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The original publication details are as follows:
Title: The iron hand in the velvet glove : the modernisation of policing in New Zealand, 1886-1917
Author: Hill, Richard S.
Published: Dunmore Press in association with the New Zealand Police and with the assistance of Historical Branch, Dept. of Internal Affairs, Palmerston North, N.Z., 1995
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
For my family
The History of Policing in New Zealand, Volume Three
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
The Modernisation of Policing in New Zealand, 1886-1917
Richard S Hill
Dunmore Press in association with the New Zealand Police and with the assistance of the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs
©1995 Richard Hill/Crown Copyright ©1995 Dunmorc Press
First published in 1995 by Dunmore Press Ltd in association with the New Zealand Police and with the assistance of the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.
Australian Supplier:
Federation Press
P.O. Box 45
Annandale 2038 NSW
Australia
ISBN for complete set of 5 volumes 0-477-01346-5
ISBN for Volume I, Part 1, 0-477-01347-3
ISBN for Volume I, Part 2, 0-477-01348-1
ISBN for Volume 11, 0-477-01401 -1
ISBN 0 86469 244 7
Text: Times New Roman 10.8/12
Printer: The Dunmore Printing Company Ltd,
Palmerston North
Copyright. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: A ‘Peaceful Order of Things’ 1
PARI ONE: Problematic Policing in the Stabilised Society, 1886-1897 5
1 New Police Force, New Expectations 7
2 Pressures to ‘Professionalise’ 27
3 ‘Peace Preservers’ and Detectives 40
4 Varieties of ‘Vigilance and Control’ 59
PART TWO: Trauma and Reform: Tunbridge’s Commissionership, 1897-1903 79
5 Commission, Commissioner and Change 81
6 Social Concerns, Police Concerns 96
7 The Path to ‘Professionalisation’ 108
8 Surveillance and Investigation 119
9 Frontier and Fringe 127
10 Post-Commission Policing 141
PART THREE: The Pursuit of ‘Professionalisation’, 1903-1912 163
11 New Technology, Old Troubles 165
12 Preventing and Detecting 184
13 Regulating Society, Regulating Police 205
14 The Force Under Renewed Review 227
15 ‘Native’ and Other Problems 241
16 Transitions 251
PART FOUR: Industrial Unionism, Police Unionism, 1912-1913 271
17 New Commissioner, New Government 273
18 ‘Unusual Circumstances’: The Waihi Strike, 1912 283
19 The First New Zealand Police Association 296
20 A ‘Most Arduous Time’ for the State: The Great Strike, 1913 304
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PART FIVE: Challenges and Continuities, 1913-1917 325
21 Discipline and Discomfort 327
22 War ‘Excitement’, War Duties 341
23 Reordering and Rationalisation in Both Branches 362
24 Controlling Indigenous Peoples 382
25 'The Coming Terror’: The Demand for Women Police 395
Conclusion 407
References 431
Notes 435
Select Bibliography 467
Index 514
Preface
This book concludes my examination of policing in (mostly) nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand. For the theoretical approach underpinning this series, refer to the introductory section in the first volume and the conclusion in the present study. Working in a pioneering arena of history has been an exciting challenge. A number of the policing methods depicted will be recognised by those familiar with studies of ‘western’ and colonial policing (even if my theoretical framework might differ from many such works). The application of ‘British’ domestic and imperial policing methods to the colony of New Zealand has however produced its own indigenous adaptations and innovations, and the ‘History of Policing in New Zealand’ series has focused on exploring how and why these occurred.
The themes and conclusions in the three volumes/four books which comprise my contribution to The History of Policing in New Zealand are of course entirely my own responsibility, but I am indebted to many people for their help. My principal thanks are to those listed in the prefaces to the preceding volumes to this book. Policing the Colonial Frontier and The Colonial Frontier Tamed. Where people fitting this category have played a specific role in the current work, their names are repeated in the list of acknowledgements in the bibliography. I must single out, however, Chief Inspector S I Young for his continuing role in liaising between myself and the New Zealand Police; I McL Wards and J Phillips, Chief Historians at the Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs, which has hosted this work; Mrs P Wheeler and D Green, successive editors at the Historical Branch who have whipped this series into shape and provided invaluable support services, latterly shared by Mrs K Hastings; and my wife Jane Tucker, whose assistance in so many ways has been beyond evaluation. The word-processing for the present volume was patiently carried out initially by Brenda Watson, and then by Secretarial Services at Internal Affairs. My friends and colleagues in my work on Treaty of Waitangi matters have been unfailingly supportive.
I am also grateful to the comparative handful of people, many of them current or retired police personnel, who comprise the ‘police history community’ in New Zealand. They have helped me gain the knowledge and insight not readily accessible to an ‘outsider’, although I should add that many of them would not necessarily agree with my overarching theoretical approach - nor, indeed, I with their way of looking at the world. I would like to thank, as well, successive Commissioners of Police who have supported the project by arranging access to material
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and resources, but none of whom have in any way attempted to intervene in my interpretations.
Finally, I would like to single out for especial praise the army of archivists, manuscript librarians and librarians without whose help and expertise the piecing together of this history would have been the more difficult by a considerable degree. Their contribution can be gauged, albeit indirectly, from a perusal of the references, which I am pleased have been reinstated to the series through a change in publishing circumstances. I welcome publisher Murray Gatenby and his staff at the Dunmore Press to the series, to which this volume is my final contribution.
Richard Hill
Wellington
I June 1993
Corrigendum:
At final publication stage for Volume II in this series. The Colonial Frontier Tamed , text was omitted from page I. The following should be inserted into the second-last line between the words ‘where’ and ‘exposed’: ‘from 1861 the Victorian-modified Irish mode was introduced. With no extensive economic base, the North Island provinces were’
Preface
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PLACES MENTIONED IN THE TEXT
Preface
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Introduction: A ‘Peaceful Order of Things’
In 1886 the New Zealand Premier, Robert Stout, celebrated the emergence of a society characterised by ‘order and tranquillity’ within and between the two races of the colony, Maori and pakeha. Lowering levels of social turbulence, a heightening of social stability, were characteristics of the whole ‘civilised world’, reflective of fundamental economic and socioideological developments. Although factors of class, ethnicity and gender continued to underpin New Zealand social relations, the colony shared with other ‘developed’ societies the onset of many decades generally characterised not by overt conflict but by ‘social order’. In such societies, this state of affairs had been attained neither by the disappearance of the manifestly unequal distribution of wealth and power, nor by any increased physical coercion by the forces of the state.
Instead, the controlling forces in such societies had developed a sophisticated, hegemonic exercise of ruling power. Earlier efforts to impose an acceptable degree of ‘peace and good order’ had relied on a mixture of physical coercion and (to use J K Galbraith’s words) an ‘obtrusive, ostentatious effort to win belief’ by the citizens in the desirability of the sought-after methods of socio-economic organisation and social activities. Relative success in this enterprise had led to ‘an imposed subordination’ of ‘correct’ beliefs and behaviours that was ‘unnoticed or taken for granted’ by most of the population. Most people acted, involuntarily, in the desired ways most of the time: the citizens had become ‘conditioned’ to a way of life that maximised the smooth operations and development of the capitalist economy and the social relations upon which it depended.
The pace and shape of this evolution of social order had differed in each of these societies. In New Zealand and other colonies, socio-racial trends towards stability had been assisted, and at key periods, imposed, by state coercive force. The authorities had arrayed at their disposal a continuum of social control strategies and tactics, ranging from the overtly coercive pole of military conquest through to ‘benign’ (and inexpensive) hegemonic means of attaining ‘peace and tranquillity’. In the early years of the colony, the ‘demands of order’ had led to police and other state coercive agencies being generally suppressive in their orientation. Policemen had geared their activities to preventing large numbers of people from behaving in ways not approved by the authorities - or securing their condign punishment if offences were perpetrated.
Just as the Canadian mounted police had overseen the ‘taming of the prairies’, so in New Zealand the police had constituted ‘key state
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personnel’ in the process of ‘pacification’ of the colonised spaces and their inhabitants. There were Maori who were resistant to ‘civilisation’ (sometimes to the point of ‘insurrection’) to suppress; there were large numbers of rootless young pakeha men to keep in check. Lower-class pakeha removed from the socio-ideological controls of relatives, neighbours, gentry, parson, factory and so forth in the ‘old country’ were considered likely to be troublesome, if not ‘criminal’. Pakeha bom in the colony were perceived as more reliable, given the emergence and strengthening of social and bureaucratic controls indigenous to New Zealand. In 1886, for the first time, the census revealed that New Zealandborn Europeans outnumbered immigrants. By now it was considered that not only were the Maori definitively conquered, they were a ‘dying race’ and likely not to present a long-term problem to the ‘orderly’ mode of existence that ‘civilisation’ required. Thus it was that the political decisionmakers had decided that the condign strategy of control could be superseded by more benign policing organisations and methods.
Policing had complemented the fundamental social, economic, ‘racial’ and ideological processes responsible for this transition from ‘untamed’ to ‘tamed’ society, Maori and pakeha. Now, in turn, policing had adjusted to the socio-racial developments that had occurred since the overt suppression of the 1860s; during a two-decade transition, New Zealand had moved from frontier to post-frontier, a development monitored, surveilled and - where necessary - ‘corrected’ by the police. In the new society of ‘peace and security’ which was emerging, the subtleties of social control required an end to the overtly coercive control paradigm of the past. Symbolic developments reflected actual change. In 1886, the police and the military were formally split into two organisations, the Police Force being generally an unarmed body (except for batons). This was appropriate for a time when, by their own assessment, the police were no longer feared by the generality of the populace but had gained their ‘respect and confidence’. Their job mostly comprised protecting the tranquil society by their surveillance activities, and suppressing refractory elements who defied the emerging new consensus on appropriate behaviour and beliefs.
New official requirements of public behaviour and private belief which characterised the modem, post-frontier New Zealand led to new types of problems for the police. Certainly the nature and degree of overt resistance to state authority had lessened, but police subcultural norms and police organisation needed time to adjust. Some of the adjustments were to occur slowly and painfully. The trauma of change within the police was however alleviated by the new regulatory bureaucracies which were being put in place to supplement the surveilling gaze of the police; by more efficacious ways of supervising, even reforming, individuals deemed to be recalcitrant (the introduction to the colony of first offenders’ probation in 1886, for example); and by the unification of New Zealand policing a decade before, which enabled both economies of scale and a
Introduction
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co-ordinated, country-wide introduction of innovations in areas such as forensic techniques and traffic control.
Statistical evidence such as that revealing an increased number of various offences and convictions per head of population between 1896 and 1906 provide an indication of the difficulties of policing the emergent, modem New Zealand. Such figures not only mask the ‘broader consensus about public behaviour and property rights’ which now prevailed in the colony (and other parts of the globe) but also reflect the emergence of ‘relative tranquillity’. Increasingly greater state requirements of social discipline as time went by meant a heightened impact by state bureaucracy upon the lives of numbers of people hitherto immune from official interference. Many of the offences now considered worthy of formal appearance before the judiciary had been acquiesced in during the days of the frontier and of emergence from the frontier. In the past, for example, police regulation of liquor consumption often encompassed the toleration of drinking habits that were technically illegal so long as they did not lead to public disorder. Now, police were under increasing pressure to enforce the ‘rule of law’ (albeit a confused and irrational law, to add to their problems).
Although the strategic mode of policing had changed between frontier and post-frontier from condign to benign exercise of power, its purpose and many of its basic methods had not altered in their fundamentals. Police personnel continued to surveil the whole populace, largely through their patrolling capacity; in the final analysis, the police owed their distinctive identity to their ability to legally employ non-negotiably coercive force against the citizens. In brief periods when state power or sovereignty seemed under threat, mostly in situations of Maori ‘rebellion’ or pakeha ‘industrial unrest’, policemen were readily able to respond to police and/or political decision-makers’ requirements for a tactical shift on the social control continuum back to overt and condign coercion.
But because of what was assessed as the relatively stabilised social and racial condition of New Zealand, the police were firmly and - over time - increasingly able to show a generally benign face to the public. When in 1891 the Commissioner of Police spoke with confidence of‘the altered state ... of the colony’ from past turbulence to the present ‘peaceful order of things’, he was not challenged. Men of authority and power continued to make such assessments throughout the period under review, including during the problems thrown up by New Zealand’s heavy participation in the First World War. Although the coercive services of the police needed to be available to the state on a 24-hour, seven-day basis, policemen were able to present a non-threatening face to most of the people, most of the time. They remained the ‘iron hand’ of the state, but most people saw only the ‘velvet glove’ which covered it.
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PART ONE
Problematic Policing in the Stabilised Society, 1886-1897
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CHAPTER 1
New Police Force, New Expectations
On 1 September 1886 the Police Force Act came into effect. The New Zealand Constabulary Force was thereby split into the colony’s standing army (the Permanent Militia) and the New Zealand Police Force, a development reflective of events elsewhere in the Empire. Both sections still reported to the Minister of Defence, and the founding Police Force Commissioner, Colonel Major-General (soon) Sir George Whitmore, continued to focus on his main tasks as Commander of Colonial Forces and - as Under-Secretary for Defence - permanent head of the Defence Department. But police operations had long since become independent of the military in any meaningful sense, and now the colony’s police had become, in theory as well as in practice, a specialist bureaucracy.
Most of the 504 men in the new Force were from the Police Branch of the Constabulary, although soldiers could apply for transfer to the Force. Military experience was still highly regarded: all future recruits had to have served a year in the Permanent Militia. As an organisation the police was now completely separated financially and administratively from both the military and the criminal justice system. One of Minister of Defence John Ballance’s earliest letters to Police Commissioner Whitmore under the new arrangement was headed ‘Civil Police Force’, emphasising the break from the armed forces. The Constabulary Force rubric under which the Police Branch had operated for the past decade had often been called colloquially (and sometimes by officialdom itself) by the name of its predecessor organisation, the Armed Constabulary. Policing had now been firmly ‘demilitarised’, with key aspects of the old ‘militarised’ police legislation of 1846 and 1867-9 repealed, and new features (the right of the men to vote, for example) added. One of the last vestiges of an integral connection between police and judiciary - and therefore of non-professional interference in policing - was also now removed: the ex officio status of Justice of the Peace (JP) given to police commissioned officers. 1
In many ways, as Inspector Peter Pender noted in 1898, ‘the working generally of the Force’ continued much as before, and hence the restructuring was to a sizeable degree symbolic of the practical evolution of the police and the military. Both shared similar characteristics, particularly their normative modus opemndi of surveillance. ‘As with the police, so with an army’, wrote a former New Zealand police officer in 1905. ‘The fate of the latter depends to a large extent on the information
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8
acquired during peace time. In like manner the success of a police force is won by the united knowledge it has accumulated’. The key mode of surveillance in the Police Force was that of the preventive patrol. The police were the übiquitous agents of the state, ‘watching and controlling’ every day and every night.
A constable of the New Zealand Police Force was instructed to ‘make himself acquainted with the local features of the district where he may be stationed, and with the names and characters of the inhabitants thereof’; he was to watch ‘the arrival of suspicious characters’ and report these and any ‘extraordinary circumstances’ to his superiors; he was to exercise discretion in his surveillance and patrol activities. In the large urban areas the police regime’s ‘incessant observation’ was carried out through a ‘four hours’ beat system modified from that of the London Metropolitan Police system. One day shift patrolled from 5-9 am and 1-5 pm, the other from 9 am - 1 pm and 5-9 pm, with the men available for emergencies such as riot or fire in between times. At night, there was a single eight-hour beat from 9 pm to 5 am. The system was modified for smaller urban areas, and patrolling was random (but übiquitous) in rural areas.
The ex-Constabulary Force military was now, by contrast, a standing army, orientated towards external defence and available for domestic use only in the most extreme of emergencies. Because of the differences between the two organisations, the change had a few immediate ramifications for the police. The Draconian disciplinary clauses from the days of overt paramilitarism had been ‘continually violated’, and the Minister ordered their modernisation. There had initially been speculation that Whitmore was better suited to his military role and that the Assistant Under-Secretary for Defence, Major Walter E Gudgeon, a thorough and methodical administrator, would become the founding Commissioner of the New Zealand Police Force. Since there were, however, career policemen superior to Gudgeon in relative rank, a decision had been delayed, with Whitmore being induced to continue to undertake the (unpaid) top policing job in addition to his role as head of the military forces, permanent and volunteer. Within a few months it was time for a decisive move. Over the Christmas parliamentary recess, Colonial Treasurer Sir Julius Vogel went over government expenditure with a view to radical pruning. The police would not be unscathed, and Whitmore assessed that a more or less full-time Commissioner would be needed to do the job. On 31 December 1886, the government accepted Whitmore’s resignation as Commissioner of Police.
Whitmore had stayed only long enough to oversee the revamping of the regulations. On 5 January 1887 he was replaced as Commissioner by Gudgeon (who for a time remained Assistant Under-Secretary for Defence). The advantage of a military bureaucrat like Gudgeon was that he was unconstrained by ‘institutional loyalty’ to the old Police Branch of the Constabulary, The new incumbent, who had been a career officer in the Armed Constabulary and the Field Force of the Constabulary
New Police Force, New Expectations
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Force, had helped Whitmore reorganise New Zealand’s coercive forces, and had acted as head of police during Commissioner Henry E Reader’s last illness in 1885. He was a key architect of the revised arrangements for the coercive social control of the colony. The new ‘civilianised’ police regulations which stressed, for example, a more conciliatory attitude to minor offenders, were now quickly proclaimed. (On the other hand, many of the old military-style regulations remained in force; men could not leave barracks without notification, or go more than a quarter-mile from their station without permission; actions liable for ‘punishment or dismissal’ included habitually quarrelling with comrades.) Operative from their date of publication in the New Zealand Gazette, 12 January, the new regulations were to remain in force substantially unchanged until 1913. The theoretical and practical framework of a police system geared to a ‘stabilising’ society was now firmly in place.
Problems were, however, endemic. With the colony in the throes of long-term economic depression, the government insisted on a leaner, more efficient force. The key area of reduction was to thin out a topheavy structure, guided - where attrition proved inadequate - by confidential reports on all staff prepared by officers in charge of districts. This would be potentially very disruptive to Force morale. The number of 1/c sergeants, for example, was to be lowered by a third. The new Commissioner forecast, moreover, that the number of commissioned officers (18, including a ‘Detective Inspector’, C T Browne) could be reduced significantly before the end of the year. When the numbering system for constables and NCOs was reconstituted following the split from the military, relative seniorities were worked out. Those near the bottom of each rank and class feared for their positions, and some resented their placings vis-a-vis others. 2
The size of the Force however provided little margin for sickness, emergencies or other contingencies, so there could be no significant overall reduction in numbers. Helped by the bureaucratic personnel whom he had inherited at Police headquarters. Gudgeon persuaded the government of this; acting too precipitately on retrenchment would create unfairness and unhappiness, which would not be conducive to efficiency. Ballance therefore instructed that other modes of economising were needed. From 10 February 1887, for example, any man transferred to the Westland and (Otago) Lake Districts would no longer receive the daily goldfields allowance (ostensibly because transport improvements had reduced the cost of living there). Over the next couple of years there were a number of transfers out of these areas, to reduce the number of payouts. From 31 March 1888, the issuing of ‘fuel and light’ to out-stations ceased.
Recruits entering the police from 10 February 1887 would cease to be eligible for the long-service pay granted to police who had served more than five and 10 years, 6d and 1 s per day respectively. The pay increments accompanying each promotion in class within the rank of constable, now to be on a strict seniority basis except in special circumstances, were to
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The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
be a (poor) substitute for long-service pay. Of even less practical benefit were the long-service medals now being awarded under an 1886 Order in Council to men with 14 years’ service and clean defaulters’ sheets for the last three years. But at first discontent focused on the question of the goldfields allowance: transfer to such regions would now be in effect a penalty, given the higher cost of living there. The government resisted all pressure to recant, and four years later the allowance was abolished altogether. 3
In theory, promotion within and between ranks was an adequate substitute for long-service pay. But in practice, such upward movement proved to be rare as numbers in senior class and rank were gradually reduced. Access to reward monies was scant compensation, and for a while this was put on hold in any case because of defective wording in the legislation of 1886; moreover, until the Defence Minister forbade the practice in 1890, Gudgeon used the reward funds to reimburse police for out-of-pocket expenses and the like. After that, functions ‘clearly within the scope of their ordinary duties’ would not be rewarded. Instead, records of merit would be taken into account in promotion decisions. Police were now seen as at least quasi-professional. Their pay was to be their remuneration, with rewards given only in circumstances of - say - ‘exceptional intelligence, or exertion’. Another mode of supplementing wages, payment of fees and allowances to the men by entrepreneurs for duty at theatres, sports events and similar functions outside rostered hours (an economy measure introduced by Gudgeon to save the expense of policing fee-charging events) would be removed in 1897. 4
Grievances among the men over the increasing necessity to rely entirely on existing wages, at a time when promotion was scarce, were compounded by the lack of a police pension scheme. Ever since the centralisation of the colony’s policing in 1877 such a scheme had been mooted seriously by leading policemen, amongst whom it was almost a truism that the provision of a shield against old age and infirmity was the best way to make policing a more attractive, long-term employment prospect for good men. As Whitmore noted, a pension arrangement would encourage men to stay on in the police when outside wages rose. It would - given a forfeiture clause for ‘bad conduct’ - act as ‘a great lever to ensure discipline’. Finally, it would allow the discarding of aging or ill constables unable to keep pace with the work. The long depression had made policing a less unattractive occupation, and so men were staying on in unprecedented numbers - especially NCOs, some of whom had taken well over 30 years to reach this status. An 1880 bill drafted by Whitmore to establish police pensions had fallen through for fiscal reasons, but by the time of the founding of the New Zealand Police Force a new proposal was being widely touted: a mostly self-funded scheme supplemented only from fines levied on policemen. 5
This scheme proved not to be actuarially viable, and in a period of retrenchment it could not be replaced by a largely government-funded
New Police Force, New Expectations
28
scheme, especially for a rather middle-aged Force. But pressure for a pensions scheme intensified as a result of the new regulations. Under regulation 10, constables and NCOs were now obliged to retire at 60 and officers at 65. This was greeted with outrage: how could men who had been police all their lives, knew no other calling, and were ‘worn out’ by policing, earn a living? Although the Defence Minister pledged to find alternative state employment for retired police as government messengers, for example - this did not work out in practice. While resisting ‘a very general feeling in the force’ that a pension scheme was essential, new Defence Minister Thomas Fergus instead secured the revocation of regulation 10 in February 1888. This, while scarcely conducive to efficiency, allayed some insecurities, but the lack of a police pension remained a cause of deep discontent. It would surface intensely from time to time, whenever (for example) constables were badly injured or died in the course of duty, as with the drownings of Constables Henry Porter (at Port Chalmers) in 1887 and Charles Hogg (at Kohukohu) in 1893.
It is true that in such circumstances, and when men retired through age or infirmity, compensation of a month’s pay for every year of service up to 12 had normally been granted. The 1886 Police Force Act allowed the paying out of an unspecified amount of compensation for ‘wounds or severe injuries received in the performance of their duty, or as an allowance to such of them as shall be disabled by bodily injury received, or shall be worn out by length of service.’ But those forced to retire or the widows of deceased policemen had no right to compensation, and this was reinforced by regulation in December 1889. The uncertainty, and sometimes actual injustices, rankled. When Constable James Robinson of Westport died after striking his head on a projecting iron bar at the police station and left no money for medical and funeral expenses, the administration refused to pay them. The men clubbed together ‘so as not to leave a stain on the reputation of the force’. When Constable Hugh Stewart was disabled in the course of duty he was discharged in 1891 on an annual allowance, but had to wait anxiously each year to see if Parliament passed it in the Police Estimates. Moreover it became the practice that the lump-sum allowances were paid out only to those who had completed 12 years’ service. 6
The various suggested pension schemes had come to naught because, essentially, of the aging state of the Force in a period of fiscal constraint. Any viable superannuation mechanism would have to be a heavily subsidised one. Gudgeon made a number of unavailing suggestions for pension schemes, particularly on behalf of the men not eligible for longservice pay. The scene was set for a continuous battle on the issue in the last decade of the century. Year after year Gudgeon’s successor was to argue in vain that a superannuation scheme was a prerequisite for creating dynamism in the Force. 7
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The pace of retrenchment in the Police had quickened with the accession in October 1887 of the precarious and economy-minded ‘scarecrow ministry’ headed by Sir Harry Atkinson. His Defence Minister, Fergus, took a highly interventionist approach. Rationalisation inevitably led to the expected redundancies at senior level, as the number of stations and districts was reduced. In March 1888 the 17 police districts became 13. The three staff of the anachronistic Kawhia District had already been absorbed by Waikato, and now Inspector Samuel Goodall’s Thames District (its headquarters at Tauranga from 1887) absorbed the Waikato area and was renamed Tauranga District (soon to be under John Emerson after Goodall was transferred to Westland in 1889). It lost the area around Thames to Auckland District. Lawrence District was absorbed by Inspector Thomas K Weldon’s Dunedin District, Inspector William S Pardy’s Taranaki District absorbed Wanganui, and the bulk of Timaru District went to Inspector Andrew Thompson’s Oamaru District (some went to Christchurch). 8
Four Inspectors were laid off as a result of this restructuring. Alfred Buckley was replaced in Southland by Lawrence’s Samuel Moore. Hawke’s Bay’s increasingly erratic and violent-tempered Robert Bullen was replaced by William A Kiely, who transferred from the former Waikato headquarters of Hamilton. Bullen would fight off an 1889 prosecution for assault, presenting a revolver, threatening behaviour and breaking and entering, but was eventually found to be certifiably insane, allegedly as a result of brooding upon his loss of office, and soon died in an asylum. Wanganui’s Inspector William H James was, like the others who were retrenched, placed on retirement leave until 30 June 1888.
The fourth retrenched Inspector was the former Canterbury Province police chief Robert C Shearman, who in mid 1887 had been ordered to swap his Wellington command for John Bell Thomson’s Auckland District, Thomson having been assessed as not up to controlling such a large and turbulent area. This ditching of one of the most famous of the policemen imported from the colony of Victoria was - Fergus declared - a ‘most hateful’ task. The decision was not rescinded despite enormous pressure, probably because of Shearman’s frequent illnesses and his open bitterness about being passed over for the position of Commissioner. His handsome compensation was, he felt, insufficient to make up for the ‘unexpected and humiliating position’ he found himself in, and his inability at 62 to find new work. Thomas Broham replaced him in Auckland. Eight other policemen - including Sergeant John Nash, No. I on the 1886 staff list - were also retrenched, as were some clerical staff, although the longserving Christchurch and Dunedin district clerks. Sergeants Henry Lanauze and John Bell, fought back and survived in the Force until 1893 and 1900 respectively. 9
Amongst a host of ongoing economising measures, other police had their salaries, allowances and ranks reduced. And although Fergus agreed with Gudgeon that the cutting back had to stop before it became counter-
New Police Force, New Expectations
30
productive, William Russell, the aristocratic representative of large landowning interests who became Defence Minister in 1889, reimposed stringent retrenching measures. The veteran Otago Inspector Weldon was dispensed with early in 1890, and replaced eventually by Moore. At the same time, the Southland and Lake Districts were merged, under the latter’s Inspector James Hickson. 10
There had been, railed Broham in 1889, far too many ‘Violent changes’ in the organisation of New Zealand’s policing system since 1877. The men were uncertain and unsettled. Depression had coincided with modernisation to effect a continual and traumatic restructuring. Future Commissioner John Cullen was to tell the 1898 Royal Commission into policing that the powers of Inspectors began to be whittled away under Gudgeon - they lost the right to make transfers, for example. The centralisation of authority was one aspect of the process of modernisation. Gudgeon strove to both ameliorate the worst effects of retrenchment, and increase efficiency.
One of his attempted improvements was to emulate the Victoria Police by introducing an examination system. The intention was to base promotion on all-round ability rather than mere seniority or the wielding of ‘influence’. ‘Book learning’ as well as ‘street knowledge’ was by now important. Gudgeon had intended to introduce examinations in 1887, but there was a delay while background study material was compiled. There was no hurry, because the reduction in the numbers of 1/c constables and NCOs had further reduced the scope for promotion. Two years later he was ready. All constables who aspired to the grade of 1/c had now to pass a junior examination, which was offered twice a year. A pass in a senior examination became a prerequisite for NCO status.
Gudgeon appointed Resident Magistrate H Stratford of Oamaru as ‘Police Examiner’. The first examination - a junior one, held in January 1890 - succeeded in identifying police talent: the two top candidates, Arthur H Wright (with 179 out of 200) and John O’Donovan, were to become Commissioners. Although the examination was not to be regarded as competitive (‘a pass only is required, after which the rule of seniority has force’), four promotions resulted, O’Donovan moving to 1/c and Wright and two others to 2/c. Twenty-four of the 43 candidates passed ‘most creditably’ what Gudgeon acknowledged to be a ‘difficult’ test.
However, given the reduced numbers of senior police, lack of retirements from the Force, and its inability to expand, expectations for advancement were being created which could not be met. This was more particularly the case after 34 of 51 candidates in the junior examinations in June 1890 were successful. Many men in line for promotion to 2/c or 1/c under the old seniority rules did not hold passes. Neither group - those with passes, those without - could be satisfied, for there were to be very few promotions. When Dunedin’s Alexander Cruickshank topped these examinations, the local press were surprised to note that after 1 1 years in the Force he was still a 2/c constable: ‘ln any of the other
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colonies this class of man would be bound to come to the front’. He was not to attain NCO status until 1900. Gudgeon was inevitably associated with endemic problems such as this. The government assessed that his apparent inability to resolve them was due to a military (and therefore, backward-looking) perspective, and decided to opt for a Commissioner more steeped in a civilian mode. For his part, Gudgeon felt that he had been superseded as the result of a conspiracy of Roman Catholics within the Police who had influence at the highest levels of government. He was asked to resign, and was ‘kicked upstairs’ by being made a judge of the Native Land Court. 11
Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Hume, appointed on 1 July 1890, was at 50 two years older than Gudgeon. There was widespread protest at yet another military man being appointed over the professional policemen, but the new Commissioner had been thought suitable not only because of his administrative capacities but also because of his knowledge of coercive surveillance. He had been deputy governor of four English prisons before coming to New Zealand in 1880 as the colony’s first Inspector of Prisons. Continuity at police headquarters in the colony’s capital, Wellington, was provided by clerical stalwarts James Graham Fox, John Evans, John Tasker and J M Goldfinch. On taking up the Commissionership, Hume began to streamline the bureaucracy; he discovered, for example, an ‘evil’ whereby the route taken for orders from the Commissioner to reach the constable on the beat was ‘cumbersome and laborious’, and gave elaborate instructions to rectify the situation. 12
But his major problem was that the job of Commissioner had been forced on him in addition to his other duties (and at no extra pay). He remained Inspector of Prisons, Assistant Adjutant-General, a LieutenantColonel in the Militia, and Inspector of Volunteers. The last office was dropped from 1 April 1891, but only in favour of a far more strenuous one, Under-Secretary for Defence in place of the retrenched Captain C A Humfrey, a position he held until 1895. This ‘affable and pleasant’ man could only provide part-time attention to his policing role, making it easier for the Minister to increasingly fill the gap. Critics claimed that it was because he was accustomed to obeying orders that he so readily capitulated to ministerial direction. This was an exaggeration, but there was sufficient truth in it to explain how a man characterised by a hypercritical former Inspector as ‘an excellent organizer’ could allow some important matters to drift after his political masters stymied his ideas for reform.
Stratford’s report on the second junior examinations had stressed that the theoretical element needed supplementing with the ‘practical knowledge of discipline to be maintained - by parades, and drill’, for example. Bureaucratisation had gone too far, and could lead to new problems: theoretically orientated examinations could give clerks of court an advantage, for example, or could mean rural police gained city
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NCO jobs for which they were unsuited. The examiner also attacked political intervention in policing matters, a trend in recent years. He asked for his report to be published; it was not. Hume privately agreed with some of these criticisms. He postponed the first senior examinations, due that September, and then the next round of junior examinations. Then, in view of the promotional stagnation in the Force, there seemed no good reason to hold examinations, so they were dropped altogether. This was later widely seen as a mistake. At least the junior examinations had held out to successful candidates some hope of ‘promotion’ to a sought-after out-station. Other matters also fell gently into desuetude - the system of confidential reports on all staff, for example. 13
Where the hiatus of discipline, activity or knowledge of policing at the top of the Force was serious, the Minister would step into the breach, particularly given the need for ongoing retrenchment. This trend escalated when the Liberal Party formed New Zealand’s first overtly interventionist government on 24 January 1891. During what was to be two decades in power, ‘the accretion of state functions developed on an ad hoc basis’, and it was often personally directed by the Ministers. There had always been a high degree of state intervention into people’s lives in colonial New Zealand. Private enterprise was perceived as weak: the state would provide much of the capital for development, and an infrastructure to service it. Human and capital resources were too scarce, the terrain and flora too challenging, for there to be any other way to develop the economic capacity of the colony. Such intervention had been boosted by Vogel’s public works policies of the 1870s, and continued by the depression-ridden ministries of the 1880s. In terms of state interventionist practice, there was little except degree between the Liberals and their political foes at the 1890 election.
But ideologically, the Liberals differentiated themselves in a significant way: they were above class, above sectional interest, and represented the interests of all the people. Plural voting had been abolished the year before; now, for the first time, a political grouping which lauded political democracy as embodying the will of the people presented itself. They would unify New Zealand; they were protonationalists, ‘making a nation’ across town and country, across class; they would only do what the majority wanted. Emergent new norms of public morality, seen to be reflective of what the public wanted and/or needed, and other forms of social control, would receive legislative sanction. In many areas of public and private life, it was believed, ‘private enterprise should be subjected to a close, careful, ceaseless and effective system of vigilant control’. The practice of making temporary appointments to the civil service enabled the new government to employ, in great numbers, men loyal to the ‘radical’ ideas of the Liberals. Powerful civil servants came to occupy key positions in new departments. Men such as Edward Tregear and George Hogben had the effective status of Ministers, and ideological justification for their actions; ‘Closer
33
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and closer around the citizen shall the web of the State be drawn’, for the good of the social order and therefore of the individual citizen. Hume was no such figure.
Premier John Ballance, however, who had been in charge of policing at the time of the founding of the Force, took a keen interest in the police. His new Minister of Defence and holder of the policing portfolio, Richard John Seddon, took an even keener interest. The police, like all public servants, ‘must be completely subordinated to “the people” ’, in the form of the people’s representatives. With the Liberals in power, the state was seen as at last embodying the will of the people: bureaucrats would have to be subservient to that will, as represented by Ministers, whom the people now in theory controlled. Hands-on intervention into bureaucratic details was thus both axiomatic and principled. With full access to Ministers, ‘outlying districts’ disadvantaged in former days could receive their proper share of state largesse for development. State control too could alone remove ‘land monopoly’ and get ‘small’ farmers onto the land. Moreover, since the people controlled the government, no government action could be viewed as corrupt.
When new constables were required, they would be personally selected by Seddon from lists of available men (and advice on what proportion, for example, should be married) provided by the Commissioner. In fact, Seddon intervened in many aspects of policing. Soon after he took up his portfolio, he overturned Russell’s refusal to reinstate Constable Patrick McGill, who had been forced by Hume to retire as a result of drunkenness. This was a foretaste of things to come. Increasing intervention, moreover, was accompanied by yet another rigid economising drive. Twelve Inspectors and district administrative structures were considered far too many in the colony’s increasingly stabilised circumstances, and in view of what Seddon interpreted as ‘express directions from the people’ to exercise economy. Small districts reflected the poorer communications and closer surveillance and repression requirements of the more disorderly past - not a period when suppression of slygrog was ‘perhaps the most difficult matter we have to deal with’, and transport and communications were rapidly improving. Five districts would be abolished, and so five Inspectors were ordered to retire on 31 March 1891: Wellington’s J B Thomson, A Thompson at Oamaru, Dunedin’s S Moore (who had allegedly been neglecting the enforcement of the liquor laws) and W A Kiely and S Goodall of Hawke’s Bay and Westland respectively.
As a result of this retrenchment, Inspector Pender’s Christchurch District would absorb the Oamaru District, the new division to be called Christchurch and North Otago (although district names were often used loosely: this one was usually called Canterbury). Dunedin District, now to be headed by J Hickson, would become Dunedin, Southland and Lakes District. Francis McGovern would be resident in Greymouth (to which Westland headquarters had moved from Hokitika in 1889), from where he would preside over an amalgamated Nelson and Westland
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District. The Tauranga and (most of) Napier Districts were to be merged into Waikato and East Coast, to be headed by Emerson. He was to move to Cambridge but Hamilton was soon selected instead, the result of long agitation in areas remote from the former headquarters at Tauranga. The Bay of Islands District was reabsorbed by Auckland District, under Broham, while Taranaki was renamed the Wanganui and West Coast District. The seventh district, Wellington and Marlborough, would be run from the capital.
This round of restructuring did not go smoothly. All the retrenched Inspectors fought back, some of them alleging religious (anti-Anglican) or other bias. It did not escape attention that one of those selected to remain, Hickson, had serious entries on his defaulters’ sheet. Pender, staying on at Christchurch, was - like Inspector Frederick Atchison - 63 years old, whereas the Inspectors to be retired were all aged 54 to 58. Two of the retrenched officers, Thomson and Moore, gained favourable reconsideration from the Premier after securing political ‘puli’. As a result. Cabinet reprieved Thomson, and Atchison was ordered to resign in his place. Yet Thomson had been considered too lax in his policing of Auckland District, and had then made a mess of a murder enquiry in Wellington, prompting Gudgeon to recommend he be given one of the lesser commands such as Taranaki. Moore was reinstated to the Force in Dunedin in December, following a parliamentary investigation, on condition he pay back the compensation he had received for loss of office. Although he was now only a Sergeant-Major, this was an important concession, demotion having been denied other retrenched officers.
In mid 1888, Sergeants John Pratt, Francis Morice and Alexander McDonald had been appointed acting Sergeant-Major at Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch respectively, complementing the permanent Dunedin incumbent with that title. All major centres now had a senior NCO to better coordinate supervision of the men. But it was increasingly felt that the rank itself was archaic, a relic of the days of rigorous drilling, and it was soon decided to phase it out. By 1894 Moore shared a full Sergeant-Majorship with only two others, Invercargill s David Ramsay and Oamaru’s William Mason (who managed to hold onto it until his retirement in Christchurch in 1910, when the position at last disappeared from the Force). Moore was promised the first vacant Inspectorship, but Seddon and Hume lost confidence in him when he either could not or would not repay his compensation. In 1894 he was gazetted as the most junior Sergeant-Major. The next new Inspector was a sergeant he had trained, which (according to his daughter) ‘slowly killed him . He died in 1897. 14
There was a good deal of resistance to the new arrangements, particularly from influential people in areas which had been incorporated into other districts; many feared policing inefficiency in the remoter regions. Much policing experience was lost Kiely, for example, retired to labour on bush land in Westland - but an ongoing reorganisation
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within each of the new districts helped assuage apprehension about the future. In particular, a regularised system of sub-districts was reconstructed by each Inspector under Hume’s direction. In the Waikato and East Coast District, for example, the 36 police stations were covered by sub-districts centred at Hamilton, Thames, Tauranga, Gisborne, Napier and Waipawa. Men in charge of these had a chance to make their mark: Sergeant John Cullen, for example, was placed in charge at the former district headquarters of Napier. Looking back in 1898, Pardy praised the sweeping away of the small districts. Their existence had encouraged conflict that was inappropriate in a period of greatly improved communications. It would have been impossible to work up evidence in two recent murder cases, he told the Royal Commission, had the district structure not been rationalised. Enquiries had covered a wide area, and there would have been inter-district rivalries. 15
Hume had played a subordinate role in the restructuring. Policing was now very firmly controlled by the political executive, a culmination of the trend in recent years. At the time of the founding of the New Zealand Police Force, there had been talk to the effect that a realm of ‘universal love and brotherhood’ had descended upon New Zealand. Quite apart from depression-driven retrenchment, because of the stabilisation of both Maori and pakeha society political decision-makers were insisting that a less expensive policing coverage was viable. Hume was so eager to fit in with the tenor of the times that he went too far. He felt that a stable society scarcely needed a centralised police force; localised ‘municipal and rural’ forces would be adequate for ‘peace preservation’. Seddon was not amused at this suggestion of reversion to devolved policing over which political control from Wellington would be difficult. However, in the rural spaces, in particular, police numbers could fall even further because of small populations and, compared to the towns and cities, low rates of disorder.
Whereas Auckland borough had one policeman per 850 people in 1887, the ratio in the largely rural Wanganui district was already down to 1:1767. Overall, too, the ratio was decreasing. In 1895 there were 487 police in New Zealand, fewer than in 1886, for a population of 728,121, a ratio of 1:1497. The nearest ratio in the Australian colonies was 1:955 in South Australia. Victoria’s was 1:809, New South Wales’ 1:691, and Queensland’s 1:563. But in response to criticisms of an inadequate level of policing, the government would point to a continuing decline in recorded serious crime, and to the fact that police district annual reports indicated a lack of ‘professional’ crime in the land. Although police numbers were soon to rise, this was not in response to a major problem of order but because of an economic and population boom in the Auckland urban area. The third largest urban settlement in Australasia in 1886, with nearly 60,000 people, it passed the 100,000 mark in 1909. 16
Given the Commissioner’s diverse duties, a great many of his
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responsibilities were devolved upon the commissioned officers. Hume felt that periodical transfers of officers as well as of NCOs and men were essential. In late 1892, Cabinet agreed that most of the officers had been in the same area for too long. Laxity had set in. In a resulting reshuffle, Hickson moved from Dunedin to Auckland and was replaced by Pardy. The latter’s New Plymouth position was taken up by Thomson, who was replaced in charge of Wellington/Marlborough by Pender. The Commissioner had been particularly upset about lax discipline in Wellington, and continued to question Thomson’s actions after his transfer - why, for example, had he not asked for compensation for the widow of a policeman who had become insane and died? Broham was sent from Auckland to Christchurch to take charge of Canterbury/North Otago. In 1893, Emerson was ordered to remove his Hamilton headquarters to Napier, the district having been refocused as ‘Napier and the East Coast’. The Thames and Waikato stations became part of an enlarged Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Islands District. Ex-Minister Fergus and others alleged that there was ‘almost a mutiny’ among police in some areas, because the men were now ‘domineered over and dragooned’ as never before.
Many saw such a redisciplining as a good thing, albeit impaired by accusations that the transfers had been influenced by political considerations. Hume claimed that they had been very beneficial, as had his frequent transfers of NCOs and men, ‘especially in the stricter carryingout of the liquor laws, the suppression of larrikinism, the abolition of houses of ill-fame, and the suppression of gambling’. When Pender was sent to England in 1895 to escort back the extradited embezzler Leonard Harper, Thomson moved briefly to Wellington following a temporary rearrangement of the Wellington/Marlborough, Napier/East Coast and WanganuiAVest Coast districts into two districts. However inadequate his policing of Wellington had been, his knowledge of the area would suffice for a short period. After the ‘popular’ Thomson died in March 1896, his second-in-command Sergeant John Duffin (once head of the Taranaki Provincial Police) took temporary charge. When McGovern was transferred to New Plymouth in Thomson’s place, he secured Duftin s sacking for intemperance. In appointing a replacement Inspector, the government bypassed a number of police on the seniority list to select - on Hume’s recommendation Sergeant Pratt, who, it was felt, had ‘cleaned’ up the administration of the Nelson sub-district since his posting there in 1892. 17
One of the foremost problems for the Inspectorate lay in the static nature of the Force. Because of the virtual standstill in promotions, discontent among NCOs and constables was increasing, and ambitious and able men were resigning. Strictures upon policing quality from politicians and public alike were frequent, and even Hume could say that ‘many Sergeants of the Force, 1 freely admit are not what they ought to be’. Gudgeon noted in 1887 that there was one NCO for every six constables. This was too many, a legacy from a more disciplined and
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37
disciplinary past. Natural attrition would not leave room for many newcomers to the rank, especially as the establishment figure for NCOs was to be cut by 14: sergeants should be stationed only where their services were needed in a supervisory capacity. Moreover, there was now renewed pressure to considerably reduce costs. When two promotions to NCO rank were necessary in 1890 for reasons of discipline, these men were made acting sergeants only, with no increase in pay. Gudgeon would not promote men to NCO ‘while I have sergeants doing the work of constables’, except for ‘specially meritorious actions’. Between 1890 and October 1897, there were only 178 promotions and advancements in class.
The Force had grown old, tired, frustrated. There were far too many men of advancing years for maximum efficiency. Senior police consistently argued that the degree of societal stabilisation had been overestimated by the politicians. The police were having to continually take on new tasks as a result of the increasing propensity of the state to intervene in social life to maintain social order. They had inherited traffic control from their progenitors at ‘Home’, but were finding this increasingly difficult to cope with as volumes increased. After a great deal of discussion, this role was mostly taken over in the cities by local bodies from 1894, beginning with Auckland, which appointed traffic inspector Thomas Turner on 1 May that year. But new functions continued to arise, for the police were far more than ‘controllers of crime’.
They were societal controllers, a job which included ‘class management’, assisting in the ‘domestication of disciplining of the working class’ by a variety of means - some of which were welcomed or even sought out by the recipients, some not. Along with other government agencies, they played a powerful role in ‘labelling’ what was acceptable behaviour and what was deviant. That the extra duties were ‘increasing considerably’ was welcomed by Hume. As a result, ‘the Police are brought in closer touch with the people’, as was proper in a stabilised society, ‘and a system of confidence and reliance is thereby established’. The men acted as labour market brokers, and as court officials of various types, collected a huge range of information (on fire brigades, for example, and private schools), inspected and licensed in many capacities (e.g. as forest rangers), committed children to Industrial Schools and enforced the 1894 School Attendance Act, prevented overcrowding on trams and excursion steamers, reported on the ‘mode of life and character’ of recipients of Charitable Aid Board benefits, provided escorts (e.g. for a hangman, to ensure that he did not get drunk and miss his appointment). When the First Offenders’ Probation Act, which emphasised reformation rather than punishment, was passed in 1886, it was the police who carried out much of the consequent supervision.
‘There was no limit to what we had to do’, a constable was to reminisce. So copious were the tasks heaped upon the police that unionists became concerned that the men were being ‘sweated’. In 1889, typically.
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the Commissioner reported ‘the usual decreases in the gross total of offences’, a reflection of the overarching movement from disorder to order in the colony. On the other hand, he also noted the growth of the ‘well-organized gang of expert thieves’, of racecourse ‘spielers’ and the like, men who ‘lead a dishonest and criminal life’. The police had, he felt, been ‘reduced to the lowest limits consistent with efficiency’. But they were to fall further in per capita coverage, and to gain even more ‘extra duties’. The fear that police were too few and too overburdened to attend to the safety of life and property therefore continued to spread, and by 1897 there was a moral panic in the land. 18
This was fed by the public worries of senior policemen. Pender in Wellington warned that ‘criminals of the worst type’ were arriving from Sydney, while Broham was - as usual - claiming that his decreasing proportion of police to population was leading to a gradual increase in crime in Christchurch. After getting six more men in February 1897, he pointed out that he was still eight short of the 50 staff he had controlled there some 20 years before. How could he cope with Show Weekend later in the year, when the city would be ‘swarming with all the thieves, burglars and spielers in the Colony’? In Auckland a judge deplored the small number of police, and painted before a Grand Jury a picture of endemic street crime and burglary. When the Minister asked Hickson to comment, the Inspector agreed that his staff numbers were ‘quite inadequate’ in view of the increasing population and the fact that a sizeable number of criminals were arriving from across the Tasman. 19
Whereas it suited police officials to focus on serious crime and ‘criminals’ in their campaigns for more police, the public were more aware of street ‘nuisances’. There was a lessening of tolerance for many activities, and police sometimes found it hard to meet the demands of the new order which they had helped to establish. The ‘bureaucracy of official morality’ could not always enforce more demanding ‘conduct norms’ when these were sought by those benefiting from the new tranquillity. The policing of municipal bylaws was neglected, and police attendance at sports and other public meetings was minimal. In particular, government and public alike frequently deplored alleged police neglect of the ‘objectionable and annoying habits’ practised by youths in public. ‘Larrikinism’ was (in Inspector Pardy’s words) ‘the scourge of colonial towns’. When Seddon heard reports of such offending in Nelson he telegraphed the sergeant in charge that ‘unless the nuisance is abated and that promptly I shall order your removal’. In May 1892, when an ordered colony-wide crackdown had borne little fruit, the Force was told that in areas where larrikinism persisted there would be immediate transfers of NCOs and constables. They must ‘at once stamp out this growing evil’. Often complaints were ‘frivolous’ - even imaginary - but expectations of public order were growing.
