means of smuggling in some illicit grog. We were all well behaved. There were no clandestine initiation ceremonies and no outbursts of violence. The threat of dismissal kept us all in line.
I was sworn in on my twenty-first birthday as a probationary constable for one year, and posted to the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) for plainclothes duties. I was one of four so posted. The other three were also former police messengers with the Matriculation certificate. Although I was unaware of it at the time, I was joining a police force loosely based on an English model. In the early days of settlement, the founders of South Australia soon recognised the need for a law enforcement body to deal with bushrangers in the Adelaide Hills, apprehend runaway seamen, provide escorts for the traffic in gold, and protect settlers from marauding Aborigines. There was also disorderly behaviour within the city boundaries that needed controlling. South Australia’s founders did not follow the practice of other British colonies of creating a para-military body, an armed gendarmerie, based on the Irish model. Instead they adopted the London Metropolitan Police model, but modified it by dividing the police force into a mounted division for country posts and foot police for the city “beats”.
Before Commissioner Leane introduced cadets, messengers and junior constables in the mid-1930s, recruits for the South Australian force were required to be twenty-one years old, fit, healthy, unmarried, with a height of at least 5 feet 10 inches, a completed primary school education and no criminal record. Most of the recruits became honest, decent, trustworthy officers. They were men who, in earlier life, had not become stabilised as tradesmen, or who had become dissatisfied with rural occupations, or were simply unemployed. Many were recent arrivals from the United Kingdom, who had been in the armed services.
When I joined the CIB in 1936 it had some thirty detectives and plainclothes staff and was based in the Police Headquarters on Victoria Square. I soon decided I would like to have my CIB posting made permanent. If this happened, I would be the first to obtain selection this way, since the normal procedure was to select uniformed members who had demonstrated above-average commitment and ability. It would also mean that I would be by far the youngest permanent CIB officer in the place. To this end I worked very hard and made sure that I did nothing wrong in the eyes of my superiors.
The twenty-six months of my cadetship spent at Police Headquarters — observing and listening to office gossip, reading official files, talking to old-timers — had widened my horizons. I now realised that the detection and conviction of offenders was as important — and far more interesting — than being a “kindly” country sergeant. I hoped one day to be a detective-sergeant. At the time, there were only two in the force — one operational and one administrative. Each sergeant had achieved that rank by virtue of his seniority, although a sergeant’s written examination had filtered out some candidates. From youth’s perspective I soon saw myself as sharp as the best detectives and better than most. The head of the CIB was always an inspector. When I began, it was an officer widely known as “Greasy Mick”. He was a unkept, fat man who sat in his office all day spilling cigarette ash down the front of his shirt. His only son was the local representative of the Melbourne-based Truth. For some reason, Truth always managed to get the inside information on Adelaide criminal investigations. Greasy Mick represented the old order of detectives and was not impressed with the need for education. He made it clear from the start that he didn’t like me — although, at heart, it may have been the new system of recruitment that he didn’t like, rather than the recruit himself. I certainly went out of my way to ensure that he had no grounds for disapproval. I worked harder and longer than any others in the branch and as a result stumbled across a couple of wanted villains. I had some other successes as well. On one occasion I located some stolen goods in an obscure second-hand dealer’s shop. Fortunately, Greasy Mick soon retired and was replaced by a country inspector, William Owen Ignatius Sheridan.
This continued the “Irish” dynasty, although it has to be said the Protestant-Catholic divide that was a feature of some of the eastern states was never very prominent in South Australia. The police force was a public service department available to migrants with little education. It was no wonder that the Irish were over-represented. “Bill” Sheridan was a newcomer to CIB work, but he soon picked up most of the goings-on in the office. By contrast to Greasy Mick, he was courteous and intelligent and I got on well with him. If Catholic members received any privileges, I never noticed it. He treated me fairly, acknowledged any good efforts I may have made and usually approved my suggestions. I couldn’t have had a better boss. Also my sergeant, George Walters, was an inspiration to me. However, there was still no systematic detective training. Potential detectives simply served for a few years as plainclothes constables, during which time they sank or swam according to their capacity to learn on the job. There was also a relatively easy detective’s written examination which I passed at the end of the second year.
