by James Morton
Here lies the remains of William Augustus Miles, Police Magistrate and Late NSW Commissioner of Police, whose parentage was derived from Royalty. He was born in Hampshire, England, and died April 24th 1851 in the 53rd year of his life, neglected and in poverty.
The third police chief, Captain Joseph Innes, had actually served for a short time in 1841 before Miles. But in 1848 he replaced Miles and, in turn, retired in 1849 because of ‘irregular practices’ when he had been a visiting magistrate at Darlinghurst Gaol, which was run as a private enterprise by Governor Henry Keck, his wife and his mistress.
Keck, Irishman, forger and all-purpose rogue, whose wife, Teresa, had reportedly sadly died in Ireland, arrived in Sydney in 1832 along with his six children. Also in tow was his mistress, Sarah Whitehouse, who was posing both as his wife and as a governess. Keck had obtained the post after presenting forged papers showing he was a British Army officer who had been governor of Dublin Castle prison. In reality he had only been a low-paid clerk. Once in office he conducted the prison as a model of private enterprise, helped by chief warder Elias Hibbs and Innes, who, for a small share of the takings, turned a blind eye to the goings on.
And takings there were. First Keck had the prisoners organise vegetable gardens, then a dairy farm, followed by poultry—he kept two emus—and a pigsty. The animals were fed with grain intended for the prisoners, but Keck did show some sort of communal spirit: the inmates were also allowed a small percentage of his profits. There was a hat-making cottage industry, with prisoners working at night and on Sundays to produce 200 cabbage-tree hats a week. For a fee, inmates were allowed out at night to go fishing at Woolloomooloo, and Keck sold their catch. The more talented male prisoners were hired out as musicians, and those inmates who had money to spare could spend it on the female prisoners, whom he organised into brothels. This was so successful that he recruited Sydney prostitutes to help out and even established other bordello premises in the courthouse. In this he was helped by both Sarah Whitehouse and the real Mrs Keck, who, far from being dead and buried in Ireland, had arrived in Sydney in 1835 and been appointed matron at the gaol. The trio must have got on well because between the two women he fathered another six children.
Of course it all ended in tears. At first tales from released prisoners were not believed—Keck was regarded as generous and good company. But an inmate was seen out and about in Sydney and the next day Keck’s coachman, James Cox, was recognised as a serving prisoner. The final straw came when members of one of his orchestras were so drunk that they refused to return to the gaol. An inquiry, begun in June 1849, lasted nineteen days and evidence was given by thirty-five witnesses before a select committee of the Legislative Council, which found the gaol to be ‘a nest of profligacy and corruption’. On 22 August chairman Charles Cowper wrote in his report:
Evidence given by Mr Keck and Captain Innes so far from being calculated to make your committee acquainted with the real state of the gaol was framed expressly with the intention of keeping them in ignorance and defeating the object of their appointment.
The Sydney Morning Herald took a righteous stance:
That burglaries should be fearfully on the increase, that life and property should be daily and hourly becoming less secure in this city and in the suburbs, can hardly surprise when the model gaol of the colony is converted from a prison into an hotel; from a house of mourning into a house of feasting; in short, from a place of restraint, discomfort, and hard-fare, to a place of luxury and no discipline.
Keck, his wife, Innes and the turnkey Hibbs were dismissed. Later Keck became the clerk of St George’s markets. By then he was a rich man. He died on Christmas Day 1863 in Surry Hills.
It is generally accepted that the standards of serving officers are directly related to the standards of senior officers. Given this sort of leadership in the police force of the new colony, it is not surprising corruption flourished and that, between 1844 and 1847—at a time when the force averaged 100 men—eighty-two officers were dismissed. The police, as they were in Britain at the time, were thoroughly unpopular, combining as they did brutality and cowardice. There were, of course, exceptions.