In the six months to 13 April 1892, 107 young men and boys were dealt with in the courts over what the police classified as ‘larrikin’
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offences. The Defence Minister described the problem: ‘ln many towns groups of lads ... collect and loiter about street-comers, spitting on ladies’ dresses, making use of disgusting and profane language, and often insulting passers-by; whilst others amuse themselves by breaking lamps, unhanging gates, and various other objectionable practices.’ Persecution of minorities, especially the Chinese, by larrikins was so serious that injuries or death could result. In a Hutt case in 1890, it was one of the attackers who died in a racial confrontation. Large sections of the community were sympathetic to the persecution of ‘Asiatics’, which was fuelled by the passing of restrictive legislation aimed at keeping ‘cheap labour’ out of New Zealand, and this made it very difficult for the police to keep order in such situations. In Alexandra, assaults and vandalism drove the Chinese community from the main street to an outlying part of town. Notwithstanding frequent raids on Chinese quarters to suppress gambling and opium smoking, the police generally sought impartially to protect the persecuted. What might have been tolerated on the frontier would not be tolerated now.
The police pleaded that the burden of their duties, and particularly the ineffectiveness of the law (e.g., the difficulty of securing convictions for ‘collecting at street corners, obstructing footpaths, etc’, and their inability to arrest in many cases), stopped them taking effective measures to stamp out larrikinism. The government declined to acknowledge this, and became increasingly irritated at the failure to eradicate the ‘evil’. By 1896, some urban larrikins were organised into gangs (‘pushes’). 20
Other areas of behaviour were focused on by the government in an effort to eliminate remaining elements of frontier morality, including ‘the social evil’, prostitution, and the copious consumption of liquor. The politicians were responding, in particular, to a burgeoning middle-class moral reform crusade, led by organisations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. If ‘untoward’ behaviour was lessening, the reformers - with the scent of success in the air - were all the more determined to step up their campaigns. Prostitution was still a public phenomenon, its legality or otherwise very uncertain. The police attitude was that since the industry could not be completely eliminated, they would focus on suppressing ‘disorderly houses’ and (as Broham described the situation in Auckland) ‘keeping the prostitutes of the town sufficiently in order to satisfy the public and the owners of property’. As the voices of the reform associations grew ever more shrill. Commissioner Hume, cipher of the government, frequently urged more proactive stamping out of prostitution. Increased police activity saw increases in the number of recorded prostitutes. An 1892 survey produced a figure of 453 brothels, 350 of these being in the four cities and their suburbs. Christchurch’s ‘official’ number had risen more than threefold since 1887. 21
Reformers frequently claimed that many ‘at risk’ children originated from brothel areas. Convictions of children under 14 had been rising.
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partly because of the long depression. By 1890 more than 250 children, some as young as live, were being convicted annually; the offence was usually larceny, prompted by hardship. In 1891, under pressure, the Commissioner ordered his men to take the initiative in sending children living in a brothel environment or with dissolute parents to Industrial Schools. The ‘Government is quite prepared to take the consequences of a vigorous administration’ of the 1882 Industrial Schools legislation, he was soon to remind them; subsequent legislation (the Industrial Schools Amendment Act 1895) made this task easier for the police. 22
A much greater burden, and one that was far more problematic, resulted from the ever-increasing grip - much of it actively fostered by the state - of bourgeois ‘Victorian morality’ upon the community. The authorities, and the growing proportion of ‘respectable people’, expected the police to actively impose the emerging ‘code of Public Morality’, sometimes against much resistance from lower socio-economic groups or (for example, given a countervailing libertarian trend in the availability of erotica) even from middle-class elements. To take one example, the social stigma against unmarried mothers was so great that a ‘babyfarming’ industry was growing. People were paid to take away babies, usually with adoption as the ostensible goal. Four adoption Acts between 1881 and 1906 helped regulate this process, but there was still a need to control criminality in the adoption field.
By 1889 there were mounting suspicions of foul play by some of the ‘baby-farmers’ after they had received payment: ‘it is perfectly well understood that the sooner the child dies the better pleased all concerned will be’. There were fears that, as in well-publicised cases in England and Australia, infants had been murdered by baby farmers in order to save the cost of keeping those unable to be onsold for adoption. Gudgeon ordered an in-depth investigation, and police interest in the matter increased after the ‘sordidly mercenary’ Winton baby-farmer Minnie Dean had a third death among her charges in 1891. Hume urged the government to regulate baby farming; registration measures like those in England should be implemented. As a result of his report, and further information which he provided on Mrs Dean’s operations, the Infant Life Protection Act was passed. But this proved inadequate to prevent excesses. When Minnie Dean appeared before an Invercargill magistrate for breaches of the Act, she was fined Id, despite the known suspicious deaths. Powerless to close her down, the police removed from her a newly adopted child.
Dean had, in the later words of her lawyer, ‘apparently’ embarked on a ‘systematic programme of child murder’. The police - prompted particularly by the suspicions of Timaru detective Thomas Livingstonecontinued to watch her, and the breakthrough came in 1895 when a railway guard noticed her leave a train without the baby she had entered it with. Its body had been in her hatbox, along with that of another infant, and these and another child’s body were dug up from her garden. Mrs
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Dean claimed that the children had died accidentally, particularly because of overly generous doses of laudanum, and that she had not reported their deaths because the police had been persecuting her. Whether or not these protestations were correct - there is now an increasing attempt to rehabilitate her as just another victim of Victorian double standards - there was no chance of a jury finding her anything but guilty amidst the climate of moral outrage. Her trial, and her hanging on 12 August 1895 for one of the deaths, amidst great sensation (she was the only woman ever legally executed in New Zealand), led to prolonged re-examination of the baby-farming phenomenon - and eventually (after police submissions) to a new Infant Life Protection Act in 1896, which among other things required the registration of persons who looked after children. 23
Tragedies induced by ‘Victorian morality’ affected many homes, including those of some police. In 1891, Sarah and Anna Flanagan, daughter and wife of Constable Daniel Flanagan, a veteran of the Irish, Victorian and Otago forces, decapitated Sarah’s illegitimate infant in a section in Gloucester Street, Christchurch. Inspector Pender ordered the arrest of the constable for complicity, but eventually only the women faced charges. Both were found guilty of infanticide, and sentenced to death before having this commuted to life imprisonment. Flanagan was not restored to the Force. Family association with such scandals was more than enough to ensure discharge from the Police. Constables were increasingly finding themselves spying on people’s activities. They had to police a rising age of consent, which was 12 at the time of the formation of the Force but rose to 14 in 1889 and 16 in 1896. They had to examine published material for obscenity, with five booksellers prosecuted for selling Emile Zola novels in 1890. Beginning with the Offensive Publications Act of 1892, a spate of legislation extending censorship powers was passed, and police enforcement of these came under great scrutiny. As ‘ladies can no longer use the Quay as a promenade’ because of the ‘naked’ males in view, Wellington police had to stop boys and youths bathing in a traditional spot in Thomdon. In 1895 a night watch was put upon the capital’s Newtown Park to prevent the ‘public scandal’ of couples engaging in ‘unseemly’ activity. In 1897 a Taranaki judge tried to force police to prevent a mixed marriage. The ‘great evil’ of organised gambling (said to be particularly rife in Wellington) was increasingly cracked down on, under previously little-used but puritanical legislation of 1881, Boxing matches were strictly regulated and - in 1893 - banned. 24
Lowering social tolerance increased the gap between the wishes of large sectors of the public and police ability (whether for lack of resources, or for legal reasons) to act on them. A sustained example of this occurred in Christchurch, where the flamboyant American A Bently Worthington (one of a string of aliases) settled in January 1890. The tall, dark and handsome confidence trickster, guilty of ‘nearly every crime it is possible
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for a man to commit’ (according to Broham), was adept at persuading people to join his ‘Students of Truth’ religious movement and part with all their worldly goods. His unconventional lifestyle, and particularly his success with women, enraged the civic leaders - especially as word gradually leaked out of his past propensity for seducing rich women, bigamously marrying some of them, and departing with their money. He lived with his wealthy ‘wife’, ‘soul mate’ Mrs Mary Plunkett, a ‘handsome and magnetic priestess’. Orgies were said to occur at his fiat, including on ‘church’ premises. In 1892 the movement built an imposing ‘Temple of Truth’, and it continued to attract new followers despite the atmosphere of scandal that surrounded it. The problem was that no illegality had been uncovered, despite in-depth police surveillance.
Christchurch clergymen, however, began to uncover Worthington’s lurid past by making enquiries in the United States. Then Mrs Plunkett, exiled to Australia by her ‘husband’ partly because her wealth had run out and partly because she had built up a rival power base within the flock (the allegedly rampantly promiscuous Order of the Temple), began to expose him. In 1893, too, the sensationalist magazine Truth began to embarrass the police about the continued presence of Worthington in Christchurch. Hume appealed to the Premier. ‘Unless the Colony intends to openly countenance profligacy and rascality, and to tacitly deny there is a code of Public Morality’, high-level action was needed. The American authorities were appealed to, but preferred that Worthington stay in New Zealand. And so the con-man kept on ‘corrupting the youth of the Colony by his peculiar tenets’ and ‘contaminating the moral atmosphere of this Community’. By 1895 Worthington’s safety was under threat from the good citizenry of Christchurch, who were egged on by the press and mainstream church leaders. His finances were shaky because of the sustained adverse publicity, and he had transacted yet another (bigamous) marriage. Late that year Worthington fled to Australia to escape his debts, and the Christchurch police breathed a sigh of relief. This was premature, for he turned up again in September 1897, and attempted to revive his movement by holding Sunday meetings in a Lichfield Street hall.
Each meeting drew a bigger and angrier crowd, and the police could not dissuade Worthington from going ahead with his plans: ‘he wants to pose as a persecuted saint’, they concluded. The disturbances climaxed outside the third meeting. All suburban and some country police had been called in, but Broham and 39 of his men could do little against the mob of 6000 besieging the hall. In the end, with Broham’s connivance, Stipendiary Magistrate R Beetham read what now passed for the Riot Act (section 87 of the Criminal Code Act 1893) and the police were then able to disperse the crowd with baton and mounted charges. The police had behaved professionally, using the ‘greatest forebearance and coolness’ to keep the peace. The prevalent climate of morality which the police were charged with preserving, but not by means clearly outside the pale
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of the law - had made ‘respectable’ people act ‘senselessly’. The police were not thanked for their intervention, although Worthington was by now so discredited that he ceased to make converts and his ‘movement’ languished. He left New Zealand forever in 1899, to continue his life of fraud until his death in custody in the United States in 1917, following a confrontation with one of his latest female victims.
In the context of moral reform campaigns, the police felt like meat in a sandwich: they had, they contended with some reason, to police inadequate laws with inadequate resources. As the 1890s progressed, the rising level of criticism was increasingly directed against police inefficiency in enforcing liquor legislation. Criticism of excessive public use of liquor was a refrain underpinning many of the reformers’ attacks on ‘moral evils’. The government began to despair of its police leadership, often intervening in policing matters, even at constable level. Hume had neither will nor choice - despite occasional protests - but to acquiesce in this, to the perturbation of Inspectors trained in the paramilitary school of discipline. When Seddon became Premier in 1893 he retained the Defence portfolio, and thus political interference in policing now came from the very top of the colony’s executive. Hume’s grip on his force was weakening at the very time that the reformers’ clamour was growing. As the link with the military grew ever more distant, the old-style discipline over men overburdened with work and tired and depressed by lack of promotion was breaking down. 25
CHAPTER 2
Pressures to ‘Professionalise’
Gudgeon stated in 1886 that ‘the entire force is now unarmed’, an exaggeration which reflected official wishes about the general ethos of society and policing by that time. A commentator noted that ‘we have all got into a habit of thinking and saying that our best protection lies in the orderly instincts of the people’. But not only did access to firearms remain; so too did the carrying of firearms. Leading policemen like Broham allowed police - especially mounted men - to carry at their discretion weaponry inherited from the Constabulary days. To Broham, ‘there is something in the sight of rifles and bayonets that tells with deep effect on a mob’. When in 1888 Inspector Pender took five armed constables to secure a Rolleston farmer and his son who had shot a complainant and attacked Christchurch’s Chief Detective Thomas Neil, Gudgeon defended the decision to use arms. The offenders ‘were violent characters and only to be dealt with by the strong hand and it certainly is not advisable to put the Police in the awkward position of having to retire from armed men while they themselves are unarmed’.
All policemen, moreover, continued to have revolvers, and the issue of these was standardised in January 1889 (at the same time as the recall of all swords on issue, these being by now of only symbolic use). The revolvers were needed from time to time, as in a 1900 incident in Dannevirke when the sergeant and his men repelled a mob besieging the police station, but such use decreased as society became more orderly. A number of policemen who joined in 1905 were to recall after retirement that they had never had to use their revolvers. Some had never even carried them. The New Zealand Force was often likened to the London Metropolitan Police in its essentially unarmed operational nature."
The New Zealand Police Force however retained an integral relationship with the military from which it had formally split. The Permanent Militia Force (comprising Permanent Artillery and Torpedo Corps branches) created from the Field Force of the Constabulary was regarded as a reserve police force. Under section 75 of the Defence Act, soldiers could be drafted in to act as auxiliary police when necessary. In 1887, six were seconded to the Wellington police during a spate of burglaries. Soon, such ‘borrowing’ became a regular occurrence. At major events such as Exhibitions, sizeable contingents of military personnel worked alongside the constables for policing purposes. When Ministers of Defence Fergus and Russell also took on the Justice portfolio
27
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between 1887 and 1891, policing remained firmly within the Defence Department’s ambit.
Conversely, and far more importantly, the Police Force was regarded officially as a reserve military force. All recruits had to come from the Permanent Militia and were required to undertake 10 days per annum artillery drill at the coastal defence installations, an arrangement which was systematised in 1890. Hume had to try to keep new policemen as close as possible to the forts in order to ease disruption at drill time, although sometimes the very newest recruits were deemed ‘proficient with the latest system of gun-drill’, and slightly longer-serving constables were sent. The duty was unpopular, since there was no reimbursement for higher messing or other costs. All Permanent Militiamen entering the Police could, moreover, be re-transferred to the military at any time. 27
The annual gun-drill courses, which catered for around 50 constables, seemed in Jeopardy by early 1896. By now Hume had some 200 exmilitary men on his staff, and it was logistically impossible to keep drilling them all. Moreover, by now the constables comprising the ‘reserve’ of ‘trained gunners’ were ‘scattered all over the colony’, and Hume felt that it was ‘extremely doubtful whether they could be concentrated in the centres expeditiously enough to permit of their being of any real value’ in the event of attack by a foreign power. There was also increasing political unease at the dangers of mixing soldiering and policing in a stable, democratic society. The Defence Minister claimed that the ‘concession’ of the Police utilising soldiers’ services had been ‘abused’: a number of soldiers had at any given time been doing ordinary police duty, and this would at once cease. Commissioner Hume deplored this ‘radical change’ from past practice, and felt that as Under-Secretary for Defence he knew best how to cope with his various responsibilities. The new order had been promulgated without consulting him, Seddon conceded that gunners could be ‘told off’ for beat police duty, but only to replace constables away at gun duty. 28
But by now the formal police-military connection was in mortal danger because of the unsatisfactory nature of the requirement to recruit from the military. The situation worsened when the Militia was reduced in numbers, decreasing the size of the recruiting pool. All Militiamen had first to have had a stint in the New Zealand Volunteers, and so new police recruits were soldiers through and through; and soldiers did not necessarily make good policemen in a period of societal stabilisation, when the wise use of discretion was increasingly needed.
All Inspectors considered that the discipline, training and attitudes of the soldier were inappropriate to the current policing requirements of the colony, and that moral standards amongst soldiers fell far short of those expected from constables. While Seddon supported the concept of police as a military reserve at the time, he later came to feel that this had not been beneficial to the Force: good ‘back-blocks’ youths had been corrupted by ‘the free life in Wellington’ at the military barracks, and particularly
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by excessive drinking. The policing ethos was quite different. ‘A policeman is always a policeman, whether off or on duty’, whereas a soldier was a civilian when off duty. ‘lt would never do for a policeman to go knocking about public houses, nor would it do for him to be talking to everyone he met in the streets.’ Men used to such behaviour did not make ideal recruits.
Gudgeon and Hume, with their military backgrounds, did not share such reservations. They and their political masters not only believed in the ‘reserve army’ role of the police, but also felt that the benefits of the discipline inside the Militia/Artillery outweighed bad habits picked up in off-duty activities. Both Commissioners came to want to complement soldier-recruits with non-soldiers, however. Gudgeon, while feeling that many good recruits could still be obtained from the military, was by 1890 openly lamenting the loss of many desirable married men who had sought to enter the police direct, being unable to ‘afford to join the artillery on the pay of a third-class gunner, and await their turn for the police.’ In a force policing a stabilising society, a high proportion of ‘stable’ married men was preferable. Both gained permission to take on some men with police experience overseas, or with prisons service in New Zealand. 29
Gudgeon’s problem had been alleviated from 1888 by the introduction of a probationary period, during which patently unsatisfactory new constables could be sent back to the military. But the choice was so limited that the Inspectors had to take on recruits they felt were unsatisfactory as policemen - men short and weak, as well as not very intelligent.
After an 1895 reduction in police starting pay, ‘good men’ could do better by staying in the Permanent Militia. Yet there normally had to be a very good reason for taking direct-entry men of superior police ability, as during a ‘war scare’ when trained gunners from the Permanent Artillery could not be spared. In 1893, still, all 28 new constables were transferees from the Artillery.
The Permanent Artillery’s Captain John Coleman, who made recommendations to the Commissioner on applicants for police positions, used criteria similar to those used by the Militia in the first place, height and physique. He acknowledged that overall, the ‘moral character’ of the men had deteriorated since 1886. One ex-soldier constable was sacked and charged with perjury and child desertion, following a long court inquiry into his alleged seduction of a ‘young girl’. The ‘tainted stream’ of recruits was, prohibitionists and other critics claimed, responsible for the ‘low level of efficiency and character of our Police Force’. Policing was far too important a function for there not to be a ‘thorough investigation’ of character at point of recruitment. 30
It was increasingly clear that a police corps based on military recruitment was not the appropriate model for a rapidly stabilising, democratic capitalist society. Overseas observers were noting that forces
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which recruited from the army tended to be those which acted as ‘the right arm of the ruling classes’ in relatively repressive societies, and comparing this with the recent development of ‘English’ modes of policing. By 1896 Hume had realised that New Zealand’s circumstances were not conducive to policing by men fitted only or mostly to be soldiers. Army training suited the men for handling confrontations, but gave them poor judgment in everyday interactions with citizens. Some were ‘unable to resist the temptations which naturally beset the path of constables’. It was a long-standing paradox: in a ‘civilised’ policing environment, soldierly police were both too repressive and too lax.
In any case, in recent months the recruiting system had ‘entirely broke[n] down’. The Permanent Militia, Hume complained, ‘have not the qualified men ready to give me for transfer’. The standing military force by now totalled only 180, and it was holding on to its best men, partly because of the need to participate in ‘policing’ expeditions against recalcitrant King Country and Urewera tribespeople. The Commissioner had both vacancies and a list of 200 suitable civilians who had applied for direct entry. Although he approved in theory of the maintenance of some formal connection with the military, he had little choice but to request the waiving of the police recruitment regulations. This was agreed to by a new Minister who ‘took the law into my own hands’ and authorised the recruiting of civilians. By the time the rules were formally amended by Order in Council in March 1897, only 16 of the 66 police recruited during the previous year had come from the Permanent Militia. 31
This change did create its own problems, insofar as the new entrants were unused to discipline. A ‘Drill and Instruction’ proclamation laid down the new order. The raw constables would be taught ‘marching, turning, saluting, use of revolvers, handcuffs, and batons’ until passed as efficient by an Inspector, At district headquarters, moreover, all constables were to be assembled weekly for instruction by NCOs, and once a month the Inspectors were to ‘give a lecture to and catechize the whole of their subordinates that may be available in the various duties they have to carry out as constables’.
The final nail in the coffin of the formal integral relationship between police and military was hammered in place in the last days of Hume’s period of office. In August 1897 Colonel A P Penton, commander of the New Zealand Armed Forces, asked the Commissioner for the most suitable dates for the annual 10 days’ drill. Hume assessed that none of the former Artillerymen in the Police could be spared. His successor, J B Tunbridge, was even more forthright: Artillerymen replacing police on the streets for the duration of the course would provide ‘very little if any real service’. The Minister cancelled the course for that year. When Penton tried to reinstate the practice in 1898, Tunbridge declared that if it proceeded T cannot hold myself responsible for the proper carrying out of the laws of the Colony’. That was the end of the matter for the government, which was anxious to give Tunbridge what he wanted. The
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break with the military was symbolically made when Tunbridge replaced the police badge based on the old Constabulary Force design with one featuring the Royal Arms. Almost a decade later, an effort by a Royal Commissioner to give police rifle training so as to make them the ‘nucleus of an addition to the defences of the Dominion’ got nowhere. 32
On 27 April 1893 Premier Ballance died, and on 1 May ‘Dick’ Seddon emerged triumphant from the Liberal Party power struggle for leadership of the colony. From this time, responsibility for policing became a growing burden for Seddon, Moral reform organisations felt that one of the keys to enforcing their own codes of behaviour upon the populace was to reform the whole police operation, to make constables more efficient and proactive agents of official morality. Their weapon was increasingly to demand a commission of enquiry into policing. They ‘imagined’, wrote Hume, ‘that they had made some startling discoveries of maladministration of the Force’. Whatever the truth of their accusations - some were undoubtedly true, others were wildly exaggerated - their general indictment of a large measure of incompetence in the Force could not be gainsaid.
On 22 February 1896 the merchant MP Thomas Thompson, ‘a political nonentity’, was elevated to the Executive Council in order to relieve the Premier of the policing burden. He was a former ‘conservative Atkinsonian’ selected for being ‘utterly Seddon’s creature’. The new Minister, who had in the past displayed interest in policing, but whose knowledge of it came mostly from his involvement in local body politics, at once began to implement new procedures along Seddon-inspired lines - not always to Hume’s approval.
On 2 March, Thompson became Minister of Justice, taking the police responsibility with him to that portfolio, which had been a matter under discussion over the last decade or so. This was a fitting step, especially in view of the rapid divestment of the residue of the military connection, and Hume could cease to be Under-Secretary for Defence. The police administration was placed definitively within the Justice Department after Thompson also relieved Seddon of the position of Minister of Defence on 22 June 1896. For most police, the change meant little in practice, but for the Commissioner and his headquarters and senior staff a separate but contiguous working life alongside Justice officials reporting to the Minister provided them with a more civilianised decision-making environment. The relationship grew closer as the years passed, as was symbolised by the Justice Department’s adoption of the Police longservice medal as an award for prison officers.
As has already been noted, throughout the western world the proselytisers of ‘bourgeois morality’ were campaigning for social and political ‘regeneration’. Central to this campaign was the struggle to lessen or abolish social reliance on alcohol. Industry leaders wanted a more steady workforce, ‘social progressives’ sought a more stable family
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life. All wanted even more ‘order’ in social life than had already been achieved. The temperance movement’s first big victory, the 1881 Licensing Act, governed the sale and consumption of alcohol in New Zealand. Restrictions were Byzantine, and evolving, with a continuing series of ‘patchwork’ Acts (44 of them between 1880 and 1914) coming into force. In 1886, temperance groups unified their efforts under the banner of the New Zealand Alliance.
From 1894, following pressure from Seddon’s political rival in the Liberal camp, Robert Stout, electors were enabled by ‘local option’ to ban liquor from their area. This did not go far enough for Stout and his allies, including the ‘left Liberals’ who saw alcohol as a capitalist device to weaken working-class solidarity. In the same year, Clutha voters gained the requisite three-fifths majority and a no-licence (‘dry’) area was declared; others were to follow. The extraordinarily dedicated temperance campaigners often claimed that police allowed slygrogging to flourish in ‘dry’ areas. Elsewhere they kept up their vigilance in detecting Sunday, after-hours and other breaches of the licensing laws which police were said to be reluctant to move against. Such accusations derogated from the police strategy for gaining public consent, reliant as this was on their neutrality from partisan politics, on police embodying ‘impersonal authority’. Soon after Thompson’s assumption of ministerial responsibility for police, a major Prohibition Convention repeated a strident demand for a commission of enquiry. 33
The pressure had intensified because Thompson was widely seen as both a ‘brewer’s man’ and a womaniser, which offended two intertwined strands of the ‘social purity’ movement. The police were even more in the centre of the liquor controversy than before. The temperance movement, in its broadest sense, was an alliance that spanned class and ideology. The ‘new morality’ was convinced that liquor was abused in New Zealand, even though arrests for drunkenness per capita fell by half between 1880 and 1895 (although they remained very high by today’s standards), and alcohol consumption declined significantly in the two decades after 1870, phenomena only partly connected with the depression. The campaign against the ‘social evil’ of drink was now by far the strongest in the land.
The police were hamstrung by internal, societal and legal constraints which made the detection of after-hours and Sunday sales, and slygrogging, very difficult. Undercover activities were monitored very closely by the press, which was quick to condemn any perceived overstepping of the mark. Public commentators treated Sunday traders as of considerably lesser iniquity than the ‘criminal class’ (or even approved of them). It was a well-known policing adage that laws relating to public morality had to have ‘the substantial support of the entire community’ to be properly enforceable. Liquor laws in New Zealand did not fit into this category. Moreover, police often found it important to retain the goodwill of publicans in order to gain information on various criminal activities.
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Even when the police felt able to prosecute a publican, magistrates were often reluctant to convict because they inhabited the same social and economic milieu. Inspector Broham noted in 1891 that it was ‘easier to obtain a conviction for murder in a court of justice than the conviction of a publican for selling after hours or upon a Sunday’. Matters frowned upon by reformers, and for which the police were often blamed, might well be legal because of loopholes in the laws. ‘Travellers’, for example, could drink on Sundays - and the law could be satisfied by city dwellers ‘travelling’ out to a suburban or country pub. The many police representations to alter the licensing laws were ignored. On this issue, the tendency for changes in the law to lag behind changes in social conceptions of morality and correctness was exacerbated. The matter was a political hot potato. While the moral reformers were vociferous and active, the drinkers were many, and drinking interests were ably represented in the highest legal/political circles by the brewing bosses. 34
To meet the mounting crescendo of criticism, the police were compelled to extend their activities into attempting to influence licensing committees to not renew the licences of unsatisfactory publicans - or not grant new licences, which was (in Hume’s words) ‘the concensus of opinions now a days’. But the prohibitionists and other reformers continued to allege widespread defiance of the drinking laws - and an increasing proportion of the community supported them. All this led to frustrations on the part of the police. When a Dunedin temperance campaigner observed a policeman acquiesce in a minor breach of the liquor law and told him that the police were in league with publicans and prostitutes, the policeman knocked him down. Hume ‘recollected that only a few years ago ... public feeling on the liquor question was decidedly dormant, and, as long as breaches of the Act were not very glaring, they were passed over; and if the Police had at that time done otherwise, they would probably have been accused of oppression by those very people who now clamour for the strict enforcement of the law.’
In 1894, former constable Theo Wake wrote anonymously to the Christchurch Star about policemen turning a blind eye to liquor offences by publicans. Detectives were assigned to discovering the identity of ‘Bulls-eye’ by the allegedly pro-publican Inspector Broham, and the Premier was notified when Wake was unmasked. The newspaper railed against this action and its reason: ‘Bulls-eye’ had exposed an unwritten general order that the ‘police as a body are not to interfere with ... respectably-conducted houses, no matter how they contravene the law . A furious war of words, pro- and anti-police, followed. In 1895, Wake made the first sustained published effort to link lack of effective enforcement of the liquor laws with political pull , and therefore also with ‘demoralisation’ in the Force. His widely-circulated pamphlet cited cases where men had been transferred as punishment for upsetting the trade’, while others had allegedly been ‘rewarded’ by promotion and other means for ignoring liquor breaches.
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Wake widened the attack to one upon the whole administration of the Force, hidebound as it was by ‘fossilized’ and ‘unreasonable’ regulations (barracks were checked at 11 pm ‘to see they are in bed like good boys’) which harked back to the time when a constable was nothing more than ‘a mere machine’. He produced a set of reforms based upon ‘professionalising’ tendencies in some overseas forces, beginning with ways of reducing political interference and of minimising ‘persecutions by tyrannical superiors’. Some of his suggestions became the standard fare of New Zealand police reform demands over the next few years: ‘the absurd position of a constable going from a plough-tail to do street duty, with the constant bungling’ that ensued, could be removed by instituting a training school. Privately, Broham and the other Inspectors were upset at the escalation of attempts to use political influence in police affairs, and Seddon’s attempt in the House to refute Wake’s claim that the Wellington countermanding of a transfer was the result of political ‘pull’ was scarcely convincing. The authorities branded Wake a ‘black sheep’ they were fortunate to be rid of, and would eventually denigrate the leading prohibitionist T E (Tommy) Taylor through his association with Wake: Taylor allegedly helped Wake flee his wife, family and the colony after an unfortunate romantic entanglement, supposedly demonstrating that his colleagues constituted ‘the pariah and the outcast, the scum of the community’. But whatever the name-calling, the liquor-focused momentum for reform was accelerating.
The major internal problem relating to the liquor issue pinpointed by some leading police was that the principle of rapid or regular transfer no longer generally operated within the Force. Men stationed in an area for a long time often developed a ‘friendly feeling’ with local publicans ‘which precludes them from doing their duty in connection with the Licensing Act’. Pardy in Dunedin lamented that long stationings had led to ‘a strong disinclination on the part of many members of the Force’ to enforce the liquor laws on hotel-keepers. By now transfers were seen by the members as a form of punishment, rather than part of the normal police routine; as early as the first five months of 1888 there had been only 16 transfers between districts. One of the first policing decisions of the new Liberal Minister in 1891 was to ban transfers ‘from one end of the Colony to the other’ in all but exceptional circumstances. This was partly on grounds of economy, partly a measure to appease the Force. But it was also a policing principle that gelled with Liberal philosophy regarding an integrated society. As JPs who opposed the transfer of a constable in 1895 said, his ‘thorough knowledge of the district’ made him ‘more capable of knowing and watching’ allegedly troublesome elements (in this case, local Maori) ‘than a strange Constable coming into the District’. 35
Commissioner Hume believed that transfers, albeit mostly within districts, would both minimise over-familiarity with locals and allow him to reduce
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grievances - especially those relating to ‘young third-class Constables being put in charge of country sub-districts, while their seniors, the older hands, have been kept in towns doing street duty.’ But the attempt to enforce transfers gave him greater internal problems than any other issue. It was partly an effort to ensure that transfers remained untainted by local pressures that led Hume to enthuse over Russell’s abolition of the right of Inspectors to transfer men within their districts. Only the Commissioner, sanctioned by the Minister, could transfer, and he often did so without even consulting the Inspector. But the high profile of the Minister in the process increased the chances of attempted ‘pull’ - and probably of influence being successfully wielded. Although transfers were ‘imperative’, therefore, the difficulties in effecting them were ‘almost insurmountable’. Hume, mortified that his attempt to take some powers from Ministers had backfired, testified that if a man did not want to transfer he would ‘almost invariably’ organise ‘puli’, sometimes successfully. The situation revealed how far the Police Force had been subject to external, especially political, influence.
In the Commissioner’s words, ‘the moment that a shift is ordered, every kind of influence is brought to bear to prevent if by local leading citizens. Individual police were often supported by influential local backers and could reasonably expect political intervention to stop a transfer. Delegations, letters, petitions; mayors, borough councillors, JPs, businessmen, clergy; all testified to the sterling contribution of ‘their’ policeman to the community and found reasons why transfer was impossible. The favourite one, used even by Inspectors ordered to shift station, was that the man’s wife was in such bad health that she could not be expected to move, least of all to the climate of the new district. ‘The police seem to have married all the invalids in the colony’, Hume raged. It was harder to transfer a policeman than any other public servant, he claimed. 36
Accusations of political/liquor trade interference continued to escalate in numbers and seriousness during the 1890s. It was commonly alleged that policemen had been forced to move because of their carrying out of the licensing legislation, local publicans having used their influence as members of the socio-economic elite to secure a political direction to transfer. A Balclutha policeman alleged he had been transferred nine times in 20 years in these circumstances. Conversely, in areas where the local police had struck up a good relationship with a publican, or where police regularly received ‘gifts’ of liquor and so forth, it was said that a constable could be ‘left to fossilize for half a lifetime’. It was hard to prove that transfers (or non-transfers) were the result of influence. But there was clearly political interference when transfers which had been ordered by the Commissioner as part of his attempt to put theory into practice (or even to punish policemen found guilty of transgression) were cancelled by the Minister. In the early 1890s, for example, Hume assessed that there were too many NCOs in country areas, their expertise
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wasted in places where a policeman ‘goes half asleep’. They would be better utilised in larger centres, in charge of constables. He also attempted to remove the ‘injustice’ whereby married constables stationed in towns had to pay rent and do strenuous street duty, while single constables in charge of rural and suburban stations got free rent and other perquisites. But when a gradual process of transfers began accordingly, these were intermittent because of Ministers’ propensity to intervene to prevent them. 37
Political intervention in such matters highlighted a trend inside the Police. The lessening of overt control by the state over the populace, the increasing replacement of external and coercion-based social control mechanisms by internalised social conditioning, had been accompanied by a de facto lessening of disciplinary control within the Force. When leading prohibitionists such as the Reverends F W and L M Isitt, and T E Taylor, alleged that the police operated in collusion with publicans, their charge struck home precisely because it had some truth. Quite apart from this, and from their frustration over inadequate powers in the legislation, the police authorities were adamant that if every infraction of the liquor laws was enforced, they would have neither the time nor the capacity to do much else. They reserved the right to exercise discretion, for which they were frequently condemned in the press and from platforms, and sometimes by their own political masters. Minister Russell, for example, when told that local police were unable to prevent slygrogging near Reefton, threatened to transfer them. ‘There were nine convictions within a month’ as a result.
Yet, as a columnist said in 1900, ‘a large percentage of the population look upon the attempt of the legislature to deprive them of intoxicants as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their liberties, and consequently take a delight in defeating the object of the law’. In such situations, police believed, it would be absurd to attempt to enforce the letter of the law. The senior police tried to take a reasonable stand. They worked hard to eradicate actual complicity between their subordinates and the liquor trade, and warned against perceived complicity too. Bachelor constables were told that boarding in pubs would ‘seriously prejudice the community against them, and interfere with the proper performance of their duty’. Efforts were made in 1894 to ensure that police with relatives in the licensed trade were stationed far from them. A year later police were reminded that under regulation 55, they would be immediately dismissed if found drinking in pubs when on the beat, or after closing time. But none of this stopped the temperance publicists churning out endless criticisms of the Force. 38
Great efforts went into suppressing slygrogging in areas which had opted for prohibition, and in the predominantly Maori region of the King Country, whose leadership had allegedly insisted on a ‘dry’ regime as a condition for opening the territory to state authority and pakeha settlement. Whatever the origins of the ‘sacred pact’, a dry King Country was both
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convenient tor the Crown, given its anxiety to prevent liquor-related disruption to the process of colonising such a large area, and an easy sop to the prohibitionists. Yet by mid 1897, the King Country was being held up as the most glaring example of a police ‘do-nothing’ attitude over liquor transgressions. This failure to suppress slygrogging was due not to want of energy, however, but to sizeable opposition to the licensing laws, with liquor being smuggled in by every train.
The Commissioner and Minister decided to attempt to quell the prohibitionists’ clamour over the King Country. They selected one of the Force’s most promising NCOs, John Cullen, to travel there incognito with a detective. Cullen reported that ‘there is more liquor consumed in the King Country than there would be if properly licensed houses were established in it’; there were even ‘walking grog shops’ on the streets at night. The problem was that a very large proportion of the inhabitants, both Maori and pakeha, disagreed with the area being dry - just as Maori women all over the colony resented laws prohibiting alcohol sales to them if they were not married to Europeans. By using both ‘tact and energy’, Cullen secured 67 convictions of 23 persons, and was elevated (from 20 September) to commissioned officer rank. This was his major breakthrough in a career which saw him become the first Commissioner to have risen through the ranks. The prohibitionists were delighted.
But as Cullen had predicted, slygrogging continued as ever in the King Country. Efforts by police and government officials to deny that law-breaking with regard to liquor there and elsewhere was übiquitous were greeted with derision. In 1895 Taylor publicly called Seddon a liar for attempting to whitewash the ‘liquor problem’, prompting an abortive police investigation into the possibility of prosecuting him. The situation was complicated by allegations that the police hierarchy was dominated by and therefore favoured Irish Catholics. This ‘fact’ was supposed to indicate that, by definition, booze would be an object of approval within the Force. It is true that the proportion of Irish Catholics in the police had been comparatively high, but it was now decreasing. Of the 26 men enrolled between 1 March and 20 May 1889, only nine were Roman Catholics; the 294 Protestants in the Force on 31 March 1897 outnumbered the 222 Catholics. Hume sought to ensure that no particular sect was disproportionately represented amongst recruits. But the 242 Irishmen still heavily outnumbered the 114 New Zealanders and 82 Englishmen, and this helped fuel popular prejudices about the Force.
Protestant constables stymied in their careers frequently (sometimes publicly) blamed this on a Roman Catholic conspiracy by superiors. Such accusations did not hold water when investigated. A nest of senior Catholics alleged by Protestant convert Inspector Broham turned out to be four Catholic sergeants as against three Protestants, and three Catholic as against two Protestant detectives. The police leadership was actually more concerned about the overtly political activities of those of its members active in Orange Lodges. ‘Nothing can tend to militate more
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against a constables usefulness in any district than the knowledge that he is an Orangeman’, opined even Broham. ‘lt arouses the deepest hatred of the Roman Catholic portion of the community who look upon such a constable as their greatest enemy instead of a peace preserver, and amongst the constables themselves it breeds strife and dissention where there should be unity and confidence.’
It would be unrealistic, Commissioner Gudgeon felt, to dismiss the ‘many’ policemen in ‘political-religious societies’. Many ordinary, ‘respectable’ police were members of masonic lodges and held antiCatholic views. Instead of taking Broham’s advice and banning such membership, on 24 April 1889 he circularised the Force: since defence lawyers used police membership of sectarian organisations to discredit evidence, constables were ‘cautioned’ not to join them or to attend their meetings or ceremonies. Although it was not actually a ban, the heading made the situation clear enough: ‘Members of Police Force not to join Political or Religious Societies.’ Orangemen in particular were outraged, and sectarian sores continued to fester within a Force already under strain. 39
Commissioner Hume, under increasing pressure from the temperance reformers, misjudged their power. He acknowledged the ‘goodness of their motives’, but felt that they were ‘inclined to run ahead of public opinion’. He predicted a backlash from the pro-liquor sector of society if the police ‘take up one particular set of laws and administer them as stringently and indiscriminately as seems to be desired’. All this was true enough. Indeed, the pro-liquor lobby had flexed its muscles already by encouraging ‘skeleton army’ disruption of street meetings and marches by the (prohibitionist) Salvation Army, often in conjunction with local businessmen who complained that the ‘Sallies’ scared off trade and disrupted traffic. The Army was harassed, sometimes with police complicity, as in Milton in 1893, when many Salvationists were arrested ostensibly for breaching the bylaws, and in Oamaru in 1887, when the police arrested the local Salvationist leader for disturbing the peace.
But had Hume fully appreciated their capacity to mobilise people, especially the lower middle class and skilled working class, he might have done more to appease the temperance movement by meeting their minimum demand, the improvement of the undoubtedly lax enforcement of the licensing legislation in some areas. Hume was insufficiently responsive to the growing embourgeoisement of public mores. Immersed in his multifarious duties, he seemed not to notice that stabilising influences at work in the community had led increasing numbers to expect a social orientation away from liquor consumption and towards ‘healthier’ leisure pursuits such as sport and music. 40
That being said, there is no doubt that the politicians provided the Commissioner with too few powers and too few policemen to enforce upon unwilling sectors of the population these heightening expectations. The prohibitionists, he told the Premier, seemed not to realise that the
Pressures to ‘Professionalise’
‘administration of the Licensing Law is merely an incident in the daily routine’ of the police. By the end of 1892 the size of the regular force had fallen to 483. Inspectors persistently asked for more men, particularly for city patrols; in 1895, for example, Pender was alarmed about his lack of coverage of burgeoning Wellington suburbs such as Vogeltown, Mitchelltown, Island Bay and Brooklyn. When Thompson took political charge of the Force, he listened to Hume’s representations with some understanding, but only managed to secure an extra 15 constables, all to be stationed in the cities. At the end of 1896 there were still fewer than 500 regular police. 41
Thompson became ever more sympathetic to the strident demands by senior police officials for more resources, and worked behind the scenes to secure them. But his influence depended on persuading his mentor, Seddon. He had, moreover, come increasingly to see that an entire overhaul of policing was required, and that this could not be done under Lieutenant-Colonel Hume, who was too firmly set in the old ways of doing things. Moreover, Hume’s mounting frustration with his job led him increasingly to blame individual policemen for the failings of the system. He gained the nickname inside the Force of ‘Bully Hume’, and became all the more alienated from his membership. When in 1897 the Commissioner, worn out by the burdens of his various offices and his increasing isolation, applied for leave of absence to visit the United Kingdom, the Cabinet seized the opportunity to declare that the moment for change had come and that Hume should step down once a successor was found. 42
56
CHAPTER 3
‘Peace Preservers’ and Detectives
Soon after the founding of the New Zealand Police Force the Draconian regulations of old were ameliorated, but the Inspectorate still sought to enforce rigid discipline. As in the past, however, there had to be latitude in the disciplinary system to accommodate the type of men employed. Given the influx of soldiers as a result of the prescribed method of recruiting, standards of discipline began quickly to decline. New Zealand soldiers might have the capacity to act as obedient automatons in battle situations, but they were by and large not suited to the life of a constable, involving as it did a great deal of time away from superiors and therefore the need to exercise much ‘wise discretion’ in both work and extra-work situations. In 1890, the Police Examiner noted, only four candidates in the junior examination gave a full and correct answer to the question on discipline and demeanour. Inspectors frequently had to castigate their men for slovenliness.
Some NCOs and officers long in the job had grown weary and dispirited, particularly because of their lack of adequate staff. A number had clearly lost the willpower to attempt to create a crack force out of what they felt to be ‘inferior’ men. Chief Detective Charles Broberg was to recall that when he joined the Force in 1895, ‘half of the sergeants could not tell you anything, and the other half would be annoyed if you dared to ask them.’ Harsh internal punishment could still be applied, often seemingly erratically or gratuitously, but in the 1890s the overall standard loosened a great deal. In one provincial city, it was later said, there was virtually no supervision by the sergeant of the night-duty men; in Auckland, Dunedin and elsewhere, such visits were virtually by way of ‘appointments’ rather than the surprise swoops they were supposed to be. This enabled the less conscientious constables to slacken their vigilance. 43
Disillusionment spread, moreover, because of the appalling working and living conditions of many police, a legacy of long years of government retrenchment. There were some improvements, such as a move to Lower High Street after the ‘old and unhealthy’ Maclaggan Street station housing Dunedin’s police headquarters burnt down. Later, a grand new brick station at Mount Cook in Wellington, built by convict labour and much lauded for its comforts, was opened in April 1894; the old station in Manners Street was inadequate, and the new one enabled better supervision of the turbulent Te Aro area. Such edifices only heightened the
40
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58
contrast between the few relatively comfortable stations and the many which were not. 44
In 1889, Mercury Bay station was (not untypically) in ‘a most ruinous condition . with four of its six rooms ‘not fit for human habitation’. The following year, the children of the constable at Wellington’s Clyde Quay station (a family of 1 1 inhabited four rooms) contracted typhoid because the house had stagnant pools of water underneath and an open sewer nearby. In 1892, the headquarters station of the NelsonAVestland District was a wretched broken down old hovel’. Some messes were so unsavoury that men ate at hotels instead. At Manaia, the police complex was a disgrace to civilisation and humanity’, the lockup exposed to rain by rotting shingles - ‘unfit even to be used as a dog kennel’. A doctor was so concerned about a constable patient that he wrote to Seddon deploring ‘the disgraceful want of the most elementary requirements of health & comfort in the men’s quarters’ in Nelson; they were sunless and noisy, and had rotting and broken floors. When in 1889 temporary accommodation was required for three policemen during a West Coast winter, the administration provided a tent. 45
Quite apart from the risk of physical illness, poor conditions encouraged slackness. By 1895, for example, the Wellington Central station had a library, but it still lacked a communal place for the men to linger. They went elsewhere for recreation, particularly to places considered with distaste by Inspector Pender. For lack of £3O to furnish a room, he lamented, habits of indiscipline were being instilled in impressionable young members. Efforts to tighten discipline seem, in retrospect, to have been woefully misguided. The authorities decided in 1895 that membership of football, athletic and other sports clubs interfered with discipline and duty. No leave would be granted for constables to play in matches or travel with sports teams. This at a time when the authorities both encouraged pursuit of ‘manly’ sports, and expected policemen to be role models. 46
Such rulings naturally affected morale, as did a consistent chipping away at conditions of employment as a result of retrenchment. From 1888 it became much harder to be reimbursed for medical attention; issue of light and fuel to out-stations ceased (and was reduced at barracks stations); and the amount of free forage was reduced. As a static number of men faced an increased workload, there were also economising measures on a regional level. In another example of police practice cutting across official ideas on appropriate behaviour, Broham stopped the customary leave to attend church on Sundays. From 1889, allowances were lowered; in 1893, constables were reminded that the 12 days annual leave could not be accumulated. 47
There seemed to be few rewards for the unpleasantness and dangers of the job. From time to time the men were reminded of their vulnerability. On 30 July 1890, 1/c Constable Neil McLeod put a drunken passenger off a steamer at Mangawhare, near Dargaville. He was killed when the
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
42
man, Henry Funcke, began firing wildly from the wharf. When captured Funcke, who proved to be insane, was almost lynched by a posse. McLeod’s was the first direct killing of a sworn policeman by an unlawful act since the founding of the Force, and the next would not be until 1910; but others lost their lives in the course of duty. While attempting to rescue people during floods in Hawke’s Bay in 1897, Sergeant Florence O’Donovan (older brother of John) and Constable Alfred Stephenson ‘died nobly’.
In the summer of 1894, the Wairarapa was wrecked on Great Barrier Island, with a death toll of 134. Sergeant Richard Gamble went to take charge of bodies, mail and other property in ‘most trying circumstances’. Many of the 63 bodies recovered had been buried by local Maori, and had to be exhumed. Corpses were being handled, a fortnight after death, in ‘a foul and dangerous atmosphere, on scant rations’. The Commissioner noted ‘no grumbling or complaints’ despite the ‘exceptional and horrible nature of the duty’. One of Gamble’s men contracted consumption, which he eventually died of in 1901. When a blast at Westland’s Brunner Mine in 1895 left 65 men dead, it was the police who coordinated emergency and ‘clean-up’ services.
The small numbers of policemen who died on the spot as a result of criminal or ‘lunatic’ activity should not lead to an underestimation of the dangers of police work. Some police died after illness or injuries caused by struggles with offenders. Sergeant-Major Michael Scanlan of Palmerston North was kicked severely by a man he arrested for being drunk and disorderly in March 1897, and died that August from illness associated with the beating. Constable John Doyle was severely injured in a fracas in a hotel yard in Otaki in 1913, and later died of his injuries. In the years between these two deaths there were a number of reports of severe injuries to policemen - in Auckland, to Constable John Irwin in 1902 and Constable Frederick Mills in 1912, for example. For many isolated rural police, danger was ever-present. Rivers had to be forded, or - as with Charles O’Reilly at Opotiki - the tides timed in order to get around sea-cliffs; and summary justice would be administered to refractory individuals who might not always receive it with equanimity.