Apart from a superficial check of crime scenes by fingerprint experts, there was no forensic backup available and the development of criminal intelligence units was many years away. A few unsophisticated criminals were identified and convicted on fingerprint evidence alone, but a burglar doesn’t have to be very bright to know about wearing gloves. The most serious violent crimes were usually committed within domestic relationships, and astute interrogation routinely resolved these. The cleverest criminals, especially those of the white-collar variety, were probably never caught — if, indeed, their offences were ever reported or discovered. I noted that the most potent weapon in the fight against crime was the detective’s capacity to bluff a suspect by acting as if he knew a great deal more than he revealed. This skill was most successful when applied to offenders who actively wanted to confess. A surprising number were first timers. On one occasion, when I was twenty-two, I was alone on night duty when I was called out to a stabbing case. A woman had had a row with her husband because he had arrived home late for a meal. While they were eating the spoiled food, she picked up a carving knife and plunged it into her husband’s chest, killing him. When I arrived at the scene the woman was sobbing, saying she really didn’t mean to kill the man. Because it was a homicide and I was young, I followed the routine and sent the police driver to pick up my sergeant, but there was really no need: the distraught woman was keen to tell us everything that ha
d happened.
The more astute members of the CIB were extremely good at bluffing. When interviewing suspects who were not first timers, and therefore presumably literate in criminal jargon, the detectives often adopted a heavy, semi-jocular conversational style. I watched this style practised very effectively on many occasions over the years. It has many advantages. For one thing, if the interrogator goes too far with his insinuations, or more direct accusations, and wishes to retreat, he claims: “I was only joking. You weren’t stupid enough to think I was serious?” This was also often the mode of conversation amongst the CIB staff themselves, and it also appeared in discussions with bookmakers and other racecourse cronies.
The detective’s ability to bluff was aided by a symbiotic relationship with the print media. In Adelaide at this time there were three newspapers — a morning and evening paper and the aforementioned independent weekly, Truth, which specialised in sensational stories. Each of these papers had full-time journalists (“crime reporters”) who were employed to obtained “scoops” from detectives. The price of these scoops was good publicity for the detectives. There was a positive, practical side to these stories — they weren’t entirely motivated by a desire for personal aggrandisement. These frequent mentions helped build up an image of the officers as astute interrogators who could quickly detect a falsehood and could outsmart suspects with cleverly devised questions. Believing this, many offenders abandoned hope before the interrogation had even begun.
There was another technique which some detectives used to good effect. One member of a two-man team would become enraged and threaten violence without actually administering any. The second detective then posed as a more sympathetic officer who advised the suspect to confess. I understand variations of this tactic are occasionally employed today. With suspects who were not of working-class origin — and especially if they came from one of the professions — the interrogators were sometimes ill at ease, although those suspected of sexual, especially homosexual, offences did not seem to cause any such awkwardness, regardless of their social standing.
I had many good opportunities to observe the more effective detectives in action because I had been attached to the operational sergeant’s small team. We investigated the more serious cases. This was a plum job. I don’t know why I was picked but I was soon using my stenographic skills to provide what amounted to the first records of interview used by the South Australian Police. I had learned shorthand at school and was the department’s fastest writer (120— 140 words per minute); I was also a reasonable typist, although not the best. One of my colleagues from my days as a police messenger was even better and could type at forty words per minute. My sergeant ensured that I was present and taking notes at all important interrogations. I would then type these up and they would form an integral part of the prosecution’s case. Sometimes I would be the one who gave this essential evidence in both the Magistrates’ and the Supreme Courts. On occasions my shorthand notebook outlines would be checked under cross-examination. I became an accomplished prosecution witness.
In this way I relieved the sergeant and others in his squad of the boring chore of one-finger typing of long documents. This also meant that an opportunity to manufacture false evidence was lost since I was not prepared to commit perjury in order to obtain a conviction. In any case reference to “Detectives Underwood and Remington” (the two brands of typewriters in the CIB office) to bolster cases for the prosecution was rarely employed. I was never aware of it actually happening, but jocular comments from time to time by some of the staff suggested that there may occasionally have been a slight rearrangement in the sequence of question and answer to strengthen the police case.
One of the duties of a junior plainclothes man in those days was to supervise the operation of the totalisators at racecourses. The workers in the tote would sell tickets through a window until just before a race. In order to ensure that no ticket-seller took a ticket for himself after the start of a race, there was a plainclothes policeman on duty inside the tote. The police also kept an eye on the calculation of dividends to ensure that the right amount of money was paid out. It was dreary work. One Saturday, while inside the tote, I noticed a young lady at the window buying a ticket. She looked younger than the statuatory twenty-one years. I went outside and identified myself as a police constable. The girl confessed to being nineteen years of age. I took her name and address and informed her that I would have to report the matter. What happened next is something I only learned about indirectly. The girl went straight to her father, a prominent member of the Jockey Club’s committee. The father approached the senior sergeant on duty to see if the matter could be fixed.
“Who’s the constable?” the sergeant asked.
“Whitrod.”
“No chance.”
