Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  After Kelly’s capture there were serious worries about the inefficiency of the country police and, more importantly, about corruption among those in Melbourne. According to the 1881 royal commission on the police, Standish’s conduct of the force was ‘not characterised either by good judgment, or by that zeal for the interests of the public service which should have distinguished an officer in his position’. There were clear examples of favouritism and one officer, John Sadleir, thought it might be even worse. Standish had a tendency to ‘form intimacies with some officers of like mind, and to think less of others who were much more worthy of regard’, but his ‘almost pathetic’ affection for Superintendent Frank Hare, notable in the period of the Kelly pursuit, was a symptom of the mental trouble under which he eventually broke down:

  His devotion to Frank Hare was of another kind—it was like the love of Jonathan for David. It was almost pathetic to see, during the months Captain Standish spent at Benalla in the Kelly time, how restless and uneasy he became were Hare out of his company. I have seen Standish on the top rail of a fence watching anxiously for Hare’s return from a short ride of a mile or two. He said to me that he was in constant fear lest some accident should happen to him.

  After his resignation as commissioner in 1880 Standish continued his rackety ways. In November 1882 he was nearly thrown through the window of the Melbourne Club by honorary member Colonel Craigie Halkett, whom he had called by a ‘provocative name’. He declined to prosecute, but the colonel duly resigned his membership. Standish died in the club on 19 March 1883 of cirrhosis of the liver. He is said to have converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. His appropriate legacy is the Standish Handicap, run at Flemington on New Year’s Day.

  Another Standish favourite was Superintendent Frederick J Winch, who had joined the force as a cadet in 1852. When Standish summoned Winch from Ballarat, he arranged for a house in Punt Road to be made ready for him, using police as labour and government supplies and materials. Winch was a gambling fanatic and had to be ordered by Standish to stop gambling at the depot; this did not stop him indulging his love elsewhere. At Beechworth he and Police Magistrate Barnard gambled with the elderly Judge Cope. They allowed him to win a few times, then upped the stakes and eventually took the judge for £300. The judge told his wife, and she publicly denounced Winch and Barnard as swindlers and also had some terse words to say about Mrs Barnard, a former barmaid.

  In July 1882 the vastly experienced Winch gave evidence to the Longmore Royal Commission on a variety of subjects, including the detective branch and the question of promotion from the ranks. Unfortunately, during his career Winch had conducted a system of organised corruption, allowing sly-grog shops, prostitution and gambling to flourish over a 20-year period. He had also blocked honest Melbourne police trying to stamp out these pursuits. Brought before a board as early as 1861, he was acquitted of charges except for borrowing money from a subordinate to balance the station’s books. Now allegations against him included being found near brothels in a drunken state, appropriating bottles of brandy and whisky from hotels, borrowing money, being found (sober) in Madame Brussels’ fashionable brothel in Lonsdale Street, permitting prostitution in hotels and improperly transferring a Sergeant O’Sullivan, who had been trying to clear the streets of prostitutes. The commission also looked into the affairs of Sub-Inspector Larner, whose chief fault seems to have been standing over publicans and ‘borrowing’ money that he never repaid.

  Overall the detective branch was seen by the Longmore Royal Commission as ‘so iniquitous that it may be regarded as little less than a standing menace to the community’ and a ‘nursery of crime’. It was institutionally corrupt and there were also complaints about the uncontrolled use of informers. The commission recommended that the branch be disbanded. Nevertheless, the force was still the place to be, and in 1888, 500 young men applied for the fifty positions available.

  As for Winch and Larner, the chief secretary thought it undesirable that they should be allowed to resume public duty. But—setting an unfortunate precedent that has continued for 150 years—instead of facing at least disciplinary proceedings, they were allowed to retire. Winch retired in November 1882, when he was fifty-five, keeping his superannuation of £326 a year.