The pressures of policing could also cause mental illness. Raglan’s Constable William Bulford was one of many policemen compulsorily retired because of ‘troubles and anxieties’ that could be traced to the pressures of police work. Constable John Day’s death in the Hokitika Asylum in 1894 may have been related to injuries he sustained in a fracas at Ahaura. The widowed Sergeant Soren Moller, a father of five who was in Pender’s view ‘one of the best and most efficient men in the force’, was declared to be insane when in charge at Blenheim in 1896; he was (in his view) ‘kidnapped’ and carted off to an asylum. Rotorua’s Constable Bartholomew Moroney was much affected by having to dig out and transport the bodies of people killed in the 1886 Tarawera eruption, and killed himself two years later. The Stratford constable, Patrick Leahy,
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who had often complained of his workload, died en route to an asylum in 1894; the coroner’s jury drew the attention of the police leadership to its neglect of the mental health of harassed personnel, and the headlines spoke of a policeman ‘driven out of his mind’, the ‘sad results of overwork’. Some four dozen serving policemen died between 1886 and the end of the century 48
Given the unpleasantness, danger and scanty rewards of the job, it was natural that policemen would attempt to act collectively to improve their lot. But regulation 72 in effect prohibited any police ‘union’ activity; ‘As a general rule, any petition signed by numbers or combinations for any purpose will subject the parties to punishment or dismissal.’ In July 1890 civil servants, partly influenced by the growth of union activity in the blue-collar workforce, had held a mass meeting (chaired by former police official James Edward FitzGerald) in Wellington to form a Public Service Association (PSA). This conservative body, dominated by heads of departments, had some union-type functions; it opposed retrenchment and advocated a classification and promotion system. Some rank and file policemen felt that joining it might help their cause. Since it was a ‘professional’ body, perhaps the police administration would allow this. But Commissioner Hume, seeing it as a back-door way of unionising, banned them from membership, pending consultation with his senior police officials, who agreed that membership of the PSA would be contrary to the 1886 Act and its accompanying regulations. On 1 September, therefore, a circular stated that ‘under no circumstances will any member of the force be permitted to join’ the PSA, even as an honorary member. Those who had joined were to resign at once. 49
With the arrival of the Liberal government, however, the political attitude to ‘benign’ combinations of workers changed. The Liberals at once granted official recognition to the PSA, and the Association opened discussions with the Commissioner of Police about possible membership by individual policemen. As Hume became attuned to the new governmental ethos - that collective worker activity was now something to be harnessed for the common good rather than suppressed - he began to alter his perceptions. In 1892, following representations from the men, he secured from the Minister an important concession: from now on, no secret reports on their alleged shortcomings would be submitted by Inspectors to Commissioner and Minister. All such reports would first be given to the alleged offender, who had a right of reply. But improvements of this nature fell far short of what the rank and file wanted. In particular, they continued to push for the right to organise collectively to pursue their aspirations. PSA membership was the most realistic option, and in March 1893 Hume rescinded the ban on police joining.
Membership of the Association was at a peak at this time, and at once policemen began to join on the invitation of district committees (which were careful to work through the Inspectors). The Greymouth branch of the PSA gained nearly 50 members in a few weeks, partly because of a
44
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
police influx; the Nelson secretary enrolled a dozen constables. There was great caution in some other areas, with the men fully aware that regulation 72 remained in force, and might be used against them even for PSA activity. Conversely, some of the more radical police ‘unionists’ by now felt that, given its demonstrated cautiousness, the PSA’s protection was of little value. When Wanganui Sergeant-Major John Anderson (whose service dated back to St John Branigan’s Otago Provincial Force) had to retire through ill-health, the PSA made him an honorary member in 1894, but typically could do nothing to improve his retirement payout of a year’s salary. Grievances were expressed to other organisations, and the Commissioner found himself receiving pleas for policing reform from groups such as the Waimate branch of the Workers’ Union, the Dunedin Social Reform Association, and the Canterbury Progressive Liberal Association. Sympathetic MPs also joined the chorus, among them the former unionist J A Millar.
But the PSA remained the official mouthpiece for police representations - so much so that Lieutenant-Colonel Hume himself became one of its vice-presidents! Police members were far from happy with its obsession with issues like classification which were of no interest to them, and with what seemed to be a lack of action on police matters. When pressure on the PSA led to efforts to bring police conditions into line with those in the civil service, the police authorities gave the matter short shrift. To a suggestion that, as with the railways, a board of appeal be established for police wishing to have censures on their defaulters’ sheets examined, Seddon snorted that ‘complaints made now were numerous, and if there was an Appeal Board he was afraid the state of things would be very much worse’. The PSA President epitomised the caution of the Association: it would ‘not be a wise policy to worry’ the authorities, for ‘courteous practice will be most likely to secure the reforms we have set our hearts on’. It failed to do so, particularly for its police members; enthusiasm quickly flagged, that of constables at a disproportionately high rate. In July 1897 the PSA’s Journal ceased publication, and the Association rapidly disintegrated. 50
To secure redress for their grievances, especially over promotion, constables increasingly violated regulation 61 by seeking out ‘political influence’. Commissioner Gudgeon noted as early as 1888 that ‘constables have so far forgotten themselves as to wait upon Ministers’. He declared that a man engaging in such activities, which were ‘subversive of all discipline’, would ‘find that his prospects have not been improved’. Indeed the transgressor would be recommended to the Minister for dismissal. Despite some exemplary punishments, however, the problem continued because policemen found that the use of influence could work, especially because of the Liberal government’s interpretation of its ‘democratic mandate’. In 1895 Hume was still protesting to Seddon that political intervention had to be ‘rigidly excluded, or discipline will very
45
'Peace Preservers' and Detectives
soon disappear. 1 shall always most earnestly and emphatically protest against interference by practically irresponsible persons or bodies, who, though no doubt actuated by the best of motives cannot possibly have either the experience or knowledge sufficient to enable them to form a just conclusion in matters of administration or discipline.’ 51
Whitmore had observed men ‘repeatedly passed over through others at Head Quarters, or, possessed of influence, being promoted over their heads’. To stop this, his new regulations provided that ‘men will be promoted always strictly by seniority, except when they decline promotion; have a bad record; or, in the exceptional case of great merit in a junior officer; which latter will be specially recorded and explained in the Gazette.’ Shearman and other senior police warned from the beginning that such a general rule (whatever the exceptions) would dishearten the able and ambitious junior men, and clog the higher constable and NCO grades with men not necessarily efficient: the seniority rule promoted drones, to ‘the disgust of the workers’. But Gudgeon and Hume as a general rule continued Whitmore’s policy in an effort to curb the use of political influence, and appear to have had some success. Given the stagnant state of the force (exacerbated by the 1888 abolition of the retiring age), and a lack of job opportunities outside it, opportunities for advancement were few enough in any case. By 1891, a future Commissioner noted, promotion had already been almost at a standstill for 10 years. 52
Between 1890 and 1896 there were only 107 advancements in class (i.e. promotions within rank). Promotion proper, to a higher rank, was a rare phenomenon; and many advancements to NCO were to ‘acting’ positions - or to the even lowlier informal ‘rank’ of ‘local’ sergeant. From the beginning of his Commissionership, Hume attempted to alleviate ‘uneasiness and discontent’ at the promotional block, partly by attempting the rationalisation of stationings but mostly by trying to get efficient constables into the NCO rank. But the financial implications of the latter idea were too great for the Liberals to accept to any significant extent. And when modes of promotion other than seniority did begin to appear with some frequency this only caused more discontent in the Force, for such promotions carried the stigma of suspicion as to their real motive. Advancements for ‘intrepid conduct’, or for detecting smuggling or illicit distillation, for example, were widely seen as undeserved or cloaks for the exercising of favouritism and influence. 53
By mid 1893, fuelled by temperance movement accusations of impropriety surrounding promotions and non-promotions, discontent had so escalated that Seddon finally agreed to take some limited action. All 3/c constables of at least seven years’ service (and all those who were clerks of the court) would be promoted to 2/c provided that they had clean defaulters’ sheets. This caveat was detrimental to many men - particularly city men, subject to close scrutiny - who had minor black marks against them for matters such as those listed by an MP: taking a glove off when on duty, being a minute or two late for a 4.45 am parade,
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
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spilling ink on the office floor. After some agitation, those with a single trivial entry were also promoted, and this policy was also applied to an intention to promote all men with seven years’ service at 2/c level to 1/c. Seddon admitted, moreover, that country men, out of sight of NCOs and officers most of the time, were advantaged vis-a-vis urban policemen. The lists were therefore worked through in order to distinguish trivial from serious offences, and to iron out anomalies between town and country service. Some men found that what they believed to be clean defaulters’ sheets were in fact not; under pressure from Millar the rules were changed so that the notification of accusations against men became retrospective, and they were given a chance to respond.
But such minor reforms did not remove the fundamental promotion blockage, and in any case the government began to renege on seven-year promotions in class, as these threatened to pack the higher classes with an ‘excess of the numbers provided for by the estimates’. At the beginning of 1897, when demands for an enquiry into policing had became deafening, the Minister and Commissioner attempted to allay the discontent both inside and outside the Force by implementing a number of significant promotions. Seniority, ‘efficiency and suitability’ were examined, and on 1 February there were 46 advancements in class, including 11 for NCOs. 54
These and other palliatives did not fundamentally alter the internal state of the Force, however. By April it was being speculated that the fate of the Liberal government was inexorably bound up with whether policing issues were urgently addressed, particularly the liquor issue. Prohibitionists had worked hard to ‘wowserise’ the Liberal Party, but by 1896 - blocked by Seddon’s astute manoeuvring against Stout - they had given up this goal. Their focus changed from demanding new laws to the proper enforcement of existing ones. In the forefront was Wake’s friend Tommy Taylor, the newly elected MP for Christchurch City, son of a policeman. He and other prohibitionist ‘left Liberals’ delivered a stream of attacks against Seddon and Thompson, against their political control of policing, and against the demoralisation and degeneracy allegedly created in the Force by ‘puli’. Some constables were said to be ‘little better than the habitual drunkards they are expected to keep in check’. Such observations would once have surprised no one, but in the light of changing mores they were now deemed to indicate a national scandal.
Increasing numbers of commentators were ceasing to blame individual policemen for the problem, criticising instead the structure itself and the under-funding of policing compared with the Australian colonies. There was increasing awareness too that a number of forces in the Englishspeaking world were being reformed, including key United States forces such as that in New York City under Theodore Roosevelt’s supervision (following exposes of political influence and police tolerance of illegal drinking and other offences), and a number of British forces such as Manchester’s. New Zealand police experts were aware of these developments, and were in any case instinctively working out similar solutions
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to the colony’s policing problems. Advances in technology, science and managerial theory allowed for - almost demanded moves toward the professionalisation’ of the New Zealand Police Force. There was increasing awareness that to maximise efficiency, policing now needed to be ‘a calling, a life-long career’. The Force already possessed one of the characteristics of a profession, an esoteric body of knowledge, but improvements in this area, such as a proper training regime, were needed. Another feature of a profession, a ‘service ideal’, was being developed via the strategy of policing by consent. The drive towards professionalisation accompanied the hegemonisation of society, and was in general terms accepted by the state as a positive development. The government responded in two ways to the inexorable pressures for modernisation.
First, it was in this context that Hume was notified that he would be replaced as Commissioner. This had been on the cards for some time. At the beginning of his term in office, Thompson had believed Hume too overburdened to handle prison matters as well as a police force under great scrutiny. Seddon had looked, in vain, for a Commissioner from the tried and trusted Victorian police force when he visited Australia in early 1897. But Scotland Yard’s policing structures were by now perceived as the more appropriate model for New Zealand, particularly as the majority of problems occurred in urban areas, and the London force had recently been developing a more benign style, which suited the trajectory of New Zealand society. ‘The Met’ had, of course, been one of the key models for New Zealand policing when the colony was founded. The AgentGeneral in England was tasked with preliminary investigations, and when Seddon visited England he conferred with Metropolitan Commissioner Sir Edward Bradford on the names submitted. As a result he interviewed and recruited ‘a famous London detective’, retired Criminal Investigation Department Chief Inspector John Bennett Tunbridge, for the job. Tunbridge was said to be ‘a strict disciplinarian, but at the same time fair and just to the men’; the head of detection at ‘The Met’ had described him as one of ‘the smartest officers I ever had the honour of being associated with’, and he had a string of successful cases to his name. Tunbridge arrived in New Zealand in October 1897, and became Commissioner on the 18th. It was another two days before Hume was induced to hand in his resignation, and Tunbridge assumed office formally on the 25th with wide autonomy to begin implementing reforms.
Secondly, the government succumbed to the tremendous pressure, including from pro-government MPs, for a commission of enquiry. In his maiden speech in 1897, Taylor had brought his long-standing campaign against political influence/corruption in the Force before Parliament in a vigorous fashion. He and his allies had melded the concepts of ‘good order and purity of government’, and calls for a public enquiry included those from former Otago policeman, now Lyttelton MP, John Joyce, and from many newspapers. Taylor’s energy in linking his attacks on the police with such a demand ensured that the government was under siege
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The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
on the issue, despite Hume’s denial of ‘disorganization’ in the Force, and his allegations that a ‘certain class of the community are for ever crying down the Police, and apparently endeavouring to manufacture grievances and discontent’. Thompson publicly rejected any need for an enquiry, but when in June Seddon interviewed Tunbridge in London about the Commissionership the Premier told the candidate of his ‘considerable dissatisfaction’ with police management over the last few years. On 30 September Taylor launched the most swingeing attack possible against ‘corruption, disorganization, drunkenness and immorality’ in the police, and alleged that the Force was in the thrall of the licensed trade via its political masters.
Taylor agreed that political influence had been inherited by the Liberals, but claimed that they had so allowed it to flourish that police were now just ‘an auxiliary of machine politics’ of the American Tammany Hall variety. He stated that Hume’s 1894 annual report had given ‘the first signs that the position of the Commissioner was becoming intolerable’ with respect to political pressure affecting promotions and transfers. Taylor had missed references in the 1891 report to, for example. West Coast police bringing ‘all the political and other influence at their command to bear on the head of the department’ to cancel the transfers of the last of the men receiving goldfields allowances. But Hume’s 1894 language had certainly been blunt: matters such as promotion must be ‘left to the independent discretion of him who is appointed to administer the Act’.
Hume had become even more forthright since. In his 1896 report he had written about ministerial intervention’s ‘breaking of the bonds of discipline and a consequent loss of efficiency’; under the 1886 Act it was he who was responsible for the ‘discipline, obedience, and organization of the Police’. He pointedly repeated these remarks word for word the following year. ‘He was a remarkably courageous man to say it’. Taylor voiced a concern that the imminent arrival of Tunbridge was a device to avoid the cleansing process of an extensive public enquiry. Thompson’s response was that when the new Commissioner arrived, the pair would tour the police districts and representations could be made to them; since the ‘widespread charges’ were either false or ‘ancient history’, there was no need for an enquiry. The admitted ‘looseness’ in the liquor arena would be addressed by Tunbridge, who would ‘put our Police Force on a proper footing’.
But Thompson was not fully in tune with the Premier’s thinking. It was gradually dawning on Seddon that an enquiry could generate both political capital and administrative efficiency. Taylor’s accusations at times were so wild (e.g. that the Bishop of Dunedin was a brothel owner) that, however bad the situation in the Police, the Force would emerge looking comparatively good and the accusers would lose their mana. Moreover, such an enquiry would take the new Commissioner to the root of the problems, providing him with a rapid education programme on his
‘Peace Preservers’ and Detectives
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new country and its policing problems. Tunbridge agreed with Seddon that an enquiry would be appropriate, for otherwise the public would continue to think that the whole Force was to be condemned rather than a few 'black sheep'. Since this was ‘one of the most serious matters we have had to deal with in this colony’, the Royal Commissioners should be men of stature and independence.
The new Commissioner, then, took up the reins of power just as a nationwide purgative experience was about to sweep through New Zealand. For months from February 1898 serving and former police, and civilians from many walks of life, bombarded the authorities with their grievances and their solutions. Policing was to achieve an enormous public profile, mostly negative despite Seddon’s hopeful assessment. But few who had observed the policing of New Zealand over the previous decade were in the least surprised at many of the allegations that were levelled during the travels of the Commission. Its hearings were a fitting climax to a difficult period in the colony’s policing history; a period when constables had relaxed their control over society more rapidly than powerful strands of opinion had wanted, and when police had failed to proactively impose upon ‘recalcitrant’ sectors of society demands for new, ‘higher’ standards of public behaviour and private mores. 55
Public attack had focused on the ‘peace preservers’, the uniformed police; but detectives had come in for adverse scrutiny as well. In 1869, the London Metropolitan Police Commissioners reported that their detection services were viewed with ‘the greatest suspicion’, being seen as ‘entirely foreign to the habits and feelings of the nation’. They were perceived by the dominant classes as potentially or actually violating the civil libertarian facet of official ideology, and by the dominated classes as being spies for the dominant classes and their agents. They were also seen universally as being prone to corruption. Internally, rivalry between the detectives and the uniformed men was intense, as it had been since the first days of the New Police. In New Zealand, the relationship between the plain-clothes and uniformed wings of the Police also remained problematic. In 1886 the Force was ‘divided into preventive and detective branches’. Under the ensuing regulations the ‘senior detective’ (by length of service) in each of the four main centres was designated Chief Detective. The new regulations stressed that the terms ‘prevention’ and ‘detection’ were only ‘indicating in a general way’ the duties of the men inside each branch. These two basic functions of policing were interchangeable, particularly insofar as all uniformed men were to be engaged in detection functions. In all police forces, in fact, most detection work was undertaken by ‘uniformed preventive police’. The relatively small detective branch undertook esoteric and weighty detection matters, and so tended to get the publicity, kudos and rewards for the ‘big catches’ - which were frequently based on a great deal of painstaking uniformed backup work.
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The preventive patrol police, therefore, were frequently at odds with detectives. Resentment was all the greater because detectives’ pay rates and allowances were higher, partly as a reward for their supposed superior intelligence and partly to offset expenses (paying for information; hanging around in bars and at the races; hiring rooms to interview people when on the road, and the like). Harmony between the two branches was further jeopardised by the new Chief Detective position. Hitherto, detectives had reported to the senior uniformed NCO, but the new situation threw this into uncertainty and turned matters into (in Sergeant-Major Pardy’s words) ‘a farce’. ‘lnspector of Detectives’ C T Browne in Wellington was both the capital’s Chief Detective and head of the whole detective division. Detectives were to be recruited only from among uniformed men - as had been the practice in any case - and would be promoted to 4/c detective rank after a period of satisfactory probation. As well as better pay, detectives had much greater chance of access to rewards. Terence O’Brien, for example, received a massive £125 reward from the Customs Department in 1889 for successfully prosecuting tobacco smugglers. Preventive branch jealousy of detectives was, in such circumstances, natural. 56
Uniformed police often stressed (correctly) that detection was a very subordinate element of policing. In 1888, as part of the restructuring necessitated by retrenchment, Browne was demoted to Chief Detective only, on a 1/c detective’s pay. Concomitantly, the Commissioner declared ‘that the Detective Force has ceased to exist as an independent branch of the Force and in all cases the Detectives will be under the Officers in charge of Districts’. This had emerged as the de facto situation anyway to resolve ambiguities, but its formalisation did not clear up the demarcation problems between Chief Detectives and senior NCOs.
Detective Inspector Browne had been (in Broham’s words) ‘recognised as one of the smartest detectives in Victoria, and in provincial days was looked upon as the best man in New Zealand’. But his downgrading was symbolic of the fact that the Force, in a period of reorganisation, was confirming its essential nature as a preventive patrol body. Shearman’s words exemplified the general police attitude towards the ‘elite’ craft of detection: ‘the great object to be gained is the prevention of crime which is not likely to follow if too many detectives’ (as a proportion of total police numbers) were employed. Moreover, although new detection techniques and successes would from time to time excite public attention, and in New Zealand as in Britain the ‘public judges of the efficiency of the Police generally largely on its detective work’, the Victorian era’s earlier adulation of detectives was now comparatively on the wane. 57
The 1888 detective restructuring included retrenchment. That March there were 19 detectives in the colony and a number of ‘acting detectives’, uniformed men placed permanently on plain-clothes duty. From the end of the month the number of full detectives was reduced to 16 and all but two acting positions were abolished. Detective work was concentrated
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upon the four centres; outside them, only Napier, Westland and Southland had detectives. When Christchurch’s Chief Detective Thomas Neil was branded by a judge as having displayed ‘gross cowardice’ for not having rushed the armed offender at Rolleston, Inspector Pender felt that public opinion was so against Neil that he should be transferred. Gudgeon not only agreed, but also reduced him in rank to 2/c. Later in 1888 the Commissioner visited the four centres to further reorganise the detective branch, mostly by a series of transfers. Auckland detection was considered to be of such poor quality that Browne was transferred there, superseding James Tuohy in charge of the district. Austin Kirby - later to disgrace the Force - became Chief Detective in Wellington. Scope for promotion was curtailed by making the four Chief Detectives the only 1/c positions. Another wave of reorganisation followed early in 1889. 58
Even after all of this, uniformed officers echoed Gudgeon in habitually describing detectives in scathing terms: ‘a dolt’, ‘useless’. Detectives were also fair game for critics, with a radical MP for example asserting that with ‘a few brilliant exceptions, the detectives of the service are lazy and incompetent’. In 1888 an Italian fraudster who had escaped from the French penal colony of New Caledonia had disappeared while in the care of Detective John Walker en route for Sydney, to the detective branch’s chagrin. Years later it emerged that he had been hidden by a compatriot in a small inner compartment in the steamer, and had ultimately escaped from Australasia. The case was much discussed for a long time, as were the entrapment and other ‘untoward’ procedures by Kirby in Wellington. An extraordinary investigation illustrated how far not only detection, but also senior uniformed policing, had slipped in standard. In July 1889, Commissioner Gudgeon reported to the Minister that Wellington’s Inspector Thomson, Sergeant-Major Morice and Chief Detective Lionel Benjamin had - together with other policemen - ‘displayed almost criminal negligence and incapacity in the preliminary investigations’ of a murder on 31 May at Kaiwharawhara, near the city. They had ‘failed to do any one of those things which might reasonably have been expected from police officers of experience or ... dictated by common sense’.
The case centred on the shooting and stabbing of Thomas Hawkings. If this had occurred near a country station. Gudgeon believed, ‘the solitary constable would have acquitted himself creditably’. As it was, the incident was reported to Morice at 11 pm, the first constables did not turn up at the scene of the crime until 7 am, and Benjamin only arrived at 2 pm. The prosecution of the main suspect, an Italian named Louis Chemis who was involved in a lease dispute with Hawkings, was proceeded with apace despite other suspects (one in particular) and no real motive. The case rested crucially upon the matching up by police clerk John Tasker of fragments of newspaper, used as shotgun wadding and found near the body, with other fragments found in Chemis’ house. The Crown also alleged that the frenzied nature of the attack indicated it could not have been committed by an Englishman!
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The search for the newspaper fragments was conducted in ‘a most haphazard manner’, and the evidence was not labelled as to origins and finder, so there was scope for mix-ups. When a stranger later found more paper at the scene of the crime - in itself a remarkable development - this too was not properly labelled. Gudgeon noted that ‘the identification to say the least became of doubtful value’. Benjamin and a constable had compounded the ineptitude by engaging in some revolver practice ‘for idle amusement’ at the site of the murder. From Inspector Thomson downwards, the police did not emerge well from scrutiny. There were hints of a police ‘set-up’ of Chemis. Gudgeon recommended reductions in rank, although these did not occur, perhaps because the jury was convinced by the evidence (despite the prosecution’s main medical witness acknowledging he could not positively swear the fragments of paper came from the wound) to bring down a guilty verdict which the judge’s summation had decidedly not steered them towards. The case would not go away, however, and the incompetence of the detection procedures remained in the public spotlight. There was general amazement at the verdict, and after a petition from people unconvinced of Chemis’ guilt (including some jurors!) the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment, which was interpreted by many as an expression of doubt as to the jury’s findings.
A long colony-wide campaign began, led by people who felt that Chemis had been persecuted because he was a foreigner (something which had been stressed by the prosecution) and had not received an adequate defence from his lawyer, who was dying of typhoid at the time of the trial. Mrs Annie Chemis took legal proceedings against Thomson, Benjamin and Detective William Campbell for perjury in connection with the finding of the newspaper pieces in a drawer in her house, but despite some damning evidence, these failed. The campaign for release continued. How could a sober, hard-working employee of the Hutt County Council for a dozen years, a father of five, commit such a brutal murder? By 1893 scientists were affirming that the large pieces of paper found at the murder site could not have entered and emerged from a body.
Newspapers and politicians asserted that the case had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt, although most commentators claimed the police had made mistakes rather than engaged in a ‘deliberate conspiracy, which is manifestly preposterous’. There had been an ‘almost incredible bungling’ by the police, so that ‘doubt and discredit’ were ‘cast upon proofs which else had seemed impregnable’. An ex-convict allegedly confessed to the crime. In 1897 the government got itself off the hook by amnestying Chemis and others on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee year of Queen Victoria’s reign. But there was further criticism of the police to come, as Chemis campaigned for recognition of his innocence, and even more when, a broken man unable to get work, he blew his head off with dynamite on Wellington’s Mount Victoria in 1898. A tip-off in
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1902 as to the actual murderer was followed up lethargically and then dropped. 59
At around the time the case had first arisen, Gudgeon had asked his officers to consider ideas which in effect amounted to the formal abolition of the detective division. They were generally agreed to. He had proposed that instead of there being a career detection service, intelligent constables would be placed by their superiors on plain-clothes detection work whenever necessary, and given an allowance to enable them to buy drinks, pay ‘touts’ and so on. This would obviate the ‘unfriendly feeling’ which currently existed between the two divisions. The ‘snobbish superiority assumed by the detectives’ would disappear, and the ‘many very useless’ detectives would be removed from plain-clothes work and put back onto the beat. Weldon suggested a compromise, whereby the secondments to detective duty would occur under the on-job supervision of Chief Detectives. He felt - and Broham agreed - that it would be damaging for the public image of the police to suddenly abolish the division altogether. Broham went further: without some permanent detective expertise, unprincipled plain-clothes men would curry favour with their officers by getting ‘bogus’ evidence to procure convictions, and the ‘Force would soon obtain an unenviable notoriety.’ Gudgeon took on board such cautions. 60
The upshot was that the detective division was not formally abolished, but it was reduced even further. In October 1889, for example, the detective strength in Dunedin was cut to Chief Detective Alexander Henderson (who was however soon under suspicion for misconduct) and Detective Joseph McGrath. Officers’ contentions about the distance of detectives from the ‘general force’ were borne out during the reorganisations when 1/c Detective Walker requested discharge from the Force to avoid the ‘humiliation’ of reversion to the rank of 1/c sergeant. When in January 1890 Chief Detective Browne, plagued by ill health, was ordered by the Defence Minister to retire ‘in consequence of retrenchment’, this seemed to mark the end of an era when detection had been regarded highly in the police. 61
Gudgeon’s reforms did not mean an end to the debate about detection. Hume vacillated over what to do about the branch, and was so antagonistic towards detectives that he openly accused them of ‘extreme anxiety’ to take charge of cases in order to get commendation, instead of working with other detectives and uniformed men in ‘the one common cause’. He felt that the branch’s ‘unsatisfactory state’ was ‘perhaps’ because of how its staff had been selected - through numbers of arrests or reports (and their ‘verbosity’), or ‘worse than all perhaps, from political influence or favouritism, instead of from special intelligence, or natural gifts and extraordinary powers’. The Commissioner felt - like his predecessor - that ministerial interference in promoting detectives had devalued the calling. Of one man elevated to the detective branch on ministerial
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instruction, Pardy claimed that no policeman in the Force was ‘less fitted for detective work’.
For the detectives, permanent and impermanent, the mode of work continued unchanged. There were ‘exciting’ tasks, such as infiltration duties by Detective Patrick Flerbert during the 1890 Maritime Strike, but by and large the mundaneness of the job belied the ‘glamour’ tag previously given it in the popular (and indeed uniformed police) mind. The diary of a detective around the time of the establishment of the Force reveals paperwork in the office from 7 to 9 am, followed by tedious and often fruitless surveillance work until midnight or beyond. Assignments to the provinces were not necessarily any more rewarding. Wellington detectives operating clandestinely in Nelson and Charleston to catch arsonists and gold thieves had to give up with no arrests, a not untypical result of such expeditions. When the authorities heard a rumour that Government House and Buildings were to be dynamited, long hours were spent in watching the buildings and their grounds. 62
It was lack of results in spectacular cases, however, that fed public disquiet and further reduced morale in both branches of the Force. On the roads around New Plymouth in 1892-3 a youth posing as a highwayman - down to a ‘stand and deliver’ patter - would rob travellers in dramatic fashion. The offences were so brazen that police inability to catch him attracted great public criticism, and incurred the wrath of the authorities. Seddon telegraphed that he was ‘very much inclined to transfer the whole lot of them’ if they did not catch the highwayman, a threatened punishment that had become fairly common. Eventually he was caught not by police sleuthing but when two men in the Criterion Hotel jumped him when he attempted to hold up the establishment; one of them, Harold Thomson, the son of Inspector J B Thomson, was wounded in the process, and was later ‘rewarded’ by a grateful government with - at his father’s instigation - a job in the Justice Department. When the ‘New Plymouth Highwayman’, 19 year old carpenter Robert Wallath, later briefly escaped custody, public attention again focused on the case. (In the event he was released after 4‘A years and became a prominent and respected local businessman, dying in 1960.) 63
1892 also saw the beginning of a saga which would become one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases in New Zealand history. At Southland’s Lora Gorge, the remote home of scattered and poor farmers of Scottish Highlands origin, Richard Bell was returning home from a meeting when he was shot at close range. He lingered for several hours in his house before dying from a ‘ghastly wound’ to his face. On his deathbed he reportedly named neighbour John Mcßae, with whom there had been disputes over cattle trespass, as the culprit. Winton’s Constable Hans Rasmussen, after visiting the scene, followed his line of command under the restructured force and reported the matter to Dunedin. Thus - it was popularly believed - the intervention of Invercargill’s police was delayed, a supposition which spurred Southlanders to urge reinstatement
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of Inspectorate status for their district (notwithstanding that it would have been quite in order for the Winton man to contact Invercargill in such a case anyway).
In any event, the police made little headway in Lora Gorge, where the inward-looking community was disinclined to give any information away - particularly because a number of the families, including the Mcßaes, were engaged in the illicit distilling of ‘Hokonui’ whisky. Mcßae was arrested, on the basis of little evidence. An approach to the Invercargill police by a ‘thoroughly respectable’ 20 year old ‘amateur actress’, Ursula Smith, led to the temporary employment of New Zealand’s first female detective. (She was possibly the world’s first female police operative, as opposed to matrons and searchers, since the first is conventionally given in the international literature as working in Germany in 1903.) Miss Smith suggested she should go to Lora Gorge disguised as a smart 15 year old town girl sent to the country for health reasons: ‘she would try to make love to one of the young Mcßae’s’ and gain his confidence. Inspector Hickson, Commissioner Hume and Defence Minister Seddon were all horrified at the very thought, and the idea lapsed. But after Detective Benjamin’s disguise as a swagman was instantly spotted by the locals, the authorities began to think again. Mrs Catherine Bell’s story kept changing (she had become in effect a defence rather than a prosecution witness), and in a context of mounting pressure to get results another application from Miss Smith proved successful. She would earn £1 per week, plus board and expenses; another detective would be sent in as a decoy.
By early February 1893 there had been no results, and the charges against Mcßae had to be dropped. Amidst the resultant criticism of the police came the telling accusation that antagonism between uniformed and detective branches had hampered the investigation. Inspector Pardy, by now head of the district, brushed off 3/c Constable Hugh Chisholm’s suspicions (and local gossip) that convicted cattle thief James Trender had committed the murder. He had allegedly been put up to it by Mrs Bell, ‘a thoroughly bad one and a most accomplished liar and the Daughter is not much better’. Meanwhile Donald Mcßae (son of John, and now also a suspect) had fallen in love with Ursula Smith. She had taken him to a lovers’ lane, where - with a concealed Sergeant Ewen Macdonell as a witness - he had named Trender as the guilty party. Further enquiries by Smith confirmed that locals believed Trender had been Mrs Bell’s lover for years - and probably her daughter’s too. The female detective then had to leave Lora Gorge, as the room she was staying in was required for another person. Pardy felt that her efforts would have succeeded fully in time, but when she offered her continued services (e.g. as an armed decoy to catch a man who had been assaulting women near Dunedin) the police felt that detective work was too dangerous for a woman.
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The case remained a public scandal throughout the 1890s, with people saying openly that the police had allowed Trender to get away with murder. In 1905 the files were reopened when a con man who had displaced Trender in Mrs Bell’s affections claimed that Trender had killed Bell to escape both liability for money owed to the deceased and his wrath. The victim had not only discovered that his wife had been having an affair with Trender, but also that his daughter Jane (when aged 11 or 12) had been seduced by him; there were fears of pregnancies resulting. However the informant, stated Chief Detective W B Mcllveney, was ‘an immoral, lying, worthless, drunken vagabond’ who had deserted a wife and nine children (later, Mrs Bell would have a child from this ‘arrant scoundrel’ before she, like John Mcßae, went mad), and so no reliance was placed upon his testimony. The whole case was still a media sensation as late as 1930, when it was reported that Trender was alleged to have made a deathbed confession. This turned out to be as inconclusive as everything else in the case, though the available evidence does suggest Trender’s guilt - probably with the help of the victim’s wife and/or daughter. Trender’s will left £3OO apiece to Catherine Bell and her (and his?) son Donald Bell, a property to Donald Bell, and money to the woman he allegedly confessed to. Whatever the truth, the police image suffered from the lack of successful detection in what should have been - given the localisation of the suspects - a fairly easy case. 64
In May 1896 the detective force suffered a ‘most extraordinary and painful sensation’ when Napier’s Detective Austin Kirby, said to be ‘well known’ in the colony (‘infamous’ would have been a better description), was arrested for extorting very large sums of money in 1882 from a Timaru tobacconist (on threat of arresting him for a ‘heinous crime’). The victim had moved overseas to escape Kirby’s demands, but had later returned to the colony. Kirby escaped from custody, and reached Sydney inside a packing case on the Talune. During the speculation about his whereabouts, a detective told the press that the head of police had been informed of his suspicions about Kirby years before; the man had long been ‘a disgrace to the force’. In June Kirby was arrested in Sydney with his accomplice W G Bassett, a Wellington private detective who was his son-in-law.
By now stories about Kirby and his misbehaviour were legion: he had been a partner in an illegal gambling saloon in Wellington, he had extorted money from spielers at race meetings. ‘Kirby seems to be generally disliked in the police force, and scarcely a member has a good word for him.’ Many people asked why his nefarious activities had gone on for so long undetected. On Kirby’s arrival back in the capital to stand trial, huge crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of the fugitive detective. He was found guilty of the substantive charge, and in November 1896 received three years gaol. Equally embarrassing to the police that year was the arrest by the Wellington police of a labourer, James Shore, for the stabbing to death of elderly Petone storekeepers Joseph and Emma
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Jones. It seemed another case of keenness to arrest anyone to assuage public anger, and in the event the charges were dropped. Stephen Bosher, the man who had reported the deaths to the police, was strongly rumoured to be the culprit, and after his arrest and conviction for theft, bigamy and murder he confessed before going to the gallows.
Of course, by its very nature, a great deal of detection surveillance never came to public notice. But insofar as much of it was preventive in intent, it was an integral part of the New Zealand policing operation. There was, for example, surveillance of organisations and individuals considered to be potentially subversive. The visit of a Russian engineer in 1893 was closely monitored in case he attempted to obtain information about New Zealand’s harbour defences. The growth of socialist and allied organisations was particularly targeted. In 1895 the Commissioner asked for a report on Christchurch’s Avon Refuge, which looked after destitute men: were its inmates subjected to haranguing by ‘Agitators’? That year, too, ‘quiet enquiries’ were being made about a reported anarchist headquarters ‘somewhere down South’; in response, Dunedin detectives reported that some radical members of the Knights of Labour had broken away to form a more ‘extreme’ group, but they would not ‘go to the length of Anarchists’. Dunedin police felt that any anarchists in the colony would be in Auckland, because of its hosting of ‘French escapees’ from New Caledonia. Pardy confirmed that when he had been in charge of the northern district he knew ‘many French & Germans with Anarchical opinions’. Auckland’s Chief Detective Martin Grace closed the matter: ‘There has been no unemployed agitation here for years and nothing to disturb mens minds that might have caused such a Society to be formed.’ 65
Tinkering with the detective organisation continued throughout Hume’s Commissionership, with transfers, swaps and dismissals a feature. One quite successful area of detective work was liaison with Australian and other overseas counterparts. Within a few weeks of the establishment of the New Zealand Police Force, Australian police tracked down John Caffrey and Henry Penn, who in an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap Caffrey’s former fiancee on Great Barrier Island had killed her father, Robert Taylor. They had pirated the cutter Sovereign of the Seas, which they scuttled in New South Wales after an unsuccessful attempt to sail to South America. The pair were hanged in 1887.
More characteristic of New Zealand detective work in public eyes - because of alleged bungling - was a case which began at the time of the Caffrey/Penn captures when ex-bank clerk Jonathan Roberts was gaoled for forging and uttering. In 1888 he was again gaoled, for theft, but escaped and was helped by ‘well-wishers’ perturbed at the length of his sentence (five years for property worth £2O). He laboured for ‘hardworking farmers with small properties’, and was captured not by detectives but by the local constable at Leeston. Imprisoned again, and working on the fortifications on Ripa Island, he swam across Lyttelton Harbour to sanctuary on Banks Peninsula. Here he stayed hidden for three months.
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feeling sorry for the police who were hunting for him in vain. He was never recaptured, although his diary turned up mysteriously in the mid 1890s, by when he was said to have found ‘an honoured and influential position’ in another country.
Wellington’s Inspector Pender reported in 1897 that ‘criminals of the worst type arrive here from Sydney almost weekly’, and asked unsuccessfully for at least a doubling of his two-man detective branch. Hickson was worse off; Auckland was the most crime-ridden city in New Zealand, but had only a Chief Detective as a permanent detective resource. The official figures were, it is true, misleading. Auckland’s Chief Detective Grace had several plain-clothes men ‘told off’ to work under him, and ‘they intend to make it their calling’. But numbers were undoubtedly few; the detective branch had become very much a subordinate part of policing by the end of the century. This was as could be expected in a period of increasing social stability. With ‘social behaviour’ generally improved, ordinary policemen were able to carry out most of the necessary surveillance and detection functions. The detection profile would soon be heightened, but as a result of new scientific techniques and discoveries rather than as a response to needs of public order. 66
CHAPTER 4
Varieties of ‘Vigilance and Control’
In the period leading up to the new Commissioner’s arrival and the Royal Commission, old modes of policing intersected uneasily with new. Although no police authorities liked the idea, part-time ‘district constables’ were still used to fill cheaply policing gaps in the countryside - and, for a time, to carry out specialist duties at, say, the Botanical Gardens in Wellington. Between October 1887 and May 1888 eight were appointed, including two to replace full-time constables in areas with decreasing workloads. Three of them, transferred from the Permanent Militia, were selected to give them a chance to prove themselves before being confirmed as constables. This system of ‘probationary constables’ did not last long, probably because the work of a district constable proved not to be suitable training for that of a regular constable.
The ‘Half-a-Policeman Policy’ was railed at by the press, in arguments privately accepted by the police hierarchy; it was unlikely that a publican, storekeeper or tradesman district constable like Makuri blacksmith John Murphy, chosen by locals who took a delegation to Wellington to secure him the job, would ‘run in’ his customers. If the part-timer were a smallfarmer, would he engage in hot pursuit at ploughing or harvesting time? How could a district constable be expected to ‘keep order’ amongst Maori without a uniform to establish his credentials? T have very little faith in District Constables especially Chinamen’, said Hume in December 1890 when sacking long-serving District/Chinese Constable Charles Wong Gye (without notice, compensation, or investigation into the charges against him).
But with the state ever seeking economies, a system intended to disappear soon after the creation of the Force was actually being strengthened (although not to the extent recommended by the parsimonious Gudgeon). A few part-timers, such as Tom Inger at Port Albert, had policed their communities for so long that they were retained despite their age because of their vast networks of knowledge. The eight district constables of March 1887 had become 18 by the end of 1896. In the Chathams the long-serving District Constable Richard Rayner had little to do, and also carried out most official functions on his part-time salary. ‘When we dropped anchor at Waitangi, we were boarded by the Port Officer Mr Rayner; the Collector of Customs Mr Rayner; the Postmaster Mr Rayner; the Chief Accountant Mr Rayner; Registrar of Births, Deaths
59
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and Marriages Mr Rayner; the Chief Constable Mr Rayner and the Chief Jailer Mr Rayner’, wrote a reporter.
Some part-timers were overworked in relation to their remuneration. District Constable Charles Dunne, stationed at Katikati from 1888 to 1922, worked 150 days on police business in 13 months in 1897-8, for which he received £25 plus (as with some other part-timers) an allowance for days on duty. His district was said to be disorderly because of a flourmill where Maori ‘congregated’ and the presence of a European gumfield. Richard Jones of Moawhango covered the huge ‘lnland Patea’ district for £5O per annum. When he had to take a prisoner to Napier, he could be away for up to a week. Some institutions were permitted to have officers or employees sworn in as ‘special constables’ for specific purposes - nightwatchmen, for example. And uniforms, at least ‘of sorts’, would be provided on request to North Island district constables (e.g. Wairoa’s Walter Torr) whose tasks included disciplining Maori. 67
While the Force clung to such expedients, some old ways were disappearing. The last of the separate water police units, Auckland’s, was disbanded in 1895, and a Wharf Police Station was opened. Old practices were revived on a temporary basis if necessary: escorting gold, for example, albeit on a user-pays basis. Other modes of policing held out against change: in addition to the district constable mechanism, for example, the mounted section in each district still throve despite the growth of railways and other forms of transportation, with the colony having 113 police horses in 1892. Foot constables were authorised to use their own horses when necessary, in return for a fee. Some 23 private horses were used for official duties in the same year. 68
Improvements in transport and communications were, however, making their mark. In the 1880s, telephone exchanges were set up in the major centres. In 1889 the Commissioner’s office and house had telephones installed, and a police telephone system linked headquarters with important district offices. In 1892, when phones were being seriously considered for some suburban stations, the first (experimental) typewritten letter was sent from headquarters. Pender had secured a cyclostyle machine in 1891, and in the late 1890s major new stations usually opened with telephones installed. By late 1893, when a Hammond typewriting machine was permanently installed at headquarters, the ‘matter of typewriting at Police Stations’ elsewhere was under consideration.
A few Christchurch police who owned bicycles began using them occasionally for police work from the advent of the cycling boom in the mid 1880s. In 1886 several police mounted bicycles to try to catch a man who had assaulted a child, and Detective Maurice O’Connor cycled after an offender in Lincoln Road. For some years bicycles continued to be used only occasionally; by a cycle patrol which in 1896-7 attempted to catch a Christchurch ‘Horse Fiend’ (who stabbed horses) for example. Detectives in that city provided their own bicycles (at a cost of £5 or so) for ease of access to the sprawling suburbs, as did a number of suburban
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constables. Sergeants could ‘exercise special supervision over the men on their beats’ by using bicycles. 69
Better transport and communications facilitated a trend towards administrative devolution in the Police. Social stabilisation enabled control from the centre to be less tight, and administrative work at district office level became regarded as a highly important component of policing per se. Future top policemen like John W Ellison, Samuel P Norwood, Charles W Hendrey and A H Wright all made their early mark in this capacity. The phasing out of the old fully centralised Constabulary model was signalled in 1891 when Chief Clerk J G Fox, who had often acted as the Commissioner’s locum tenens, was made redundant. Wright, as district clerk in Wellington from 1893, ‘generally gave directions on police matters’ in his Inspector’s absence, and Hendrey temporarily took over the Wanganui and West Coast District on the death of his Inspector in 1896. So well did he perform that in 1898 Tunbridge considered making him Chief Detective, even though he had only been promoted to sergeant in the same year. The death of long-serving headquarters accountant J M Goldfinch in 1895 was just one of many events which, taken together, meant a continuing lessening of headquarters control despite the propensity of Ministers to run a hands-on operation through the Commissioner. 70
The police were making increasing use of scientists like Christchurch’s Professor Alexander Bickerton, who conducted his analyses in a disused morgue in the grounds of the district headquarters. Police forensic techniques were becoming more sophisticated, despite well-publicised blunders such as the Louis Chemis affair. Chief Detective Grace and Detective William Chrystal of Auckland, for example, gained a conviction in a murder case described as ‘one of the most important ever tried in New Zealand’. It involved a triangular love affair and the use of strychnine poison, and the resultant hanging was a public warning to potential poisoners that forensic science was on the advance. By the time of the establishment of the Force, moreover, it was already increasingly police practice to use the legal expertise available to the Crown to conduct ‘important’ prosecutions. This definition was decreasingly confined to murders, grand larceny and so forth; a Crown solicitor was used to conduct an 1891 case against a Blenheim man charged with raping two young girls, for example. 71
The time of the formation of the New Zealand Police Force was, in the Defence Minister’s words, a ‘critical period of a new departure in the mode of dealing with the Maories’. There would no longer be differential treatment: offending was offending, be the perpetrator white or brown, now that most Maori acquiesced - at least on the surface - in European ways of doing things. This made it more possible to discipline those individual Maori who did not. Even large-scale resistance, since it was now localised or perhaps regionalised, could be definitively suppressed by the full panoply of police and law. ‘Rebels’ still adhering to Te Whiti’s
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teachings at Parihaka were brought under the norms of British sovereignty by being hauled before the courts on matters such as breaches of licensing laws. When fines were not paid, they were arrested and gaoled. In these circumstances, Te Whiti - whose followers continued to engage in ‘ploughing’ and other passive resistance tactics after he was released from custody in 1886 - should be treated, in Whitmore’s opinion, like ‘any other criminal’.
But complementarily, under Ballance’s regime the use of force by the state was to be minimised, a continuation of his ‘one policeman’ policy (under which an unarmed policeman as opposed to many soldier/police was to be stationed in ‘troubled’ areas). The assumption was that postfrontier circumstances required quasi- (e.g. the use of former Constabulary Force men who were allocated land in ‘Special Settlements’) or fully military coercion only in extreme circumstances. Even the unfortunate ‘battle of Hastie’s farm’ in mid 1886, when settlers and authorities had unnecessarily provoked confrontation with Titokowaru and his followers, had not involved the military. From now on, police-led rather than purely military actions would be the normal response to resistance. The situation was most closely monitored by Inspector Pardy (promoted to 1/c because of his handling of Maori issues, and kept on in Taranaki at Atkinson’s insistence when Russell had wanted to move him to Dunedin) and his successor Thomson, particularly through their ‘eyes and ears’ in the Parihaka area, Pungarehu ‘one policeman’ Thomas Hickman.
Hickman had been ‘appointed to the Police Force especially for Maori Work’ at Pardy’s solicitation. He mediated between the Crown and Te Whiti-ites, and would sometimes even tip off Parihaka about a raid. Once Te Whiti refused to go with Pardy upon arrest, but agreed that T will come for Mr Tommy’. At times, for example in 1887, Hickman would have to advise that soldiers accompany police when ‘fierce resistance’ to an expedition to Parihaka was likely. Whatever the Maori perception, the state was determined that full integration was to occur, with the highest of rangatira suffering ‘the same degradation’ in incarceration as pakeha offenders. As Hickman reminisced in old age, his job had been ‘to reconcile the Maori to pakeha rule’, and this was to be the case in all remaining ‘Maori districts’. At Puranui Pa, far up the Waitotara, customary tribal law had generally prevailed. When a murder now occurred, however, a police expedition went in under ministerial direction to emphasise that pakeha enforcement modes prevailed. 72
There was frequently little or no overt Maori resistance to such exhibitions of power. Many hapu had assessed that the best way to maximise their interests in the post-warfare period was to accommodate sufficiently to pakeha mores to be left alone on other matters dear to them. In late 1885 the Aotea area had been a ‘hotbed of Kingism’; by April 1887, Inspector McGovern reported, it had become a ‘friendly’ area. The price of pacification could be high for Maori, who did not - despite the propaganda - receive equal treatment with the pakeha (or at
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least, with well-off pakeha). In 1888 a Maori youth was executed in Poverty Bay for murder after a very perfunctory trial. Evidence which emerged later cast grave doubts on the prosecution case. This was not an isolated occurrence. 73
The ‘taming’ of the Maori was being systematised, with policing playing a key role. Commissioner Gudgeon noted that the railway which was moving southwards into the King Country would help pacify the ‘socalled frontier townships’ of Kihikihi, Alexandra and Te Awamutu, and eventually take ‘civilisation’ into the heart of Kingism. When disturbances involving resistant Maori periodically broke out at the railhead, the police were there to mediate and - if necessary - coerce. In various parts of New Zealand at this time, policemen were being promoted for ‘gallant conduct’ in ‘allaying’ situations of Maori resistance to pakeha moves to enforce substantive sovereignty upon the remaining no-go areas. Constables would frequently, in such circumstances, be supported by Permanent Militia detachments. This happened, for example, in October 1890 when the alleged ‘notorious Maori fanatic’, breakaway Te Whitiite prophet Te Mahuki (Te Manakura), and his followers in effect seized control of Te Kuiti, expropriated property from storekeepers whom they felt had exploited their people, and awaited the Maori millennium prophesied for 2 November. Inspectors Broham and Emerson at once took a force of armed constables, detectives and soldiers to the town by special train. There were 22 arrests for ‘riot and assault’, and the offenders received gaol sentences of up to a year. In 1891, Emerson took soldiers and police to Waipiro Bay to disarm the rival sides in an intertribal land dispute. 74
In such ways was nominal sovereignty replaced by the assertion of direct state control of remaining Maori-dominated areas. A senior policeman noted of the Te Kuiti expedition: ‘This arrest of a prominent Kingite and Native agitator, possessing an enormous amount of influence over the natives, on account of his reputation as a “tohunga”, having been effected in the very heart of the “King Country” and surrounded on all sides by hundreds of Tawhiao’s followers, indicates I think pretty conclusively that the time for obstruction on the part of Maoris, to the execution of any legal process in the Waikato, has now happily gone by.’ A little later, another expedition by special train headed to King Tawhiao’s Pukekawa headquarters to seize Kerei Kaihau for his symbolic pulling up of a survey marker on the King’s land. ‘Tawhiao said the police and soldiers ought not to have come.’ Similar actions were to be repeated on occasions when Kaihau got out of gaol. Overt displays of state might were considered so important that they were sometimes headed by the Commissioner himself.