However, on the Queen’s Birthday holiday in 1848 crowds attacked the St James watch house on Elizabeth Street and released the prisoners, smashed furniture and destroyed the library. Two years later, after the New Year’s Eve 1850 riots, in which the police lost control of a largely young crowd of rioters for up to four hours, a commission reported there was still a substantial criminal element in the force that collaborated with the men they were supposed to be arresting. When the ringleaders were finally arrested all but two were released by the police, and it was then that the force was described as being at an all-time low, with scandals, drunkenness and bribery prevalent among the constables.
In the 1850s CGB Lockhart, the commissioner for Crown lands, wrote in his Sketch of a Proposed System of Police for the Colony of New South Wales that the constables were ‘such confirmed drunkards they could not be trusted out of surveillance’, and ‘many of them were either infirm old men or petty tyrants with itching palms’.
When at the beginning of the 1860s the New South Wales police system was being remodelled by Sir Charles Cowper, Edmund Walcott Fosbery was offered and accepted the position of secretary to the department and acting inspector-general, arriving in Sydney in 1862. Born in England in 1824, he had been a company secretary before he migrated to Victoria and the Mount Alexander goldfields, later joining the Victorian police force as a gentleman-cadet.
That year riots on the goldfields at Lambing Flat (near Young) in New South Wales saw police and the military deployed to restore peace and led to a new push for more effective policing in the colony.
In 1862 the Police Regulation Act was passed by the colonial parliament, and on 1 March that year all existing police forces amalgamated to establish the New South Wales Police Force under former Army captain John McLerie as inspector-general.
The force had its headquarters in Phillip Street, Sydney, and the colony was divided into districts and sub-districts. There were 800 policemen at the ranks of superintendent, inspector, sub-inspector, sergeant, senior constable and constable. The force was divided into foot police, mounted police and water police, and now Fosbery established a detective force.
Fosbery was appointed inspector-general of the police force in 1874, after the death of Captain McLerie. On his retirement in 1904 things had changed for the better, and he commented:
A peaceful traveller, or even an armed escort, was not safe from highwaymen forty-three years ago. The police and mounted patrols, who were under control of various magistrates, were not always a class of men equal to coping with the villainy and criminality of the day.
During that time, however, there had been two contrasting boards of inquiry. The first, in 1867, into crime in the Braidwood district, had been censorious of both the magistracy and the police. Bail was being given far too often and derisory sentences imposed. One magistrate had effectively opted out of dealing with bushranging cases to avoid reprisals against his property. As for the police, officers were far too friendly with the families of bushrangers and were not under the proper control of their superintendent. The leniency of magistrates was an early example of the judicial and public behaviour that led to the police thinking they were underappreciated and unsupported, and therefore disinclined to take positive action against criminals.
The second was the 1892 Royal Commission on Alleged Chinese Gambling and Immorality and Charges of Bribery Against Members of the Police Force. It followed allegations that there had been corruption in dealings with the Chinese population, then centred on North George Street in Sydney, and regarded by the complainants as the best beat for obtaining money. The allegations against the police included wanting chests of tea, ‘diamonds for their fingers’ and, worse, ‘gifts of women’. As for the Chinese immorality, that was the seduction of European girls, promiscuous intercourse with European women and opiu
m smoking.
The commission reported favourably on the Chinese community, which it considered singularly peaceable and generally law abiding. It also approved of the way the Chinese dealt with their women. As for the allegations of immorality: there was no real evidence of seduction, the girls who lived with Chinese men were happy; and prostitutes were treated better than the drudges of some white families. But—and this was a big but—all succumbed to opium smoking. As for the allegations that police were turning a blind eye to Chinese gambling and were taking bribes, the commissioners, also a little myopically, found:
With reference to the charges of bribery generally, the commissioners would state one consideration that renders the truth of them all extremely improbable. No beat is under the exclusive of any individual constable. On the contrary, not only are officers relieved from duty at stated intervals by other officers, but they are frequently shifted from one part of the district to another, so that for bribery to be effectual it would have to be, to a large extent, general, and that amongst so numerous a body of men who surely include a percentage of honest individuals, is practically out of the question. Thus, after the most searching inquiry, after plying witnesses with questions often verging in their bias upon unfairness to the police, the commissioners emphatically discredit the charges of bribery.