Detectives of that era were also greatly aided by the legislative consorting provisions which made it an offence to consort with convicted or reputed thieves. In the popular imagination, criminals congregated in “thieves’ kitchens”, places that were half brothels, half sly grog shops. Here they would drink beer and plot crimes. If undesirable types could be prevented from congregating like this, the theory went, the crime rate would diminish. Conviction for consorting carried a penalty of up to six months’ gaol and there were probably five or six such convictions a year, just enough to keep up the pressure. CIB officers would note any suspicious meetings and issue warnings. If the consorting continued over a period of months, then the person involved could be charged, but more often he would be “squeezed”. After, say, five warnings, the person involved was considered ripe for a charge. He would be aware of his position. Some CIB officers would then squeeze him for information about the activities of other criminals, offering to defer the charge if he cooperated. It was a useful device, although based on a strange view of the underworld. In fact every Salvation Army officer in town was chronically guilty of consorting, but the Salvos were never squeezed.
Entry to the CIB opened up a new world of masculine activity to me. Women police then were few in number and had a very restricted range of duties — they were mainly concerned with the welfare of women and children. There were no women attached to the CIB. But they occasionally accompanied detectives when females were involved as victims, witnesses or suspects. The women police officers did not wear uniform and were largely untrained in crime investigations. They were warranted members of the force, but were never known to arrest anybody. The ages of the detectives ranged from thirty-five to fifty-five; all were well dressed in woollen suits and ties, all wore a felt hat, shoes were polished. Since they were all tall and worked in pairs, with a habit of studying closely any strangers when they entered a hotel bar or a racecourse, they were easily identified as plainclothes police. I sometimes wondered just how they managed to be so well dressed on their salaries. It became clear to me that if I wanted to achieve acceptance as a full-blown detective I would have to emulate their dress sense. I was lucky. I made friends with a Mr Sheehan, the leading cutter for Ingersons, then the top men’s tailoring firm, and he ensured that my suits were of fine material and well cut, for a medium price. They were so good that some of the older detectives asked me where I got them! The Whitrods paid for them out of my clothing allowance and a bit of scraping.
Two characteristics of CIB duties were immediately obvious to me: the freedom of action, and the strong bond of mateship that existed in the pairs of detectives. After a year living in the depot under closely supervised, semi-military discipline, I was attracted to the manner in which the men were given reports of various crimes to investigate, and then left alone to get on with the job. There were no duty statements and a minimum of record keeping. Daily diaries were maintained and scrutinised weekly by the administrative sergeant but I never knew of any check on the validity of the entries in them. It truly was a Golden Age for the detective staff. Those who were competent and conscientious (about half of the staff) worked; the others — the incompetent and the lazy — got by wi
thout rebuke. In most detectives’ offices in those days, there was a “hard man” or someone who passed as such. A former Victorian footballer was our “heavy”. All state Forces found it advantageous to have one on tap for those occasions — rare in South Australia — when a particularly dangerous criminal needed to be interrogated by a detective whom he respected. This usually meant “respected” physically. There was a certain status attached to this role and supervisors tended to be lenient in their duty allocations to recognised hard men. Our hard man so arranged it that he spent a great deal of duty time attending race and trotting meetings where he enjoyed fraternising with bookmakers and trainers. I know he had difficulty in passing the sergeant’s examination for promotion, but on the fourth attempt he was successful. In my eight years I never knew him to mount the witness box to give evidence.
There was no procedure for reviewing cases that had come before a court. “Not guilty” (NG) cases were never examined to see how the conduct of the prosecution could have been improved. The “NG” verdict was always put down to the contrariness of juries. We never received advice from the staff of the crown prosecutor on how we might have handled an investigation any better. Although there was no departmental library, and no incoming journals, the CIB was well served by one of Commissioner Leane’s innovations. He organised the preparation of a Reference Book which contained details of the sections of all the state and federal acts which were relevant to state police responsibilities and powers. This book was hard-backed, but loose-leafed, so that amendments which came out regularly could be inserted. As well as the relevant legislation, there were details of up to three leading cases on any significant point. But this single book was hardly a substitute for a departmental or branch library. I immediately subscribed to the English Police Journal and later to the new Journal of Criminology. At some personal cost, I hunted around the secondhand shops for an old edition of Archbold’s Criminal Pleadings and eventually located one. Archbold was the standard text on English law; it laid down what was necessary to prove a charge and how to frame an indictment. One could learn in Archbold, for example, that it was impossible to steal fish in the sea, since they belonged to no one. Fish in English rivers were different. Prior to my purchase of Archbold, the South Australian police had simply relied on precedent: an indictment would be worded in the same manner as a previous one. After I’d introduced Criminal Pleadings, the younger members of the CIB began to argue the merits of recent court decisions when assembling for the 9.00 a.m. and the 2.00 p.m. musters. It was rare for any of the older men to participate.