Since the early 1880s, IPs in the Chatham Islands had called for armed intervention to suppress passive resistance tactics by the Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga hapu of Te Atiawa on the Chathams. The Islands had never been a high priority for the government, given their
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isolation and lack of economic significance. Even after installing a Resident Magistracy in 1855, the state had for some years acquiesced in the continuing Maori enslavement of the Moriori (who had been conquered in the mid 1830s), with Maori chiefly constables unprepared to intervene in slave-owners’ affairs. The Maori, now followers of Te Whiti, resented the almost total control by a handful of powerful squatters (from whom the JPs were drawn) over the Islands. Although only 3 percent of the lands had been allocated by the Native Land Court to the Moriori, the pakeha squattocracy utilised the bulk of the Maori awards. Eventually the government agreed to a show of force. In 1889 Gudgeon took a police/military expedition there: T should like them to be rather powerful men ... as we may have a rough & tumble’. The Islands’ sole policeman since 1868, the aging district constable Rayner, had been powerless to make the Maori (and a few of the remaining Moriori) pay the dog tax levied in 1887, or stop them hunting wild pigs on runholders’ property, or prevent them erecting fences to keep out the runholders’ livestock. The ‘ringleaders’ were gaoled in Wellington, and full control was restored to the pakeha elite who ran the Chatham Islands in conjunction with Rayner and a handful of officials. From this time there was an uneasy accommodation between the squattocracy and the Te Whiti-ite leader Himeona Wi Te Tahuhu, the latter appreciating that the might of the state would descend again if the ‘obstructionists’ became too much of a ‘threat’ (although trouble did recur from time to time, as in 1891 when women rushed the gaol and freed some of their Maori and Moriori menfolk who had been arrested in another display of passive resistance, or in 1915 when land was illegally occupied). 75
Despite encroaching state power, areas with endemic ‘Maori problems’ remained. In the Hokianga, for example, ‘cultism’ had continued in an unbroken line from the time of Papahurihia’s prophecies before the annexation of New Zealand. At around the time of the formation of the New Zealand Police Force, the advent of three ‘prophetesses’ in a row in the area caused concern for the authorities. The government was already worried about the extent of slygrog selling and smuggling in the far north. By the time Commissioner Gudgeon heard in mid 1887 of the great influence of the ‘lunatic prophetess’ Remana Hi of Waihou, he was so concerned about the state of disorder there - and Auckland Inspector Thomson’s seeming apathy about it - that he carved a new northern district out of Auckland District. In particular, he feared that the feud between Remana Hi and her rival Ani Karo might spill over into internecine warfare. The government had reportedly been asked to move against the cultists by ‘friendly’ Ngapuhi chiefs. Inspector McGovern, considered an expert at dealing with ‘fanatics’ and also knowledgeable about the suppression of slygrogging and smuggling, was transferred to take charge.
Remana Hi had links with Parihaka, which made her movement seem very dangerous in officials’ eyes. The cult wore white, symbol of
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peace, but when its members detained a pakeha who had trespassed on their sacred enclosure at ‘Mount Zion’, the new District Inspector responded with a show of force. On 22 July, before dawn, a force of eight constables, 11 bushmen sworn in as special constables and two Native Constables, headed by McGovern, surrounded the ‘hauhau’ camp near Okaihau. The specials went in with batons when the offenders declined to be arrested. ‘Whack! Whack!’, recalled former constable Alexander McGilp: ‘When the batons came down it was just like a scene in a stockyard when you are drafting cattle.’ The Maori retaliated with axes and spears made of chisels attached to sticks, their firearms having been destroyed in a whare fire ‘accidentally on purpose’ begun by ‘friendlies’. The police party received ‘some nasty knocks’ (including a slight tomahawk wound to McGovern’s shoulder) and the regular police opened fire. After five of the rebels were ‘considerably wounded’ (one of them critically with a ‘frightful wound’ to his back), some made their escape. Eventually 23 were arrested, 16 of whom (including Remana Hi) were gaoled. The ‘Battle of Waihou’, McGovern felt, had achieved its objective, ‘the disbanding of the notorious Waihou assembly’ and the demolition of their camp. Commissioner Gudgeon praised the courage of the police party in forestalling ‘disastrous consequences to the peace of the district’.
But, led by Chief Hohoia Patone, the movement surfaced again in adversarial situations from time to time. Given that the state had already demonstrated its capacity to use whatever force was necessary, McGovern could normally negotiate from a position of strength deals involving, for example, a pledge to leave the Maori ‘rebels’ alone so long as they stayed inside the boundaries of their own land. Policing policy was now informed by in-depth surveillance by pakeha police. When Commissioner Gudgeon wanted Remana Hi locked away again as a ‘dangerous lunatic’, investigations ascertained that local ‘friendlies’ had been spreading false rumours about her cult for their own purposes - and the district constable had passed these up the police hierarchy as being incontrovertible fact. 76
Such instances drew attention to the potential role of Maori within the police, now that there were only a few regular police with Maori blood, and the Native Constable institution (totalling 22 part-timers at the founding of the Force) was officially destined to be phased out. In the past the New Zealand police authorities had used Maori to control Maori, by taking on tribespeople to enforce pakeha mores (insofar as was possible) within their own tribal boundaries (‘like policing like’), and by imposing Maori ‘occupation police’ upon recalcitrant tribes. Local Native Constables would not have been of use in the Hokianga, as the rejectionist ‘cult of the white’ refused to allow any of its members to have any connection with the state - except to negotiate deals to prevent policemilitary suppression.
On the other hand, a ‘stranger policing stranger’ policy would have led to a hostile tribal reaction counterproductive to the ‘peace’ secured
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through negotiations. Any such recruiting would have reflected the immense hostility between the various hapu in the area (particularly toward the ‘pagans’ by ‘friendlies’ who had been converted to Mormonism). The Native Constable institution, then, was by now seen to be of limited value in limited circumstances, and the decision to ultimately phase it out was reconfirmed. Meanwhile, the expedient of policing by part-time Maori constables continued in certain areas. Inspector Bullen of Napier, the most irascible commissioned officer in the land, described the services of Native Constable Tara Te Rata (Charles Gilbert) as ‘beyond praise’ and equal to the work of two European constables. He was rewarded with the high salary (for a Maori policeman) of £B4. A typical request, from the Reverend Karaka Te Tarawhiti of Huntly, asked for a Native Constable for his district because his people resisted behavioural guidance by pakeha police; a member of the tribe was, he considered, required as both role model and coercer. 77
The attitude of most police authorities towards most Native Constables, however, was even more contemptuous than that towards the district constables. When Bullen praised Tara Te Rata, he had added that ‘of Native Constables he is the only reliable one that I have experienced’. In 1887 Inspector Goodall of Tauranga assessed that his 10 Thames District Maori police were of ‘very little real value’. The following year the Inspector sought the removal from the New Zealand Police Force of its only remaining full-blooded Maori regular constable. Hare Takerei, Goodall explained that Takerei had been ‘in the Arawa Native Contingent for which service he received a medal but he is now of no real value as a constable and especially so amongst his own tribe’. He had once been ‘useful’ but had now allegedly compromised himself by engaging in adultery. Commissioner Gudgeon endorsed this assessment (Takerei ‘has never been of the least use to us’), and the Defence Minister removed him from the regular Force on 1 May. 78
This was an act charged with symbolic significance. It was the final definitive statement that the process of ‘civilising the natives’ was no longer seen by the authorities to involve the integration of Maori into the police. The last vestige of Grey’s assimilationist policing policy introduced more than 40 years before had finally disappeared. In the 1840s, and again in the 1860s and 1870s, coercive racial control had been a key element in the policing of the colony, and had been seen to require, inter alia, regular Maori police. Now, in parallel with the trend for the pakeha to become a more controlled citizenry - largely through hegemonic influences - Maori too were becoming less of a perceived threat to ‘stability and progress’. The great majority of tribes and hapu were now seen to pose little or no problem for the state’s assertion of substantive sovereignty; many were becoming sufficiently socialised into pakeha modes of seeing and doing to require no special attention.
In the special circumstances, or the specified areas, or at the specific times, that a specialist Maori policing presence was required, this could
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be handled by the few part-timers or the occasional swearing in of special constables. Hare Takerei’s specialist services, it turned out, were needed, whatever Gudgeon felt about him: he was made a Native Constable ‘to assist police when called upon etc’. In particular, like a number of other Native Constables he was required to control tribespeople at Native Land Court hearings. He was removed from the Force in 1889 upon refusing to do sustained duty at Rotorua, 26 miles from his home, on a mere £24 per annum. Native Constable Piri Raiti (Billy White) of Mangonui was famed for working up successful cases; he knew, it was said, 90 percent of the Maori population between Russell and the North Cape. The pakeha constable in charge of his sub-district said that Raiti ‘wants only education to make him one of the smartest Constables’ in all the colony. But the fact remained that, for the pakeha authorities, increasingly ‘acceptable’ Maori behaviour meant that the Native Constable institution was regarded as an anachronism. As with pakeha part-timers, so with Maori part-timers, and indeed indigenous police throughout the Empire. It was written of the Papuan experience, for example, that though ‘the local man knows the country and the people ... on the other hand, he is likely to have too many friends and relations’. The gradual purging of part-time Maori policing agents, begun in the early 1880s, therefore continued.
As a result of general retrenchment, indeed, 11 Native Constables were discharged in a single purge in 1889. This was rationalised as the getting rid of ‘quite useless’ men. In 1893 the government swept away the remnants of the special judicial arrangements for Maori which had existed for 50 years, along with the Resident Magistracy system. From now on, unless differential treatment was specifically legislated for (e.g. in liquor laws), Maori were subject to Stipendiary and unpaid magistrates in the same way as pakeha. It was not expected to be long before special policing arrangements would also go. In 1892 there were only nine Native Constables left in New Zealand; by 1897 the era of the big Native Land Court hearings was over, and the Native Constable institution seemed to be hanging in the balance. 79
To offset the increasing demilitarisation of the police, in situations of grave danger to the public peace (particularly those of interracial ilk) the police and/or political authorities could still call in the military if all else failed. An incident involving the amnestied former rebel leader Te Kooti Rikirangi indicated the delicacy of such situations. In 1887 the Commissioner heard that Te Kooti was preparing to move from the King Country back to his homeland in Poverty Bay. Police assessments were that both settlers and ‘friendlies’ would be sure to attempt to repel him, in view of the bloody events of less than 20 years before - particularly the ‘massacre’ at Matawhero. A major breach of the peace was predicted. Inspector Kiely was ordered to watch his movements, given carte blanche to employ infiltrators, and told to ‘See him as often as you can and obtain
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influence over him if possible either personally or by means of those you are hereby authorised to employ.’ By early 1889, however, Te Kooti was determined to make the trek with his followers, and Gudgeon predicted that ‘his enemies will probably try to shoot him’, an event that could well have had dire ramifications for the public peace.
The Premier, Atkinson, and Native Minister E Mitchelson begged Te Kooti not to go. When he ignored the advice Atkinson travelled to Gisborne, and was alarmed to find Maori and pakeha volunteers organising to repel Te Kooti and his followers. He ordered the disbanding of the irregular vigilantist corps, but also rejected Gudgeon’s plans for an escort for Te Kooti’s journey. So concerned was he at the prospect of serious conflict that on 23 February Atkinson announced that the Commissioner had been ordered to personally organise a joint police/ military expedition to prevent Te Kooti and his 250-strong party reaching the East Coast, by intercepting and arresting him. This was seen by many observers as stretching, if not violating, the law. Troops and police from various parts of the colony began from that day to converge on the Opotiki area, Te Kooti having reached nearby Waiotahi. As a result of his defiance of an ultimatum to turn back by 26 February, late on the 28th some 300 police and soldiers (including kupapa) marched towards his encampment at Waiotahi pa. The bulk of the force stopped a mile away while officials and a handful of police parleyed with the warrior chief. Details of the ensuing events are unclear.
The military commander, Major T Porter, apparently believed Te Kooti’s assurance that he and his party would turn back to the King Country from the next day (they were, indeed, already in retreat mode). He supposedly accepted the chief’s suggestion that the expedition’s heads should contact Mitchelson to secure permission to waive the arrest of Te Kooti. But Inspector Goodall, in possession of an arrest warrant for unlawful assembly causing ‘terror and alarm’, apparently both mistrusted Te Kooti’s word and was conscious of the Premier’s pledge that he would be arrested to ‘vindicate the law’. According to Goodall, Porter ‘tried to bounce and threaten me with vengeance of Government and said Government would be kicked out if I arrested offender’. Goodall ordered Ngaitai and Ngatiporou forces in Crown employment deployed in order to cut off escape routes, and Te Kooti was arrested. A telegraph corpsman on the expedition later recalled that the Maori leader ‘could have started a war but didn’t’.
At the court appearance, Goodall testified that it was ‘a crime to have a large number of men together by which others are intimidated.’ Te Kooti was bound over to keep the peace, on huge sureties, and agreed to return to the King Country. The sureties were found after he had languished in gaol for a few days. From that time onwards, the prophet was closely surveilled, and the Premier declared he would never be allowed to return to his home region. Because the confrontation had been resolved peacefully, with ‘great public satisfaction’ ensuing, in the short term
Walter E Gudgeon, Commissioner of Police, 1887-90. New Zealand Police.
Constable Neil McLeod, killed at Mangawhare, nearDargaville, 30 July 1890. B Pickering.
Sergeant-Major W T Mason (centre), Detective T Livingstone (second from left) and other Timaru staff, 1891. B and D Thomson.
A cycle patrol formed to catch the Christchurch ‘Horse Fiend’, c. 1897; includes detectives L D Benjamin (far right) and Richard Marsack (fifth from right). Alexander Turnbull Library.
Christchurch police cross Hereford Street bridge to their beats, 1897. B Thomson.
Police guard Hone Toia (arms folded and wearing hat) and other prisoners after the crushing of the ‘Hokianga Dog Tax Rebellion’, 1898. F Barrett loan, Alexander Turnbull Library.
Pahi’s Constable J Abrams conveying prisoners and witnesses to court at Paparoa, c.1904. Otamatea Kauri and Pioneer Museum.
Royal Commission on the Police Force of New Zealand, 1898. Standing: J W Poynton, SM; Lieutenant-Colonel A Pitt; E Kane (secretary). Sitting, centre: Commission chairman H S Wardell. Photographed with Arthur Hume (Commissioner of Police 1890-7), seated left, and J B Tunbridge, seated right. New Zealand Graphic, 13 October 1900.
New Commissioner J B Tunbridge greeted with the Royal Commission of 1898 by the Minister, who is saying, ‘Thank heavens, Tunbridge, you have come at last to relieve me of this bundle. You’ 11 find it heavy, but I wish you luck in the washing.’ National Archives.
Politician T E Taylor ‘extracting the truth’ at the 1898 Royal Commission from former Commissioner Hume: ‘Don’t squeal Colonel. I’ll be as gentle as I can. But it’s a terrible root this, and I’m afraid it has given you a great deal of trouble. You’ll feel better after it’s over.’ National Archives.
John Bennett Tunbridge, reforming Commissioner of Police, 1897-1 New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
Robert Wallath, ‘the Taranaki Highwayman’, in New Plymouth Gaol, July 1893. Taranaki Museum.
Amy Bock, male impersonator, after arrest, 1909. National Archives.
Detectives at Wellington, 1902: from left, Tudor Boddam, C R Broberg, S Rawle, J A McGrath, A Cameron, J J Cassells. B Thomson/New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
The new Auckland Central police station and barracks, comer of O’Rorke an Princes Streets, 1900. Auckland Institute and Museum.
Police physical culture/gymnastics class, Auckland, 1906, Arthur Skinner seated thir from right. Sergeant C Hendrey to the left of him. Auckland Star collection, Alexande Turnbull Library.
Walter Dinnie, Commissioner of Police, 1903-9. New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
Police Force Headquarters Staff, 1908: front row from left, C E Matthews (private secretary to Minister), Commissioner Dinnie, J McGowan (Minister of Justice), A H Wright (chief clerk), W McGill (editor, Police Gazette)', back row from left, E Dinnie (‘Finger Print Expert’), W McNeely (clerk), M Gaffney (clerk), A Muggeridge (storekeeper), J Nelson (clerk), A Quartermain (‘Finger Print Expert’). Canterbury Times, 4 November 1908.
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Goodall emerged enhanced in reputation, while Porter was lambasted for having shown ‘lamentable weakness and want of judgment’. (Porter himself claimed he had not been reluctant to arrest.) Settlers along the eastern coastline could now, it was said, sleep in peace because of the actions of the intrepid Inspector: ‘no rubbing of native noses’ for him, no listening to all the ‘Pakeha-Maoris in New Zealand’. But privately, the authorities were displeased with Goodall. Firmness was indeed the approved policy towards Maori, but in situations where state forces might be overwhelmed, or where great disorder might eventuate from a confrontation, a hard line needed to be tempered with discretionary caution.
Gudgeon felt that the risk had been too great, that Goodall’s ‘excitability’ and ‘ignorance’ of Maori ways had almost led to a race conflagration. When Goodall became involved in mutual recriminations with military officers who accused him of cowardice for initially being reluctant to leave Opotiki (his riposte was that they were guilty of ‘sympathy with offenders’), the Commissioner declined to support him. Gudgeon seemed to feel that to accede to the Inspector’s demand for a public enquiry might lead to embarrassment for the police if it were revealed how close to hostilities Te Kooti’s arrest had brought the state’s forces. Cabinet refused to allow the relevant papers to be tabled for scrutiny. In the end Goodall asked for a transfer from the area, on grounds that he could scarcely work with his antagonists in any future military emergency. This was granted by the Minister on Gudgeon’s recommendation, and he was sent to Westland.
When the Inspector was made redundant in 1891, he claimed to have been punished for ‘any amount of untruths’ which ‘pakeha-Maoris’ had ‘no doubt’ written about him. He had, he said in a petition to Parliament, been retired because of the accusations of ‘cowardly’ conduct that had been levelled against him. Gudgeon, he stated, had sent him a note saying that there would be no enquiry ‘for state reasons and asked me to let it drop as the Government were opposed to it’, and now he was being punished because of this lack of enquiry. It is quite possible - as hinted at the time - that high elements in the government and bureaucracy had differed over how to deal with Te Kooti, and that Porter and Goodall had been reflecting the views of different factions. It is equally possible that the Premier needed a scapegoat for what was widely regarded as an exercise in overkill, the more so during the period when Te Kooti secured a Supreme Court ruling that his conviction was unjustified (this was overturned in the Appeal Court). 80
The police were frequently under tight political orders on Maori issues, particularly once the Liberals assumed office. When in 1891 rival Maori parties began to clash over land in Hawke’s Bay, Seddon secured a speed-up in Land Court procedures and in the meantime ordered Inspector Emerson to prevent ploughing on the disputed land. If ploughmen refused to desist, they should be charged with ‘endangering
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the peace of the Colony’. As the Liberals increased the pressure for land sales by Maori, a consequence of their support for intensive small-farm pakeha settlement, new intertribal and interracial confrontations emerged in various parts of the North Island. There were a number of suppressive expeditions and the government insisted on firm treatment of those captured in the course of ‘obstruction’. The government was particularly anxious to promote state penetration into the ‘last frontier’ in New Zealand, the Urewera, Emerson and a five dozen-strong police/military party had to stay at Te Whaiti for many weeks to protect surveyors. Although the Urewera tribes submitted formally to the Crown in 1894, resistance to surveying and roadmaking continued, and both police and military remained deployed there.
In the first quarter of 1894 there were military/police expeditions to areas quite close to Auckland: Tuakau, Paeroa and Opuatia (near Mercer). The last case was typical. Three constables had tried to arrest Kerei Kaihau yet again for pulling out survey poles during a survey opposed by King Tawhiao, but he had been freed by a hundred Maori. Inspector Hickson was ordered to the area with 20 police and a number of Permanent Militiamen, In the ensuing fracas 19 arrests were made, and although no one was ‘much hurt’ some constables were ‘rather roughly handled’. Seddon, who was undertaking a tour by train to pacify Maori, announced in the King Country that ‘an all-powerful Government had stepped in and the wrong-doers were now in custody’. 81
In 1895 there were more major expeditions into the King Country and the Urewera, again occasioned mostly by disruptions of surveys. In 1896 the ‘ Waihou fanatics’, now based at Mangatoa, once more openly resisted the pakeha, refusing to pay their debts to storekeepers, the dog tax or county rates. Settlers were alarmed because the tribespeople were arming themselves. Their new leader, former Native Constable and prophet Hone Toia, was in close contact with Parihaka. The Maori were surveilled and disarmed, and arrests and gaolings followed. But the civil disobedience campaign continued. By the time Tunbridge became Commissioner in 1897, a showdown was clearly on the agenda. The Hokianga County Clerk noted that the ‘hauhaus ... regard incarceration in the light of a picnic which increases their knowledge and causes them to be hailed as heroes’, an ethnocentric interpretation evocative of the endemic clashes of culture in the area. In Tunbridge’s time, a full-scale rebellion would erupt. 82
Since the beginnings of the colony, police had confronted working people behaving in ways that were interpreted by the authorities as endangering ‘peace and tranquillity’. With the onset of the long depression in the 1880s such duties increased, although the extra work involved was offset by the general trend towards greater adherence to desired ways of behaviour. Unemployed men who demonstrated against a lack of state interest in their plight were suppressed; workers who refused to accept
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wage reductions came increasingly under surveillance. When companies brought in non-union (‘scab’) labour to break strikes, the police were almost automatically mobilised in anticipation of breaches of the peace. The first big such dispute after the formation of the New Zealand Police Force occurred at Wilkie Brothers’ stone quarries at Cape Foulwind, near Westport. The workers had struck over a pay cut, and because they were allied with the militant Denniston Coal Miners’ Union, the police responded with alacrity when the management claimed that its scab labour was endangered. Police authorities, though frequently ill at ease with such situations, in the past had habitually protected company actions which - however unwise or even provocative - were not illegal. But changing times were leading to changing police procedures.
At ‘wet and windy’ Cape Foulwind, the strikebreakers proffered - in Inspector Emerson’s words - ‘gross insults’ towards the picketing strikers. Despite such provocation from armed, ‘drunken & boisterous’ scabs, and broken promises by management, the strikers did not attempt to prevent the strikebreakers from working. Emerson praised their leaders for vetoing picketing support from unionists in nearby mining towns, thereby averting ‘great bloodshed & destruction of property’. A threat to public order still remained - but from the behaviour of the scabs. On 2 April 1889 the Inspector defused the situation by declaring that he would arrest strikebreakers who threatened violence or carried firearms. Furthermore, he insisted that newly arrived scabs be sent back home, and he helped establish mediation by Public Works Department head C Y O’Connor. Emerson withdrew his squad of police, leaving two constables to monitor the situation. The police official had carried out a model proactive policing operation: the need to pre-empt the emergence of mass public disorder, and preserve the overall smooth running of economy and society, had outweighed the immediate interests of a handful of capitalists. When a Cape Foulwind store was dynamited later in April, and nationwide publicity followed. Gudgeon endorsed a refusal to send more than two extra men to the tented police station at the site. After investigation, the Commissioner agreed with initial suspicions that ‘the dynamite affair was a plant’ to discredit the unionists and force largescale police action. 83
In the words of Sergeant-Major Pratt of Auckland, the role of police in strikes was to act ‘fair and square with all parties, without fear favour or affection for either side’. Although this attitude could be damaging to business interests, the growing union and socialist movements noted however that in the final analysis the police and legal system operated in favour of capital rather than labour. Workers therefore frequently perceived the constabulary to be their enemies. Such was the case in the big wave of strikes of 1889-90, part of a worldwide upsurge in industrial militancy, and particularly in the Maritime Strike of August-November 1890. Though beginning as the offshoot of an Australian conflict, it was encouraged by the Union Steam Ship Company which, as the employers’
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vanguard, assessed that it was time for a decisive showdown between capital and labour.
The strike was of such large scale (‘the first nationwide industrial dispute which extended over several occupations’, it involved some 8000 participants) and so fraught with tension when ‘free labourers’ were brought in to work the ports that the authorities felt obliged to enrol large numbers of special constables (‘specials’) in the cities to help the police protect the scabs. There was an ulterior motive, quite apart from the overt reason that relatively few police were available to be deployed in a large-scale operation. The government had intelligence that some police, dissatisfied with their wages and conditions, empathised with the organised working class, the class in which most of them had grown up. This seemed confirmed when, early in the days of the strike, Wellington and Lyttelton police allegedly stood back and watched as scabs were intimidated by strikers. The Defence Minister reportedly summonsed Hume over the matter, and the Commissioner gave his men orders to ‘protect all classes of labour from aggression or violence’.
There were risks in the use of special constables, given their recruitment from volunteers in situations of ideological strife, but they were less than those of provoking workers by calling on the military to supplement regular police resources at the wharves. The soldiers were available for action, however, and riots during the Australian maritime strike persuaded the government to consider their possible use. But Inspectors were warned not to ‘show them till their services are absolutely required’. An early use of unarmed soldiers at the Wellington wharves proved provocative, and from then on this was avoided. Instead, when large numbers of police were taken from their beats for strike duty, soldiers were drafted in to replace them on the streets. This latter operation involved 18 rank and file soldiers and three NCOs in Wellington; these Permanent Militiamen worked in three reliefs to cover all beat patrol duties. In some centres, especially Dunedin, military personnel were brought in from their forts and ‘kept in readiness’ at police district headquarters at times of heightened tension. 84
From the beginning of September 1890, plain-clothes policemen unknown to the strikers infiltrated their organisations in the various centres in order to obtain ‘timely notice of any danger’. Country police were brought into the cities when it seemed as if sympathetic industrial action would close the railways and make transporting them difficult, and there was much other movement of police. District officers had to arrange that their ‘whole available strength can be promptly brought to bear in any particular direction where their services may be needed.’ But union leaders, aware of the might of the forces of the state, worked hard to avoid an escalation in confrontation. Like their rank and file, they were conscious that employers wanted to use this opportunity to destroy the incipient union movement in New Zealand, and that violence against scab labour would help rather than hinder the cause of capital.
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After a fracas in Dunedin over attempts to load grain on 1 September, some 200 specials were sworn in by the mayor and local JPs, with the support of Inspector Moore. A delegation of ‘shocked’ unionists saw the Premier, blamed any disturbances on ‘larrikinism’ and expressed the strikers willingness to provide pickets to protect property and order. This had already occurred in Wellington, where the pickets had reportedly done ‘excellent service in maintaining order’. ‘Ever since the labour trouble commenced’, The Press was soon saying, ‘the Union pickets have been very zealous in the performance of their duties, as selfconstituted guardians of the peace’. Some strikers were sent by their leaders to be sworn in as specials in Dunedin and on the West Coast, with 60 of the 260 specials in the former city unionised wharf labourers! After the strike was over, Hume publicly thanked ‘the leaders of the various labour parties, who ... materially assisted the police in maintaining law and order, and so averted serious trouble.’ 85
During the course of the strike the government was, however, prepared for all-out confrontation, not trusting the willingness or ability of the union leaders to contain their membership, and influenced by reports of ‘new union’ industrial struggles throughout the world. It stressed that ‘any attempts at intimidation or rough usage will be promptly and sharply dealt with’. The Ministers had procured hastily compiled information on possible use of the ‘Riot Act’, of ‘military aid to the civil power’, of specials. When the New Zealand Maritime Council called the strike, the Inspectors at the main centres were each told by Hume to secure the names of up to 500 men who might be willing to be sworn in as specials. They were to get these from officials acquainted with jury rolls, and were to contact ‘large employers of labour who will probably know good men’.
Supplies of batons stockpiled at relatively untroubled centres such as Timaru were sent ‘disguised’ to the four cities for use by specials, and to other areas where militant unions had strength - the West Coast, for example, where colliers and railway hands had joined wharf labourers on strike. Many special constables were members of the Volunteer Force (the part-time complement to the Permanent Militia), whose commanders in the most troubled areas were ordered to make their men available. The deployment of the Volunteers as such was considered, but rejected because their ranks were thought to be all too representative of the community as a whole, including workers. In 1885 an incipient Volunteer ‘trade union’ had been suppressed; during the Maritime Strike ‘members of the Westport Naval Artillery band led a procession of striking seamen through Westport’.
On the other hand, some Volunteers were perceived to be too ideologically motivated against labour. ‘Ministers will not hear of Hussars being called upon’, the Commissioner noted, for this would be counterproductive. All in all, it was ‘impossible to say any Volunteer Corps could be relied on in cases of civil disturbance’, although the specials
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were generally placed under Volunteer officers. Even more problematic was another alternative: if there were insufficient volunteers for the ranks of the special constabulary, magistrates could call up some or all citizens to assist in the suppression of any peace-disturbers. Any such call-up of non-volunteers would mean the rapid organising of large numbers of people not necessarily willing or able to submit to discipline. In Greymouth, the IPs’ attempt to expand the pool of volunteers by summonsing ordinary citizens to be specials caused much indignation. An even more problematic course of action was to allow private persons to ‘in an emergency arm themselves’ to help the authorities put down ‘such riots as savour of rebellion’; this did not occur. 86
In the event there was little violence. The main policing problem was the (often drunk) ‘free labour’, who included ‘some of the Criminal Class’. There was little the police or government could do about the quality of scabs, but the police were obliged to protect them from interference by strikers and their allies. A series of incidents in the Christchurch-Lyttelton area on 8 September, when strikers clashed with scabs at the port, on the bridle path between the two communities, and at a suburban Christchurch station, were notable because of their rarity. The 102 specials enrolled to serve at Lyttelton were disbanded after two tedious days. Scabs entering and leaving the wharves through the barricades in Wellington required more protection, with up to 400 specials deployed on one occasion. The regular police had to work hard to control those specials (especially men from the countryside) who had volunteered in order to crack unionists’ heads. Specials were officially told that ‘it is, perhaps, better to err on the side of leniency and caution than to be too zealous’. Even some of their officers seemed to be in need of discipline. Hume had to remind Captain Mclntosh of Wellington’s ‘City Guards’ that his position as sergeant in the ‘special force’ was a civil rather than a military one, and that he and other Volunteer officers placed in leadership positions in the specials units were responsible to the police leadership. 87
By the last week in September, the threat of major disorder had dissipated. In Wellington, country constables had been sent home and the Permanent Militia taken off street duty. A fortnight later strikers were going back to work. On 10 November the Maritime Council finally admitted defeat and called off the remaining strikers, the seamen. Police drafted to problem areas remained in case of further trouble. A dozenstrong detachment headed by Inspector Emerson, for example, stayed at the mining town of Huntly ‘to see that the free labourers ... are not molested, and that no injury is done to the mine.’ But extra drafts were able to be withdrawn even from the militant West Coast before the end of the year. The government and employers had won the struggle, and even the Denniston miners, when instructed in February to deunionise or lose their jobs, opted for the former - and had to accept reduced wages to boot. From the classical police point of view (whatever the private
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thoughts of members of the Force) the handling of the Maritime Strike had, in view of the small amount of disorder, been a resounding success at what Hume called a ‘critical juncture’ in the life of the colony. The police authorities, moreover, welcomed the ‘industrial peace’ which prevailed in the aftermath of the crushing of the strike. They were able to cope easily with the few incidents that did occur. When Detective Kirby heard that striking bootmakers planned to ‘make it lively’ for scabs arriving in Auckland by steamer, Sergeant Andrew Clarke of the water police prevented the strikers from ‘thronging the very narrow passages’ nearby. When the bootmakers hooted and jeered the scabs, this ‘was soon suppressed by the police’. 88
When the Auckland Trades and Labour Council complained that this action by police supported capital against labour, they were correct enough. There had been complaints in radical union circles from time to time to this effect. ‘lnspector Broham strutting behind the barricades in all his gilded glory’ was depicted as a man who would be ‘clearly in his element’ in Ireland, ‘leading on the crowbar and battering ram brigades, smashing down the huts of the half-starved victims of grinding laws.’ But in the final analysis, the police mandate was to quell disorder and promote order, as these terms were defined by the controllers of state power. The government had made it clear that it believed the burgeoning union movement needed checking; where there was a need for coercive action, the police would provide it. The strikers had generally not given any excuse for such intervention, and nor did working people abandon their struggles even after the suppression of the strike and the subsequent virtual crushing of unionism in the colony. In the general election of 1890 many working people struck a blow at the government and - as they thought - employers by voting for candidates endorsed by the labour movement, or at least for the Liberal Party. As the Governor, Lord Onslow, put it, the questions at issue ‘were really a fight between Capital and Labour’; with many, he believed that the Maritime Strike was now ‘transferred from the financial to the political arena’.
The Liberal-Labour alliance defeated the conservative ministry, and the new government set out ‘to provide a framework which would improve the workers’ bargaining power within the limits of the wage system’. Their ideological approach, poles apart from that of Marxian socialists, held that the interests of labour and capital could be reconciled, that there need be no strikes, lockouts or sackings. Industrial conflict was seen by Minister of Labour W P Reeves as a serious threat to the social fabric; class interests should be subsumed beneath those of state and society. Nor should there be any colony-wide, worker-based bodies to rival the state in power and influence: the proposed system, touted as benefiting workers, allowed unions to register only at local or regional level, making the emergence of another organisation like the Maritime Council unlikely. 89
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This scheme dovetailed with the government’s other radical programmes: to break up landed oligarchies and settle large numbers of small farmers on the land, for example. The Liberals turned into a doctrine the traditional New Zealand placing of the state in a strong position to intervene to promote social and economic development. At first conservative reaction was great, but after a clear electoral mandate was given in 1893 a radical three-year reform package made New Zealand world-renowned as a ‘social laboratory’. In August 1894 the industrial reform programme culminated with an Act to impose compulsory conciliation and arbitration in labour relations. By then, policing methods had altered even further to meet the new requirements of the state.
In particular, the police were even less inclined than before to suffer gladly capitalist fools - men of wealth and power who deliberately fomented confrontation and therefore invited disorder. The issue surfaced spectacularly in the month the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act was passed. The manager of Benmore Station, Thomas Middleton, was determined to make use of the services of shearing contractor Alexander McCallum. The Oamaru contractor had alienated the Shearers and Labourers Union by quashing an attempted strike at Benmore, and his anti-union activities had later led to violence in Australia. The local sergeant, Thomas O’Grady, considered that Middleton’s decision to take on McCallum could gratuitously provoke a serious incident. He was far from impressed when Benmore’s management asked for police protection against ‘rash spirits’ in the union. Like his superior, Inspector Broham, however, he felt that the police had no choice but to protect property.
Commissioner Hume was more attuned than his men in the field to the new political situation. ‘lt seems to me’, he told the Defence Minister, ‘a serious question as to whether the state is to be put to heavy expense, and perhaps grave difficulty, by the injudicious action of a Station Manager.’ Such ‘hasty action’ by Middleton ‘may lead to a general strike of shearers in New Zealand, and therefore I think he should not be supported in his action.’ Seddon agreed: ‘Make the reply very decided.’ The letter, dated 21 September, was anything but ambiguous: since any trouble would be due to the commissioning of a man not ‘on good terms’ with the union to import Australian shearers, the police ‘most distinctly decline to assist in bringing about a quarrel between shearers and employers, and therefore you must not depend upon this Department for protection under those circumstances.’ There would be no official acquiescence in actions which ‘may lead to very grave difficulties all over the Colony’.
Middleton went public over this ‘extraordinary state of affairs’, which had placed him ‘beyond the pale of police protection’ were he or his employees to be attacked by ‘lawless men’. A response, the joint effort of the Minister and the Commissioner, promised that under the legislation soon to take effect, confrontations between capital and labour would become a thing of the past. ‘The Government further resent the very
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grave reflection you have cast upon the shearers of New Zealand, by stating that they are lawless spirits; they have proven themselves to be law-abiding colonists’. The station management was lectured on how to deal with the type of problem which had cropped up the previous year: ‘conciliation & not provocation would, the Minister thinks, have been the most reasonable way of ending your difficulties once & for all; and that in a manner satisfactory to yourself & with profit to your employers’. Government accession to Middleton’s request would have meant encouragement for an ‘extreme & inadvisable course’.
The request was, the Minister felt, like a man notifying the fire brigade that he was about to bum down his premises. ‘A wiser course would be to refrain from applying the match.’ The Commissioner concluded that the ‘Government considers the Compulsory Arbitration and Conciliation Act to be all powerful: hence, relying upon this it is considered there is no necessity for special police protection.’ The company which owned Benmore saw the response as amounting to ‘a political manifesto’, and assumed that Hume’s letter (‘utter rubbish ... beneath contempt’) had been dictated by his political masters. In fact, Hume’s first - harsher - draft had actually been toned down by the Minister. Working people, who in the wake of their crushing defeat in the Maritime Strike had decided that their best hopes lay with the Liberals’ industrial relations regime, strongly supported the police approach.
In their predictable fulminations against the police position, various employers’ representatives ignored Hume’s assurances (‘clarifying’ his letter of 21 September) that in the event of a breach of the peace, police intervention would be swift. Whilst new problems might arise, and sometimes new police tactics eventuate, in the final analysis the purpose and function of policing was non-negotiable. In the event, most employers came to welcome the transfer of class struggle from the workplace to state-sponsored forums; ‘state socialism’ turned out to be nothing more than a ‘humanised’, and more efficient, capitalism which provided a ‘minimum under-pinning of the rights of the citizen on social issues’. The state, however, continued to accept that individuals were responsible for their own fate within a state-provided environment of ‘peace and good order’. The fundamental task of policing was still to protect the state’s requirements as to the ‘maintenance of order’. 90
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PART TWO
Trauma and Reform: Tunbridge’s Commissionership, 1897-1903
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CHAPTER 5
Commission, Commissioner and Change
When Hume handed over the functions of the Commissionership to Tunbridge on 18 October 1897 the occasion was fraught with a symbolism embodied in the careers of the two men. The ‘blunt’ lieutenant-colonel, ‘half military man and carrying the odour of prison discipline’, was being displaced by a ‘police specialist’ characterised as ‘rapid in his train of thought, a Departmentalist to his finger tips’. As a veteran of the Otago Provincial Police was to testify the following year, under Tunbridge there developed ‘a feeling about the Force that it has been handed over to a permanent expert police-officer’. Tunbridge, moreover, was a professional policeman attuned to the rhythms of a ‘democratic community’ in which the law and policing had ‘the respect of a large percentage of the population’. The law, he asserted, should not be oppressive, and nor would society tolerate the police being given (in his words) ‘powers so Draconic as to practically enable them to dragoon the people into observing’ them. Benign policing suited tranquil times. Policemen throughout the colony slept easier knowing that reform was now inevitable, and many observers hoped that political interference in the Force would be done away with. After years of laxity, it was expected that a professional force with esprit de corps would be quickly established. 1
On his arrival, however, and particularly after a briefing by the Premier about the allegations by Taylor and other politicians and reformers, the new Commissioner felt that the first priority was to have the Royal Commission sit as soon as possible. He perceived that New Zealand’s policing problems were due to inadequate police numbers, lack of proper training and subsequent discipline, and a Force with too many ageing and infirm men. But he quickly found that all these matters had long been known to the government, not least through Hume’s ongoing submissions, and decided that only a Royal Commission could give him the necessary mandate for sweeping reform. He did not want, as Seddon desired, to be himself a member of the Commission, for its results might then seem tainted. Appearances would be preserved if he made constant submissions to it in the course of its proceedings, thereby securing ‘independent’ conclusions amenable to him. A Commission with open-ended powers of investigation and recommendation would give him the mandate, moreover, to quickly get rid of undesirable elements, or people manifestly inadequate for the job, without the constraints of ‘rights’ built up by Force members in the past. 2
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In terms of inadequacy at high levels, however, there was an immediate problem to cope with, that of Inspector Emerson, Reports that he was a drunkard and a gambler had been accumulating. Recently the Auckland Prohibition and Temperance League had claimed that he had been intoxicated on a steamer, and T E Taylor had publicised this in his speech of 30 September. Emerson’s ‘disgusting’ drunken conduct allegedly included threatening and abusing passengers who had remonstrated with him when he urinated into a hand basin. Seddon had dismissed the charges, but Tunbridge felt that such serious allegations against one of the most senior policemen in the land needed a quick response; a protracted Royal Commission was not an adequate solution to this problem.
Tunbridge secured the appointment of a one-man commission of enquiry. Stipendiary Magistrate H Eyre-Kenny, in early November 1897. The Royal Commissioner’s investigation gave a foretaste of things to come by uncovering a great deal of evidence embarrassing to the police administration. In the event he rather stretched his credibility when he reported on 13 December, by giving the veteran police officer the benefit of the doubt, but with damning caveats. Even though Seddon declared Eyre-Kenny had ‘completely exonerated’ Emerson, in effect he had accused the Inspector and his key witness of perjury, and declared the evidence to be ‘conflicting and perplexing in the extreme’. He had also declined to award the Inspector costs. Taylor damned the report, therefore, as being ‘contradictory, and, at some points, ludicrous’, and a newspaper that normally had no truck with prohibitionists said it was, ‘to put it mildly, a very remarkable document’. But Tunbridge, rather unhappily, had little choice but to retain Emerson.
Tunbridge felt that the problem of Emerson was ‘mainly owing to [his] having been retained in the Service after he became unfit for his position owing to advanced age and indifferent health’. The system was ‘in a measure to blame’, and its reform would have to await the results of the main Royal Commission. Taylor claimed that the Inspector had survived so long because he was a friend of the Premier. Certainly, he had been promoted to 1/c in 1896 despite being frequently in trouble with Hume. Cullen was not alone in testifying before the 1898 Commission that Emerson had been too lenient on breaches of liquor and gambling laws, and on the ruffianly Detective Kirby. But in the event this Commission too declined to find Emerson guilty of further specific charges: he had not been drunk at the Gisborne races (he had had a bad cold), and when he had placed his hand on a woman’s shoulder to point out figures on the face of the moon he had thought she was his daughter. The Commission however had no choice but to acknowledge that he had at times - including in the presence of his men - been ‘in liquor’, and nor was he sound on the question of gambling. These failings were undoubtedly ‘subversive of discipline’. Emerson, formerly one of the foremost practitioners of disciplined paramilitary policing in the colony, had overadjusted to the new, relaxed ethos. The Commission concluded that the
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Inspector was no longer worthy of his office, because of his ‘unbefitting’ conduct and his inability to properly command his men.
Because of Emerson’s long service in the colony, however, the Commission recommended that he should be permitted to resign and given a retirement allowance; he was, moreover, granted his legal expenses for the special (Eyre-Kenny) Commission. In September 1898 the Premier defended Emerson as ‘one of the bravest men ever we have had in this colony’, and blamed his humiliation on ‘prejudiced persons’ wanting to ‘cast a stigma on him and his family’ because he had ‘stood in their way’. But the fact remained that he was a liability. Tunbridge was unable to contemplate a man so ‘mentally if not bodily worn out’ remaining in the Force, whatever the validity of the specific charges against him. The Napier District, indeed, would ‘have been quite as well without the Inspector as with him, as the work has been carried out by his Clerk’. On 15 December 1898 the Cabinet finally acted: Emerson would retire, with three months’ paid leave and two years’ pay as a compassionate allowance.
By now, however, the Inspector had fallen gravely ill. When Inspector McGovern took over from him on 13 January 1899 he was not expected to live much longer. His compensation was rushed to him, in case his death complicated matters. He lingered on until 3 April, with Tunbridge - feeling that a man once important in the Force had been allowed to degenerate in office by government inaction - reportedly showing kindness and compassion to him until the end. Seddon accused Taylor of having hounded him to his death. 3
The Minister had told Tunbridge that he would generally be free from ministerial control, except in the field of appointments. On 22 November 1897 the new Commissioner notified his Inspectors of this, and gave them some idea of what to expect under his regime. As laxity had set in, the Force would have to be redisciplined. Tunbridge would revive the paramilitary adage that ‘a policeman has no hours of his own; he is supposed to devote the whole of his time to the Force’. The New Zealand police was ‘more nearly approximate to the Constabulary Forces at Home’ than to the Metropolitan Police, and so internal discipline should be stricter. On the other hand, this would not be the mindless discipline associated with the ‘pipe-clay tenets of militarism’. As an observer would remark, in place of ‘the military rule of thumb, and the stupid code of punishment applied to Tommy Atkins, which carries with it senseless hardships and indignities, it will be found possible to enforce a high standard of discipline, and still at the same time not crush the individual exercise of intelligence on the part of the men.’
The new head of police frequently reiterated this need for greater discipline within the parameters of the discretionary power required of a professionalising force with relatively few constables. In 1898 he noted that in ‘almost every town’ that he had visited the regulation against gossiping on the beat was ‘evidently more honoured in the breach than in
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the observance. I continually notice the constables on beat duty in idle conversation with private persons’. When the Wellington constables ignored his strictures, he threatened them and their NCOs with dire consequences. 4
A key problem, the Commissioner saw at once, was that of manpower. In order to make the sub-district system, and therefore the chain of command, work properly, he needed 50 more policemen. This would not be attainable unless and until the Commission pronounced accordingly, so in the meantime he concentrated on raising the establishment to its full entitlement in all ranks and classes. Re-establishing the network of sub-districts which had fallen away in all the retrenchments, for example, required more NCOs to head them. So on 27 October he asked Inspectors to recommend four constables apiece for such promotion. Seniority, he stressed, ‘must stand second to efficiency’. From the list 16 NCOs were selected before Christmas. This was the beginning of a long-term increase in the number of NCOs - there were 56 at the turn of the century, and nearly twice as many by 1917. Twenty-five advancements in class (called ‘promotions’ in the colony, Tunbridge noted) to 2/c constable and 27 to 1/c soon followed. By the time the Commission began its hearings in mid February 1898, Tunbridge had promoted some six dozen members of the Force and appointed three constables to the grade of 4/c detective. The Minister had in effect given him carte blanche to attain full allowable strength. Major restructuring would have to await the results of the Commission, but Tunbridge’s actions increased efficiency and were welcomed by both police and many outside observers. 5
The government had difficulty finding appropriate people to serve on the Commission. On 4 February 1898 the Royal Commissioners were at last appointed; Stipendiary Magistrates Joseph Poynton and Herbert Samuel Wardell, and a barrister. Colonel Albert Pitt. This line-up did not impress the prohibitionists, who claimed it was ‘rigged’ to ensure that minimal fault was found with the government’s past handling of policing. Pitt was a known supporter of the Liberals who had recently travelled to London with Seddon for the Diamond Jubilee. Within five years he would be the leader of the Legislative Council. Wardell, who allegedly owned brewery shares, was a frequent member of official enquiries. Poynton was a classical Liberal supporter, a self-educated West Coast gold miner (who would become Public Trustee in 1900, and Secretary to the Treasury in 1910). Taylor and others saw the Commission as tasked with giving a mandate for change - but not sufficient change to remove policing from tight political control. The Commissioners would be reluctant to get to the heart of the problem. This seemed confirmed when they accepted Seddon’s and Thompson’s refusal to testify.
The Commissioners’ terms of reference allowed them to examine any aspect of policing they wished; originally due to report by 1 May, they received an extension of time and their report was finalised on 28 July. The members of the Force had been notified that ‘they have nothing to
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fear as a result of any statement or complaint they may bring’ before the Commissioners. Many observers would have agreed with one constable’s testimony that for the ‘good’ men the Commission was the ‘best thing that has ever happened, and the bad ones think it the worst’. But many of Taylor’s star witnesses declined to testify, or changed their stories when they did; it was said that some were intimidated, while others had been ‘bought off’ by Tunbridge’s promotions. Although Taylor cross-examined witnesses, he claimed that perjury and other untoward matters (such as the fact that ‘private’ letters to Hume had never been filed, making it impossible to properly investigate the success of attempts at ‘influence’) impeded any meaningful result. Conversely, there were allegations that Taylor had got witnesses to perjure themselves, and had persuaded Pardy to slant his evidence regarding influence.