It was among the first of many exculpatory inquiries over the next century.
Sydney wasn’t alone in police problems. Down south in Van Diemen’s Land, a February 1853 newspaper recorded an early example of how police corruption was allowed to flourish.
No less than six cases of police misconduct came before the Bench last week, the offenders being all convicts, and most of them fresh from Port Arthur. No free man is safe against the attacks of these infamous scoundrels, unless his position in life is such as to render it dangerous to meddle with him; strange to say, however, notwithstanding the daily exposures of police incompetence and misconduct, they are supported through thick and thin by magistrates, and punishment is administered in no homeopathic doses on the testimony of scoundrels who never tell the truth unless by accident.
For many years, well into the late twentieth century, Victorian politicians and high-ranking officers in the police believed that, while corruption thrived in New South Wales, when it came to the Murray River it drowned. They were deluding themselves and others with them. From the foundation of the force there were troubles at all levels. It was unsurprising. In their first seventeen years the police were paid less than road labourers; there were no standards of entry and there was no code to govern police conduct.
Before then, in August 1838, Henry Batman, chief constable of the Melbourne City Police, under whose tutelage some of these police services had grown, was dismissed for bribery. Between 1838 and the appointment of Superintendent EPS Sturt in 1850, no fewer than six chief constables were engaged to lead the city’s police. One of these, William Sugden, embraced the new English model of detectives and devoted 10 per cent of his force to a detective branch.
In 1851, after Victoria separated from New South Wales, a fine-sharing policy was introduced in an effort to recruit constables. Naturally, this had disastrous consequences. The police were keen to weed out sly-groggers, whose convictions produced fines, but serious assaults, which would not, went undetected.
Reliance on informers became the fundamental means for detectives to solve crime. Informer payments came from the wages of detectives without reimbursement. The select committee on police in 1852 was told that ‘there has been, in the case of several detective officers, a most suspicious suddenness in getting rich’.
However, magistrates were often perceived as being anti-police in licence cases. Constable Patrick Bourke said days of investigation and surveillance would come undone when the magistrate would ‘dispose of the case and turn around and look at you as if you were a dog’. This was unsurprising: many of the licensing magistrates had financial holdings in the hotels the police were trying to prosecute. And of course many police disobeyed the 1853 regulation that forbade them to moonlight on night shift for publicans—an open invitation for corruption among the poorly paid constabulary. Frequenting brothels and drunkenness were endemic amongst police, and in 1854 a prison was built in Richmond specifically to hold offending officers.
After 1854 Victorian police were given enormous discretion to maintain what was referred to as ‘moral order’. This was largely maintained by sporadic raids targeting the poor and working classes, whom many in the upper echelons saw as synonymous with the criminal class. Gambling, prostitution and illicit liquor only became the subject of police concern if conducted by those ‘worthy of watching’. During the 1850s public houses were ubiquitous in Melbourne, and visitors noted that licensing laws were ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’. The laws were notoriously unpopular and the police, who relied primarily on their network of informants to solve crimes, did not want to alienate the locals by using trickery or disguises to secure sly-grog arrests, so in 1855 a force of ‘revenue police’ to suppress the sly-grog trade began operation.
The arrangement under which the police took a share of fines imposed by magistrates also brought trouble on the goldfields, where police tricked miners into admitting they had no licence and then arrested them. A witness to a parliamentary inquiry said, ‘A trooper is looked upon as a devil, no better!’ Police superintendent Armstrong was given the name The Flying Demon because of his standover tactics, which, apart from the usual flogging and bashing, included tying recalcitrant miners to trees and burning the tents of sly-grog sellers. During his short time in the force he was said to have illegally amassed £1500.