  The dishonesty in the Victorian police of the time may be compared with that of the detective branch of London’s Metropolitan Police of the same period. In 1877 one third of the branch, admittedly only seven officers, appeared at the Old Bailey charged with betting frauds. The men received sentences of up to two years apiece.

  As always, what happens at the top influences the state of a force. Victorian chief commissioner Thomas O’Callaghan also led a chequered professional life. He joined the police in November 1867, aged twenty-two, and after becoming a detective was reduced to the ranks in 1871 for supplying liquor to a prisoner. Eleven years later he was accused of disrespectful behaviour to the Longmore Royal Commission, which declared him ‘not trustworthy’. Despite this he was promoted to inspector in 1892. He became chief commissioner in 1902.

  O’Callaghan was not supportive of the men under his command. During the 1890s he actively campaigned for police to retire at the age of sixty, thereby accelerating his own promotion. However, when he became chief commissioner he encouraged the government to raise the retirement age to sixty-five years. This both kept him in office and hampered promotion for his junior officers. The government’s decision was given effect by an order-in-council in 1902, after which, feeling betrayed by O’Callaghan’s about-face, officers met on 19 March 1903 to protest. With the newspapers of the time and politically unaligned politicians backing them, the order-in-council was cancelled.

  A new requirement that confined police to barracks to provide an emergency response capability also met with hostility. Police openly disobeyed O’Callaghan’s decision and a group went directly to the chief secretary to have the order annulled. With a rash of additional complaints from the community, Premier Thomas Bent appointed James Cameron as chairman of a royal commission to inquire into the force and its management.

  The 1905 Cameron Royal Commission found ‘many blemishes’ in O’Callaghan’s administration. He had caused dissent in the ranks when he refused to retire and, worse, he was alleged to have an improper interest in licensed premises in Carlton, something that, if proved, should have brought about his instant dismissal. Instead the committee merely referred the matter for a legal opinion. However, despite all this, he remained in office until he finally retired on 31 March 1913. He is the prototype of the corrupt commissioner Thomas Callinan in Frank Hardy’s novel Power without Glory.

  Even John Mitchell Christie, whose use of disguise and then-unorthodox methods led him to be called the Sherlock Holmes of the Melbourne police, was not above suspicion. The well-known thief-taker, sportsman and later customs officer was thought to have lived with the wife of Levi Walker while the skeleton-key maker and bank robber was in Pentridge in the 1860s. Worse, he had ‘dressed her like a lady’. Christie, who resigned in dubious circumstances, was not a fan of the subsequent efforts of the force, writing in his diary:

  One does not expect the genius of a Sherlock Holmes for comparatively small wages but the pretensions of the Victorian force are such as to warrant the public in expecting a high average of successes.

  However, it may simply have been a bit of sour grapes.

  If the 1901 merger into a federation of the various colonies gave rise to expectations of better policing in the states and territories in the new century, these hopes were to be disappointed.

  3

  SPOOKS, STRIKES AND SCANDALS: VICTORIA 1920–1946

  ‘A Police strike is a rare and beautiful thing’, wrote Bertha Walker in Solidarity Forever!, her study of Australia’s radical history. Whether a police strike is actually a beautiful thing is debatable, but it was not rare at all in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when there were strikes in London (1918, 1919), Liverpool in support of London (1918), Ci
ncinnati (1918), Boston (1919), Long Beach (1920) and Quebec (1920). In 1924 in South Australia the entire force threatened to tender its resignation, in an attempt to obtain a wage increase.

  By the early 1920s the reputation and morale of the dreadfully underpaid Melbourne police were in serious trouble. The chief commissioner was paid just over half that of his New South Wales counterpart, and at a time when a man’s hat cost about half a pound, a suit just over £5, a dining-room suite £42 and the cheapest Vauxhall car £825, the basic wage for a Victorian policeman for a 47 ¼-hour week was a little over £5.