Tunbridge, travelling the colony with the Royal Commissioners, had the opportunity to observe or hear about first-hand the grave faults of the system he had inherited. As planned, too, he was able to influence the Commissioners. He found in them a ready audience for the proposals to radically reform the Force which he had been working on since his arrival. In terms of its general behaviour and efficiency, Tunbridge gave cautious approval. But he had to indict certain past happenings: the numerical weakness of the Force, the quality of recruits, the fact that a third of the NCOs when he took over were aged more than 55. There were also too many ‘elderly’ constables and officers, and the detective branch performed only ‘fairly well’. In short, there were impediments to efficiency at both the beginning and the end of the personnel process, with good men not regarding policing as an attractive career and unfit men staying on far too long. His testimony and comments addressed these factors. When the Commission’s findings were presented to Parliament in September 1898, they reflected recommendations in Tunbridge’s annual report written at the beginning of July, particularly his advocacy of greater police numbers, recruit training at a depot, SubInspectors to supervise the four centres - thereby freeing up the senior Inspectors for more work in their districts - and a pension system. So when Tunbridge was asked to report on the Commission’s findings, he was in effect being invited to endorse his own views. 6
The Commission’s first meeting on 14 February made two important decisions. First, it would admit the press to its proceedings, a course the wisdom of which the Commissioners later came to doubt when all of their sessions were reported with much sensationalism. Second, Wardell was appointed to the chair. The magistrate, having once been a policing official, had retained an interest in and knowledge about police affairs. The Commission welcomed representations from police and public alike, but decided to attempt to confine their investigations to matters less than five years old. After hearings in Wellington, they crossed to the South Island. Moving from centre to centre, the Commissioners encouraged policemen to hold meetings, discuss their grievances collectively, and
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appoint delegates to present their points of view. It was a markedly different situation from that which had prevailed in the recent past. 7
Newspapers reported luridly on the Commission’s proceedings. An Australian commentator could be forgiven for thinking that the ‘general reputation’ of the New Zealand Police was ‘that it is the most drunken and demoralised affair of its kind outside Hades’. Reporters were quick to generalise from individual incidents. An Auckland paper alleged in late March that drunken and disorderly behaviour, and the fathering of bastard children, were not uncommon amongst the city’s police. When Inspector Hickson investigated these charges, he concluded that they were based on the following events: one constable had been sacked recently for being drunk on duty, another had left town hurriedly in order to avoid having to support an illegitimate child, and a third had implicitly acknowledged fathering a son out of wedlock two years before. As the Commission road show progressed, the Police quickly came to feel that they were the subject of gross exaggeration as to their culpability and inefficiency. 8
The biggest clashes during the Commission between police and accusers were between Tunbridge - who felt that he needed to stress the basic integrity of the Force to be able to carry out meaningful reform - and the prohibitionists, particularly the colourful Tommy Taylor. In Christchurch the Commissioner had soon lost his temper and accused Taylor of ‘flinging mud’; he demanded notice of every case of alleged malpractice Taylor might henceforth bring before the Commission. The prohibitionist leader retorted that Tunbridge had been acting as counsel for ‘every unworthy and intemperate man in the Force’, and withdrew completely his cooperation with the Royal Commission on the grounds that he could have no faith in a body so close to a partisan Police Commissioner.
Some commentators felt that Tunbridge was the ‘aggressor in using offensive language’, and that Taylor had been correct in opposing the Commissioner’s efforts to defend ‘a state of things for which he is in no way responsible’. Hume had travelled with the Commission at his own request; many believed it was up to him to be the counsel for the defence, with Tunbridge acting as ‘an impartial and unbiased spectator’. Many commentators regretted that Taylor had withdrawn from the melee, since it was he who had been most instrumental in bringing forth the evidence ‘required to show the real condition of the Force’.
‘Mr. Taylor in our opinion has done excellent service in what may be termed the capacity of counsel for the prosecution ... there is little doubt that but for his zeal and energy in the matter the Commission would not be in the possession of one-half of the information which is at present before it in regard to the inner working of the police force.’ 9
The thrust of Taylor’s allegations was that ‘control of the Force has been by Ministers and not by a Commissioner’. Although his bid to force Seddon and Thompson to give evidence failed because they argued that
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as advisers to the Governor they could not be obliged to submit to questions on matters of policy, in the course of the Commission’s enquiries it emerged beyond all doubt that allegations of political interference in the Force were well-founded. In the assessment of Broham and other experts, the ‘rot had set in’ well before the coming to power of the Liberals, but had worsened thereafter. By 1898 Broham had long ‘concluded that unless a man exerted himself politically to get advancement he had a very small show in this Force’. Dunedin’s Inspector Pardy summed up the general opinion by saying that discontent and inefficiency were due to the ‘continuous political interference of members of Parliament’; ‘good’ men who did not use influence were naturally aggrieved when they saw fellow policemen benefit by doing so. Former Inspector Frederick Mallard, a long-time scourge of police inefficiency, noted - and he was not alone - that politicians had made Hume ‘the scapegoat’ for problems far more deep-rooted than the failings of the Commissioner. Future Commissioner John O’Donovan acknowledged that he had with reluctance attempted to use political influence to get a posting to a desirable station, Stratford. 10
Tunbridge testified that while in New Zealand it was seemingly ‘a recognised rule’ for the highest of authorities to be appealed to on the most trivial of matters, an efficient police had to be ‘as independent as possible’ from outside interference. A key reason for abolishing the provincial forces had been to make it easier to resist police becoming ‘simply creatures of ruling power’. Yet Seddon had enormously enhanced the status of Premier, particularly after the 1893 election results made him impregnable against Stout. Seddon ‘is the Ministry’, wrote senior bureaucrat Edward Tregear in 1897; Thompson was as much his creature as any other, one of those ‘running to him all day like little boys about this & that’. Seddon considered government patronage of the public service as essential to preserve the will of the people vis-d-vis the bureaucrats, and to ensure that even the humblest person had the chance of direct access to state power. He saw himself as embodying the struggle of the people against selfishness and sectionalism. By the later 1890s, almost the sole test of sympathy with the people was loyalty to the government, in the person of Seddon. This was both ideologically and practically preferable (in the words of the Liberal MP A Hogg) to ‘a Civil Service aristocracy’ running a ‘despotism’ in the land.
The first recommendation of the Commissioners addressed ‘that resort to political influence which has caused so much dissatisfaction to the men and to the executive officers of the department’. They had no doubt that it was used, but averred that this was the case in ‘every service and every State’, and that it was impossible to assess the extent of its successful use. They also noted that it had been prevalent before 1890, and assessed that it had not been proven to be generally corrupt or deleterious. It did however provide opportunities for undue privilege for politicians, and for the subversion of efficiency; it was (as a commentator summed up)
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‘never too soon to mend’ this flaw. So the Commission recommended that ‘the Commissioner of Police, while controlled by the Minister as to expenditure and responsible to him, should have absolute authority as to all appointments, promotions, transfers, dismissals, and distribution of the Force.’ The nineteenth-century system of tight political control of policing operations was now anachronistic; political intervention should be only in ‘final analysis’ terms. With the appointment of a professional head of police who would carry out its wishes in a general sense rather than on the basis of detailed instruction, the Liberal government had already conceded that point - at least, in principle. 11
But the government was not willing to follow through on a recommendation to give the Commissioner ‘absolute authority’ over any matters. There could be no definitive devolution of power to state servants, whatever the evolving myth in the western world that policing was an autonomous operation, that constables were responsible to ‘the law’ and judiciary rather than to an appointed head responsive to the political executive. In Seddon’s words, ‘the responsibility of the administration of the Police Force must be vested in the Minister in charge of the department, and in no self-governing colony could you divest yourself of that responsibility by giving it to a paid servant.’ This was red rag to the Taylor bull. Taylor himself acknowledged that since Tunbridge’s arrival promotions, transfers and dismissals had been devoid of political content (although the ‘crucial evil’ of ministerial appointments remained), but there remained scope for the political abuse of policing.
In fact, he had already predicted a cover-up, and had written a booklet to more or less coincide with the official release of the Commission’s report. The Shadow of Tammany was his own guide to the evidence presented to the Commissioners: ‘the cause of the pollution of New York’s Police Force is here in its most vigorous form ... the prostitution of every office in the State to the interests of political parties.’ He had demanded the enquiry because ‘rampant corruption’ was inevitable if the ‘exaltation of the party over the State’ continued. Government Ministers had to be impartial in their fundamental role as ‘trustees for the time being of the public records and affairs’, but the Liberals had violated this trust - particularly through the Premier, who had ‘formed a political alliance with the capitalistic brewers of the colony’.
This alliance was the cause of ‘much of the demoralised administration of the Government’, particularly in the Police, and had led to much doctoring of evidence to the Commission. That Tunbridge had been forced into the position of counsel for the defence was an unfortunate situation for a man of integrity. The Rev Frank Isitt’s contribution to the booklet told of a marked decrease in crime in the Clutha area since it had gone dry, but alleged that the police there continued to allow liquor offending. When an area went no-licence, its police, especially those friendly with publicans, should be transferred. Taylor’s allegations that the licensing laws were not fully enforced, partly because of political
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influence, were true enough, if exaggerated. But his summing up of the evidence to the Commission as ‘proving the utter demoralisation of the force through political influence’ could not be taken seriously, even allowing for the philosophical difference between ‘Liberal democracy’ and Taylor’s concept of liberal democracy. Most observers, therefore, felt that Tunbridge’s reforms would suffice to rectify faults in the policing of New Zealand. Taylor and his allies, however, continued the campaign, and kept the police hierarchy and the government on their toes. Taylor lost his seat in 1899 due to his anti-‘Boer War’ stance, but again haunted the Liberals as an MP between 1902 and 1905, and 1908 and 1911, when he died. 12
Criticisms of political influence and other strictures having been voiced, however, the Commission’s findings generally endorsed Tunbridge’s assessment that, ‘taking the Force as a body’, it could be seen to be ‘coming out remarkably well’. The Commissioners pronounced that its ‘general conduct’ was ‘good’, and that it was ‘doubtful if any other body of men, numbering so many, would bear the searching investigation the Force has undergone without as many or more instances of neglect of duty or lapses from good conduct coming to light’. On the question of fathering illegitimate children, for example, given ‘that the Force is largely composed of young vigorous unmarried men, a considerable number of whom have passed into the Police from the Military Force, we are surprised more cases of this kind have not come to our knowledge’. Such a dismissal of charges of laxity amounted to special pleading, since the police administration itself stressed the importance of adherence to the official code of morality, given the significance of the constable’s role of moral exemplar. Yet the impression created was such that Seddon was able to get away with demanding that Taylor apologise for forcing the spending of £4250 on the Commission to prove that one policeman had transgressed the railways regulations! Much more ‘rottenness’ than that had been revealed, even though the majority of the specific charges levelled by the accusers had not been proven. 13
That being said, the Commissioners were correct enough in their general assessment of the state of the Force. Their hearings had, by definition, focused on the extraordinary rather than the ordinary, since they were tasked with investigating allegations. Figures of reported crimes, summonses, apprehensions and so forth revealed an acceptable picture - particularly in comparison with even a decade earlier. The clearance rate had decreased a little since 1886, but the number of police per capita had fallen by considerably more. On 31 March 1896, for example, there were 484 police, 10 fewer than a decade before, while the population had risen by 18.9 percent. The ratio of police to population, 1: 1530, was at its nadir that year. Yet the amount of undetected crime was still ‘comparatively small’. The Commissioners pointed to the Australian forces, where at its highest (in Western Australia) the ratio was 1:325, and where even the
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lowest (South Australia’s 1; 1100) was much higher than New Zealand’s figure of (by now) 1:1435. New Zealand police could cope relatively well with crime and public disorder at a time of considerable internal problems because of the rapid stabilisation of both pakeha and Maori society. But there was no doubt that police resources were overstretched, and so it was appropriate to commend the results which were being achieved. 14
Tunbridge pointed out to the Royal Commission that even increasing per capita police expenditure by a shilling from its current rate of 2s S’/kl would leave New Zealand with a much cheaper policing system than those in the Australian colonies, whose cost ranged up to Western Australia’s 1 Is 3d. If the new Commissioner got his 50 extra police there would be one policeman to about every 1400 citizens, still a much lower ratio than those across the Tasman. There was no longer the same need for frugality as in the past. The economy was by now on the mend, with strong economic growth which was to continue until 1907. By 1900 Tunbridge had increased New Zealand police numbers to 574, and the ratio to 1:1359. Numbers reached 667 by 1906, albeit with a lower ratio of 1: 1387, which was acceptable to the state because of ongoing societal stabilisation. The cost of policing per inhabitant in 1906 was 2s lOVid, less than half of that of Australia, and the political authorities were reasonably satisfied that this was adequate, despite continuing complaints from the police. 15
The working life of a policeman was not an easy one, but thanks to the increasing propensity of people to behave as desired, it was not as strenuous as in the colonial past. The worst aspect of the urban beat system was generally the ‘long and wearying’ (‘very tired, feet numbed, back and neck slightly stiff’, wrote a Wellington man in 1905) eight-hour night duty, which was often followed by court appearances in the morning. Night-duty men usually broke the rules to relieve the harshness and monotony of their section, and so suffered more when a particularly keen commissioned officer was stationed in their centre. Inspector Terence O’Brien aroused resentment after his transfer to Dunedin in 1902; being a former detective, he was allegedly ‘fond of roaming about at night... is generally out to close on midnight & is continually growling about the men gossiping’. Within a few months he had ‘had several of them up’.
It was easy to spring surprise visits on the men, as each beat had at least one ‘timed point’ that had to be reached with precision. The Christchurch night-beat men were reportedly glad to have got rid of Inspector Ellison, whom they had nicknamed ‘Snuffy’, in favour of Robert J Gillies: ‘they seem to like the new man very well, he never goes out in the street much’. The latter was apparently more representative of the new breed of officers. Efficiency on the beats was generally improving, and thus supervision did not need to be so severe, 16
Police results were all the more impressive when the multifarious
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duties thrust on the constables were taken into account. ‘The work the men of this Force have to perform’, Tunbridge testified, ‘is work that I never knew any other Police Force to perform. ’ This was an exaggeration, but the sheer volume of work seemed too great for the numbers involved. The Commission indicted the Liberal government, its predecessor, and Hume for this understaffing. Each of the four cities, it stated, should have a reserve of at least 10 men and a sergeant, and the Commissioner should have at his disposal at least another 10 men who could be sent to smaller towns and country districts. Hume’s defence of the establishment figures, while an attempt to justify his subservience to the politicians, has some theoretical validity; the primary, preventive role of the Force was not necessarily impeded by a falling ratio of police to population. When Tunbridge noted an increase in ‘crime’ over the last seven years, the former Commissioner responded that the rise was in the overall ‘offending’ rate - not that for serious matters such as assault and burglary - and that in any case, not all reported ‘crime’ turned out actually to be ‘crime’.
In fact, overall offending was steadily decreasing over the long term, just as it was in the ‘Mother Country’. Between 1886 and 1890 an annual average of 171.8 common assault charges per 100,000 people came before New Zealand magistrates’ courts; this fell to 123.6 between 1896 and 1900, and to 74.5 for 1916 to 1920. Similarly, summary convictions for all offences before magistrates’ courts totalled 26.76 per 1000 population in 1886, 21.32 in 1890 and 17.93 in 1894. Convictions for crimes of violence - much less susceptible to variable reporting habits - declined dramatically after 1870, falling from more than 3 per 1000 to less than 1 by 1910. Even the incidence of assaulting, resisting or obstructing the police was halved between 1900 and 1920.
From the 1870s, in short, there were ‘massive falls’ in the rates of violence, drunkenness and the consumption of spirits, and a gradual growth in the numbers imprisoned was - as the Prisons Department noted in 1913 - ‘by no means commensurate with the increase in our general population’. That year. Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout solemnly informed the Supreme Court grand jury that the decreasing crime rate was a reflection among other things of ‘the efficient moral training of the youths’ of the country, particularly those who were native-born. In 1920, Stout reported in the same forum that the number of prisoners per capita was only two-thirds of the figure in 1890. As social control networks strengthened and the proportion of ‘outsiders’ declined, the causes of the extremely high rates of property crimes, fighting, and drunkenness in the frontier period had decreased dramatically.
The decline in serious offending was an obvious indicator of a stabilising society. Short-term variations tended to obscure the trends - ‘crime’ figures rose in 1898, but only because 105 Maori were ‘shut up in gaol because they ploughed someone’s land’. The failures of some types of offending to decline over time can probably be put down to police efforts to seek ‘higher’ standards of behaviour from the public.
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Sometimes, very high standards were reached. A Nelson constable complained that he could not prove his worth as a policeman because of the total lack of ‘serious’ crime in the town: in his 6V2 years there had been only a single break-in to a shop. Pender boasted before the Commission that all serious crime committed in Wellington in the previous five years had been detected. Auckland detectives reported that there was very little crime in the biggest city in the colony. Pardy noted that the amount of drunkenness in Dunedin had been decreasing over the years.
Alongside the changing code of public behaviour, police behaviour was altering as well. ‘People do not put up with being knocked about without complaining these days.’ The Rowan and Mayne strategy of public consent for policing which had been aimed at by the London Metropolitan Police was, in these altering social conditions, now more achievable. At the end of the century Tunbridge ordered that the ‘Maxims For General Guidance of Members of the Police Force’, which embodied the ‘new police’ ideals, be displayed in police stations. (The maxims appear as the endpieces in the present author’s Policing the Colonial Frontier.) In 1900, moreover, extraordinarily detailed rules regulating life in the barracks were issued. 17
The fact that reactive policing was a very necessary component of preventive policing helped to explain why fewer police per capita than in the past were now needed. Techniques of reactive policing were steadily improving as a result of innovations in science, transport and communications. People marvelled at the improvements: ‘the whole state of living has altered altogether’. It is true that the Force was still struggling to pay for these innovations. During the 1898 Commission, the North Invercargill constable noted that he had to go to the watertower telephone to ring his headquarters, and if that was unavailable, to the one at the brewery. Not even Wellington’s Manners Street station had a telephone at that time. In 1899 only two police stations in urban Auckland were on the phone; another three - outer suburban stations on key communications routes - followed in 1900. But where little money was needed, professionalisation proceeded apace. Modern records systems, for example, were gradually established. A filing system for photographs of suspects sent from overseas was set up in 1902. 18
Bicycles were by now used extensively by New Zealand police, as they were by their overseas counterparts. In Christchurch, 20 police used their own bicycles to aid their work. Despite the proven value of this, the administration had refused to provide a maintenance allowance let alone - as Broham advocated - free bicycles. Following a recommendation of the Royal Commission, men in some regions who used their bicycles regularly ‘for the benefit of the department’ could get an allowance of 2s per week. But after the turn of the century, the Christchurch Inspector could authorise the purchase of ‘station bicycles’, including one for the sergeant to use to visit patrol constables. By 1905, as street paving
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improved, bicycles were also being used extensively in Auckland and to a degree in Wellington, again especially for surprise visits by NCOs to the beats. The efficiency of supervision increased greatly in these cities, and horse hire and public transport fares were saved (as was time). Forensic and detective techniques were improving; next to South Australia, New Zealand had the best apprehension rate in Australasia. The police were seen by the public to be professionalising. 19
Increasingly, the police called on outside experts in their investigations and prosecutions. In October 1886 Thomas Hall, monied nephew of former Premier (and former Canterbury police controller) Sir John Hall, was convicted at a sensational ticket-entry trial of attempting to murder his wife with antimony. (His alleged accomplice and lover Margaret Houston was acquitted.) Hall had aimed to benefit financially from the murder, and thereby both save his business from a scrutiny that would have revealed many defalcations (especially by forgery) and make a healthy additional profit. He had planned the murder before the marriage, indeed before his criminal actions in his business. Only the intervention of Mrs Kate Hall’s doctor had saved her from imminent death at the hands of the ‘vilest criminal ever tried in New Zealand’.
Upon his arrest at ‘Woodlands’, his Timaru mansion, he had attempted to throw a phial of antimony into the fire, but Inspector Broham had grappled with him (despite interference by Houston) and prevented this. Hall was given a life sentence, but meanwhile the police had exhumed the body of his wife’s father. Captain Henry Cain. Dunedin’s Professor James Black found a great deal of antimony in the body, and in early 1887 Hall was found guilty of Cain’s murder, partly on the basis of the forensic linking of the two cases. This verdict was quashed on appeal (to outraged accusations of ‘class justice’) because of a technicality that was removed from the legislation within a few years. However, this case, the most infamous poisoning in Australasia in the nineteenth century, and one which had gained worldwide attention, vindicated the use of forensic science.
In Christchurch in 1900, legal clerk Henry Styche, besotted by another woman, attempted to bribe his wife Elizabeth’s doctor with £2OO to murder her. During the trial, billed as The Styche Sensation’ (Styche claimed that his wife had an aversion to intercourse and emitted ‘a very offensive odour’; she became ‘deranged’ during the hearings), great attention was focused on the evidence of a typewriting expert. On the basis of his analysis, the mild-mannered Opawa resident was gaoled for seven years for an attempt to procure murder. In 1901 the Crown was less successful over an alleged murder by poisoning at sea by one Jane Smith. In 1902 the Christchurch police found themselves in difficulty over the alleged wrecking of the luxury schooner Ariadne near the Waitaki River mouth the previous year. Captain George Mumford had confessed to having agreed to accept £4OO to scuttle the yacht from its wealthy British ‘playboy’ owner Thomas Kerry, who stood to gain £lO,OOO in insurance
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money from the wreck. At the direction of the insurance company’s agent, Mumford had written to Kerry demanding payment and noting that there was no written agreement. He later, however, produced an agreement, claiming that his letter had referred to an attempted postwreckage agreement rather than this extant pre-wreck one! The trial of Mumford, Kerry and young crewman Nicholas Freke for ‘casting away a ship’ (the first such charge in New Zealand) was another sensational one, partly because of hints of tangled homosexual relationships, and partly because of Mumford’s claim that Freke (‘friend’ of Kerry) had witnessed the ‘agreement’ to the scuttling. This time it was the defence (led by A C Hanlon) which applied the new forensic techniques, and these revealed the agreement to be a forgery, which threw the Crown case into disarray.
Freke was discharged, and Kerry’s defence was that the yacht had gone aground accidentally, with Mumford deciding to capitalise on this when approached by the insurance company, which had offered him £4OO to claim a conspiracy. Kerry was acquitted, but bizarrely, although Mumford had no financial motive unless he had been paid by Kerry to scuttle the Ariadne, he received four years’ gaol for conspiracy to defraud Lloyd’s. It appeared to many that there had been a miscarriage of justice, to others that there was no doubt Mumford and Kerry were guilty - it was just that the agreement had been a verbal one. Mumford’s evidence comprised the main case that the wreck was a deliberate casting away, yet the judge had directed that while it could not be used in evidence against the other accused, it was admissible against him. As for the insurance claim, Detective Richard Marsack travelled to London to give evidence on behalf of the underwriters against Kerry’s claim, and in the end a compromise was effected. Whatever the truth, such spectacular forensic failures as this on the part of the police were noticeable because of their increasing rarity. The newspapers tended to stress instead the advancements in efficiency and science which led to police successes. 20
Partly as a result of its improving public image, policing seemed - despite countervailing adverse publicity and the tough workload - an increasingly attractive proposition. There were 350 men on the waiting list to join when Hume left office. Even if the pay were lower, Pardy felt, the ‘fascination about the police with young men’ would ensure an equally long list. Whatever the allegations of the prohibitionists and others, in general the uniform had come to symbolise respectability, unlike at times in the past. Even Pender, who tended to glorify the Irish and Victorian constabularies, went along with the new ethos: married constables were as good as single ones, possibly even ‘steadier’. They were reflective of a ‘more settled’ society, of a good-mannered society. It would be ‘ridiculous’, he agreed, for police to once more carry rifles. They were now supposed to be ‘respected’ not only for their capacity to coerce, but also for the values their uniform exemplified. A H Wright suggested that the police carry leather batons in order to minimise danger to the lives of offenders. When even the veteran Inspector Broham had
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shed sufficient of his paramilitary policing conceptions to downplay the importance of transfers, and Hume argued in favour of ‘extra duties’, both had the same goal; to put the policeman in ‘closer touch’ with the public.
These developments did not, of course, supersede the sine qua non of policing, the constable’s ability to apply legally sanctioned, non-negotiable force. It was this which set the policeman apart from the rest of society - in both the policeman’s perceptions, and those of the citizenry. A policeman’s daughter recalled of city police that ‘we lived in tight little communities strictly governed as regards contacts with the public’. It was ‘a very cloistered life’. W J Phair, typically, did not ‘enter greatly into social life, believing that such did not go hand in hand with his duties as a police officer’. All this was a reflection of the paramilitary organisation of the police, and of the fundamental purpose of policing, however much closer to the public the Force was moving. But with stabilising factors at work amongst the populace, and increasing sophistication of techniques, those coming to the attention of the police were now more targeted and more targetable, more alienated from the mass. ‘You have no idea the terror some people have of the police’, testified Pardy of groups perceived as potential lawbreakers. Those against whom physical coercion might well be needed, however, constituted a decreasing proportion of what was now being characterised as a ‘settled society’. 21
CHAPTER 6
Social Concerns, Police Concerns
In the post-pioneering society, the policing emphasis was shifting steadily towards the idea of the constable as moral exemplar which had been embodied in the long-term consensual strategy of the founding London Metropolitan Police Commissioners. The New Zealand Royal Commissioners, therefore, were forthright in their criticism of pockets of insobriety in the Force, arguing that these problems had been inadequately policed internally. Liquor problems within the Force mirrored liquor problems in the community as a whole; and the vexed subject of policing of the licensing laws received much attention from critics of policing and from the Commission. Bringing the control of liquor within the Force and in the community into line with the new, officially-approved ‘manners of the age’ was a double challenge for the police.
It remained a major problem that the politicians had been too timid to back up their general desire to reduce consumption by providing the police with adequate legal weapons. Hume had openly acknowledged that ‘Sunday trading and selling during prohibited hours are carried on to a great extent throughout the colony’, but added that the ‘law is so complicated and defective’ that there was often ‘not the slightest hope of a conviction’. The police were ‘quite capable and ready to carry out workable laws’, but ‘as long as the liquor-laws remain as at present, no organization could possibly successfully grapple with the question’. Tunbridge fully endorsed these views: ‘so long as the law remains as it is this cannot be checked to any appreciable extent, even if the whole Police Force of the colony were engaged’ in suppressing licensing breaches. Both Commissioners repeatedly advised the government on the measures which would enable them to curb alcohol offences. 22
Temperance campaigners maintained that although the laws were imperfect, they should still be rigorously enforced. They had done their homework prior to the meetings of the Commission: 633 people had been seen to enter an Auckland hotel on a Sunday, for example, while 70 had gone into a Waimate pub on Easter Sunday. These and similar figures showed that the illegal consumption of alcohol was widespread. Christchurch’s Frank Isitt and his Prohibition League had been monitoring after-hours drinking for years, and accused Inspector Broham not just of laxity but of perjury in his defence of his men. It was alleged to the Commission that constables in different parts of the colony had complained to prohibitionists that they had been ordered by their superiors to go easy
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on most breaches of the liquor legislation. It was a matter of record that the Premier had stated that the licensing laws would not be administered with ‘undue harshness’. 23
This and other evidence suggested that the influence of liquor capitalists had penetrated deep into the colony’s political life, and that in turn the politicians had put pressure on the police. The Commission was given numerous examples of political influence being used to stymie police promotions, or to effect transfers, when constables or NCOs became vigorous in licensing law enforcement. John Cullen, promoted to Inspector the previous September, testified that in 1886 he had been transferred from Timaru at the instigation of publicans because as sergeant in charge of the town he had been ‘pretty successful’ in suppressing Sunday trading.
There was, moreover, plentiful testimony about police being ‘rewarded’ for turning a blind eye to liquor law violations. Stipendiary Magistrate H W Northcroft, a former Sub-Inspector in the Armed Constabulary, had seen Auckland police ‘over and over again in hotels drinking - in uniform’. They would be plied with free booze either at the bar, often after hours, or by means of the publicans leaving bottles in doorways or on window-sills in the backyards of pubs. A former barman at Christchurch’s Railway Hotel (run by an ex-policeman) testified that the pub was known as ‘a policeman’s hotel’. The police were ‘bought off’ in small ways to overlook breaches of the law. 24
The Commission had no choice but to acknowledge that after-hours selling was ‘pretty general throughout the colony’, and that Sunday trade in particular was of ‘startling’ dimensions. That being said, the Commissioners entered the almost obligatory caveat that the extent of the matter had been exaggerated. They noted, moreover, that critics underestimated the truly chaotic nature of the licensing laws, and the difficulty of obtaining evidence which would make liquor charges stick. This compounded the real problems created by the determination of publicans and their clientele to circumvent the laws. If the local police were not in on an ‘arrangement’ for after-hours drinking, for example, it was common to have sentries posted outside pubs to give warning of their approach. Sophisticated warning devices, usually comprising switches linked to hidden bells which rang in the bars, were often used. There was little to suggest widespread police connivance in major violations of drinking laws, the Commission found; nor was there any hard evidence of transfers as punishment for their enforcement. This was, to say the least, a cautious interpretation of the evidence, and sources then and since have confirmed that many police took small ‘bribes’ of free alcohol in return for developing selective blindness.
In concluding that by and large the Force had been ‘fairly successful’ in enforcing the licensing Acts, therefore, the Commission had ignored a great deal of evidence, much of it from people who would normally have been regarded as reliable and trustworthy witnesses. The Commissioners
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probably intended to emphasise that a basic cause of the problem was the legal quagmire of the liquor licensing statutes. They were aware of the strength of opposition to tight liquor control, and did not want the reform campaign to be diverted into focusing on the enforcement superstructure rather than the legislative base.
The stakes were high: the ‘new morality’ was replacing the ‘old’. The new ‘bourgeois respectability’ required of all citizens by the state authorities was being resisted in the liquor area more than in any other. There was general acceptance of other required standards, such as tightening codes of language. There was no civil libertarian protest when a Gore farmer was arrested for saying within earshot of the Governor and his party: To Hell with the whole bloody lot of you buggars.’ There was social acquiescence in a formal tightening of the code of sexual morality, with no resistance for example to the raising of the age of consent. But ‘bourgeois morality’ met customary working-class behaviour head-on over the liquor question. And, unusually, powerful capitalists and their political allies sided with those who wished to engage in ‘dissolute’ practices. 25
Senior police were not suggesting an extreme solution, but a systematisation of the licensing laws which would represent a compromise between the prohibitionists/temperance campaigners and the publicans/ brewers/illegal drinkers. They argued that the do-nothing attitude of politicians represented not a ‘middle ground’ but a de facto siding with liquor interests while de jure pretending that a strict liquor regime should be in place. In a country where even magistrates openly admitted turning a blind eye to liquor law breaches, and themselves drank when they felt like it, the prohibitionist or extreme temperance position was clearly not viable.
This was clear from experience in ‘no-licence’ areas, where slygrogging was rampant despite considerable police attempts at suppression. In the Clutha district, there had been 79 cases of illegal liquor-selling, but 56 had been discharged for want of adequate evidence. Community support for the supply of liquor was too great, and even people initially willing to be witnesses were talked out of it or intimidated. The police had been forced to adopt a detection methodology ‘strongly condemned by many persons’ and hence counter-productive in terms of the strategy of consent. This was ‘a system of deception’ whereby constables ‘assumed false characters and resorted to subterfuge to obtain the confidence of men with the intention of betraying them’.
There was no other way around the problem in dry areas. Tunbridge recorded glumly that ‘Public sympathy is invariably with the sly-grog seller, and it is hopeless for a witness to attempt to obtain employment in the district after ... one of these cases. Were he a criminal his chances would be infinitely better.’ Tunbridge railed against ‘a very small minority of the Magistrates’ who condemned police for the undercover soliciting of sales of illegal liquor (or illegal betting): ‘if the learned gentlemen in
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question know of other means of obtaining the necessary evidence I should be extremely grateful if they would communicate them to me.’ He denied that any attempt had been made ‘to entrap an innocent or ignorant person’; the magistracy should ‘reserve their comments until there was a suggestion that the practice was being abused’.
Police entrapment techniques created a general atmosphere of suspicion in no-licence areas that soon reduced detection rates drastically. Anyone arriving in the King Country with a swag, testified police stationed at Otorohanga, Te Awamutu and elsewhere, was assumed to be an undercover policeman until proven otherwise. Moreover, techniques used in the policing of no-licence areas were viewed as the thin end of the wedge for the reintroduction to the whole colony of policing modes now deemed obnoxious and counter-productive. While the Royal Commissioners acknowledged that subterfuge ‘may’ be justified in some cases, they recorded ‘the hope that it will never become a recognised police system in this colony.’ Methods used in the policing of dry areas were already seen to be having ramifications in liquor cases elsewhere. Invercargill’s Sergeant Ewen Macdonell had admitted to the Commission that he did not caution such suspects before taking statements from them, and indeed had extracted statements by pretending that others had confessed. The Commissioners deplored such ‘resort to falsehood’. They responded favourably to a suggestion from Cullen that liquor outlets should be allowed in the King Country. 26
Many police would have been happy with whatever direction new legislation took so long as it were rational and enforceable. For now, they were assigned the thankless task of enforcing ‘laws of singular severity in the face of a public opinion which in reality winked at their infringement’. Because of this, ‘in many cases the policeman, who is after all only a man in blue clothes, winked too, and the dignity of the law suffered.’ The Royal Commission in effect endorsed a selective approach to liquor law enforcement pending rationalised legislation, since strict insistence on existing laws would, ‘until the sentiment of the community undergoes a considerable change, require the almost entire attention of a Police Force larger than that which now exists in the colony.’ The problem for the police would remain: how selective should they be? One thing was still certain: those holding strong views on either side of the debate would not be satisfied by the outcome of the Commission on this issue. 27
‘That there is a great deal of discontent, dissatisfaction, and apathy in the Force there can be no doubt. Life and energy must be infused into it’, said the Commissioners. They identified higher pay as one prerequisite for this revitalisation. The current rates were the lowest in Australasia even though men in forces across the Tasman received perquisites denied New Zealand police - free uniforms, a pension scheme, and so on. A 2/c constable in Wellington on 7s 6d for a nine- or 10-hour working day cited
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Sydney police pay to back up his contention that considering ‘the unpleasant nature of the work’ New Zealand police were ill-rewarded. Moreover, unlike their Australian counterparts, married constables stationed in cities received no rent allowances. ‘A man who marries is marrying into poverty’, as Inspector Pardy put it. Otago police unanimously - and typically - requested a small pay increase for the worst paid, plus free uniforms and a house allowance for married men. Like others, they asked that all police be eligible for long-service pay, on the grounds that different rates of pay for long-term men doing the same job were a pervading grievance; the alternative was a reformed remuneration structure. A District Judge summed up the general view by characterising police pay rates as ‘miserable’.
The Royal Commissioners chastised the government for paying constables at a level which gave them no chance to save. This could only foster inefficiency. As 3/c Constable W G Wohlmann (later to be Commissioner) asked, could police do their duty impartially if they were indebted to local shopkeepers? The opposing argument that there was a long waiting list was dismissed: many of these potential recruits were neither equipped nor qualified to be constables. The best young men would become available only if there was a substantial pay hike. A young constable who had taken a pay cut in leaving a labouring job would have thought harder had he been aware of the expenses involved. Whereas New Zealand still paid its police less than labourers, in Britain and Ireland police pay was now up to 50 percent higher than that prevalent in the class from which they were drawn. Many New Zealand constables, while appreciating the permanence of employment offered by the Force, regarded it as an ephemeral position until they could get something better. 28
At the beginning of the 1890s Hume had sought to alter the system of classification within ranks, arguing cogently for its abolition in favour of pay increases by length of service. In 1894 Seddon had declared that the police were ‘very well paid’ compared with working men outside the Force, and that he had been deluged with applicants for the military and for transfer from the military to the Police. The government had therefore felt able to cut police starting salaries from £127 10s to £l2O (6s 8d per day) from 1 April 1895, in anticipation of acceptance of Hume’s plan to introduce increments for service - which it endorsed in principle but stalled on implementing. By the time of the 1898 Commission there were 122 men on the new rates, all aggrieved at being trapped on low pay in 3/c rank, perhaps for very many years. Quite apart from the extra cost of introducing what was now the Metropolitan/Royal Irish Constabulary system of increments for service, the Liberal leaders had realised that this would make more difficult the penetration of political influence into the Force. Tunbridge, and a number of police witnesses of all ranks, endorsed the abolition of occupational classes, which were depicted as hampering the progress of the men and thereby making them despondent
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and inefficient. Actual or potential abuse of the system created jealousies. Its abolition would cost a mere £lOOO per annum, and ‘give immense satisfaction to the Force generally’.
The Commissioners endorsed such views and advocated that pay increases inside ranks should be by length of service only. The starting rate for constables should be 7s per day, rising by 6d every five years (Tunbridge had advocated that the first three increments be at four-year intervals) to 9s after 20 years. This rate did not match that sought by the city men who had made representations to the Commission, but it was generally seen as an acceptable compromise that would make New Zealand police wages comparable with those of the Australian colonies in terms of their relativity to labouring rates. Sergeants, currently earning 8s 6d to 9s 6d depending on class, should be appointed at the latter level, and rise by increments of 6d to 11s, a more generous upper rate than advocated by Tunbridge. The range of detectives’ remuneration, 9s 6d to 13s 6d, should remain; but the maximum should be reached after only nine years - again, a more generous recommendation than Tunbridge’s. Constables on plain-clothes duty (‘assistant detectives’) should receive an extra shilling per day, as should the increasingly burdened clerks. The cost of these reforms was estimated at between £16,000 and £20,000 (less if Tunbridge’s modifications were accepted), a not impossible amount. 29
The government had finally to act. On I December 1898 classes and long-service pay were abolished and the ‘increment system’ was instituted, mostly at the rates of pay recommended by the Commission. Constables would receive pay increases at five-yearly intervals. Their starting pay was returned to the old 7s per diem, with the maximum set at 9s. Sergeants’ pay would begin at 9s 6d, with three-yearly increases and house allowances. Detectives were to have a 14s 6d upper limit, with Is increments at three-yearly intervals. The few police who would lose out by the new arrangements, men of 15 to 20 years’ service who were remunerated under the long-service pay arrangements, were allowed to stay on their existing rates. An anomaly was therefore accepted; other, far more serious, anomalies were to emerge as ramifications of the new system.
The Commission had recommended that married constables and sergeants in larger centres (the only members of the Force not provided with free quarters) should receive a house allowance, and Tunbridge had agreed, though opting for a lower sum. Donald McLeod, a city constable about to be married in 1898, was ‘frightened’ by the rents he found when searching for a home: Wellington ‘needs a fair rent bill’, he lamented. The government accepted the new Commissioner’s recommendation of a 7s per week allowance after three years’ service for constables, and Is 6d per day for NCOs. But as Pender noted in 1900, there was insufficient differential between the 9s maximum for a constable and an NCO’s starting wage of 9s 6d. When a country policeman was promoted to a
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city, the 6d per day extra plus 10s 6d per week house allowance was no compensation for rent payments which were £1 or more in Wellington. Why would a country constable want to swap the relative freedom of his sole-charge lot for a harder, more unpleasant working life in the city at a reduced real income? Increasing numbers of constables were turning down promotion. 30
The Royal Commissioners had also pointed out that all other uniformed government employees had their uniforms provided free. Tunbridge supported in principle their recommendation that this perquisite be extended to the Police, as applied in most forces. Hostility to this suggestion from the politicians on grounds of cost prompted him to try a different tack in his 1899 and 1900 annual reports: he recommended the free provision of a portion of the uniform, as in Victoria, while pointing out that ‘so far as the men are concerned’ the free uniform proposal of the Royal Commission was one of its ‘principal recommendations’. After long wrangling, the government conceded free issue from 1 October 1901 of all uniform material, plus waterproof coats, headgear and nightduty coats in all stations south of Wanganui. This was to apply to all in the rank of Sergeant-Major downwards (except for district and Native Constables, for whom uniforms remained optional). The tailoring of trousers, jumpers and riding-pants was now all that would have to be paid for by the members of the Force. Tunbridge favoured the year-round wearing of helmets for headgear as being more reflective of a non-military force, but did not force the issue when the great majority of police opted to retain shakos. He appointed a junior clerk in the Wellington district office, Amos Muggeridge, as police storekeeper to run the free-issue system from a small store behind the Lambton Quay station. Uniformity in uniforms made for a smarter-looking, more professional force. 31
While such government responses to the recommendations of the Commission had the intended effect of heightening morale and therefore efficiency, not all news for the Force was good. There was despondency, for example, when amendments to the old regulations were gazetted in December 1898. Regulation 39 now included a new rule deducting a shilling per day from all men off sick, presumably in an attempt to claw back some of the increased cost of pay and allowances. The experience of the Commission had, however, improved the ability of the police to organise opposition, and the new rule was gradually whittled down under challenge. For example, in the first test case of a man injured on duty (Sergeant Walter Haddrell, on wharf duty in Wellington), it was agreed that the rule did not apply in such circumstances. In 1901 it was conceded that the deduction might be waived for sickness contracted while on duty; nor would any deduction be made when a policeman was in hospital. But the objectionable clause remained as a focus of grievance.
Continuing dissatisfaction about the arbitrary power of the police hierarchy was fuelled by the Royal Commission’s clearing of former constable John Haddock of accusations of wrongdoing. This contradicted
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the results of Inspector Hickson’s investigation into the Warkworth constable in 1895, when he had been sacked for allegedly encouraging parents to rebel against the compulsory vaccination of their children. In actuality the issue had been the imposition on the local community of a non-qualified vaccinator, and Haddock was now compensated for loss of office by a payment of £164. Royal Commissioner Poynton later acknowledged that during the 1898 hearings he had felt that constables had a ‘substantial grievance’ in connection with disciplinary proceedings, since sergeants were invariably believed in preference to constables. Although, as Chief Detective Herbert (who claimed to have suffered from this himself) noted, the Inspectorate’s siding with NCOs was ‘the common custom in all Police Forces’, this was small comfort to the men. 32
Another important cause of low morale and inefficiency remained the lack of a retiring allowance. Because of this and the 1888 revocation of a compulsory retiring age, elderly and infirm men continued to stay on in the Force as long as they could. When English and Welsh county and borough forces secured a superannuation scheme in 1890, pressure on the government increased. In 1891 Defence Minister Seddon accepted a compromise suggested by Hume: long-service pay could be replaced by a subsidised insurance scheme that would give retirees either a £4OO lump sum or£l per week. But the majority of the long-service men were loath to accept abandonment of their allowance, and a delegation proposed that instead a ‘liberal scale of pension’ be introduced. However, the long depression was not yet over, and in any case government policy was moving away from perquisites for special categories of employees, for these were seen as not fully ‘democratic’. If the police won special privileges, other state servants would want them.
Because of ‘the advanced age of the majority of the present members of the police’, any worthwhile pension scheme would need so large a subsidy ‘as to place it absolutely beyond possibility of ever becoming a practical reality’, was the 1892 response to a police pension scheme promoted by the Dunedin men and William Hutchison MR The following year, the government went as far as it could on the issue without actually spending any money. On Hume’s suggestion, it revived a scheme first mooted by Gudgeon six years before: new recruits were now compelled to take out life insurance that would provide at least £2OO upon death or on reaching the age of 60. But this was only a partial solution, and as Tunbridge noted, most men were already ‘useless for active police work’ at 60 because there was ‘not a harder life you could put a man to’. Men should be enabled to leave, Pardy submitted to the Royal Commission, by being eligible for graduated retiring allowances after 15 years’ service. 33
Advocates of a police pension had another significant argument. There was a well-founded general belief that the New Zealand police were amongst the least corrupt in the world. A police pension fund would
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help perpetuate this state of affairs. Police were exposed to ‘temptation’ to an unusual degree, and yet even men unable to live in what many might see as minimal decency resisted the urge to steal or take bribes. Without a secure future, however, they might well step beyond the bounds of honesty. Tunbridge told the Commissioners that, as a rule, forces without pension schemes were ‘the most corrupt’ he knew of. He submitted that retirement at 60 should be compulsory for constables and sergeants, with Inspectors retiring at 65, as at the setting up of the Force. It was also noted that payments into a pension scheme would help keep healthy men in the Force, because to resign would be to waste an accumulating benefit; while conversely, the scheme would allow ‘brokendown’ men to leave.
‘The Police Force differs’, the Commissioners reported, ‘from other branches of the public service. Policemen for many years have to do dreary night duty, and it appears from the evidence that, although they are generally men of superior physical development, there is a tendency to break down at an age at which other Government employes are still vigorous. Their occupation exposes them to great risks of injury and disablement. The duty of a policeman appears to unfit him for any other kind of work, and he must retire at a comparatively early age if the Force is to be an efficient one. For these reasons we strongly recommend the establishment of a Police pension system, such as exists in connection with the Police Force of other colonies.’ This would infuse ‘life and energy’ into a force full of ‘discontent, dissatisfaction, and apathy’. Tunbridge had even stated publicly that ‘some’ of his Inspectors impaired efficiency because their age precluded them from ‘throwing into their work the amount of energy, both mental and physical, required of men holding such responsible positions.’ The situation was said to be even worse in lower ranks, with a number of both physical and mental breakdowns. Around the turn of the century there was a great deal of publicity about the continuing propensity for police to become mentally unbalanced. Sergeant Patrick Scully of Clyde, for example, upset among other things by newspaper criticism, took to drink and then began acting strangely; by breaking into a pub, for example. 34
Superannuation had loomed large in Tunbridge’s plans from the beginning. He advocated a subsidised scheme involving a 4 percent deduction from wages, noting that this was ‘not nearly so liberal’ as in other forces, and that in effect ‘the men would very largely provide their own pension fund’. He felt that this was realistic, and most policemen had therefore backed it during the Commission hearings. The Commissioners did their own calculations and opted for deductions at 5 percent. Like Tunbridge’s, their scheme would be supplemented by the state paying into the fund emoluments from ‘outside offices’ held by policemen on behalf of other departments of state, payments by departments for which police currently performed gratuitous work, fines for breaches of regulations, the Reward Fund, and possibly penalties for
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offences by the public against licensing, gambling and police offences legislation. 35
Eligibility criteria, the Commission felt, should be similar to those in other ‘kindred’ countries and colonies, and include provisions for the families of those who had died on the job: three years’ salary to the family of a man who lost his life in the course of duty, a refund of contributions to the family of a man who died of natural causes while in the Force. Policemen retiring permanently unfit after between five and 15 years’ service should receive a month’s pay for each year of service, up to a maximum of a year’s pay. Those of 15 years’ service should get a pension of 15/50ths of their pay at retirement, with an extra l/50th for each additional year of service up to 30 years (when a maximum rate of three-fifths of final salary would be attained). Persons dismissed from the Force, or who resigned voluntarily before the age of 55, should not receive any pension. Compared to other forces’ pension schemes (e.g. Victoria’s, which had only half the contribution rate recommended for New Zealand), and the aspirations of many of the rank and file, this scheme was by no means generous, but it was a breakthrough in principle. 36
The Commissioners argued that their scheme would relieve the state of a financial burden rather than create one. Since 1888, nearly £30,000 had been paid out in compassionate allowances to retirees and their widows and children. An equivalent lump sum would be enough to establish the scheme on such a sound basis that elderly police could be retired immediately. The government, however, refused to accept either Tunbridge’s or the Commissioners’ schemes, or a fall-back position of the Commission, fearing as before the costs of the schemes and their ramifications for the wider state service. Tunbridge protested vigorously at the latter argument, for ‘there is no comparison whatever’ between the police and ‘civil servants’. For one thing, other branches of the state were ‘not prevented from augmenting their incomes by private means’; for another, they ‘run no risk of bodily injury’. He was not used to having his wishes rejected by the government. How could he revitalise New Zealand policing when the continued want of a contingency fund ‘mitigates against the Force becoming an efficient body’?
Tunbridge worked out a compromise solution, which he presented to the government in the form of a ‘Police Provident Fund Enabling Bill’: it included deductions of 5 percent of wages, and he was prepared to allow money to accumulate in the fund before the scheme began. So long as the departments for which police currently conducted work gratuitously paid their fair share, there need not even be any inaugural capital funding from the state. His arguments covered every angle, and he refused to be rebuffed. In his 1899 annual report he claimed that the fund ‘could be established and maintained without any additional cost whatever to the public’. It was an ‘injustice’ to deny the men what ‘they are themselves prepared to pay for’. The colony wouldgam by not having to pay old-age pensions to impecunious ex-policemen. He ridiculed the caution of
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actuaries who did not appreciate the special nature of a police pension fund (strenuous work shortened lives, and police administration of the fund would reduce overheads). The government at last succumbed, and in August 1899 accepted a police pensions scheme in principle, while submitting Tunbridge’s costings for actuarial scrutiny.