It was after the April 1852 robbery of the barque Nelson, when some 232 kilograms of gold was stolen, that arrangements were made to recruit police from Britain. Fifty officers from the paramilitary Irish Constabulary, who were experienced horsemen, were recruited at the proposed pay of ten shillings a day. They were required to post a £50 bond—more than double the cost of a single man’s passage—to remain in the force for three years from their arrival. It was thought that there should be an inspector, to be paid not less than £300 per annum, and three sergeants to keep them in order. London’s Metropolitan Police, where the policy was policing by consent, was approached to provide these officers.
It was then that the first of many commissions and committees was appointed to examine policing in Victoria, and on 8 January 1853 the Legislative Council passed an act for the regulation of a police force, merging the then seven separate bodies into one. The next day the force, under its chief commissioner, William Henry Mitchell, dealt with two furious drivers, two saddle stealers, two robberies, a vagrancy and a murder.
Unfortunately for the force, Mitchell lasted little more than a year before he resigned his post due to increasing ill health. The Argus newspaper, never a supporter of the early police, paid him due tribute:
Nothing could be worse than its condition when he took the reins. Corruption, perjury, ruffianism of every description were rife throughout the force, till it had become a public nuisance, not a safe-guard. In a few short months, with the aid of a strong will, a sense of duty and a competent intelligence, all this has been so far reformed, that to calm observers like ourselves, it appears little short of miraculous.
After his retirement as chief, Mitchell seems to have travelled to England, ‘to avoid the local profiteers’, he said, with a virtual blank cheque to acquire provisions. Although he spent hundreds of thousands of pounds for a force of 2010, there was no doubting his integrity. As he explained, ‘I could have put aside £100 000 for myself and no one would have known’. His shopping skills, however, were less adroit and the department eventually sold piles of inappropriate uniforms, greatcoats and rifle bayonets at a huge loss.
Unfortunately, the first long-lasting commissioner—the gambler, drinker and womaniser Captain Frederick Charles Standish—was, unsurprisingly, not a success. In his native England there was said to be n
o more popular man on a racecourse, and in 1852 he sold his mortgaged properties to pay his gaming debts and set sail for the colonies. He became assistant commissioner of the goldfields and in September 1858 was appointed chief commissioner of police in Victoria, at a salary of £1200. He had already been rejected for the appointment in 1853, when he applied under an assumed name.
Standish was not a good choice. He certainly undertook some reforms, including the use of the telegraph and the railway for communication and transport, but his control was lax and he did not believe in any formal training for officers. There was also preferment for Irish Catholics (82 per cent of the force). Suppression of sly-grogging was in Standish’s view ‘inoperable’ and he continued the unofficial licensing system, under which favoured and well-controlled establishments went untouched by the police. Efforts to police gambling in Melbourne were as sporadic and discretionary as efforts to suppress other vices. Gaming was the domain of detectives, not beat police, and the focus was once more on ‘low-class’ establishments. By 1860 competition was rife among publicans, who set up skittle alleys and billiard rooms in their hotels, which also functioned as gambling venues. Tricksters setting up gaming tables at racecourses knew they had to pay detectives a fee. Just as half a century later Commissioner Blamey had a penchant for sly-grogging, Standish’s enthusiasm for the tables and cockfights made it difficult for police to see gambling as a crime, and hence it was rarely prosecuted.
From 1860 to 1863 there were no fewer than three select committees looking into his administration; the third suggested he be replaced, but he survived. Standish also had a close personal interest in the leading brothels in the city and it was he who took the Duke of Edinburgh on a tour during his 1867 visit to Melbourne. Clearly, Standish had an artistic eye. One of his preferences in the brothels was for naked white women to be placed on black chairs. He did not, however, survive the Ned Kelly outbreak. Legend has it that the hunt for Kelly was suspended while the weights for the Melbourne Cup were declared.