  There were demands that officers should be given pensions. Victoria remained the only state not to provide these to police, the entitlement having been abandoned in 1902. Over the years the non-pensioners in the force had grown and by the 1920s totalled 74 per cent. The government, which had been warned that this balance was now a problem in the force—for one thing, pensioned officers responded to emergencies more swiftly than non-pensioned ones—disregarded the advice. Overtime payments were still outstanding from the policing of a long-running waterside strike. A semiofficial pension system for injured officers, which had been run by the Police Association, had been scrapped. Then, in the autumn and winter of 1923, militants led by Constable William Brooks were agitating for pay parity with New South Wales officers as well as to be given one Sunday in two off instead of only one in four.

  Additionally, there were difficulties with the plainclothes licensing division, with allegations that some of its members were consorting with criminals, such as Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor. There were also allegations that the police were leaning on the brothel madams, asking up to £50 a week protection, and more if they had lost at the trotting. At pavement level one girl was said to be paying a beat policeman half of every five shillings she earned.

  There was a similar situation in Adelaide, where there were allegations of graft with police who enforced the Betting Act. It was suggested that no bookmaker could make a living without immunity from police interference. The going rate was alleged to be £4 a week to two constables, and when the bookmakers stopped paying arrests followed. Samuel Lampard gave evidence in support of bookmakers Eric and John Shannon. He said he had been paying for ten years. Plainclothes policemen were getting a staggering £40 a week ‘under the lap’ and were buying motorcars with the proceeds. Truth newspaper interviewed twenty-three bookmakers, and twenty-one said they were paying the police.

  The Victorian officers had no confidence in their new commissioner, Alexander Nicholson. Appointed in 1922 over far more qualified men, he had never completed primary school and until just before his appointment had been stationed in Ballarat. Although a man of personal bravery, he had no conception of the problems confronting a city force, nor how to deal with them. To add to the officers’ complaints, in November that year he reintroduced a system of secretly monitoring beat officers using special supervisors known as ‘spooks’, a system tried, tested, found flawed and discarded in the first few years of the twentieth century. Special supervisors were given a motorcar and, working in either plainclothes or uniform, would tour the city rooting out beat officers found indulging in unacceptable behaviour such as taking free meals or sleeping on their shift. The officers were reported and fined or more severely disciplined. There was no doubt there had been skiving. In the celebrated 1921 Gun Alley murder case, the beat officer admitted he had not patrolled the alley as he should have done on the night Alma Tirtschke was murdered. The long-running journal Round Table reported:

  [An] increase in burglaries in city premises upon beats regularly patrolled by constables had made many people doubtful of the integrity of some members of the force and the administration of the licensing law had not been above suspicion.

  There was also more than just a hint of nepotism in Nicholson’s appointments, which included his brother-in-law. Other appointments were of the ‘set a thief’ principle and, unfortunately, the men appointed as supervisors were not of the highest calibre or integrity. One man had himself been reported on two occasions as being drunk on duty, the second time just a year before his new appointment.

  In February 1923 Nicholson transferred seventeen plainclothes licensing officers back into uniform. They included Constable Brooks, whom Nicholson thought ‘unfit for this class of work’ and who had ‘tried to create a deal of trouble at that time’. Later Brooks was fined five shillings when he left his post in Swanston Street after he saw his replacement, who was fifteen minutes late, walking towards him, instead of waiting for his actual arrival. Although he was married and living in Prahran, Brooks was then transferred to Geelong. Another officer, James Dunn, who queried his own transfer, was promptly charged with a disciplinary offence and fined. The fine was later overturned, but he received no explanation for the move.

  Brooks was then transferred to the licensing branch in rural Colac and refused to go on duty. He was promptly charged with insubordination but obtained a public hearing for his appeal. He argued that he was ‘under the impression that the Chief Commissioner had given instructions that he was not to be employed on licensing duty’. He was acquitted.