The Government Actuary, Morris Fox, calculated that the projected fund would be viable only if the government matched the 5 percent deductions, raised the proposed retirement age from 55 to 60, and recalculated pensions on the basis of 60ths rather than 50ths of salary. Tunbridge, who had already been advised privately that his scheme was ‘too liberal’, conceded these points, while branding parts of the Actuary’s report as ‘absolutely valueless’ and ‘misleading’. Police were ‘not noted for longevity’, he railed; over the previous two decades, 57 serving constables had died at an average age of 41% years. With Tunbridge’s concessions, the government decided to act. For it was clear that the number of inefficient men would soon increase unless something were done: there were already 18 police over 60, and 70 between 50 and 60.
During the second reading of the Police Provident Fund Bill on 16 October 1899, Seddon agreed that the necessity for a scheme had ‘been admitted for years’, and that the inability of the present system to let in new blood had been the underlying cause of many woes in the Force. The police, being a unique body, could not be seen as a prototype for other state servants, he claimed - forgetting his past stance on this issue. Men whose lives were in effect ‘handicapped’ in the service of the state should not be turned out like paupers on a year’s salary. The government had modified the scheme even further and had at last, he believed, found a scheme that was not impaired by the up-front financial demands of earlier suggestions; indeed, there would even be savings on current costs. So when the scheme was introduced - it became operative on 1 December 1899 after some jurisdictional wrangling between the two Flouses - it was considerably less generous even than the cautious one recommended by the Commission. Yet it was more than better than nothing, and constituted a major advance in policing welfare; 212 of the 220 men with compulsory life insurance schemes chose to transfer to the new Police Provident Fund. 37
The Fund was established with a pool of money taken from the Police Reward Fund, internal fines and penalties, and contributions from policemen. The Consolidated Fund would meet any shortfall. The 5 percent contribution recommended by the Commissioners was applied only to police joining the scheme under the age of 30. Those joining between 30 and 40 would put in 6V2 percent, with 8 percent for those between 40 and 50 and 10 percent for those over 50. Men forced to retire through ‘unfitness’ would receive a refund of their contributions if they had been in the Force less than five years, a month’s pay for each year’s service (with a maximum of 12 months) from five to 14 years, and a pension for men who had been in the Force at least 15 years. The latter
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was set at 1 /60th of the final year’s pay (averaged over the last seven years if a promotion had occurred within the last five) for each year of service, up to 36/60ths. Men aged 60 (or more) with 25 years’ service would qualify for the maximum rate.
Men forced to retire through injury or ill health contracted in the execution of their duty could also receive up to 3/sths of a year’s pay for life. If they were killed on duty their widows would receive £lB per annum, plus 5s per child under 14 per week. The death of a serving policeman in other circumstances would ensure a benefit for the family of up to the total amount of his contributions. Men dismissed could get up to half of their contributions refunded; if they resigned voluntarily, up to three-quarters. The life allowance would be forfeited by a conviction or by association with ‘thieves, prostitutes, or other persons of bad repute’. Many payments were at the discretion of the scheme’s administrative Board. 38
The logical consequence of the pension - the first such scheme for state employees in the country - was the reinstitution of a compulsory retiring age. But because of initial government doubts about the viability of the Fund, this did not happen immediately. Tunbridge, losing patience, insisted in 1901 that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to have a compulsory retiring age of at most 65. After two years of operation of the Provident Fund, he noted, the credit balance of £13,000 was ‘much in excess of the most sanguine of anticipations’. Since its annual income exceeded expenditure by some £5OOO, the government need not worry about a few retirements. Faced with such healthy-looking figures, Cabinet succumbed. From 1 January 1902, then, the new regulation 10A enforced retirement at 65. Tunbridge’s perseverance had added the finishing touches to the edifice of a key reform in the professionalisation of the New Zealand Police. One of the first to retire under the new provision was SergeantMajor David Ramsay, with 40 years in the service (he had joined the Canterbury Provincial Police at the time of its paramilitarisation) and not a single day off for sickness or holiday. 39
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CHAPTER 7
The Path to ‘Professionalisation’
While the Royal Commissioners decided that it had been rare for political intervention or patronage by influential outsiders to succeed, there was no gainsaying that it had been often attempted and sometimes successful, and that this had caused suspicions that every promotion had been the result of influence. Many of the rank and file, in particular, had become concerned that the practice of promoting as a reward for bravery was open to abuse. It was felt that if an influential person took up the case of someone who had done no more than what many others had done, that policeman might well be promoted (despite perhaps having a record of defaulting). Promotions for acts of courage, moreover, were seen by many to be invidious in themselves. A man promoted in this way would advance over the heads of policemen who were not only his senior, but who might also be much better policemen, or much better potential NCOs. ‘Nothing is more destructive to efficiency and discipline than to have an ignoramus over intelligent men’, as a senior policeman had put it to the Royal Commission. 40
The replacement of the ‘class system’ by increments inside each rank removed this grievance in most circumstances except that of promotion to NCO rank. Tunbridge’s confidential commentary on the Commission’s findings recommended that while ‘in very special cases’ meritorious service might be rewarded by advancement, in most cases not even a financial reward was necessary; entries in a ‘record of merit’ would stand a man in good stead when he was being considered for promotion. This was not as radical as the Royal Commission’s recommendations, which were for the abolition of money rewards in favour of shortening the period to be served before the next pay increment. But, from now on, ‘record of merit’ entries gradually superseded monetary and promotional rewards, and most police were prepared to accept this in return for increments for service within ranks and a fairer chance of promotion.
The Commissioners noted that Tunbridge’s promotions had ‘done much to create a more contented and hopeful spirit in the Force’. There was optimism that the ‘stagnation of promotion’ which had blighted the Force since the inheritance in 1877 of so many provincial NCOs would soon be a thing of the past. Force numbers were expected to increase, and a number of the men soon to retire were NCOs. Time and again constables had told the Royal Commission that they despaired of ever reaching the top of the constable’s rank, let alone becoming NCOs. The new Commissioner felt that the NCOs, ‘the backbone of a Police Force’, were
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the ‘weakest part’ of the New Zealand Police. He inherited 39 sergeants, 14 of them over 55. The constables he had quickly promoted to NCO rank were slowly adjusting to their superior positions, and the pension system would enable him to ‘clear away many of the older sergeants’. Now, Tunbridge pledged, promotion to NCO would be much more attainable - and it would be on merit, with seniority counting only where merit was equal. He was confident that such promotions would greatly improve efficiency, even though the Royal Commission’s recommendation of an examination prerequisite for entry to NCO rank had not been accepted by the government. In particular, better overall supervision would allow him ‘to weed out and get rid of the objectionable members now in the Force’. 41
As for political influence, the Commissioners were realistic enough to concede that continued attempts to exercise it were inevitable. But if, they pointed out, the Minister determinedly disavowed any intervention in internal police arrangements, such attempts would come to naught and eventually cease. This was not an acceptance of the thesis that the police had ‘original powers’ and were autonomous from political direction, but an effort to remove the inefficiencies caused by extensive political intervention. There was acknowledgement that in the last instance, and in such specific ways as the amount made available for expenditure on policing, the Force was the instrument of the legislature and its appointed agents, the political executive, most specifically the Minister charged with overseeing the policing function.
In recommending that Tunbridge have ‘absolute authority’ in running the Force, the Royal Commissioners were articulating a reformed system of control. They had been uneasy that under Hume, matters such as transfers, promotions, dismissals and distribution had all needed endorsement - or were initiated - by the Minister. Given the Liberals’ propensity to take interventionist control over state bureaucracies, the pre-existing centralisation of power in the Police enabled its political masters to take decisions that cut deep into its personnel and administration. So tight had executive control become that the Commissioner had developed the habit of voluntarily consulting the Minister on matters such as rewards. On two issues on which Hume had made recommendations to the Minister - transfers and promotions - the lists had often been altered at executive level. 42
Furthermore, Hume had inherited an obligation to refer all intended appointments to the Minister, a situation which did not arise - Tunbridge noted - in other Australasian or in British forces. It was clear moreover that in the 1890s ministerial intervention into the composition of the Force had gone well beyond the Minister in charge of the Police formally endorsing lists of names submitted by the Defence Office. The extent of political control over appointments was uncertain, but many believed, for example, Taylor’s allegations that Seddon had been anxious to get West Coasters into the Force. The dangers of a Force containing many
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constables grateful to individual politicians were frequently discussed in public. 43
Direct political control of appointments was so unpopular that it could not continue. In any case, a new approach to the appointment process was clearly needed. Hume, Pender and other senior figures had testified before the Commission that the standards of new appointees had been low. Police authorities felt the military lacked in standards, its alleged slack administration making it very hard to get the transferees from the Permanent Artillery even ‘to submit to discipline’. A Dunedin sergeant with 26 years’ experience of policing testified that they were ‘utter failures’ as constables. As for the civilian recruits, the new ad hoc system made no provision for enquiry into the candidate’s application details or fitness, except by taking note of those who had recommended him. The standards required were low; candidates had only to be able ‘to read, write, and spell, and to work sums in simple addition and subtraction’, prerequisites dating from the exclusive recruitment of soldiers, whose disciplined training was supposed to outweigh any intellectual shortcomings.
The police authorities were unhappy that a sizeable proportion of the transferees had come from an urban background, where they were inclined to ‘contract bad habits’ at an early age. They preferred young, rural men, as did crack overseas forces such as the Royal Irish Constabulary and the London Metropolitan Police. The ideal London constable was ‘a big, slow-moving, rugged type, working deliberately and carefully’. Throughout Britain, Tunbridge testified, at least four-fifths of recruits were from rural areas. 1/c Sergeant Patrick O’Neill, a policeman since 1863 and now in charge of Dunedin’s headquarters station, expressed it thus: ‘lf you let me select my men I would go into the country and get a lump of a farm-servant, and train him up.’ The young man from an agricultural district was an ideal ‘empty-head’, receptive to programming in police duties and predisposed towards obedience, regularity, the work ethic and so forth, the attributes of the model citizen. City-bred men, professed the head of the training school for the London police, ‘know too much that is detrimental to good discipline. You have to knock so much out of their heads before you can begin their training.’ Sir Edward Henry noted that although rural lads were ‘slow’, they were ‘steady’, and ‘you can mold them into any shape you please’. Tunbridge, as might have been expected given his Metropolitan Police background, implemented much stricter inquiries into the moral character, associates, and so on of intending recruits. 44
But the main problem with new recruits was that there was no specific training to convert them into efficient constables. New men went straight onto the beat after a lecture on the need for truth, sobriety, subordination and respect, and a few words about duties from an NCO. Theo Wake had deemed it ‘unjust and stupid’ that new policemen were held personally responsible for any irregularity they committed because of ignorance of
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the law; nor was immediate street duty conducive to efficiency, because for months men avoided ‘cases’ while they acquired a ‘smattering of knowledge from the older hands’. Each district had responsibility for onjob training, following an 1896 instruction prescribing weekly hour-long in-service classes in the main centres. Some districts gave no such formal training, and where it was provided it did not amount to much. Facilities were lacking; Hickson lectured to all available city and suburban men for half an hour on each monthly payday, but many of his listeners had to stand in the corridor. Lack of legal training had become a less serious problem since the passage of the Criminal Code Act in 1893. But policing was primarily about the control of behaviour, and this did not necessarily - or even often - have much relationship with the colony’s formal legal code. The Royal Commission had recognised that the lack of proper training was a major fault of the Force. 45
Tunbridge set in motion plans to revise the whole basis of recruiting and training. The Royal Commissioners had listened to evidence that in the major forces of the Empire, new policemen were trained at depots. There had previously been depot training in the New Zealand Constabulary Force. When John Dwyer had joined in 1878, for example, he had spent two months training at the Constabulary Depot at Mount Cook in Wellington. After 1886, the recruiting of the police from the Permanent Militia meant that all new police had received at least a form of depot training, albeit purely of military character.
Commissioner Hume, reflecting the advice of senior officers such as Pender who kept abreast of international policing developments, had advocated the centralised training of recruits, but the government had considered this too costly. When Hume secured permission to take on civilians with no military or police training, he suggested that the Wellington Central station should be deemed to be a depot. ‘The older men who have passed their prime’ should be transferred there, so that the young men could leant from them as well as conduct the strong-arm and exhausting work of which they were no longer capable. Towards the end of the probation period the newcomers would be transferred to the more challenging Mount Cook station, still under ‘depot’ control. When the government would not sanction this proposal, Hume put the Mount Cook part of it into informal effect anyway. At this ‘important station where young constables on joining were trained’, Sergeant Paul Shirley put some of the new men through the ropes; the station was near the ‘slum areas’ of Wellington, ‘quite a good place to get real police training and experience’, and gymnasium training was available. But as a training device the idea proved to be inadequate, partly because of overcrowding, partly because Shirley was too ‘slack’, partly because of the informality of the arrangement. Shirley was transferred back to Dunedin after three years, on the eve of the momentous changes in the Force wrought by Tunbridge’s arrival and the Commission.
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It was no longer appropriate to place a new constable onto the street without training, ‘He is armed with much power’, the Royal Commission noted, ‘and his ignorant use of it may cause serious mischief to the public and himself.’ Training, moreover, should not be the drilling-based training of the old Constabulary days. Pender, an Irish Constabulary veteran who had recently visited Ireland, noted to the Commission that even at the Dublin depot drilling was secondary to teaching. ‘Any one that understands police work, I think, will agree that instruction is the main thing.’ He had tried to cope in Christchurch by putting newcomers on the streets with experienced men, and he and his sergeants also gave formal instruction to the men once or twice a month. Policemen needed to study the increasingly sophisticated legal code, leant about modem ideas of appropriate public behaviour, be lectured on the multifarious duties of the constable, and pick up extra skills not required in the past, such as the ability to apply first aid. Evidence to this effect was so overwhelming that the Royal Commissioners could scarcely have resisted the demand to make depot training central to their recommendations, even had they wanted. All experts in policing from Tunbridge down agreed that New Zealand’s stage of social development required a better educated, more skilful constabulary, and that this in turn required a specialist training course for recruits. 46
The Royal Commission recommended a four-month depot training course, as in Dublin. The report gave Tunbridge the boost he needed to reverse the government’s earlier rejection of the idea: the ‘establishment of a Depot [was] of the utmost importance’, although in order to preempt rejection on grounds of cost he declared that a two-month training period would be adequate (before the Commission he had argued for three months, as in Melbourne). The Training Depot would, therefore, cost only £7OO per annum. 47
The government accepted Tunbridge’s representations: a Depot would be established with a two-month training programme, and the range of recruits would be 21 to 30 years (rather than 23 to 40 as before). A new sergeant (since 1 January 1898), John O’Donovan, who had been the first New Zealand policeman to pass the solicitors’ examinations, was appointed as the founding instructor. Tunbridge described him as being ‘endowed with a natural aptitude for imparting instruction’. The Depot was to be established next to, and integrated with, Wellington’s Mount Cook station, the brooding brick edifice built at the comer of Tory and Buckle Streets four years previously which had doubled as a poor substitute for a ‘Training School’. O’Donovan set about establishing what became the pattern of probationary training that would last for decades.
On 1 December 1898 regulation 59 was altered to fit the new entry requirements. Applicants (to be 5 ft 9 in or more in height) had to be able to prove they could read, write, spell and do sums to higher standards than before, and also pass a health examination. The health checks were to be carried out by new Police Surgeons appointed at the four main
The Path to ‘Professionalisation’
centres, salaried men who presided over the health of all policemen (and who policed their sick leave). When the Christchurch Surgeon, Dr W H Symes, felt that varicocele, ‘due to Masturbation in boy hood’, might disqualify recruits, Tunbridge showed himself to be broad-minded for the times: the ‘evil habit’ of a candidate’s past was ‘immaterial’ so long as the man was now healthy in body and mind. In their first month at the Depot, probationers were to be instructed both in police regulations, legislation and bylaws, and in practical police work. By the second month they were attending at lower courts, and patrolling in company with Wellington beat constables for at least four out of every 24 hours. O’Donovan reported to the Wellington Inspector, who had overall charge of training. 48
The Royal Commission’s recommendation of 4s per day for probationers was rejected in favour of Tunbridge’s view that the new men should get 6s (from which, until the establishment of the police pension scheme, they had to pay for the life insurance taken out compulsorily under the 1893 regulations). The first intake of 15 probationers, selected from a waiting list of some 500 candidates, commenced their training in early December 1898. The batches remained small, normally around a dozen, and usually developed great camaraderie. Discipline during instruction and in the police station, where they lodged under the ‘care and attention’ of Sergeant John Briggs, was strict. At 10 pm each day the roll was called, and lights-out was at 10.30 pm; only those on night duty or with special permission were allowed out after that time, and then (in the latter case) only until 11.30 pm. The instructor was responsible for ensuring ‘strictest order and regularity’ and ‘utmost cleanliness’. The probationers were kept very busy; there was no chance, for example, for them to take advantage of a special rate at the Newtown gymnasium. After a month they were obliged to pass a Standard Four education test and an examination in policing matters. Failure in these, or misconduct, or lack of progress in general, could mean dismissal. 49
All probationers not on night duty had to rise at 6 am (7 am in the winter, 7.30 on Sundays) and parade for an hour’s drilling half an hour later. The first drill instructor was Constable Charles Sutherland of Mount Cook station, a man of imperial and colonial military background. Sergeant O’Donovan was to take on this task once he had leamt the ropes, but this came sooner than anticipated when the constable was forced to resign for borrowing money from the probationers. O’Donovan’s job was still so classroom-orientated, however, that when from 1 February 1900 a new clerical allowance of 1 s per day was granted (at the behest of the Royal Commission) the ‘sergeant instructor’ was among the list of recipients. At first drilling had been an unpleasant experience in bad weather, but then Hume allowed the use of an empty workshop in the grounds of Mount Cook Gaol. It made, said Tunbridge, ‘a capital drill shed’. 50
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On 16 January 1899 O’Donovan reported the examination results of the first intake. Five probationers had been discharged, and of the remaining 10, eight had achieved marks ranging between 729 and 972 out of 1000. This was a satisfactory result, and he recommended acceptance into the Force of seven of the men; the eighth was discharged for being poor in spelling, writing and arithmetic, and another soon followed. The six new policemen were sworn in on 8 February, with two assigned to Auckland, three to Christchurch and one to Dunedin. Nine men who might well have ended up as policemen under the old system, then, had not done so, although later failure rates were not nearly so high.
Wellington would get few of the new men because it could avail itself at all times of the services of the probationary constables. When the newly sworn constables went out to their stations, some could attend the classes which had been operating under the 1896 instruction, although manpower shortages led to their abandonment in Auckland. Dwyer in Christchurch held weekly classes for men of less than four years’ experience, while later Ellison in Wellington represented the ‘old school’ in dropping the classes: one lesson on the street was worth 20 theoretical lessons.
In subsequent intakes to the Depot, few probationers failed the examinations. Ancillary courses were gradually added. First aid, for example, was soon being taught as an additional service to the public. In the Commissioner’s eyes, failure in this examination was tantamount to being guilty of ‘inattention or want of intelligence’. Soon all men in the Force were ordered to make themselves familiar with first aid techniques. In 1899 Tunbridge imported Lectures to Police Recruits, written by Inspector S J Cotter of New South Wales. The book, said to offer ‘most excellent advice’ to recruits, stressed the police maxims which had originated with the British ‘new police’ and had long been utilised by various forces in New Zealand. It was following the success of this book that these maxims were printed in poster form and distributed for display throughout the colony’s police stations. 51
In March 1901 Pender, the Inspector in charge of Wellington District, was notified that Constable David Latimer would be promoted to sergeant and transferred to take charge of the Mount Cook station. A single man, he would live in and hence would be able to supervise the probationers even more closely. In March 1902 O’Donovan was transferred to the Wellington District staff, headed for promotion. By the time his successor. Sergeant Douglass Gordon from Auckland, took over, the period of experimentation had ended. The founding instructor had set up a tightly regulated establishment, and the authorities were in general satisfied with the end-product of the courses. Morale amongst the probationers was high; a spirit which was quasi-military already became the more so with an influx of men who had served in the ‘Boer War’, a reminder that qualities such as toughness and ‘patriotism’ were still sought along with the newer virtues of understanding the law, wise use of discretion, and so
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forth. By mid 1903, candidates who had not been to South Africa had ‘little chance’ of acceptance into the Depot.
This all rather backfired on the Police, for it was soon almost universally agreed that the ‘contingenters’ did not make successful policemen. Cullen, who might have been expected to be the most promilitary Inspector, stated baldly that the ‘worst type of man I have found coming into the Force during my experience are returned troopers.’ Like a number of the former Permanent Militiamen, some desired to ‘shirk their duties and responsibilities as much as possible’. Soon the Commissioner ceased to give them preference: ‘when men get away like that they get loose in their habits and get up to all sorts of things that they would not if at home or in the Colony. They seem too to get to know too much and when they come back they think you cannot instruct them in Police duties.’ A sergeant in 1909 attributed the entry of ‘the larrikin element into the Force’, which was then being investigated, mostly to the policy of recruiting South African veterans.
But this was only a temporary situation. In the longer term, the important factor in recruiting was that young men born in the colony or who had come to it as children were increasingly entering the Force. This was perhaps partly because of what had been stressed during the Commission hearings, matching the colony’s policing to New Zealand conditions, as well as demographic change. The recruiters could pick and choose youths knowledgeable about the colony, albeit with an emphasis on rural recruits. In the 1901-2 year alone, 111 candidates, ‘after inquiry, measurement, &c., were found to be eligible for the service’. In the five-year period ended 31 March 1906, 161 of the 240 admitted to the Force were New Zealanders by birth. 52
The system of putting police entrants through Depot testing was not a completely rigid one. Men with adequate previous experience could gain direct entry, and some who failed the course were given a second chance. In May 1899, for example, a former gunner from the Permanent Artillery was found unable after Depot training to ‘furnish an intelligible and satisfactory report’ because of inability in spelling, grammar and construction, while his speech was inadequate to the point of incoherence. He failed the educational test, getting only 645 out of 900, and was sent back to the military. Yet in November he was readmitted to the Depot, and this time he passed.
Of this man’s original dozen colleagues, six gained only ‘very indifferent’ passes and were told that they would have to undertake further study after entry to the Force, and submit to re-examination. Of 11 men sworn in on 17 November 1899, one was ‘wanting in smartness, style and address’ and another was ‘very indifferent’; if they did not improve themselves, they were told, they would be discharged. The Depot system had brought new standards of recruiting and training, but it was recognised that knowledge alone did not necessarily make a good policeman; ability to perform in the field was the most significant factor.
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and so Depot results were generally viewed as broad guidelines rather than the definitive test of suitability. 53
The new-style training was supposed to inculcate habits of discipline without being oppressive. Men reminiscing about their days as probationers in the first two decades of the twentieth century invariably talked in terms of rigorousness but ‘fairness’; a prevalent esprit de corps counteracted feelings that petty regulations were unnecessarily restrictive. Many of the Royal Commission’s recommendations and Tunbridge’s reforms, in fact, embodied the philosophy that efficiency was directly related to the all-round happiness of the men - provided that this was consistent with the paramilitary organisation and ethos of the Force, which other recommendations and reforms sought to regularise and codify. The Commission had recommended a number of improvements to conditions and therefore morale - more leave and the right to accumulate it, for example, and the general adoption of a practice in some stations of giving constables every fourth Sunday off. Most observers agreed that the gradual adoption of such reforms was accompanied by greater efficiency and better discipline. As early as 1901, Tunbridge was reporting that serious breaches of regulations, ‘especially in relation to drink, are now of very rare occurrence indeed’. 54
The Commissioners, however, had found themselves at odds with the men and the Commissioner over transfers. As Tunbridge noted, the old Irish Constabulary principle of frequent transfer which had previously operated in New Zealand ‘had been gradually altered’. Despite Hume’s determination to effect regular transfers, they had become a thing of the past. In 1896 he had called - unavailingly - for compulsory five-yearly transfers for all constables and NCOs. As a modem policeman applying the consensual strategy systematically, Tunbridge argued that periodic transfers were an anachronism. This had not been the theoretical position as recently as 1895, when Seddon had reaffirmed them in principle (while noting their practical difficulty when the first to protest was invariably the local MP). Removal of policemen to new stations, in Tunbridge’s opinion, need only occur in certain circumstances - when a man was not doing his duty properly, or where (Clyde was cited as an example) it was ‘a punishment’ to keep a man long because of the high local cost of living. By and large, in his mind, performance was enhanced by familiarity, and an explicit, official rejection of the principle of ‘stranger policing stranger’ was overdue. This theoretical stance kept Tunbridge in tune with the thrust of demands from within the Force that members should not generally be transferred except on their own application. 55
Yet Hume’s statements reveal that transfers were often brought about by public figures responding to pressure from (in particular) publicans and brewers; that, in effect, men were punished by transfer for doing their liquor-enforcement duties conscientiously. He acknowledged to Taylor that it was ‘perfectly impossible’ for a Minister to resist pressures
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from influential men, and it was on these grounds that he had argued that since any disorganisation in the Force came mostly from political intervention, the Commissioner alone should as a rule have full authority to transfer. The Royal Commission found that while it was not possible to prove that publicans had inspired transfers, regularising the transfer system would prevent this being a widespread belief in the Force - as well as removing jealousy by enabling a ‘fair’ rotation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stations. In adhering to the idea of some degree of periodic transfer, it was resiling from Tunbridge’s more ‘modem’ aversion to any form of this (while agreeing with his desire to enhance the Commissioner’s powers vis-a-vis the politicians). 56
The differences between lifestyles at desirable and undesirable stations were significant for the men. Constable John Jeffries admitted using political influence to secure a good billet at Nelson’s port. This, he testified, was par for the course; ‘of later years, if we do not move members of Parliament we would get nothing done’. His MP, the Government Whip, acknowledged that there had been political intervention. Factors which made stations desirable included climate, easy workloads and perquisites. Winton was a ‘good’ station: for a dozen years Constable Hugh Mulholland received commissions and fees that increased his income by up to £2O per annum. Transferred (unwillingly) to Cromwell, he found the cost of living much higher and also that the ‘extra appointments’ (‘pickings’) that went with the job (e.g. the position of bailiff) brought in considerably less money. 57
The Royal Commissioners struck what they considered to be a balance between too rapid and too few transfers. The ‘familiarity and intercourse with the people arising from a long residence in small communities lead the constable into relationship with one section of the community, which generally results in partisanship, and he ... is regarded as antagonistic to another section of the community.’ To ensure that men were not unduly ‘influenced by their surroundings’, and also had the chance of transfer to sought-after stations, the Commissioners endorsed Hume’s contention that transfers should be at five-yearly intervals, though the timetable need not be a rigid one.
Tunbridge labelled the Royal Commission’s recommendations as ‘impracticable. Owing to the very many things that have to be considered in appointing men to Stations it would be absolutely impossible to establish any hard and fast rule with respect to transfers.’ In the absence of any instruction from the Minister, transfers under Tunbridge and his successors became not more but less frequent. This was not just a matter of expediency but also one of conviction: in a stable society, the longer a constable stayed in place, generally, the better, the post-reform Police Commissioners believed. Arguments for regular transfers came to be based on the ‘virtues of a new broom’ and of an infusion of new energy and thoroughness in the transferee, rather than on the capacity to better coerce.
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Even Cullen was to support the suggestion of Tunbridge’s successor that transfers need not be frequent - and that, if it was in the Department’s interests, a man need never be transferred. It took a man a full year to ‘pick up the district’, most top policemen agreed. A few men would stay for decades at the same country station - Richard Allan was stationed at Charleston from 1909 until 1942, for example. Except for those stuck at undesirable stations despite applications for transfer, and those who were punished by transfer to such billets, most men were happy about the trend. The old wisdom about ‘stranger policing stranger’ transfers was no longer appropriate for the policing of a stabilising society. 58
One grievance aired in the discussions about transfers showed that the police perceived their social status to be rising. They were becoming, by their own account, far more ‘respectable’ than the police of old, and were rebelling against customs and rules which located them amongst the Tower denizens’ of society. A 1/c constable noted that ‘constables and their families who are shifted about have to travel steerage, no matter how small the vessel may be or how bad the accommodation, and are thus forced to herd with all sorts of dirty and questionable characters’. They should, said a sergeant, be treated ‘as mechanics and not as ordinary labourers’. It was ‘degrading’ to a man to ‘put him down into a coalhole’, let alone his wife and children. Such sentiments struck a chord with the likes of Tunbridge and other reformers. Most constables might still come from working-class stock, but their entry into a professionalising force should give them the prospect of upward social mobility. It was appropriate that an increasingly ‘stable and steady’ society be policed by an increasingly ‘stable and steady’ Force. 59
CHAPTER 8
Surveillance and Investigation
It was not surprising, given his background in detection in the London Metropolitan Police, that the new Commissioner took a particular interest in detective work. At the time of Tunbridge’s arrival, the recent discharge of Chief Detective Maurice O’Connor had left the colony with only 13 professional detectives. He quickly promoted three constables to probationary periods as 4/c detectives, and aimed to secure even more. However, the main problem continued to be quality rather than numbers. Detectives were undoubtedly an elite within the force, being much better paid than their uniformed equivalents. This was partly because they were expected to buy information from the ‘underworld’. Uniformed men doubted, with good reason, that this happened very often, and in reality their higher pay was mostly to reward them for being supposedly ‘of superior intelligence’. When bungling amongst detectives was revealed, their very raison d’etre was questioned - by the bulk of the police, as well as the public. ‘There are some men in the Detective Office who can hardly write their own name or speak the King’s English’, was a not untypical comment by a uniformed man. The Commissioner very rapidly gained an inkling of past difficulties with quality, for within a week of his arrival he had, on Broham’s advice, called on New Zealand’s most senior detective, 1/c (Chief) Detective Alexander Henderson, to resign over improper conduct in a Christchurch hotel. When Henderson refused, he was dismissed.
A magisterial enquiry cleared Henderson of charges of using improper language towards two girls, and drunkenness. The report did, however, note two matters pertaining to internal discipline: he had failed to report the hotel disturbance, and Broham had characterised him as being ‘of drunken habits’. But the Force was so lacking in detective expertise that Henderson was soon reinstated to the detective wing (albeit in Wellington, where he would be under closer scrutiny, and at 2/c level). Following the general abolition of classes on 1 December 1898 in favour of incremental pay based on seniority of service, he found himself atop the new seniority list. 60
There was no doubt that the downplaying of detection vis-d-vis uniformed work inside the Force had led to decisions - including the selection of poor personnel - which had harmed detective efficiency. Broham told Tunbridge that Hume had refused to allow him to get rid of an honest but ‘useless’ member of the branch: ‘to have him known to the Public as an acting detective, as a man supposed to have at least a
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shadow of the qualities of a Sherlock Holmes, is enough to raise a laugh on peoples faces at the expense of the department’. Most witnesses before the Commission agreed that the quality of detection had declined. In such a small and decreasingly mobile society, the detection emphasis was of necessity upon surveillance rather than infiltration: ‘it is quite impossible', Tunbridge noted, ‘for any person to conceal his identity for any length of time, therefore so called Secret Police Agents would cease to be such after the first case in which they were employed came into a Court.’
Infiltration activities, then, were usually carried out by ordinary police sent incognito to other areas. New constable Sidney Rawle later described a typical such incident. Sent from the Depot to Dunedin, his first job was an undercover one, to befriend a burglar and entrap him into selling his loot to a ‘fence’. The pair caught a train to Christchurch, both carrying stolen jewellery (Rawle’s was ‘on loan’ from a case before court), and the police swooped on the burglar in the guard’s van. Spectacular ‘catches’ were often made in this way, rather than through the detective branch. Politicians accordingly could not see great value in ongoing detection surveillance, and resources for the detection branch did not have a high priority. Long hours and poor working conditions meant that the best men were either not attracted to detection or soon disillusioned with it, despite the better pay. 61
Nor did the uniformed branch put any high priority upon detection. This and the lack of resources for the branch made detectives feel beleaguered, which exacerbated the endemic rivalry between the two modes of policing. There were examples of successful collaboration - the conviction and hanging of bushman Frank Philpott for the murder of his woodcutter partner in the hills above the Hutt Valley in 1897, for example. But the coexistence of the two policing methods continued to be uneasy. Detection surveillance, for example, often involved long hours socialising with ‘dubious elements’, ignoring liquor and other breaches of the law in the pursuit of information from publicans and their customers. Tunbridge told the Commission that turning a blind eye to lawbreaking was a breach of regulations, but everyone knew that this was integral to detection. Uniformed police disliked the detection branch partly because of its very way of operating, and they found themselves often denying that what was the norm in detection should be the norm. Inspector Pardy, for example, claimed that it was ‘utter nonsense’ to say that detectives had to ‘chum in with the publicans’; ‘police have no right to form nurseries for crime for the sake of detecting criminals’. 62
Yet often such rhetoric had to be abandoned in the face of policing realities. Harry Feast, Christchurch’s most famous former detective, told the Royal Commission that in the provincial past there had been a ‘direct order’ that detectives should not have their hands tied by involvement in liquor, brothel or other ‘tupenny-ha’penny’ cases. This had generally, though informally, continued. When Sergeant Cullen
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secured the arrest of a noted Napier spieler, Inspector Emerson persuaded a JP to release him on grounds that he was a valued police informant. Some senior uniformed policemen realised that specialised detectives were essential, despite their atypical occupational subculture, and that the best way to ensure that their methods did not get too far out of kilter was to bring them more firmly under their control. During the course of the Commission, Tunbridge introduced a system under which detectives had to account for all their movements in the course of duty. Many agreed with Hume that one way of reducing the detective branch’s propensity for autonomy would be to abolish the position of Chief Detective. 63
Even inside the detective branch there were tensions over such matters as monetary rewards and newspaper coverage. More serious was the resentment by uniformed men seconded to plain-clothes duty that they received no perquisites for doing the same work as detectives - travelling, mixing with criminals, ‘buying’ information, surveilling immigrants, and so forth. The Commission’s recommendation of a shilling per day allowance had (in the usual fashion) first been suggested by and later endorsed by the Commissioner. This way he could get the best men into plain-clothes work, and ‘discover any latent detective talent that may exist in the Force’. The measure was introduced in 1898. The allowance was given to the 15 plain-clothes constables (and also to the 10 district and assistant clerks). This was a welcome move towards equity, but did not assuage the sense of grievance of those uniformed men who were not officially ‘told off’ for plain-clothes duty but whose specialisation in surveillance techniques made them de facto detectives. Auckland’s Detective William Maddem, for example, cited a uniformed man who could tell the detectives where nearly every ‘doubtful character’ in his district lived. 64
Tunbridge’s response was to seek out for plain-clothes duties uniformed men who had been specialising in such work and who might be entitled to the shilling payment. Some of the men nominated by Inspectors were to become prominent detectives. Tunbridge paid particular attention to the needs of plain-clothes constables, seeing them as key recruits for a fully professional detective branch. By the end of the century he had secured permission to increase the branch to 20, and had selected four plain-clothes men to do so. Some of New Zealand’s most famous detective names emerged in this way; Charles Broberg, James Mcllveney, Tudor Boddam and (after J J Cassells had been rejected by Tunbridge for ‘not being able to keep his own Counsel’, making ‘rash statements’, etc) W B Mcllveney. Detection work was gaining increasing kudos inside the Police, and providing better career opportunities; W B Mcllveney was to become Commissioner. 65
It was a truism of the time that good detectives were bom, not made. Their duties were seen by some (including Tunbridge) to be ‘so very dissimilar’ from those of the ‘ordinary constable’ that they need not
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necessarily have done time in the uniformed branch - so long as they were of ‘above the average intelligence’. Because of this feeling, the Royal Commission recommended the enabling of direct entry to the detective branch (Tunbridge was even prepared to waive the height and other criteria for entry to the general Force), and the regulations gazetted on 1 December 1898 allowed for this. But in the event, the accepted wisdom within the police ‘occupational culture’ prevailed: general experience of police work was essential for the job, and direct entry remained a sleeping clause. Indeed, Tunbridge was soon looking at better integrating the two wings of policing, by making it easier - for example - for detectives to move back into the preventive police. In 1899 Dunedin’s Chief Detective Terence O’Brien was promoted to the new commissioned officer rank of Sub-Inspector; his elevation signalled to ambitious police that a move to the detective branch would not preclude their advancement to the top echelons of the Force. 66
The Royal Commission had accepted Tunbridge’s invitation to recommend that a commissioned rank of Sub-Inspector be revived and implemented at the four centres, superior to and in effect replacing the dying senior NCO position of Sergeant-Major. This was seen as a means of securing greater commissioned officer attention to the peculiar problems of policing the major centres of population; as a means of enabling Inspectors to pay more attention to out-stations in their districts, a task which had in recent years been neglected; and as a means of relieving the Inspectors of much of their burden of clerical work. The Sub-Inspector ‘would also attend the Magistrate’s Court to conduct police cases, and generally direct the police work of the city’, as well as train men for the difficult transition from NCO to Inspector rank. Tunbridge believed that much of the recent public criticism of policing was ‘due solely to the fact that the Police Force has not kept pace with the ever-increasing demands arising from the continual expansion of the four cities’. They had been inadequately surveilled. The government endorsed the recommendation, and on 1 December 1898 the revival of the office of Sub-Inspector was announced. The salary would be £250-£2 BO, plus lodging allowance.
Four Sub-Inspectors were appointed from 31 March 1899. O’Brien was stationed in Christchurch, and of the three sergeants promoted, Ewen Macdonell was located in Wellington, Nicholas Kiely in Dunedin, and Edward Wilson in Auckland. The members of the revived rank were tasked with the ‘arrangement and proper carrying out of all police duties in their respective cities’, and they stood in for the Inspectors during the latter’s absence. This was a most important point, for the district clerks had been in de facto control when the Inspectors had been out of town, and NCOs had resented receiving what amounted to orders from mere clerical constables or sergeants. Eventually, when the Sub-Inspectors’ workloads became oppressive, sub-districts were established in the suburbs and the sergeants-in-charge could handle routine matters themselves. 67
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But while clearing up one anomaly, the new rank’s altering of the chain of command created uncertainties in the relationship between the detective and uniform branches, particularly where the two commissioned officers were at loggerheads. In Wellington Chief Detective McGrath was perceived to be linked with Sub-Inspector Macdonell in a power struggle against Inspector Pender and his powerful District Clerk A H Wright. Pender required detectives to report to him via Wright’s office, Wellington being allegedly a special case because of a greater amount of detective work than elsewhere. Tunbridge had to intervene and rebuke both Inspector and Sub-Inspector, the former for his ‘towering passion’ and for talking to Macdonell as if ‘to a slave or a dog’, the latter for not showing adequate ‘consideration, respect and obedience to the rank, age and experience’ of the veteran officer. Pender felt that ‘the object of the Sub-Inspector and those acting with him is to if possible worry me out of the service’, but whatever the truth of this, McGrath had been in a genuine dilemma: it seemed sensible for the Wellington detective branch, like those elsewhere, to report via the Sub-Inspector’s office.
The Commissioner, however, chose to boost the authority of the Inspector. Since regulation 233 placed the detective branch under the control of the officer in charge of the station, the Chief Detective should report direct to the Inspector (or his nominee) unless the Sub-Inspector was temporarily in charge of district headquarters. The practice became, therefore, that Sub-Inspectors reported to their superiors only ‘in connection with the Uniform Police’, although they could still seek assistance and information from Chief Detectives. All districts were circularised accordingly in August 1899. The duties of Chief Detective were now more precisely defined. He alone would be the channel through which detectives passed information to the officer in charge, and through which they received that officer’s instructions. As Richard Marsack would note in 1909, a Chief Detective must ‘feel the pulse of his men’ and know who to assign each job to. 68
This direct link between Inspector and Chief Detective did not remove tensions, especially in the Wellington office. McGrath claimed that, almost since his arrival, Pender had been hostile to him. This had manifested itself in a number of petty ways, such as a refusal to allow the Chief Detective to submit crime reports direct to the Police Gazette, as occurred in other centres. Such actions, McGrath claimed, added to ‘the unpleasantness and lack of discipline which undoubtedly exist in this station’. He did not intend ‘to be treated as if I were a probationary Constable without making a proper protest’. In his assessment, based on service under seven or eight officers, the system worked best when the commissioned officer conferred with the detectives daily on the broad thrust of detection work, and let the experts work out the details.
Possibly Pender had been hostile to detection per se, seeing its importance as having been exaggerated under the new regime. He was not satisfied with Tunbridge’s censuring of McGrath, and brought charges
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against his Chief Detective in 1900. These were investigated by Poynton, who agreed with the Commissioner’s assessment that insufficient deference had been shown the Inspector, but that a reprimand was adequate punishment. It was alleged by politicians that Wright had ‘got up’ the charges in order to rid the Wellington area of McGrath and thereby remove his immediate rival in the police hierarchy; and that the elderly Pender was propped up by Wright. Although the new Commissioner had supported Pender in this feud, presumably to reinforce the sanctity of the chain of command for internal discipline, the Inspector’s days seemed numbered. (Among other things, he was soon quarrelling with both Wright and Macdonell’s replacement, A J Mitchell.) He had damaged the image of the Force at a time when there were calls for a new commission of enquiry. This, in the brave new era of the Tunbridge reforms, was unforgivable. He managed, however, to cling on until his retirement in 1902, when the veteran W S Pardy was also pensioned off. 69
Quite apart from demarcation and other disputes with the preventive police, detection remained as problematic and controversial as ever. In Hawke’s Bay, for example, there had for some time been allegations that plain-clothes policemen were inefficient and/or had been paid ‘hush money’ in certain cases. The long-running ‘lnner Harbour Mystery’ kept such suspicions alive. In June 1900 the naked body of a young woman was found in Napier harbour. The police reportedly responded in ‘remarkably easy-going fashion’ - omitting to photograph it, or publicise a description, or notice a distinctive brooch in the hair. When Detective Benjamin was told that young Ada McKeman had been missing for over a month without her parents reporting it, he did not link this with the body. He and Inspector McGovern felt merely that the missing young woman had ‘cleared out’ of home. Before long it was openly rumoured that McKeman had been pregnant to a prominent local man, and that after her mother had tried to abort the foetus her father had knocked her downstairs and broken her neck; her body had then allegedly been disposed of in the harbour.
The parents’ actions were undoubtedly extremely suspicious, and it eventually became clear that the body was McKeman’s. By 1901 there was ‘a general impression abroad that the Napier police know all about this affair and this is not surprising after the affair of the Hastings Post Office robbery of two or three years ago when it was alleged that certain detectives were paid to be silent’. In February 1902 Tunbridge told the Minister that Benjamin was ‘absolutely useless as a Detective, and I really do not know what to do with him’. In the end he was severely reprimanded for ‘gross neglect of duty’, his pay was reduced for three years, and he was transferred to Palmerston North. The Inner Harbour affair was, Tunbridge concluded, a ‘case fearfully bungled’; press and
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public continued to speculate whether something more sinister than this had occurred. 70
1900 saw the beginning of another case of great public interest. A Wellington prostitute sold detectives information about her ‘old flame’ Arthur Blatch, who was wanted for a murder committed in Colchester, England, seven years before. Despite her unreliability, on the basis of her evidence the police arrested house painter Charles Lillywhite. Although the arrested man resembled the description of Blatch, Tunbridge was uneasy - but Pender, Detective Broberg and Acting Detective George Nixon were all convinced that they had the culprit.
Between the lower and high court hearings, documentary evidence arrived of Lillywhite’s involvement as an activist in the painters’ union in an American town, which proved seemingly beyond all doubt that he was not Blatch. That Lillywhite was indeed ‘lily-white’ was ‘generally believed’ by press and public alike. But the police remained unconvinced, and after two Colchester policemen made a positive identification he was extradited to England in March 1901. Three months later he was released, clearly innocent, and the New Zealand press lambasted police and judicial authorities. ‘The record of official and judicial blundering in ... criminal proceedings is a long and disheartening one’. Another ‘terrible wrong’ had been committed. Even after the Commissioner depicted the case as ‘a most regrettable blunder’, Pender remained unconvinced that a mistake had been made; an arrest had been ‘unavoidable’, given all the evidence assembled by his detectives. The affair was kept in the limelight by Lillywhite’s long struggle for compensation, which culminated in an award by the British authorities of £6OO plus his passage back to New Zealand. 71
The new Commissioner frequently found detection standards in specific cases to be lower than those of Scotland Yard, but he believed that with his improvements the detection police were, in general, adequate to the task - and improving. Their preparations for the 1901 Royal Tour by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, for example, were both thorough and elaborate. To keep watch for an expected influx of Australian criminals out to take advantage of public excitement, not to mention for possible assassins, all passenger vessels arriving in the colony were boarded by detectives in search of ‘suspicious’ persons - including those ‘who may possibly be members of foreign Anarchist Societies’, whose activities were feared by international authorities and the royal detective squad. Close surveillance was kept upon those identified as suspects. Auckland’s Detective Maddem travelled to Sydney to observe departing passenger ships in order to tip off New Zealand detectives in advance.
Christchurch and Wellington detectives Marsack and Boddam were also sent across the Tasman, to ‘form part of an Inter-Colonial Detective Force for the protection of their Royal Highnesses’. When the royal party travelled on to New Zealand the 14-strong ad hoc Australasian detective
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force accompanied them, to reinforce a squad of uniformed police (headed by O’Donovan) accompanying the royal visitors, and extra regular and special police drafted in to each centre visited. Work over the years by New Zealand detectives watching out for revolutionaries provided a backdrop. In 1900, for example, Cullen’s men had been ordered to keep watch on an Austrian boarding-house where the ‘rules of Anarchists’ were allegedly being studied. 72
The international tensions of the period had also induced Tunbridge to emphasise guarding against spies from countries potentially hostile to the British Empire. Indeed, almost any visitors from certain countries were suspect. In 1898 the Commissioner ordered surveillance over two Russian counts and a woman travelling with one of them. Sydney police had warned New Zealand of the imminent arrival of Count Pagenkoff, although they could provide no reason for watching him ‘beyond that he is a Russian’. The Auckland police grew very suspicious when he was spotted taking photographs from Albert Park, including of the harbour (and presumably, therefore, of harbour defences). By the time the count (who was attache to the Russian Embassy in Berlin) reached the tourist resorts of the central North Island, two wealthy Mancunians he had teamed up with were also under suspicion.
By early 1899 Pagenkoff had noticed that he was under surveillance. He was both ‘amused’ and ‘very much annoyed’ at being thought a spy, and went public about being under constant scrutiny in a colony ‘which professes so much liberty’. The police eventually accepted that he was a bona fide tourist, in the colony for health reasons. Most of their other suspicions about spies (an American couple, for example, or a ‘Boer agitator’ allegedly paid from Transvaal President P Kruger’s secret service fund to seek Maori support) were also proven to be baseless. Such public gaffes, however, usually occurred only when the detective police were too few for surveillance purposes: the regular police, as in the Pagenkoff affair, proved to be inept would-be counterspies. 73
CHAPTER 9
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The 1898 Royal Commission endorsed Tunbridge’s assessment and that of other senior police that part-time policing had only a short-term future in a professionalising police force. Part-timers harked back to pre-‘new police’ modes of policing. They were (in the Commissioner’s words) ‘ordinary members of the community who are merely given the powers of a constable in case they are wanted. It is simply a money-saving makeshift arrangement.’ As with the policing of the United Kingdom in the distant past, they were largely a reactive institution. They would generally ‘only act when called upon by either the public or the nearest regular Police Constable’, which was a far cry from the surveillanceorientated preventive policing of the ‘new police’, let alone the modernising, professionalising police of the turn of the century.
In the 1890s some young men had attempted to gain a part-time policing position in an attempt to bypass the clogged waiting lists for the Permanent Militia. But since these positions were held in low regard by the administration, this could scarcely be a successful route to a full-time policing job. That professionalisation was a slow process, however, was indicated by the continued survival of the office of district constable. At the turn of the century most country-dwellers were less of a threat to ‘order and regularity’ than ever before. There had been sizeable population growth, but most had occurred in the towns, with the urban proportion having risen from a third just before the Anglo-Maori wars/goldrush period to a half. Given this trend, together with the ‘settling down’ of the colony, large areas of rural New Zealand could still be watched over by district constables. There were 20 of these by the end of 1901, their numbers having increased in the last few years despite decades of unhappiness with the institution on the part of police administrators.
The old policing concept of ‘like policing like’ (the alternative maxim to the dominant past strain of policing in New Zealand, ‘stranger policing stranger’) was in a sense returning to the colony. But as with district constables, the part-time Native Constables represented an anachronistic strand of this principle. These men surveilled their own people on behalf of the state, under the control of the nearest regular constable. By 1901 there were only seven Native Constables, but some extra Maori police not formally responsible to the Police Force were soon to be appointed for the purpose of ‘like policing like’ control in Maori-dominated rural areas. This occurred under the Maori Councils Act of 1900, which attempted to meet long-standing Maori demands for greater legal control
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over their destiny by establishing a small degree of self-government. The legislation resulted from the interplay between protest and cooperation in which most Maori participated.
The great Liberal aim was to get small farmers on the land; where Maori held out against releasing their land, the approach was one of ‘gentlemanly’ bargaining rather than coercion, wherever possible. In return for their land, Maori would receive the benefit of roads, railways and all the socio-economic and cultural advantages of ‘civilisation’. Police and troops had been withdrawn from the Urewera during the survey disputes of 1895 when Seddon agreed, in return for recognition of the Queen’s mana, to establish chiefly committees to do the work normally carried out by the hated Native Land Court, whose ultimate function was to alienate land from the Maori. This had boosted the Kotahitanga (Unity) movement’s push for the legal establishment of tribal autonomy at a local level. With the establishment of Maori Councils, the government had finally succumbed to some of the Maori Parliament’s arguments on such matters - particularly since these were shared by numbers of the ‘rapid assimilationisf Maori who were soon to form the Young Maori Party. The new system was a kind of minor replication of the 1860s official runanga system in a new era. It had similar aims, so far as the government was concerned, such as the suppressing of ‘pernicious customs’, so that chiefly authority was bolstered but only in the context of the Crown’s ‘civilising mission’. 74
There were 26 district Maori Councils established, with each settlement electing a village committee to enforce their bylaws. When it quickly became clear that their powers of enforcement were stymied by lack of finance and authority, some of the Councils decided that they required tribesmen to be sworn in as part-time constables to enforce local laws on sanitation, dog and other taxes, and so on. Pakeha authorities authorised this as a cheap way to help fill a relative policing vacuum in the countryside, one which would be available if circumstances required coercive action by state-approved Maori authority. In April 1902, for example, two such ‘Maori Council Constables’ were sworn in, Te Kahu Te Maari, tasked with operating under the Rongokako Maori Council (based at Papawai in the Wairarapa), and Epo Tumi of Purangi, who worked for the Taranaki Maori Council. The Police Force provided general guidance. A constable sworn in under the Act was ‘not to interfere with Europeans unless he is acting with one of our regular Constables’, although Taranaki Maori tried to get police authority over pakeha. Regular police were told that they could use the Council police ‘if necessary’ in circumstances in which Maori were involved. Sworn ‘Native Police Constables’ helped alleviate the enforcement excesses of some Councils or their sub-institutions. 75
The Maori Councils never flourished, and when they declined their controlling capacity went too. By 1909 they were in serious difficulty, and an attempt by Maori Cabinet Minister Apirana Ngata to revive them
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was not a success. Constant European encroachment (straying stock, liquor selling, violations of wahi tapu) which the Council constables were powerless to stop made a mockery of local laws. General conferences of Maori Councils replaced the Kotahitanga parliaments of the 1890s as a forum for non-Kingitanga Maori until 1911. Their discussions revealed the difficulty of Maori juridico-policing activity in an interpenetrated society in which the Maori were the subjugated culture. However constables continued to be appointed to work with those Councils that kept going.
Meanwhile, district and especially Native Constables continued to be attacked for being too integrated with their local communities to be useful for suppressing offending by their acquaintances, employers or customers. When Rotorua Native Constable Arama Karaka professed in court to be able to identify only four of 14 accused persons in an illegal fishing case, the magistrate declared him to be ‘an adverse or unwilling witness’. The problem was that tribal culture and customary law continued to clash with that of the dominant culture. Maori who utilised traditional fishing waters did not consider their activities at all untoward; nor, in many recorded cases over the years, did their fellow tribesmen who were part-time policemen. Maori society remained essentially communal, despite the best efforts of the pakeha authorities. Family history has it that Native Constable Thomas Williams of Opotiki would warn his elders whenever a liquor raid was likely, sending them home from their slygrog haunts. One way of overcoming such problems, appointing a Maori from another tribe or hapu, had been tried, and failed when tribespeople refused point-blank to contemplate being policed by an outsider. Some had preferred a pakeha policeman to a member of a traditionally rival tribe, and attempts at such appointments simply created trouble. 76
The situation in Rotorua in the 1890s provides a ready insight into the problems of the part-time Maori policeman. Karaka had been appointed in 1894 in place of a Native Constable accused of drunkenness. His duties occupied a great proportion of his time, yet his pay - even after a sizeable increase - never rose above £4O per annum. A particularly onerous task was that of attending and keeping order at Native Land Court sittings; these lasted throughout most of 1898, for example, in the Rotorua district. The long and erratic hours Karaka worked prevented him obtaining other, more regular employment. He came to resent having to take orders from his superior, the (much better paid) regular constable at Rotorua, William Bern.
In particular, he did not like the oppressive regime imposed upon him by Bern - he was not allowed, for example, to make arrests without first fetching the pakeha constable, whom he considered to be ‘a bad man’. Bern made him report to the police station at specific times, and ordered him to do duties generally outside his brief: escort prisoners, control turbulent railway workers, deliver summonses, and so on. This prevented
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him from cultivating food for his family, and matters worsened when Bern put him on nightly patrol duty in the old (Maori) part of town. In 1899 he resigned in disgust when the hierarchy accepted Bern’s word over his. Yet despite all the shortcomings of part-time policing, from the point of view of both the state and the policemen themselves, ‘respectable’ residents in both Maori and pakeha areas who had little or no chance of gaining a regular police presence would often press the state for such an appointment. Even the tribal authorities at Maungapohatu in the depths of the Urewera asked for a Native Constable to help maintain local order. 77
Police authorities were prepared to accept non-regular modes of policing as a stopgap measure, so long as these were to some degree under Police Force control. This included those sworn in as special constables in particular circumstances. In 1899, when thefts from trains and stations were escalating. Railways Traffic Inspectors at the main centres and Wanganui, and the Timber Checker at Invercargill, were sworn in as specials to help suppress them. This proved so successful that the system remained in force. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other bodies remained able to have employees sworn in as constables under section 14 of the Police Offences Act, with police blessing, for this complemented regular police work. When forms of policing not amenable to some degree of regular police control were mooted, however, the police authorities were sceptical. When Wellington civic authorities signalled an intention to establish a 50-strong Fire Police (under the 1886 Municipal Corporations Act) to assist the city’s Fire Brigade, Tunbridge noted: ‘Unless they are properly instructed and placed under efficient control, I fear they will [be] more in the way than anything else.’ 78
When help was needed on a temporary basis, the Police Force continued to call in the military, the Defence authorities interpreting their guidelines for intervention with some liberalism despite the removal of residual links between the two organisations. In late 1897 a ‘notorious convict’ who had escaped from Lyttelton was recaptured after three days by a 13man Permanent Artillery picket that had been complementing the police surveillance operation. In late 1898, when there were reports that Austrians were about to land illegally in the Auckland district, Cullen had so many men deployed at the races and on other public order duties that he called in soldiers to assist the handful of men who were available for bordercontrol duty. When the ‘Rough Riders’ left Auckland for the ‘Boer War’ on 5 March 1900, 25 Permanent Artillerymen helped the police control well-wishers.
While appreciating the availability of such help, Tunbridge felt that the use of soldiers for policing duties was backward-looking and should be minimised. It impeded the development of professionalism and also produced its own inefficiencies; soldiers drafted into policing duties, for
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example, had no power of arrest to prevent ‘illegal acts’ (although when called out by the Governor in an ‘extraordinary disturbance of the peace’, they did have all the legal powers of constables). Moreover, whatever their powers, soldiers unused to the ‘minimum force’ requirements of policing were liable to create havoc. In 1901 the volunteer Clutha Mounted Rifles were used to help mounted police keep clear a line of march for visiting Imperial troops in Dunedin. There were numerous complaints that they had behaved brutally towards the crowd, thereby creating disorder out of order. 79
At times, therefore, the Commissioner turned down Inspectors’ requests for military aid. Politicians, recognising that Tunbridge’s wishes on this issue would eventually prove costly (more, and more professional, regular police would be expensive) sometimes countermanded his decisions. In 1898 the Minister overrode a refusal to allow Cullen a secondment of soldiers to help police an exhibition; in April 1900 the Premier himself ordered the Permanent Artillery to provide men to police Auckland’s streets at night while regular police were undertaking inspections of premises. When the statutes were consolidated in 1908, the Permanent Militia remained available to act ‘either in aid of or as a Police Force’. The Defence Act of 1909 reconstituted the Permanent Militia (generally known from 1902 as the Permanent Force) as the Royal New Zealand Artillery, and it too retained provision for the use of soldiers as police. 80
In one area of endeavour, moreover, the reforming Commissioner had little choice but to work closely with the military: in the mounting of occasional expeditions into the bush to repress residual manifestations of armed Maori resistance to the state. Many threatening situations did not in the event lead to such confrontation, given that official policy was to proceed cautiously with the ‘civilising mission’ in the interior. Most Maori were perceived to be becoming pakehaised, or at least were not obstructing the ‘approved’ rhythms of life. It seems that the majority of Maori saw that they had little choice but to adjust to the settlers and their government, but many adjusted to the least possible extent, and preserved the customs most precious to them. This seemed an acceptable price for the state to pay for the fact that (in Seddon’s view) ‘the greatest good feeling prevails between the two races throughout the Colony’. In some areas, non-threatening regimes under customary Maori law were tolerated. So too was Te Whiti’s pacifistic community at Parihaka in Taranaki, so long as it did not overtly challenge the state’s right to enforce the laws which mattered most to the government. 81
Not all police felt that ‘Parihaka law’ should be tolerated. T have tried every means in my power to procure evidence to justify Te Whiti’s arrest for counselling etc. the natives to plough up the land’, bemoaned Inspector McGovern, ‘but I fear without success’. Members of the chief’s community would not give evidence against him, and his ‘instructions’ to them were phrased in Old Testament parables which his people then
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interpreted in ways which meant that European mores were frequently ignored or violated. Tunbridge cautioned that even if testimony were available, it might well not be ‘good policy’ to prosecute. As Pungarehu’s Constable Thomas Hickman, the state’s expert on Parihaka, noted, the community was a model of racial harmony and industry. Crime was virtually unknown, although sometimes police had to intervene in land disputes between the rival followers of Tohu Kakahi and Te Whiti. The only way that the inhabitants revealed themselves to be in any serious sense ‘opposed to the Pakeha Law’ was by harbouring fugitives, and that was, for now, tolerable in return for socio-racial quietude in the previously much-troubled Taranaki region.
Kingites and other formerly resistant Maori had by now ‘showed they were government men by submitting to the law so easily’ , 82 The authorities hoped that a similar integration into the sovereign state would be gradually effected at Parihaka, and in mid 1899 the police passed on a message that ‘though Te Whiti’s mana might be great amongst them, the Queen’s would prevail in diplomacy and far reaching effects in the end’. The police concentrated on ending Parihaka’s ability to successfully harbour wanted Maori. They were anxious, in particular, to catch the fugitive Wehi, sought on slygrog charges since 1897. Despite many night raids Wehi, who slept in a different house each night, always eluded capture. Hickman now instituted a ‘system of annoying them’ with constant visits, thereby making ‘all Te Whiti’s followers dull and reserved and not so full of enjoyment’. Relations between the Crown and the Parihaka leadership improved a great deal after Hickman showed ‘laudable tact energy and perseverance’ in securing the apprehension (and, ultimately, execution) of a tribal outsider who had murdered his Parihaka-bom wife in the community. 83
Despite such breakthroughs, the situation remained far from satisfactory for the authorities; Te Whiti and Tohu were still ‘both very averse to any European law coming within range of Parihaka’. When the Governor, Lord Ranfurly, visited Parihaka the community insulted the Crown by seating Wehi at his table. Indeed it was not until 1905, when the fugitive was injured in an accident, that there was any hope of an honourable solution to this problem. By then a change in the law meant that the original charges would now have been laid against the European supplier of the alcohol, rather than against Wehi. Sergeant W Haddrell suggested, and the government accepted, that the arrest warrants could be dropped. To avoid accusations of weakness, it was intended to portray this as an act of mercy that would end Wehi’s virtual ‘life imprisonment’ at Parihaka and allow him to receive medical attention. Even this olive branch was premature. The Maori were distrustful, and when Hickman and New Plymouth’s Native Medical Officer visited to pass on the news and attend to the fugitive, Wehi could not be found. ‘To find a native who wishes to hide away in Parihaka would be as difficult as finding a needle in a stack of hay.’
Auckland race meeting, New Year’s Day, 1904. New Zealand Police.
‘lce-cream Charlie’ serves Constable J Cleary in the yard of Christchurch Central police station, 1906. B Thomson/Cleary family.
Constables J Quinn (left) and G Doggett wearing night and day uniforms respectively, February 1908. B and D Thomson.
Manners Street police station, Wellington, early twentieth century. New Zealand Police Association.
District Constable H Insley’s launch Sunbeam , Cowes, Waiheke Island, 1908 Waiheke Island Historical Society.
District Constable J Bennett and his wife outside their house/police station, Waiheke Island, 1906. Mrs Norris/Auckland Police.
Wellington Central police station, Lambton Quay, 1890s. Tyree collection, Alexander Turnbull Library.
Bicycle line-up in yard of Wellington Central police station, 1898, mounted constable E Eales at right. B Thomson.
Police station at Matavera, Rarotonga, Cook Islands, early twentieth century. New Zealand Police.
Police Chief William Mcßimey and staff, Police Headquarters, Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands, 1909. Elmah Mcßimey.
Thomas Boyes, district constable at Motueka from 1866 to 1902. Mrs B Malone.
Mounted Constable Patrick Cassidy, who joined the New Zealand Police Force in 1897. P O’NeilL/Mrs N Cuttance.
Policeman in attendance when the Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Ward, drives the last spike on the North Island main trunk railway line at Maunganui-o-te-ao, 6 November 1908. New Zealand Railways collection, National Archives.
Palmerston North police staff during an inspection, 1908. T Quirke loan, New Zealand Police.
Constable Henry Montgomery, outside Raurimu police station, 1906. R Carter/W Peterson.
Sergeant John Dart lectures to probationers at the Mount Cook Police Training Depot, Wellington, 1908.
Dumb-bell exercise for the leg muscles; probationers at the Mount Cook Police Training Depot, Wellington, 1908,
The newly completed Police Training Depot at Wellington South police station, Newtown, Wellington, 1908. Photographs on this page from Weekly Graphic and New Zealand Mail, 30 September 1908, Parliamentary Library.
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Not until after Te Whiti’s death in November 1907 were the warrants tor Wehi s arrest cancelled, as part of a wider reconciliation between the Crown and the new Parihaka leadership. That December Haddrell and Hickman attended a hui at which they notified the ill and crippled Wehi that not only was he free, but that fines levied against him up to 12 years before had been remitted. Haddrell ‘pointed out to them that the arm of the law was far reaching, and that although it might be years still in the case of Parihaka as well as that of the Maori, they were often arrested years after they had been first wanted’. Nevertheless, the government could be ‘merciful when sickness and illness came on’. Wehi had been pardoned as a symbolic proof that ‘both races would be treated alike’ by the Crown. A local paper observed of Te Whiti’s funeral that as ‘each shovelful of cement was cast into the tomb it seemed as if fresh blows were given to the fast-dying idea of a Maori nationhood. It was Te Whiti’s conception that the Maori should be a separate, self-contained, self-governing people, but the passing of this warrior chief closes that page of native history’. This judgment was both Eurocentric and too narrowly focused on Parihaka, but it was an accurate reflection of government policy, of common pakeha belief, and - in the final analysis — of the trend of history for decades to come. Progressive Maori ‘know that the rapid absorption of the native race is inevitable’, asserted the Hawera Star , echoing the policies and beliefs of Grey and many others 60 years before. 84
There remained one Maori fastness far more impenetrable for state agencies than Parihaka - the ‘vast, isolated, rugged’ Urewera region of the Tuhoe people. Here, noted Constable Donald McLeod, ‘communication with the outer world is rendered most difficult, and it has really to be seen to be understood’. Yet the Crown had decided to push road and survey lines into the territory, albeit with great care. When surveyor/ ethnologist Elsdon Best complained that the most remote constable in the area had been intervening unwisely in intertribal disputes because of too literal an interpretation of the law, Tunbridge urged a cautious approach. ‘Great discretion must be exercised in dealing with these native matters, and Police should interfere to prevent serious breaches of the peace only.’ Although police investigations were to exonerate Constable William Lowry of Best’s charges, finding that his mediation between rival hapu was exemplary, he was ‘directed’ by the Commissioner to take no action in cases which were not ‘serious’. 85
In 1902, Hare Matenga went into the bush when a warrant was issued against him on a horse-stealing charge. Four years later he had still not been captured, and it was suspected that tribespeople were harbouring him. When the incidence of stealing from camps in his vicinity increased, the police became more determined to find him. The expert on detection in the bush - Wellington’s Detective Broberg - headed a police operation which spent much of ‘a very bitter and severe winter’ searching for Matenga without success. It was not until 1907 that ‘the Maori Bushranger’
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was captured by Broberg, after he had taken another small expedition (posing as a survey party) into the Raukumara range. The original charges against Matenga had been minor (and on these he was acquitted anyway, although he was gaoled for thefts committed while on the run), but for the authorities the stakes had been high. Matenga had shown that at least one region remained out of the effective reach of the authorities. As a newspaper put it, ‘the majesty of the law was set at defiance’ by a single man. His recapture in the year of Te Whiti’s death was another sign of the closing in of the state upon Maori attempts to retain some selfdetermination. 86
One rather more significant step in this process had been the quelling of the penultimate armed rebellion by Maori in New Zealand. Inspector Hickson blamed his poor showing at the 1898 Royal Commission on the fact that he had just returned from the suppression of the ‘Hokianga Dog Tax Rebellion’. Between 1891 and 1897 the police had on request collected the dog tax on behalf of local bodies, who resiled from the confrontation often involved. But this service had been discontinued because it brought policemen into contact with Maori citizenry ‘in an undesirable manner’. Maori tended to own many dogs, which were frequently used for hunting pigs, a staple part of their diet. The tax had been introduced in 1881 mostly to induce Maori to keep fewer dogs and thereby to protect runholders’ sheep and cattle. Many Maori had no intention of altering their lifestyle, and since they had been only partially integrated into the cash economy they saw the tax as discriminatory as well as oppressive.
The campaign against the dog tax became the symbolic rallying point of a number of Maori resistance struggles. In 1892, Te Whiti had told his followers to resist such an unjust imposition upon their traditional way of life. A dawn raid by Pardy and a police detachment to arrest dog tax defaulters who had physically resisted the state prompted the local Resident Magistrate to observe that ‘lt would never do to let the Maories think that the arm of the law cannot reach Parihaka’. Even ‘friendly’ Arawa chiefs who refused to pay the tax were arrested and humiliated by being forced to do public works outside Tauranga Gaol. The dog tax became a particular symbol for those influenced by Te Whiti-ism, including many in the Hokianga. Here Hone Toia’s people remained determined to resist what they perceived as unjust laws, and in effect established their own ‘state within a state’ at Waima. In 1897, as the year before, a number were gaoled for refusal to pay fines for non-payment of the dog tax.
That dog taxes were the casus belli rather than the real reason for this stance was indicated by the fact that when local ‘respectable’ Maori wanting to avoid confrontation offered to pay the fines of the resisters, the offer was refused in favour of being gaoled in Auckland. In September 1897, the Hokianga County Clerk told Hickson that 50 more ‘fanatics’ were anxious for dog tax proceedings to be taken against them. They
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were said to ‘regard incarceration in the light of a picnic which increases their knowledge and causes them to be hailed as heroes of their fellow associates’. That year Te Whiti and Tohu continued to send Parihaka ploughmen out to harass the settlers and the authorities, among their stated grievances being the dog tax. After taking advice from Parihaka, the Waima community formally established their own rival sovereignty movement under Hone Toia. In 1898 a new round of summonses for nonpayment of dog tax were issued, with a deadline of 1 May. On 28 April the Maori told a meeting that included the County Chairman, as well as Constable Alexander McGilp and Native Constable John Beazley (‘quarter-caste’ Maori Hone Pihere), that they refused to ‘obey your laws’ - not just the dog tax but also other burdensome matters, such as a recent imposition of rates on land near public roads which they had no way of paying, particularly now Dalmatian gumdiggers were competing with them for work that had been the mainstay of their local economy. They stated they would resist being gaoled with force of arms, and barricaded Waima. Inspector Hickson hurried north with five constables, one of them James Treanor - having been given only two minutes notice of departure.
The inhabitants of Rawene feared attack, as Toia had told McGilp that his people would go there with arms and ‘destroy the bad law’. Though they pledged to oppose only the authorities, the women and children were evacuated on McGilp’s advice and under the direction of the magistrate J S Clendon, many of them to Kohukohu across the harbour. After Clendon visited Waima, many returned, but in the middle of the night on the 30th Clendon received word that the ‘fanatics’ were on their way, and ordered the immediate evacuation of the whole town. Only a few volunteers and police therefore greeted Hickson when he arrived on the Glenelg. A cannon was set up on the wharf. When some 20 ‘rebels’ finally rode into town at dusk on 1 May, the pakeha fled to the safety of the Glenelg. Hickson allegedly hid behind the mast, his ‘revolver falling out of his hand with fright and cowardice’. In the event the visit was a peaceful one, but the government had already decided to send soldiers. By the 3rd 120 troops had arrived, with two field-guns and two machine-guns. The gunboat Torch arrived on the 4th with a 60-strong naval contingent that had orders to land and defend the settlement if necessary. A hundred volunteer troops remained in Auckland ready for instant despatch.
Seddon had ordered these arrangements, and in view of the perceived seriousness of the ‘rebellion’ placed not a policeman but LieutenantColonel Stuart Newall in overall charge of the expedition. Newall told ‘loyal’ chiefs acting as intermediaries that the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Hone Toia’s people was non-negotiable. When this did not happen, and with the comforting backup of the Torch, Newall decided to march on Waima on 5 May with half his force. The remainder would guard the town. As Beazley guided the Artillerymen and police, struggling with the
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machine-guns (one went over a bank) and two drays (one an ambulance), over the 16 miles of difficult terrain to Waima, Hone Heke Ngapua MP, grand nephew of the 1840s rebel Hone Heke Pokai, went to Hone Toia’s encampment hoping to negotiate a surrender.
After some parleying at Waima, a messenger was sent off to abort a planned armed ambush of the police/military column at a saddle between Omanaia and Waima. He reached the ambush party just in time, a bloody scene having been averted by a delay in the departure of the column from Rawene, and a lengthy difference of opinion between Beazley and Newall at the foot of the hill, where Newall overrode the Native Constable’s warnings that the road ahead was likely territory for an ambush. ‘They would have slaughtered our men without being seen’, McGilp felt. Another of Toia’s messengers galloped up to the Crown ‘attacking party’ as it reached Omanaia. McGilp and the local police only just stopped an army officer shooting the man, having seen a piece of paper between his teeth and deduced his role as a peace emissary rather than the advance guard of an attack. The messenger asked for a considerable delay while Heke was further consulted. ‘Friendly’ chiefs on the expedition strongly favoured this, but Newall refused. He did, however, agree to camp overnight at Omanaia to allow some time for discussion at Toia’s Otatara headquarters, with noon the next day as a deadline for surrender. Whatever the outcome, this would ‘sustain our prestige’.
By late the next morning, Heke and Toia had persuaded the ‘rebels’ to prevent a battle. At 11.30 the community’s leaders rode out with the politician and the prophet to lay down their weapons in surrender to Newall’s column. The Crown congratulated itself on having avoided ‘serious consequences, if not loss of life’, through ‘knowing the effect the display of a superior force has upon any aboriginal coloured race’. Hickson and the constables arrested five leading ‘rebels’ (including former policemen Toia and Hone Mete) against whom warrants had been issued. The government wired that all guns were to be surrendered before the force left Waima, and in the meantime 11 more Maori were arrested. On 13 May the Auckland soldiers embarked from Rawene with the prisoners, while some police and soldiers stayed behind to bolster ‘friendly’ Maori support for the Crown. The prisoners were initially charged with ‘intention to levy war against Her Majesty the Queen’. These charges were dropped when all pleaded guilty to being ‘members of an illegal assembly’ and some to charges of assault. The ‘ringleaders’ were gaoled for 18 months. The situation in the Hokianga remained uneasy; local IPs and settlers felt that another ‘uprising’ was quite possible, and the police kept watch over edgy communities. 87
But with the mediation of Heke, the remaining members of the Waima community agreed that they would abide by the law and pay all taxes. They were, said the County Chairman, ‘settling down to their former peaceful habits of life’; he asked that their fines be remitted. The Minister of Justice declined to do this, but agreed to give them a year to
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pay - knowing that they had a contract to produce railway sleepers which would give them the wherewithal to do so. So ended what was, in the eyes of observers, ‘a full scale armed rebellion against all authority, local and central, of the Pakeha’. Seddon made it clear that the Liberals’ attitude, in the final analysis, differed not one iota from that of other governments - however much more benign their initial approach to ‘recalcitrants’, ‘The firm stand taken and the display of force will do lasting good. These fanatics now know that threats and arming themselves will not be tolerated for a moment, and that the authorities are determined that the law shall be implicitly obeyed’. Substantive sovereignty had apparently been imposed throughout the Far North - the first area to reject it after the annexation of New Zealand some 60 years before.
Common Maori reactions to their seemingly irreversible alienation from the land and population decline included not just political strategies which aimed to unify, parliamentarise or westernise (Kotahitanga, Kauhanganui, Young Maori Party, etc), but rather a contrasting retention of or reversion to institutions of the pre-European past. But the state’s desire for the removal of ‘objectionable’ aspects of settler culture was matched by a determination to expunge what were seen as the worst excesses of ‘uncivilised’ Maori behaviour and belief. From 1898 the pakeha authorities concentrated their wrath upon tohunga, the guardians of religio-medical lore; they were backed by clergymen, Christian rangatira, and those Maori leaders (loosely grouped within the milieu that came to be called the Young Maori Party) who asserted that the way forward for Maoridom, and to preserve ‘benign’ elements of Maoritanga, was to quickly assimilate. Medical authorities in particular were concerned that some practices of tohunga, such as dipping fevered patients into cold water, were harmful.
More than this, in the eyes of political, bureaucratic and religious authorities, tohunga were ‘asserting a power and control which were inimical to law and order’. ‘These people require careful watching by the police’, the Premier noted. However, ‘disturbing the Native mind and becoming assertive’ were not actually crimes. The government and police had to content themselves with warning Maori communities to consult Christian clergy and bona fide doctors rather than ‘witch-doctors’, until the Tohunga Suppression Act was passed in 1907. 88
The special attention paid to the policing of Maori was by now generally a marginal activity, a hangover from the past. Another fringe policing activity looked to the future: a concern for women. Previously, the policing of women had been mostly a reaction to prostitution and, to a lesser degree, vagrancy and drunkenness. Women, generally, did not offend against prescribed standards of behaviour. But now there were increasing demands upon the state to meet the requirements of the ‘new morality’ with regard to women; by proactively protecting them from offensive language or behaviour, for example. New Zealand had been the
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first relatively independent country in the world to give women the vote, and women were not only prominent in the burgeoning prohibition movement but also in demanding a higher standard of both public and private behaviour, including by women. The police had little choice but to pay increasing attention to women as both potential offenders and potential victims. There was even talk that women might be used in a policing role, and a few were making tentative applications. When former Police Commissioner Whitmore responded with horror (The thing is monstrous’) to such a suggestion while opposing women’s suffrage in the Legislative Council, a supporter of votes for women replied that ‘not even the most advanced advocate of women’s rights’ would demand that. In 1897 a Brisbane suffragist wrote that she had heard a rumour that New Zealand might employ female detectives; she was applying for a position, since Queensland was ‘not advanced enough to have them yet’. Tunbridge hastily noted that ‘at present there is no intention of making such appointments’. But change was in the air. 89
Women had long been used in marginal capacities in the police. It had become a firm rule that men in sole charge of stations had to be married, so that their wives could mind the station in their absence, care for female prisoners, and cook for prisoners and visiting policemen. In 1897 only one country station was run by a single man, a widower helped out by his teenage daughter. Looking back, a policeman remembered that much of his work ‘fell on my wife’s shoulders when I was absent ... I always thought the Police Department were very hungry in not making some payments to Constables wifes for such important duties.’
At bigger stations, women fulfilling this role were still designated ‘female searchers’, or sometimes ‘matrons’, and given a small stipend. It had been increasingly recognised since the early 1890s that their functions might need to be expanded; indeed, that the police might require fulltime female workers at the four main police stations in the colony, in line with developments overseas. The main argument in favour of this, apart from the need to look after the increased numbers of women being detained, was that the heightened regulatory powers of the state were having a growing impact on women and children. It was considered, on the principle of Tike policing like’, that people with ‘feminine’ attributes were required for tasks like enforcing the child protection duties of the Infant Life Protection legislation. It was also felt that women were best suited to the proactive protection of the virtues of women and children, by keeping a watch in public parks for example, a practice already instituted in New York and elsewhere. Hume brought up the idea of fulltime matrons in 1893, albeit mostly to guard female prisoners in the larger lockups, and he secured provision for matrons in the four centres in the 1894 estimates.
But since such matters were still on the margins of policing discourse, progress was slow. A full-time female employee for Dunedin was mooted in early 1894, but the cost of converting station buildings to accommodate
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a live-in ‘matron’ with direct access to the female cells had been considered too great by the Commissioner. The breakthrough came on 1 December 1895, when the first full-time Police Matron, Sarah Beck, was appointed; stationed at Wellington’s Lambton Quay headquarters station, she was treated with ‘great deference’ by the men (who rose when she entered the dining-room), and was to stay in the job for 23 years. In March 1897 Rose O’Brien was appointed in Auckland, and a Dunedin Police Matron (Eliza Codings, who had been one of the colony’s first two women prison visitors in 1896) joined a week later.
Conditions were far from ideal. Mrs Codings objected to her allotted quarters next to the watch-house because the noise of prisoners being processed throughout the night interrupted her sleep; the Inspector of Weights and Measures’ room was fitted out for her, but this proved little better. When she requested a private place to receive people seeing her on Infant Life Protection Act matters, Tunbridge told Inspector Pardy to place a table behind a screen in the corner of the sergeant’s room or the lockup-keeper’s office. She protested vigorously; she would have to discuss delicate matters with the many women and children who visited. Pardy confirmed that her workload was of ‘great dimensions’, but she did not get better conditions.
By April 1898 Mrs Collings was becoming desperate. She had not had a full night’s sleep since her arrival. She pleaded for a small room with a bath (since she was not allowed to use the men’s) outside the main buildings, as was provided for prison matrons. When all Tunbridge could offer was the detective’s office, she stayed put. By August her health had broken down, and she could not cope with duties which had sometimes occupied her throughout the night. Pardy endorsed her plea to be allowed to live away from the station. He also supported her request to be relieved of evening work, since she was busy all day inspecting premises, escorting prisoners to asylums, and so forth. The Commissioner was not sympathetic, although he did concede that sergeants at suburban stations should be asked to report on applications for licences under the Infant Life Protection Act. Mrs Collings was soon ill again, with influenza said to have been contracted after rough treatment at the hands of two ‘extremely violent lunatic patients’. At the end of September she was herself committed to Seacliff Asylum for the insane, leaving behind a destitute daughter far from her nearest relatives in Auckland. When she recovered, penniless, Cabinet voted her a compassionate allowance of £25.
Her replacement, Miss Jane Coals, was appointed in the most casual of fashions. Hearing of the vacancy, she sent a letter to the Minister; so marginal was the job that none of the usual checking procedures for police personnel were carried out, and she was appointed without much ado. That being said, the establishment of Police Matron positions was symptomatic of changes in the social (and economic) position of women, and of increasing bureaucratic intervention into aspects of social life
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hitherto of little interest to the authorities. Women’s organisations therefore attached great significance to this relatively lowly position. The Canterbury Women’s Institute, for example, submitted suggested qualifications for the job when in May 1898 the police decided to create such a position at Christchurch, the last of the four centres to gain a Police Matron. 90
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CHAPTER 10
Post-Commission Policing
In 1897 there were still seven police districts in New Zealand. These comprised those based on the four main centres, Napier and the East Coast, Wanganui and the West Coast (of the North Island), and Nelson and Westland. Inspectors Cullen and Hickson argued before the Royal Commission that the four main districts were too large, and particular concern was expressed about the Auckland District - the ‘most troublesome in the whole colony’, in Tunbridge’s words. The new Commissioner, however, felt that the existing district system would be adequate (with some fine tuning, together with his reconstruction of fully-functioning sub-districts) once the proposals for Sub-Inspectors were implemented. The Commission followed Tunbridge in recommending only minor changes to the district system, and only some of these were effected.
At the beginning of 1899, for example, the Palmerston North subdistrict was transferred from the ‘unwieldy’ Wellington District to Wanganui/West Coast, whose headquarters was shifted from New Plymouth to Wanganui to remain in the centre of the enlarged district. Control of it went to Inspector R J Gillies, just promoted with J W Ellison from sergeant to the Inspectorate. Inspector McGovern was transferred from Wanganui/West Coast to district headquarters at Napier. Cullen had been confirmed on 22 December 1898 as permanently in charge of Auckland District, where he had been acting in Hickson’s place, and Ellison took over the Nelson/Westland region at Greymouth. 91
Gillies and Ellison had been promoted to replace Emerson and Hickson, two of the three Inspectors who had come under very critical scrutiny from the Royal Commissioners. All authorities acknowledged that the Inspectorate had to be of impeccable quality. Inspectors’ reports on their staff, for example, were almost conclusive in determining the men’s futures (with the partial exception of dismissal), and so Inspectors needed to be men of wisdom and judgment. With the Police Commissioner’s capacity to intervene in district affairs necessarily limited, the burden upon the Inspector was heavy. The Royal Commissioners concluded that Hickson had lost the capacity to control the crucial Auckland District. Among his sins, he had over the previous five years visited few of his 52 out-stations. He was, Tunbridge told the government, ‘mentally if not bodily worn out’, and Taylor branded him as ‘utterly incapable’. The Royal Commission recommended that he be called upon to resign. 92
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After the Royal Commission reported, and with Hickson away on sick leave, Tunbridge told the government that while the Inspector might be able to cope with the ‘easy’ Nelson/Westland District (to which he had applied to transfer) T doubt if his constitution will stand the climate of Greymouth’. A transfer there would be a ‘cruel kindness’, although since Hickson’s probable compassionate allowance would not be enough to retire on he was prepared to give him ‘a trial’. But the government was adamant that full efficiency was needed at the top, and when Emerson was notified of his compulsory retirement, so was Hickson; he would leave the Force on 31 March 1899, after three months’ retirement leave. Given that he had been the only senior policeman with a string of serious entries in his defaulters’ sheet, it was remarkable that he had outlasted most of the other officers from provincial days; it was perhaps poetic justice that he was among the last to retire before the introduction of life pensions. His health soon broke down permanently, and he died on 9 October 1899, six months after Emerson. 93
The Royal Commissioners also found that discipline in Canterbury was ‘very lax’, echoing continuing allegations by Wake, Taylor and other temperance campaigners. Broham had previously blamed laxity amongst his men on the ‘careless and indifferent’ Sergeant-Major Mason, The latter had been transferred, but the Commission nevertheless recommended that the Inspector be ordered to pay more attention to supervising his men and enforcing the disciplinary code. In September 1898 Broham told Commissioner Tunbridge that he felt he had no option but to apply to resign. When news of his impending resignation leaked out, however, influential Cantabrians rushed to his support. At a crowded meeting convened by the Mayor of Christchurch, full confidence was expressed in the Inspector. Tunbridge was in a dilemma. If the government invited Broham to withdraw his resignation, this might be seen as a statement that ‘the implied censure of the Commissioners was uncalled for’. It could ‘leave the Inspector to conclude that his services are indispensable and that he, backed up by a section of the Community, is master of the situation’. Moreover, the issue had become politicised when the Opposition backed Broham, claiming that his drubbing had been the result of his criticisms of political control of promotions and the like.
On the other hand, government and Police alike were anxious to avoid alienating public opinion. On the contrary, reflective of the strategic move towards hegemonic social control, the authorities were increasingly focusing on wooing ‘community’ support. Moreover, as Tunbridge confirmed to the government, Broham was still ‘both mentally and bodily vigorous’, and despite his advanced age (for a policeman) of 58 years he was ‘one of the best officers in the Force’. The Commissioners had not fully realised the implications of their strictures against a man who ‘undoubtedly has a very lofty idea of his position’. Even though he ‘perhaps does not descend to details as much as could be wished’, the humiliation of a public censure was ‘too great a punishment’. Tunbridge
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felt that when Broham had filled the previous position of Superintendent, he had got into the ‘habit of ordering Inspectors to perform the work, which he himself has been called upon to perform since his reduction’. ‘lf desired I will quietly hint to the Inspector that if he will withdraw his application, nothing more will be heard of the implied censure.’ The government accepted this strategy, and Broham, sufficiently vindicated by the glowing public testimonials for his abilities, sought and obtained permission to withdraw an application made ‘while labouring under the keenest sense of the injustice done me by the police Commission’.
Because it had not directly sought Broham’s withdrawal of his resignation, the government was not seen to have been swayed by public pressure. At the same time, the affair had signalled that top police officials would come under closer scrutiny in the future. For now, the transition from laxity to tighter control required the services not only of Broham but also of the other veteran Inspector, Pender. The Royal Commission had acknowledged that he had kept a tight grip on Wellington, although his capacity to quarrel with subordinates had always been a problem - and he was soon embroiled in a dispute with the new Commissioner. In the event, Broham was not to last long in the Force. Tunbridge had been prepared to give him one last chance, but he was now behaving erratically, including by demonstrating Draconian attitudes towards his men. The Commissioner placed him under even greater scrutiny, and in the end his health broke down. He retired, sick, on 28 February 1900. His annual payment of £240 from the Police Provident Fund (which had come into operation only three months before) financed a trip ‘Home’. He died in Rome before the year’s end. 94
As for the other accusations against specific policemen, the Royal Commission trod carefully and cleared men of wrongdoing where there were any doubts, probably with the general morale and reputation of the Force in mind. This could lead to some apparent whitewashing. The Commissioners cleared Oamaru’s Sergeant O’Grady of charges by Taylor that he was intemperate and neglectful of his duties. Yet he had acknowledged intemperate habits, and during the course of the enquiry Tunbridge had had to intervene to stop him committing perjury, and to inform the Minister that he had forged entries in his station diary.
Like ex-Constable Haddock, ex-Sergeant Duffin had to be compensated for wrongful loss of office. But some unsavoury members of the Force were removed as a result of the hearings. For example. Sergeant Daniel Hannan of Stafford was found guilty of defrauding a vulnerable young woman whose mother, a publican, had just died. Tunbridge made him resign even before the Commission’s findings were released (this precipitateness was to force the government to compensate Hannan for loss of office). The Commissioner, moreover, set about getting rid of some men who had escaped the net of the Commission. When Sergeant Henry McArdle, in charge at Nelson, displayed (to Tunbridge’s mind) ‘inconceivable’ incompetence in a murder investigation, he was in effect
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forced out of the Police by being ‘allowed’ to retire on compensation. The case involved the lacing of porridge with the poison ‘Rough on Rats’, but the investigators had not noticed vomit at the murder scene - and had disposed of it without analysis on its discovery two days later. 95
Although the Royal Commission tended to avoid coming to conclusions as to the guilt of accused policemen or the validity of grievances, its hearings made it clear to the public that discipline in the Force had been steadily deteriorating. Much of the evidence to this effect came from policemen themselves. The weight of their testimonies strengthened a feeling that the whole police machine was, if not corrupt, at least creaking and inefficient. Even the smallish number of complaints which were upheld by the Commission gave cause for alarm at the state of the Force. A typical such case was that of 3/c Sergeant John Dwyer, ‘an excellent officer’ stuck at Oamaru for a dozen years, most of the time as an acting NCO, his promotion held up merely because he had held the specialist position of ‘police gaoler’ and was therefore believed to be out of touch with mainstream police work. The Commission recommended promotion, this occurred, and he later rose to high rank. 96
Taylor claimed that all his charges of September 1897 had been fully justified. Senior police and judicial officials had testified to the undermining of the Force through the use of influence. Tunbridge had worked to conceal the iniquities of the past, particularly ministerial interference, from the Commissioners, he asserted. ‘No one will deny that the worst that could be hinted against the police force of New Zealand and its management has been spoken aloud at this inquiry’, a newspaper commented. The authorities were, however, pleased that many public rumours and innuendoes had been stilled. ‘Anything that has been left unsaid was certainly not of any consequence’ was a widespread reaction, and this in the final analysis benefited the new police image. The Commission had delved into every comer of policing and the results were not that bad; and all problems had been identified. Tunbridge had moreover come personally to grips with the Force throughout the land.
‘The evidence of Mr Tunbridge generally was very favourable to the force, which he considered, speaking from a wide experience, would bear comparison with the police of any other part of the world.’ In the parliamentary debate on the report in mid September 1898, Thompson declared it to be ‘very gratifying’; ‘confidence has been restored’. Only some two dozen men had expressed grievances, and only five of these had received favourable recommendations, mostly regarding promotions. How could the Force be teeming with dissatisfaction, he asked (conveniently forgetting that many of the police witnesses had represented large numbers of men). Where was the evidence of successful use of influence?
Premier Seddon asked what was wrong with political scrutiny of the public service to attempt to rectify perceived wrongs; this was a politician’s duty in a democracy. There had been no evidence of untoward influence, of any meaningful corruption. With a great deal of sophistry, he reeled
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off figures: of a dozen of Taylor’s specific charges, three-quarters were ‘disproved absolutely, two are partially proved’, and the only one fully proven was that a policeman had breached railway regulations by taking a dead child to Dunedin to be buried with his other children. Such was the heinousness of the Force that this was the sole result of the Commission. There was no doubt that it had ‘reinstated the police in the public confidence’.
The truth lay somewhere between the two extremes exemplified by Seddon and Taylor, but in the circumstances the government had indeed come out well. It had been presented (in a politician’s words) with ‘one of the most cautious, prudent, colourless reports ever submitted upon such strong evidence to a Legislature in this world’. It was the best the administration could have hoped for, and the government avoided extensive parliamentary scrutiny by referring the report to the wasteland of the Public Accounts Committee. Seddon meanwhile had a platform of recommendations that in general he could accept, that would make his coercive agents more efficient and therefore gain kudos for the government. Indeed, said the new Commissioner, some considered the New Zealand Police to be ‘the most perfect body of men in the whole police world’. Such views, the relatively soothing tones of the final report, and the increasing propensity for newspaper proprietors to give favourable coverage to the policing authorities - particularly now that it appeared that the few identified miscreants were to be removed and the structural defects repaired - helped to reassure the public. Even before the post-Commission reforms were implemented, the Police were emerging fairly well after an extraordinarily public cavalcade of allegations. 97
At the beginning of the new century there were a number of transfers of commissioned officers in order to get the right mix. From 1 March 1900, Wellington’s Sub-Inspector Macdonell was removed from Pender’s querulous control and placed at Greymouth in charge of Nelson and Westland District. The new rank was thus no longer confined to the junior commissioned officers in the four major urban centres. Macdonell’s predecessor on the West Coast, Inspector Ellison, was sent to Christchurch in place of Broham. Napier’s Sergeant A J Mitchell was promoted to Sub-Inspector to succeed Macdonell in Wellington. (When he too quarrelled with Pender he was replaced in early 1901 by Edward Wilson and sent to Auckland.) By early March 1900 there were six Inspectors and five Sub-Inspectors (plus the last two Sergeant-Majors, whose status was nearly equivalent). 98
It did not take much reading between the lines of the Royal Commission’s report to appreciate (as Taylor trumpeted) that the investigators felt that a near clean sweep of the Inspectorate was required. In attacking Taylor, Seddon declared as unsuitable the one Inspector the prohibitionist had identified as competent: if the Premier could get the
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evidence, the man would be out of the Force! On 1 August 1900 one of the Sub-Inspectors, O’Brien, was promoted to Inspector, the first time this had happened. There were again seven Inspectors. A similar promotion followed three months later for Macdonell, who replaced the retired Inspector McGovern but stayed on at Greymouth; Sergeant Patrick Black was promoted to the vacant Sub-Inspectorship, As had been intended, a meritocracy soon developed, with men well down the seniority list of sergeants being promoted to commissioned rank. Henry Green, who had joined the Force in its founding year, gained a Sub-Inspectorship in this way in September 1901. Agitation to increase the number of police districts had continued, particularly from areas allegedly ‘neglected’ by the police. One obvious way to meet such demands was to continue appointing Sub-Inspectors outside the main cities, and in 1901 Invercargill gained a Sub-Inspector. Influential people in Southland then agitated strongly to designate the region as the eighth police district in the colony. They were successful, and on 1 October 1902 Mitchell was promoted to Inspector to head the new district."
As Tunbridge gradually brought in a network of commissioned officers which satisfied his quest for efficiency, the Sub-Inspectors were vulnerable to rapid transfer. Auckland’s Wilson protested early in 1901 at his pending transfer to Wellington - he had just purchased a house and apprenticed his son, and had a sick wife - but got short shrift. He was ‘the most suitable officer’ for the capital, and that was that. Pender had continued to quarrel - not only with Macdonell, McGrath and Mitchell, but also with District Clerk Wright. But the real problem was his over-reliance on the District Clerk, as his sometime defender Tunbridge acknowledged: in the Blatch case, for example. Sergeant Wright was (said the Commissioner) ‘imported into a matter’ that was not his business. Senior policemen in Pender’s district had fallen out with their Inspector, in Tunbridge’s assessment, because of ‘a belief on their part that Sergeant Wright was permitted to usurp their functions and intrude himself into matters appertaining to their duties and which were entirely outside his duties as District Clerk’.