  On 31 October 1923, Derby Day in Victoria, with Melbourne packed for the racing, Brooks persuaded the 10 p.m. night shift at Russell Street to refuse to go on duty. Their sole aim, at this stage, was to have the spook system withdrawn. Nicholson did have the sense to declare that the supervisory system would be discontinued, but unfortunately no one told Brooks and the other officers. Why has never been satisfactorily explained. It was possibly because Nicholson did not wish to be seen to give in to a small group of firebrands. Instead Brooks had a meeting with Nicholson and Premier Harry Lawson and was told that, in effect, officers could like it or lump it. Brooks persuaded them to choose the latter.

  When on the night of 1 November Brooks and twenty-eight men, later dubbed the Famous Twenty-Nine, refused to go on duty, Lawson told them to return to their posts. They refused; Brooks and another were dismissed from the force, and the remainder were discharged. Dismissal meant not receiving a ‘certificate of character’,not being allowed to associate with officers, and not being allowed in a police station. Despite his ban, Brooks toured police stations in an effort to bring the force out on strike, telling them, quite wrongly, that all officers at Russell Street were ‘out’. By noon he had persuaded over 600 officers to strike, or at least not to report for duty until the situation was clearer.

  The news spread like wildfire, and as a result the heart of the city was in the hands of criminals, who mugged and robbed, with the remaining officers unable to stop them. Shop windows were smashed, trams were set on fire and a massive two-up game was played on the streets. Stores such as Myer were looted and the proceeds taken back to the suburbs for sale to the likes of Squizzy Taylor. Round Table commented:

  In the police strike riots seventy-eight shops were smashed. Police on strike marched around the city in ordered formation, hooting the constables who were still on duty and in particular abusing those who were still attempting to control the traffic at busy city intersections.

  The hapless Nicholson was left isolated and Lawson now looked to the military in the form of Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, who had been knighted after distinguished and decisive action in the First World War, to restore order. In a matter of hours he rounded up a special constabulary force with batons, brassards and a hat with the letters SCF. After four hours of fighting, the streets were once again under control. But by then three people had been killed and £78 000 in damage had been done. A shopkeepers’ association was formed to claim compensation.

  Only two of the protesting officers had a right to a pension. None was allowed back into the force, although one man, James Golding, was admitted to the South Australia Police and a second, William Fellowes, joined the Peace Officer Guard in Sydney and later the Commonwealth Police in the Australian Capital Territory. Eventually most of the men obtained better jobs than they had held in the police force. Some took jo
bs in the tramways as night watchmen and in the penal department as warders. For a time Bill Winterton, who later became a hotel manager, was a well-known figure spruiking outside the Tivoli Theatre.

  Brooks was never called to give evidence at the subsequent royal commission on the police inquiring into the riots and their causes, and he later moved to Hay in country Victoria, where he worked as a contractor and then as a night watchman. In 1943 he became a caretaker in a college in Ballarat and died the following year.

  There were two more scandals to come. In the summer of 1925 The Argus ran a story about brothel owners purchasing protection from police. It was claimed that a Joseph Nicolte had written letters to the chief secretary and the officer in charge of the plainclothes police, complaining that numerous brothels in Little Lonsdale, La Trobe and Spring streets operated without police hindrance. In March Josephine Ricardo handed a sworn declaration to the chief secretary in which she claimed that prostitution was flourishing in central Melbourne and police were being paid off by a core of brothel keepers known as ‘the Combine’ to avoid prosecution. It was also hinted that drug taking was rife in the brothels.

  Police graft was reported as operating at all levels. Unless they were bribed to go away, policemen on the beat would loiter in front of brothels, scaring away the customers. More senior police were said to receive large payments to ensure that no prosecutions were launched against ‘the Combine’. It was also claimed that prostitutes who attempted to operate on their own account were invariably prosecuted. By the standards of the times, the sums of money involved were large. In 1921 one woman is said to have paid £2295 to the police in ‘protection’ money. Amid calls for his removal Commissioner Nicholson was reported as denying ‘any knowledge of these things’.