Tunbridge had a problem over the matter. He was obliged to support the principle that inferiors could not give orders to superiors, but he also saw the value of the District Clerk operating as a locum for the Inspector - particularly when haste was of the essence. At the Royal Commission it emerged that Napier’s District Clerk S Norwood (‘an excellent man’) held the district together under the increasingly befuddled Emerson. The Inspector testified that when he was away. Constable Norwood ‘does every thing pretty well as if I was there myself’, opening all correspondence, even giving orders to NCOs (to the chagrin of Sergeant Mitchell). Auckland’s Inspector Hickson acknowledged that the 1/c constable who clerked for him was regarded as the officer in charge in his absence; he would wire the Inspector if urgent matters arose. With their fingers on the pulse early in their careers, some of the non-frontline staff were to reach
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high police rank. Storekeeper Amos Muggeridge, a former clerk/storeman who scored top marks in his depot intake, was promoted to sergeant in 1906, having joined only in 1899. Ultimately he became a commissioned officer. The controversial Wright rose to Commissioner. 100
Despite Tunbridge’s understanding of Pender’s reliance on his District Clerk, the Inspector proved to be his own worst enemy. When Tunbridge let him off lightly over Wright’s untoward involvement in the Blatch fiasco, Pender argued back that there ‘never has been the slightest justification for anyone to feel that Wright’s role had been outside his proper duties. Indeed, T am fully convinced that a feeling of that kind never honestly existed .... In my opinion it was only put forward as an excuse for endeavouring to get Sergeant Wright removed from here because he would not join in the combination to harrass me out of the service’. The Commissioner had had enough. Pender was bluntly directed to confine the District Clerk ‘strictly to the duties of his office’. Tunbridge was clearly beginning to feel that the value of his officer’s undoubted knowledge and abilities was being overridden by his capacity to embarrass the Force. 101
The situation led to a rare and savage attack on Tunbridge in the House. Wellington City MP George Fisher alleged that the Commissioner had been trying for several years to get rid of Pender. In his view, Mitchell had been transferred to Wellington to do Tunbridge’s ‘dirty work’, to ‘annoy and harass’ Pender. McGrath was but one member of a ‘spy system’ with which Tunbridge had networked the colony and instituted a ‘reign of terror’ against police and public alike. Under pressure from wowsers, he was sending plain-clothes men into hotels throughout the land on missions of entrapment. What else could be expected? He had risen in the ‘Met’ as a detective, after all. In the inevitable and prolonged defence of Tunbridge which followed, Wright was castigated for orchestrating a campaign against McGrath, and Pender was advised to go. It was now only a matter of time before he did so. 102
With retirement at 65 now mandatory, the final two commissioned officers from the provincial past, Pender and Otago’s W S Pardy, were retired on 1 April 1902, They were given three months’ retirement leave and generous pension payments - for Pender, £240 per annum for life. O’Brien was now sent from Napier to take charge of Otago; he was replaced by Macdonell, who was in turn replaced at Greymouth by SubInspector, soon to be Inspector, Wilson. Ellison transferred from Christchurch to take over Wellington from Pender, and was himself replaced by Inspector Gillies from Wanganui. The latter’s replacement, Kiely, was promoted to Inspector on 1 July 1902, while Sergeants Dwyer and O’Donovan were promoted to Sub-Inspectorships. The new stratum of leadership was now firmly entrenched. 103
Despite a new set of officers in the Force, and the various reforms, old beliefs died hard, including that men could ‘get on’ through favouritism. In particular, it had long been widely believed by Protestant police that
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Catholics were over-represented in upper ranks, and favoured their coreligionists when allocating the sought-after sole-charge out-station positions or making recommendations for promotion. The Royal Commission had endorsed earlier dismissals of such allegations. Of the men at the attractive sole-charge out-stations, 134 were Protestant, 101 Catholic, roughly equal to their proportions in the Force. Furthermore, men in charge of out-stations had generally been recruited in the days when a disproportionately high number of Catholics had entered the police - those with Irish Constabulary experience, in particular, having been sought after. Hume told the Royal Commission that he had tried to make sure religious affiliations were relatively balanced. Militating against a Catholic conspiracy, moreover, was a feeling amongst Catholic police that one ‘got on’ in the Force by being a Protestant - particularly by being a Mason. 104
Whatever the Royal Commission’s findings, and the ‘meritocratic’ reforms, allegations of sectarian influence continued to be made. These were fuelled by complaints by politicians and others not only about persecution and favouritism within the Force, but also about alleged persecution by police of civilians of different sectarian hue. In 1901 a politician suggested the removal of Sergeant W J Phair from the heavily Catholic Reefton area because of the policeman and his family’s supposed prejudices against the majority of the population. Tunbridge noted that he could not win in such situations. If Phair was not transferred, the police administration would continue to be targeted; if he was transferred, Protestants would claim that Catholic influence had been successful. In this case, Phair was moved to Tauranga. The religious question, Tunbridge sighed, was ‘the most delicate one with which I am called upon to deal’. 105
The self-disciplining agencies operating in society, and the consequent reduced need for overt modes of social control, led to an expectation that the more Draconian forms of internal police discipline might now be relaxed. This was happening, but not too fast in view of the laxness which had crept in by the last decade of the nineteenth century. There were, therefore, increasing attempts by constables to have the degree of internal police control lessened. This posed problems for Tunbridge insofar as many of the problems of the Force had clearly resulted from the fall-off in actual discipline in the time of his predecessor. While the formal disciplinary code could be relaxed, actual discipline would in some circumstances be tightened. While the Commission was sitting he sacked several constables and two sergeants for misconduct, and warned a number of others that their offences would be ‘borne in mind’. He railed against off-duty men frequenting pubs, was not averse to sacking constables for offences such as paying over-persistent attention to young women, and was not afraid to secure the dismissal of men for public incidents in which complainants declined to press charges - off-duty
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policemen, for example, for making obscene comments about the wife of the proprietor of Auckland’s ‘The Geisha’ tearooms (Tf that’s your wife I would not put my prick in her passage’, was the major offending remark). 106
By the time of the Royal Commission it had become fashionable for both police and military leaders to claim (in Broham’s words) that ‘the most woeful mistake was made in recruiting from the Artillery’. This was reflective of altering perceptions in keeping with the altering state of society, the increasing degree of ‘order and regularity’. The arrangement had not initially been challenged by either institution; it did not suit any more because circumstances had changed. All policing experts now firmly believed that ‘a very inferior class of men’ had entered the Force from the military in the 1890s. Some even felt that training as soldiers had (in Hickson’s words) done them ‘more harm than good in the police’. Others, such as Broham and Cullen, believed that most recruits to the police from the Permanent Militia/Artillery had gained entry to the military and then transfer to the police by the use of political influence. Yet others asserted that sickness inside the Force was on the increase, and put this down to the allegedly inadequate physical characteristics of the ex-soldiers. All police authorities had welcomed the ending of the restrictions on recruiting. 107
Purging the ‘artillery spirit’, which had caused a ‘loose style of living and habits’, was however not easy, partly because of the continued links of the police with the military. Artillerymen were still being drafted in to help the police out with street duty, for example, despite Seddon’s 1896 banning of the practice. These links were increasingly anachronistic, including from the military’s point of view. They did not - as the Commander of the Forces, Colonel Penton, told the Royal Commission - any longer aid the external defence of the colony by providing a core of trained gunners all around New Zealand. In theory this was still seen to be desirable; police with military training could, in the event of an invasion, help hold off the insurgents until the various volunteer units were mobilised to supplement the Permanent Artillery (the remaining section of the Permanent Militia). But since the police had now ceased to return ex-soldiers to the military for their 10 days’ annual drill (a period of drilling which was inadequate anyway, said Penton), they had ceased to be soldiers in any meaningful sense of the word. Conversely, Penton now intended not to Tend’ any more Artillerymen to the police except in circumstances specifically provided for by section 75 of the Defence Act, especially civil emergencies. loB
The Royal Commissioners were emphatic in their recommendation that recruiting should remain open, that the police-military link should be formally severed, and indeed that soldiers should be barred from entry (after Artillerymen who had joined the military in order to get into the Police were given a chance to apply for the Force). Thomas Thompson, under pressure to retire ever since the revelations during the 1898
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Commission, stood down from politics at the 1899 election. When James McGowan took over ministerial responsibility for policing on 23 January 1900 as Minister of Justice, unlike his predecessor he did not take the Defence portfolio as well. Policing was now seen to be definitively separated from the control of the military. McGowan proved to be eager to comply with the wishes of the Commissioner, and with the Premier’s confidence Tunbridge had a great deal of leeway within which to professionalise a Force that now had few residual links with the military. 109
A frenzy of newspaper commentary followed the release of the Commission’s report. A Wellington public meeting unanimously deplored the ‘rapid advance’ towards the ‘Tammany system of corruption’ said to have been revealed during the Commission’s hearings. It urged that Tunbridge be given a free hand to remove inefficiency and corruption. This was the thrust of the various commentators, public resolutions and so forth. By (more or less) endorsing these sentiments, the government ensured that Tunbridge had a political as well as a popular mandate for drastic action. It supported Tunbridge’s strenuous efforts to prevent improper political or other intervention in the lives and work of policemen. In 1899 police were told to report any threats of transfer for ‘remissness’; in 1901, conversely, when the Commissioner heard that policemen had been approaching men of influence to gain advantage, he warned that culprits would be ‘severely punished’. Although not all of the report’s recommendations had been accepted, particularly if they were opposed by Tunbridge (a recommendation for two days extra leave, for example), the broad public/political mandate meant that its thrust was implemented with remarkable rapidity.
As early as 1 December 1898 the 1887 regulations were altered to incorporate Depot training, the abolition of classes within ranks, the rank of Sub-Inspector, revised and higher qualifications for entry, and the abolition of the anachronistic prerequisite of military service. On the same day, the new increment system and pay scales were introduced. To policemen and public alike, reforms seemed to be continuous. Soon after the regulations were altered, on 1 February 1899 the Police Surgeons were appointed at the four centres, as recommended by the Commission and the Commissioner. From now on urban police received free medical attention, although concomitantly the ‘sick register’ was more closely monitored than in earlier years. 110
The progressive implementation of reforms had an element of public relations to it. Observers sought assurance that the police modernisation procedures under way in other western societies were finally to be effected in New Zealand, and a continuing flow of initiatives reminded press and public alike that this was occurring. But the state authorities knew that both were concerned most of all with the perceived degree of crime in the colony, and that prevention and detection techniques needed to be efficient enough to at least prevent offending levels increasing.
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From mid 1899 all stations were ordered to send in a monthly return of local offences, and if these revealed a sizeable increase over the corresponding month in the previous year, explanations were demanded and careers suffered. ‘Good’ results were fed through to journalists.
Less amenable to measurement was the police response to demands for improved standards of public morality. It was a truism in police circles that a sole-charge constable ‘controlled the morals’ of his community. But in an era of heightened expectations it was difficult for the police to demonstrate ‘success’, particularly given the ‘social purity’ reformers’ propensity for manufacturing moral panics. Moreover, modernisation may have brought a liberalising of social behaviour at this time, for some have assessed that the ‘puritan tradition grew weaker and a code of pleasure grew stronger’ at the fin de siecle. A ‘foul leprosy of sexual immorality is permeating the minds of the children in the schools’, a newspaper ranted in response to ‘evils’ such as mixed classes. Many policemen kept a ‘dictionary of dirty words’ to look out for and suppress (a policeman’s daughter recalled that she knew of no policeman’s family ‘that did not avidly study’ such lists!).
A primitive ‘trickle-down’ theory often led to police getting the blame for ‘immorality’. T E Taylor, in particular, did not relent in his scrutiny of ‘all matters regarding the moral welfare’ of the colony, and the police authorities paid attention to his and others’ demands - perhaps partly to deflect the social reformers’ criticisms of policemen. Legislation along British and Australian lines that was progressively put in place enabled the police and other authorities to censor and punish: the 1892 Offensive Publications Act was just the first of many. At first attention focused on suppressing advertisements. Under pressure from Taylor, Tunbridge arranged for the postal interception of catalogues of allegedly ‘immoral and indecent’ material available from Sydney’s ‘Sir Robert Bear’. Dr Truby King of Seacliff Asylum, who was to become the regulator of the ‘proper’ rearing of New Zealand children, sought to put the works of Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola in the same ‘indecent’ category as the ‘lllustrated Marriage Guides’ which the reforming campaigners found so offensive. In order to discourage others from purveying material not considered fit for public consumption, a newspaper was fined for advertising such novels. 111
Tunbridge undoubtedly attempted to keep up with the stricter standards being demanded by the reformist moralists, but the legislation seldom proved adequate to gain convictions, and purveyors of ‘pornographic’ literature did not regard the law as a deterrent. When advertisements for contraceptive suppositories (‘The Latest French Discovery’) were designated not to fall within the ambit of the 1892 legislation, the Commissioner ordered that the offending newspaper editors be spoken to. He declared that ‘any decent newspaper would refuse to insert the advertisement after perusing the circular’ accompanying the merchandise, which explained how continuous pregnancies wore women out,
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exacerbated poverty and so forth. Tunbridge frequently enjoined his men to suppress ‘immorality’, including by finding ways to overcome the ‘problem’ that the 1892 Act ‘practically leaves it to the Court to decide what is intended to have an indecent, immoral or obscene effect’. In this and a few other arenas, the police seemed more proactive than politicians in helping impose the new standards of behaviour upon sectors of the population, although they were generally in tune with the wishes of the political executive and legislature on these issues. But as with other policing matters, in areas of social behaviour where masses of people did not want to change their ways - or wanted to change in different ways to those officially approved - it was an uphill struggle. 112
The politicians and police were not alone in leading the charge for ‘better’ standards of public (and private) behaviour. In the final analysis it was demands from the leaders of New Zealand’s socio-economic elite which had led inexorably to a tighter regulation of the populace. Although society was regularising and stabilising, although turmoil was noticeably decreasing compared with the colony’s short past, police surveilled every nook and cranny of New Zealand life, ever ready to crack down harder on recalcitrants. Chinese quarters such as Raining Street in Wellington were scrutinised for alleged gambling, prostitution and drug offences. Police participated in City Council investigations of ‘slum’ conditions in the surrounding Te Aro area, which was (in the eyes of a constable at Mount Cook station) ‘without doubt the roughest quarter in N.Z. most of the inhabitants being wharf labourers and a big percentage of thieves speilers and wasters generally’. A later Commissioner, James Cummings, was to recall of the area that ‘if you did not know how to put on a headlock you were useless’ as a policeman.
But although surveillance was most intense in the low-life urban areas, it increasingly pervaded other aspects of social life. When it became clear that ‘baby farmers’ were continuing to allow illegitimate children to die once they had collected lump-sum payments for taking them into care, the police investigated with a view to cancelling licences issued under the 1896 Infant Life Protection Act. In 1898 policemen stationed near railway stations were instructed to attend the arrival and departure of all main passenger trains, with an eye to surveillance and control and to regulate the waiting cabmen. Constables continued to be appointed as probation officers, and also hunted down truants in cooperation with school committees. Policemen gained increasing powers under legislation such as that governing Industrial Schools. 113
In Auckland District there were a total of 146 ‘extra’ appointments for policemen at the end of the century. In 1899 nine policemen in that district acted as deputy registrars of Old-age Pensions, and other constables also investigated the characters of elderly people suspected of being insufficiently clean-living to qualify for state aid; in February 1902 the Premier directed that police were to furnish a report on all Old-age
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Pensioners in the colony. Police collected weekly payments from parents of children in Industrial Schools for the Education Department - not an easy task - and had to track down absconders, and from 1901 the Force followed the careers of former inmates of Industrial Schools. In 1900 the members of the Royal Commission on the Sanitary Condition of New Zealand were allowed to avail themselves of police services to such a degree that ordinary work ‘may have to take a secondary place for the time being’.
While agreeing that the police role included surveilling and ‘cleaning up’ unsavoury corners of New Zealand life, police officials were none too happy about the extent of such diversions from regular beat and crime-watch activities, particularly at a time when the public was scrutinising their mainstream policing activities so closely - and even more so when large numbers of police were deployed on ‘bona fide’ police operations, such as policing the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York in 1901. Tunbridge and his officers tried to set limits. They resisted, for example, attempts by local urban authorities to impose upon policemen functions seen as properly the responsibility of council officials, such as policing places of entertainment (a problem that had increased as the practice of employers hiring off-duty policemen to keep control had fallen away) and traffic control. The latter pressure increased as motor cars began to be seen in the streets after 1898, and particularly after the 1902 Motor Car Regulation Act. During the smallpox scare of 1903 Tunbridge refused requests that constables provide nursing services; police would cooperate with the Health Department, but not to the extent of withdrawing from their ‘legitimate Police duties’, since it was ‘the Public order and safety which demand the first attention of the Police’. 114
When police officers protested that they could not spare men for additional duties, however, this could be seen as special pleading, given that they were operating in a less turbulent societal context than that of the past. A watch-house keeper characterised Dunedin, still the colony’s commercial capital, as ‘a very quiet town to do duty in’. There were very seldom more than three or four prisoners in the city’s lockup, and sometimes three or four nights passed with none at all. There was an increasing trend for little to ever happen in one-man country stations such as Mokau. At the former goldrush boom town of Charleston, the offences in the 20 years after 1898 were all of minor ilk (drunkenness, lunacy, etc); in the 30 years from 1909 Constable Richard Allan would handle a grand total of 39 charges at that station. Despite the much larger population, it was still realistic in 1900 for a circular to echo instructions of the 1840s: ‘All strangers arriving in rural districts should be carefully noted’. When a rural constable found three butchered bodies (including that of a child) at East Eyreton in 1901, he just could not cope with the strain, so far was the scene from his previous experience. 115
In general, it could be said that - particularly in the small towns and rural areas - there were sufficient police to conduct the surveillance and
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enforcement measures necessary to impose the aspects of the new morality which were being resisted among certain sectors of the populace. Moreover, the post-reform police were under increasing scrutiny to ensure that they conformed to the new societal mores. After their initiation at the Training Depot, they were now more carefully socialised into the revised police role at their first posting. In 1898 a bout of illness, including typhoid, had hit the Auckland barracks, prompting the government to act upon what it had already acknowledged, that Auckland needed a new district/city police headquarters. The office/barracks complex was opened early in 1900 at the comer of O’Rorke and Princes Streets.
It was a ‘civilised’ model for its time, with quarters for 40 single men who were surveilled closely by their superiors to ensure they lived a life reflective of the orderliness of their ‘luxurious’ surroundings. These included imported ‘wire-woven mattresses’ (a first for a police station in New Zealand), a library and reading room, and ‘lavatories of the latest patent’. The idea was ‘to make the barracks as home-like as possible’: contented men were efficient and moral men. The Auckland men were reportedly soon ‘smarter and cleaner’, and were motivated enough to spend over £lOO of their own money on a billiard table and fittings. Tunbridge’s successor was to see the Auckland barracks as a prototype for all the country’s cities and large towns, and the Royal Commission on the Police Force of New Zealand in 1905 praised its ‘excellent accommodation and perfect conveniences’.
The four cities, in and around which the ‘great bulk of the crime of the colony, particularly against property’, occurred, were Tunbridge’s major worry. Soon after his arrival he hinted that they would need considerably greater police coverage. In the meantime, he hoped to do away with a number of the one-man suburban stations in favour of larger stations manned by an NCO and at least three constables. ‘A system of reliefs extending over the whole twenty-four hours could then be established.’ Such a development proved not to be viable, but the Commissioner and his successors frequently reappraised the policing of the larger urban areas and ensured that their policing infrastructure was adequate for the control of order and morality. 116
As a result of the Tunbridge reforms, the men of the New Zealand Police Force had gained a greater collective confidence and esprit de corps. This was the more so because professionalisation measures had been introduced in phases and manageably, and carried out with an unprecedented degree of consultation between superiors and rank and file. The lower ranks had in fact been encouraged to organise in each centre to submit to the Commission their collective views on reforms. Some individuals benefited greatly in confidence from this exercise. The constable selected to represent the views of Otago’s rank and file.
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W G Wohlmann, eventually became Commissioner, despite the handicap of a German-sounding name.
In keeping with the boost in morale, the police image became smarter, which drew favourable public comment. In 1900, for example, the old grey night-duty greatcoats were replaced by neat new blue ones. Revised dress codes and other measures ensured that the new standards would not be ephemeral. From 1902 all men were required to have their uniforms inspected, at the monthly parades at headquarters stations and during the regular visits by superior officers to out-stations. Tunbridge had, moreover, introduced new incentives for good work, which helped boost pride in the job. In 1899 he agreed to help procure Royal Humane Society awards for policemen, which would supplement internal police rewards. 117
Nor had Tunbridge been neglectful of the living and working conditions of his men. He had worked hard to persuade the government to build the new Auckland headquarters, and in 1902 the police lockup cells in High Street were vacated because the building had become decayed and ratridden. New cells were built next to the new station. The Royal Commission had advocated a new police station for Invercargill, and in 1899 Tunbridge secured permission for a ‘handsome’ three-storey building to be built. This was completed in March 1901. 118
As was often the case in policing in New Zealand, however, an increase in morale and public confidence was soon at least partially offset by another major scandal, and this led to further problems of image relating to political interference. Control of the Force had been handed over to Tunbridge not as of right but within certain constraints. Some Liberal politicians had stated this openly after the 1898 Commission, and the government always reserved the right to intervene. One such intervention was to lead to Tunbridge’s departure. In December 1900 the sergeant in charge of the Nelson sub-district, Edward Mackay, was suspended and on the Commissioner’s instructions subjected to an enquiry by a Stipendiary Magistrate into charges of drunkenness and related matters. His Greymouth-based Inspector and ‘prosecutor’ Ewen Macdonell testified to his sobriety, efficiency and integrity, and he was acquitted. But rumours about his behaviour continued. Towards the end of 1901 Macdonell began to hear further accounts of alleged untoward behaviour by Mackay and a few of his younger constables. Among the latter the name that stood out was Frederick Durbridge, whose ‘offences’ were said to include impersonating a woman. Macdonell investigated but discovered little because, he felt, people had been ‘squared’ not to talk: ‘in all my experience I never came across such a state of matters as appear to exist in Nelson’. One commentator argued that the problem was that there was too little for police to do in ‘sleepy hollow’ Nelson. Such assertions had recurred with reference to the policing of ‘quiet’ localities ever since allegations against Inspector Alfred Strode’s armed police in Dunedin in the 1840s.
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Whatever the cause of any deficiencies in the Nelson police, the Commissioner treated the rumours as a matter of gravity. Following enquiries by Tunbridge in February 1902, Macdonell was forced to investigate more thoroughly and came to a more definite conclusion. Constables Durbridge, Arthur Burrell and Thomas Kemp, he reported, had ‘apparently clubbed together’ for immoral and unlawful activities, protected by Mackay. The sergeant, for example, had not reported an incident in which Burrell and Durbridge had been discovered with two women of ‘ill-repute’ in their quarters at midnight. One of the visitors, a barmaid friend of Durbridge, had left town, and like her predecessor for the constable’s attentions was thought to be seeking an abortion. All this was serious enough in a force cleaning up its image and moving towards enforcing and role-modelling new standards of public and private behaviour. Worse, there were charges that police had been committing assaults and even inciting public disorder: a drunken Durbridge had allegedly led a dozen-strong crowd to force a tavern to open after hours. After Macdonell interviewed complainants, some were said to have been threatened with dire consequences if they stuck to their testimonies.
Tunbridge was loath to accept the general tenor of the Inspector’s report, feeling that the evidence fell short of proving the existence of an enclave of police terrorism within the Force. He was mindful that Durbridge was one of his ‘superior’ new breed of men, having joined in 1900. He believed that complainants should lay assault and other informations at the time of the alleged offences, and to suggest that they were too scared to do so ‘is all nonsense. People do not put up with being knocked about without complaining these days’.
‘No doubt almost every person who has been proceeded against by the Police imagine they have a grievance against the Police’, and ventilate it when asked to, Tunbridge claimed. The Commissioner felt that charges should be laid only in relation to the midnight tryst. These alone could only have been handled under police internal regulations, and it was ‘manifestly unfair’ to charge constables under police rules for problems which could have been placed before the magistracy. The son of the local newspaper editor, said to have been brutally assaulted by Durbridge while intervening in a disturbance, was ‘not entitled to much sympathy’; and it was too late to do anything about most of the allegations anyway.
It was now Inspector Macdonell who pressed most strongly for the removal of unsatisfactory police. His protests that matters had been downplayed because of pressure by Mackay, Durbridge and their friends and colleagues were dismissed. Instead, Macdonell was censured for having communicated with his main informant. Constable Joseph Williams, directly rather than through Sergeant Mackay, an action said to be ‘quite contrary to all discipline’! However, the Commissioner was forced to concede that the by now very public furore made an enquiry ‘unavoidable’, and the government agreed. Tunbridge seemed to believe that the whole series of allegations had arisen as a result of ‘the
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machinations of a certain portion of the Nelson community who were hostile to the Sergeant’, and that the enquiry would exonerate the accused. Indeed he warned Macdonell not to join in the supposed witch-hunt against Mackay.
By Cabinet instruction, Tunbridge travelled to Nelson in mid March to personally conduct the enquiry. Given his known views on the matter, it seems surprising that he was given this task. When the Commissioner arrived, his suspicions seemed to be confirmed. Mayor H Baigent gave the local police a clean bill of health and alleged political interference against them, while 236 people (said to include ‘the leading citizens and representative business and professional men’) had signed a petition in defence of Sergeant Mackay, who was said to have reduced crime to a minimum. In the event, Tunbridge confined himself to investigating the one set of charges on which he considered prima facie evidence existed. After extensive hearings, the record of which covered 286 pages, the Commissioner concluded in a set of findings and an attached report to the Minister of Justice on 24 March that the only proven charges against Mackay were minor matters of ‘neglect or omission’. To transfer the NCO ‘and place him on the streets in one of the large centres would be too great a punishment’. He noted that Baigent and other prominent citizens had urged Mackay’s retention, and that it had been rumoured that any transfer would be due to political influence.
Tunbridge therefore imposed his own sanctions, as he could under the regulations: Mackay was ‘cautioned’ and ‘reprimanded’ (although Tunbridge’s report to the Minister indicates that he knew a political decision to transfer was still possible). Kemp was ‘severely reprimanded’, and his transfer would be ‘considered’. Burrell and Durbridge (along with a minor player. Constable Patrick McGrath) were also ‘reprimanded’ and ‘cautioned’, while Burrell was in addition ‘severely reprimanded’ and fined 2s 6d for twice leaving his beat (having been seen doing so by Macdonell playing the spy). Durbridge should ‘perhaps be removed to some other station, where he had better not become quite so intimate with the persons amongst whom he has to perform police duty’. Durbridge and Burrell had avoided worse punishment only because of their clean records.
In his formal findings, therefore, Tunbridge had recommended consideration of transfer for Durbridge and Kemp. But in his accompanying report to the Minister, his comments were harsher. The two constables ‘appear to have become too familiar with certain sections of the community’, while Burrell and Durbridge had ‘been too ready with their hands’ (although he had not investigated assault charges against them since these should have been heard in court). With regard to the complainant police, Tunbridge decided that Constable John Bird had made a ‘frivolous’ and ‘baseless’ charge against Mackay, and that Constable Williams’ word ‘cannot be relied upon’. In fact, he said, the five main constables in the whole affair should be transferred. While
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news of some of the Commissioner’s findings leaked out, however, details of the report did not: the public knew only of the reprimands and the small fine, not of the five recommended transfers.
In the event, attention was focused on Mackay’s fate. He had been exonerated to such a degree that transfer or disrating now seemed inconceivable. The Nelson press, convinced that a conspiracy against Mackay and his supporters had been dashed, crowed loudly. On 13 April 1902, however. Cabinet considered Tunbridge’s report and rejected the recommendation that Mackay be retained in Nelson. It also rejected the decision to punish Burrell and Durbridge in minor ways only. It was said that these decisions were based upon information supplied privately to Ministers, which would have been available to the Commissioner had he sought it out. Cabinet had given ‘a direct censure’ to the Commissioner, the first crisis in a New Zealand career in which it had appeared he could do no wrong. Many observers jumped to his defence. A newspaper asked why the government should ‘put such a patent slight upon the Commissioner as to set at naught his decisions upon a purely Departmental matter?’ A number of commentators reasoned that, for any of a number of possible reasons, the government wanted the Commissioner to resign. The Premier, indeed, had stepped in precipitately to handle the political response to Tunbridge’s report, in the absence of the Minister, McGowan. (The Commissioner did not endear himself to Seddon when he queried having to give him the report and its documentation before McGowan had seen them.)
Some felt that the government believed that Tunbridge had been ‘captured’ by the mystique of his model Force, and was unable to see that there was still some way to go before it was fully reformed. Others considered that Seddon wanted to remove the Commissioner so he could reintroduce political intervention into policing. The Premier insisted that the evidence supported the charges against the alleged recalcitrants. There had been false official entries, undue use of fists, absence from the beat without permission, ‘undue familiarity’, after-hours appearances in pubs, women in the station, and so forth. Mackay had let discipline slacken; ‘if constables were to strike the public so, where was it to end?’, the Premier asked.
Cabinet had directed that Mackay not only be transferred but also disrated, and he was not to have charge of any station for six months. His career suffered thereafter. Constable Kemp was to be transferred to Mount Cook station in Wellington, where a close eye could be kept on him. Burrell and Durbridge were ordered to resign. They asked for reconsideration of this decision because of their good record sheets and the triviality of the charges actually laid against them. When the Minister declined they refused to resign, and on 2 May they were sacked. To remove factionalism in the Nelson police, McGowan also - with Cabinet’s endorsement on 16 April - ordered the transfer of the two complainant constables, Bird and Williams. The sackings and transfers refocused the
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debate. Even commentators who had been appalled by the alleged activities of some of Nelson’s police now saw the attempted resolution of the problem as a ’despotic exercise of Executive authority’, and joined the campaign to have the whole affair ‘laid bare’ by a public tribunal. Local worthies pressed for a full public enquiry, a large petition requested Mackay’s retention, local MP John Graham applied pressure for there to be no alterations at all in Nelson’s policing arrangements. One reason for the strength of the reaction was that the public thought that nothing more serious than reprimands and a half-crown fine had been recommended by Tunbridge.
The government tried to ward off the escalating public outcry by hinting at a greater magnitude to the affair than was publicly known: ‘it is quite evident that those who are agitating cannot be aware of the whole of the facts’. Those who packed a public meeting chaired by Baigent on 1 May were not impressed by this approach. The Bishop of Nelson stated that it was unlikely there was evidence which had not been released. More likely, he claimed, the government had overridden the Commissioner under pressure from Roman Catholics. This was a reference to suspicions that the ‘cabal’ that had allegedly been working to destroy Mackay had originated after unsuccessful assault charges against two Marist Brothers employed at the Stoke Industrial School. A Nelson Citizens’ Vigilance Committee was established at the meeting to press for a full and public enquiry into the whole affair. Now that sectarian bitterness had entered the scene, the furore increased - so much so that the Governor exercised his constitutional rights and called for information on the subject. Although Acting Premier Joseph Ward rejected the ‘widespread suspicion that private influence was used to persuade the Cabinet to take a different view of the affair from the Commissioner’, his reference to ‘fresh correspondence’ suggested otherwise to many observers.
From overseas, Seddon authorised Ward to table all documents in the House if the demands for an enquiry continued. He had been surprised at the Commissioner ‘giving the Inspector practically a rap over the knuckles’. If the evidence were produced, the ‘course we have taken will be justified for we took a much more grave view of the offendings and properly so than did the Commissioner’. What would settle the issue in the public’s mind, he felt, were the moral implications of the behaviour of the Nelson police - particularly Durbridge’s connection with a barmaid. In response to Seddon’s willingness to ‘let them have the lot’, the full documentation was published in the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives in August. But this only inflamed matters by confirming that charges other than those officially investigated had featured prominently in the deliberations of the authorities.
Civil liberties were seen to be at stake. The accused had not even been shown the charges or background documentation. ‘The constitution and regulations of the police branch of the public service are being and have been outraged’. It was alleged that the published material ‘bristles with
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inaccuracies, assumptions, tittle-tattle, the tainted statements of persons who have come under the whip of the law, and an obvious bias against one officer by another’. When the Premier visited Nelson near the end of the year, a deputation from the Vigilance Committee urged the reconsideration of the whole matter, especially the case of the jobless exConstable Burrell. Led by Graham, they advocated the acceptance of Tunbridge’s original decisions. Seddon promised to remedy any injustice which could be proved.
Meanwhile, the campaign against this ‘extraordinary exercise of Executive authority’ refused to die down. As a result of the Tunbridge reforms, it was by now received wisdom that the head of police should not have his operational decisions interfered with at the political level. Even if the disrated and dismissed police were guilty of graver offences than had been disclosed at the Commissioner’s enquiry, there had still been, it was argued, ‘a gross miscarriage of justice in procedure’. The Premier, resisting requests for a parliamentary enquiry, intoned that ‘Politics should be kept separate from the police’ - a phrase whose irony was not lost upon observers. In the event, to deflect the continuing criticism Cabinet allowed the reappointment of Burrell to the Force, but not that of Durbridge - on the grounds that since he now had a job in Wellington he did not need reinstatement. Durbridge had other ideas, and reapplied several times for his former position.
Long before this campaign had proved fruitless and died away, Tunbridge had fallen ill and in January 1903 decided to retire on medical advice. He was loath to say anything derogatory about the government in public, but hinted privately that factors other than his health were involved. He told Kiely, for example, that ‘the present condition of my health enters into those reasons’ which had induced him to retire. It was openly suspected by many that both his ill health and resignation were intimately related to the way he had been humiliated by the government, and the fact that such humiliation had been likely to continue. The regime had made no secret of its intention to continue hands-on intervention if necessary: Ward noted, when reviewing the case, that heads of department did not hold autonomous power. The Minister, responsible to parliament, had the final say, and that was how things should be. Tunbridge had - thought many - been ‘subjected to a degree of political interference that was intolerable’ to him.
Tunbridge’s honeymoon had been a short one. He had initially been attacked in 1899, when problems with Pender had first emerged. It was rumoured as early as 1901 that he was unhappy about the continuing degree of political interference in New Zealand - whatever the government’s protestations - and had been applying for positions in Australia. There were said to have been other areas of disenchantment, including the ignoring of his repeated requests for legislative changes, especially on the liquor issue. Yet despite all this, he praised the government ‘for being pleased to adopt practically all the recommendations made by me’.
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and denied any friction, although this was interpreted as protesting too much. He returned to England in May 1903.
As soon as Tunbridge’s resignation was announced, the accolades had flowed in. There was almost universal appreciation of the significance of his reforming zeal. He had found on his arrival that the New Zealand Police were in a ‘dissatisfied and disorganized condition’. Now, it was said, the Force had never been so efficient nor morale so high: aged and unfit police had been weeded out, discipline enforced, merit rather than political ‘pull’ rewarded, proper training implemented, an excellent pension scheme introduced to induce good men to stay on, and so forth. Nor was this just retrospective praise. As early as the 1899 annual reports by Inspectors, Tunbridge’s achievements had been lauded. Officers wrote of the much greater degree of satisfaction amongst the men. The ‘new spirit’ of contentment was conducive to ‘increased zeal, vigilance and carefulness’. But all this, it was widely noted, depended on aprofessionalisation, a bureaucratisation, which was operationally independent of the ‘uninformed’ machinations of politicians. The government’s interventions into the ‘Nelson Scandal’ were seen as a betrayal of the ideals so painstakingly implemented by the Commissioner. T E Taylor put bluntly what many felt: Tunbridge had got out because he refused to be a puppet of the Premier. But the government, while undoubtedly fully appreciating Tunbridge’s modernisation of policing to fit New Zealand’s stabilising society, and generally disposed to give him a long leash, felt obliged to show that - in the final analysis - policing was a function of state like any other. 119
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PART THREE
The Pursuit of ‘Professionalisation’, 1903-1912
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CHAPTER 11
New Technology, Old Troubles
The circumstances of Tunbridge’s departure from the colony in mid 1903 had been unfortunate, but the importation of a senior policeman from the detective wing of the London Metropolitan Police had undoubtedly been seen as a great success. The government therefore sought to replicate the experiment, although not without protest from many who said this was ‘a slur’ upon senior local police. New Zealand’s Agent-General in London, W P Reeves, acted as an intermediary. The government selected Walter Dinnie, a man of some considerable fame in the ‘Old Country’ for having - inter alia - broken up the ‘Great Fire Ring’ of arsonists and arrested the ‘Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. He had specialised in frauds and forgeries. The well-educated son of an historian/poet who became a wealthy businessman, and brother of noted Scottish athlete Donald Dinnie, Walter Dinnie had joined Yorkshire’s West Riding Police, said to be one of the best forces in Britain, in 1873. After clerical work there, in 1876 he joined ‘The Met’, where more clerical work had been followed by a detective career that took him eventually to the highest rank in the branch, that of Chief Inspector, in 1895. He was a popular and respected figure at New Scotland Yard. He had in the course of his career visited America and Africa and studied British and colonial policing, introducing innovations as a result. He had been offered the New Zealand position on 11 March 1903, retired from New Scotland Yard on 5 April, sailed on 23 April, arrived in the colony on 8 June, and began work at once.
The government had, Seddon announced in August, ‘the right man in the right place’. Dinnie was generally content to consolidate his predecessor’s reforms. But he was also keen to push reform further. The transition was smooth. Tunbridge left an annotated list of recommended promotions which Dinnie found to be a sound basis for new intakes of senior police. He began a series of small reforms which were, in aggregate, conducive to greater efficiency. In 1904 he changed the Police Gazette from fortnightly to weekly publication. In 1905 he ordered Muggeridge to stock boots, blankets and the like at the store, for sale at near cost price to the men, and in 1906 he improved the issuing of uniforms, particularly by providing for more frequent supply of certain items. Some allowances were improved, some increments were accelerated. In 1905 he had made Sergeant A H Wright second-in-command to the Chief Clerk, now John Tasker, John Evans having recently retired because of ill-health. Tasker
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died that November after a short illness, while running the Force in the absence of Dinnie, who was away advising the Tasmanian government. Dinnie now followed the Scottish system and filled the vacancy with a uniformed man - Wright.
The theory was that the Chief Clerk was the person best placed to act on behalf of the Commissioner in his absence, and that the Commissioner was better able to control men under sworn discipline than public servants. To increase Wright’s status, he was promoted to Sub-Inspector from the beginning of 1906, a move that caused much jealousy. In an equally meteoric rise, Invercargill’s Detective W B Mcllveney was transferred to police headquarters in February 1907 and made Chief Detective. He was both the youngest and the first New Zealand-bom policeman to attain this position. Mcllveney became the Commissioner’s personal troubleshooter. Dinnie also introduced compulsory weekly instruction for young city men, and monthly drill sessions. When outlining such reforms in later years, Dinnie could scarcely make them sound exciting, despite their cumulative significance - with one exception. 1
Dinnie’s most important and spectacular innovation was a reflection of progress in international forensic science. Much of what had passed for the application of science and technology to New Zealand policing had been ad hoc contributions by individuals. In 1887, for example, Oamaru’s Constable John Dwyer had apprehended ‘a band of notorious criminals’ that he suspected of committing a burglary. One of the offenders had left a clear impression of his foot on a blotter pad. Dwyer inked a suspect’s feet and found a perfect match, the first such detection in New Zealand. The gang were gaoled. Other crudely improvised means of identification were in use when Dinnie arrived. The new Commissioner sought to professionalise such procedures, and systematise the use of several recent developments in forensic science - most particularly, to maximise the benefits from the fingerprint system of identification (‘dactyloscopy’) recently introduced to the colony.
It had been known for a very long time that each individual’s fingerprints were unique, and could therefore be used for identification purposes. The problem for state authorities had been to find a classification system able to systematise the detection of offenders. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Sir William Herschel, Dr Henry Faulds, Sir William Gallon and others had been developing such identification systems. The most advanced, Gallon’s, was complicated and cumbersome, and had no simple method of primary classification. Gallon collaborated with Herschel, and after a Home Office enquiry in 1893 the result was adopted by ‘The Met’ in 1895, but only as a complement to the clumsy and expensive anthropometric (Bertillon) system of identification, which relied upon precise body measurements and which, even if valid, could not pinpoint the presence of criminals at the scene of a crime.
Edward R Henry, following experimentation when he was an official and later Inspector-General of Police in Lower Bengal, had long been
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devising a better system. His finalised classification system comprised three major divisions (loops, whorls and arches), together with a composite pattern and many sub-categories, and it was to become the standard system around the world. It eventually became clear that Henry’s scheme could supersede the body measurement system altogether. It was adopted as the sole identification device for all of British India in 1897, soon after Argentina became the first country to base its police identification system on fingerprints alone. This boosted Henry’s career, and he was appointed Assistant Commissioner in charge of the London Metropolitan Police Criminal Intelligence Department in 1901. Because of an infamous case of mistaken identity which had put Adolf Beck wrongly behind bars for years, Henry had a mandate to replace all existing identification procedures with his own system.
Henry quickly established the Central Finger Print Bureau and the Criminal Record Office. He had just become Commissioner of Police at the time of Dinnie’s appointment to head the New Zealand Police. In 1903 the system was resulting in 140 identifications per month at New Scotland Yard (compared with 462 Bertillon identifications in the five years before 1900; the Bertillon system had been dropped altogether in 1902), and fingerprinting was introduced to British Guiana. The Henry system’s classical manual. The Classification and Use of Finger Prints, was used worldwide. Normally the base files were established by the fingerprinting of offenders. A reoffender leaving fingerprint evidence could then be identified with certainty. 2
At the time of Dinnie’s arrival, fingerprinting was a new science in Australasia. After a visit by a New South Wales prisons official to England, that state introduced the Henry identification system for its gaol inmates in 1902-3, followed quickly by Western Australia and then by a nationwide system. Growing Australian interest in the system was echoed in New Zealand after a favourable report by Timaru’s Detective Garrett FitzGerald, who had travelled to Britain while on leave recovering from injuries in 1902, studied fingerprinting at New Scotland Yard, and brought back sample equipment which he showed Tunbridge on his arrival in Wellington.
Minister of Justice McGowan asked Tunbridge for a report, but the Commissioner had always had a blind spot about fingerprint detection and remained sceptical. Faulds, the first scientist to recognise the importance of finding fingerprints at the scene of a crime, had worked with Tunbridge in London but failed to persuade him of the value of dactyloscopy. Hume, still head of the prisons system, proved to be more amenable to the idea, seeing the fingerprinting of inmates as a way of identifying recidivists who gave false names. McGowan therefore decided to introduce fingerprinting into New Zealand prisons. In March 1903, R Lascelles Ward was appointed by the Prisons Branch of Justice to set up the system, which was to be modelled on that of New South Wales in order to facilitate trans-Tasman cooperation. 3
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Ward drew up a comprehensive scheme which was embodied in instructions by Hume to all officers in charge of prisoners. Impressions were to be taken on form IFPB from all prisoners and these, together with the subject’s criminal history, were to be forwarded to the officer in charge of the Finger Print Bureau in Wellington. If prisoners objected, they were to be told that fingerprinting was ‘merely a substitute for photography’. Since all prisoners in police custody were included in the system, police were involved from the beginning. Constables in charge of police gaols with no current prisoners were to practise the art of fingerprinting on themselves. Akaroa’s Police Gaoler became so skilled that Ward commented that ‘I wish you had the handling of more prisoners’. Some police gaolers - Timaru’s, for example - who were ‘fully occupied’ requested exemption from having to fingerprint every drunk and minor offender who came their way. Could they fingerprint only criminals who were important enough to be photographed? Ward refused the request because of the importance of comprehensive coverage. 4
This goal was regarded as over-ambitious, and Hume had to tell Ward that ‘your suggestions are somewhat ahead of the times. The Minister has decided that, for the present, only finger prints of those undergoing sentences are to be taken. Doubtless your suggestions may be carried out later on.’ All the same, even Tunbridge soon appreciated the potential of the scheme. He agreed that 27 police stations should experimentally fingerprint all those charged with ‘serious offences’. It was quickly clear that the system would be needed to improve detection and identification techniques. On 28 April 1903 all police in the colony were notified by circular of the methods of print-taking, and all recruits passing through the Depot were to be instructed as well. On-the-job learning was not just confined to urban police, for country police were from time to time to be called into the city to master the techniques. In each area an ‘intelligent’ policeman (usually a detective or a plain-clothes constable) was detailed to take charge of fingerprinting operations. 5
Tunbridge was concerned that there was ‘no law empowering the Police to force persons in custody to have their finger prints taken’. Most arrestees would, no doubt, be persuaded through ignorance of their rights, but no force could be used against those who refused. The law on this matter was sometimes treated cursorily. When Ward reprimanded the Wairoa constable for the poor quality of the fingerprints sent in, the man noted that his prisoners had resisted and he had to ‘hold their hand and fingers down on each occasion.’ Tunbridge was uneasy about the implications of such actions for the image of the police, but Ward forged ahead with infectious enthusiasm. 6
The Bureau chief needed great energy to overcome the difficulties of getting the system running: inadequate headquarters facilities, the careless mixing up of fingerprints, mistakes (in nine out of 21 sets of fingerprints in the case of the Oamaru Gaoler), a lack of enthusiasm amongst senior uniformed police. But by 30 June 1903 the Bureau had received 498 sets.
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and efficiency was improving. Some policemen’s wives who acted as gaol matrons were learning the technique. When Dinnie arrived in New Zealand he found a system that was operating fairly smoothly in terms of placing offenders’ prints in a classification system, but was as yet of very limited use as a system of identification and detection.
Dinnie needed no persuading as to the efficacy of fingerprinting as an integral tool of policing, not just an adjunct located in the prison system. Towards the end of his New Scotland Yard career he had, under Henry, organised new comprehensive systems of criminal registration. At one glance, he held, police should be able to take in all a criminal’s relevant details: photograph, handwriting specimen, reports, associates, operating habits and fingerprints. 7 The fingerprint system played a major part in this registration scheme. Even before he reached New Zealand he had decided that police should take over fingerprinting operations and registrations, and he had secured permission for this within days of arriving, McGowan having had problems with Ward.
The transfer from the Prisons Branch to the control of the Commissioner of Police occurred on 8 July 1903, and the next day Ward’s Finger Print Bureau became officially known as the Police Finger Print Branch (although it remained popularly known as ‘the Bureau’ for a long time), located at police headquarters in Wellington. Dinnie quickly reorganised ‘something like a finger-print system’ into a workable system, including by replacing the storage cabinets with a more suitable set-up. All fingerprint correspondence was to be sent to the Branch via the Commissioner’s Office. By August the Branch was said to have a more or less complete record of the colony’s ‘habitual tricks’, and soon fingerprints and accompanying details were being sent across the Tasman. By 7 October a New Scotland Yard-style system had superseded the more narrowly focused Bureau system, and on that date a comprehensive new set of instructions was issued. The prison administration (including staff at Police Gaols) would still secure the fingerprints of men taken into custody, while the police would focus on investigative work which made use of the fingerprint files at headquarters. In particular they would search for fingerprints at the scenes of crimes, a method which had ‘occasionally been the means of identifying criminals and proving their guilt.’ The Branch would collate supplementary material, including photographs, with the fingerprint records; there would be an integrated identification system as at New Scotland Yard. 8
The Branch monitored developments in Australia, and liaised with the state police authorities. Dinnie instructed Ward in November 1903 that photographs and other details of criminals received from Australia were to be circularised to major New Zealand stations. Early in 1904 Ward persuaded Dinnie that details of New Zealand criminals ‘known all about’ should be sent to each Australian state monthly, while those about whom little was known but who might have an Australian connection should be inquired about separately. Meanwhile the Finger Print Branch
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worked on perfecting its ‘New Zealand Habitual Criminal Register’, for example by transcribing information from the penal records of discharged prisoners before these were filed away in Wellington. Ward was alert to deceptions, such as prisoners transposing finger impressions - ‘a not uncommon device on the part of old convicts for throwing out the F.R Classification’. 9
Before leaving the United Kingdom, Walter Dinnie had obtained ‘special permission’ to put his son, Edmund (Ted) W Dinnie, through an intensive fingerprint course at New Scotland Yard. Two days before the absorption of the Bureau into the Commissioner’s Office, he was taken on as a civilian ‘Finger Print Expert’ under Ward. Apparent differences in perception between the Dinnies on the one hand, and Ward on the other, led to the latter’s departure in 1904. Ward was still perceived as being too preoccupied with recording prints, rather than using them to apprehend offenders. Detective FitzGerald was offered the control of the Branch, but his health was not up to it (eventually he had to resign from the Force for this reason). Edward Bade, a policeman and photographer who had studied fingerprinting in London in 1903 on a visit to interview a witness in a murder case, also turned down the position.
The second-in-command, Dinnie junior, was then placed in charge of the Branch, gaining the title of Finger-print Expert and Photographer from 1 October 1906. He was to dominate New Zealand’s fingerprint industry until his retirement in 1947, famed throughout the colony as the result of various cases in which he was touted as the only Australasian fingerprint expert who had trained with London’s Metropolitan Police. He was regarded at New Scotland Yard as ‘an officer of considerable ability’. The early Finger Print Branch was small. The leading sworn police official in it, Dinnie’s deputy, was Arthur G Quartermain. A prison warder recruited on 1 April 1903 because of his extensive knowledge of prisoners, Quartermain travelled the colony training police in identification techniques. He was made an Acting Detective (as well as Assistant in the Branch) on 1 September 1905; his powers of arrest and custody were often required, despite his lack of ordinary police training. In 1904, for example, he travelled to New South Wales to bring back a burglar who had escaped from Dunedin Gaol and had been arrested after the New Zealand police identification authorities were contacted by suspicious police in Yass. 10
Commissioner Dinnie realised that fingerprinting was a powerful public relations weapon as well as a significant detection aid. The public were fascinated by it, and devoured numerous newspaper and magazine articles about the 1024 primary combinations of the four basic fingerprint patterns; about the chance of two identical sets of prints being less than 1 in 64,000 million; about famous overseas ‘catches’ based on fingerprint evidence. But the fascination was laced with scepticism, including among many policemen. E W Dinnie had to wire to Napier’s Inspector Macdonell; ‘Finger prints cannot fail in identifying the owner of them’. The struggle
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for acceptance of the validity of the system was intense in its early days. The populist New Zealand Truth and other journals of its ilk habitually claimed that the fingerprint experts’ magic lantern shows revealed the Branch to be peopled by fakirs and palmists, and that any self-respecting burglar would wear gloves anyway. A great deal of publicity was given to a man who had ‘proved’ that he was in the army when he had allegedly earlier been convicted and fingerprinted - until the Police Force proved that he had stolen the army papers in question. 11
The aura of science, especially as manifested in the fingerprint system, was - like elsewhere in the western world - an important part of the imagery of police professionalism. Commissioner Dinnie realised that the full acceptance of fingerprinting (and by extension of other technological innovations) would depend on a continuing series of successful identifications. Successes were being recorded very early in the life of the Branch. In February 1904 a newspaper reported that the New South Wales authorities had, within seconds of receipt of 14 sets of fingerprints from New Zealand, identified their owners. Photographs were then forwarded across the Tasman as a means of double-checking. The Wellington-based fingerprint experts went anywhere in the colony to examine crime scenes for clues, and to testify in important cases. In March 1904 a Hawke’s Bay newspaper recorded how - in a typical case - a man charged locally with theft was suspected of being the offender convicted of seven similar charges the previous year at Wanganui. E W Dinnie travelled there with impressions of the Wanganui offender’s fingerprints, and pronounced there to be no ‘shadow of doubt’ that it was the same man who was up again in court. The Crown Prosecutor, noting that scientists believed the system to be infallible, urged that the existence of the Criminal Register be publicised widely. 12
Throughout 1904 E W Dinnie, still working closely with the prisons administration, refined the fingerprint and associated record-keeping systems, particularly the photographic files. More elaborate forms were introduced that April, and all prisoners in gaol were re-fingerprinted on them. All reoffenders who had been previously fingerprinted had to have their impressions taken again. That month, too, the Police Gazette for the first time published the photograph of a wanted man - John McKenzie (real name James Ellis, a convicted rapist), who was wanted for the murder of his former employer, scrub-cutting contractor Leonard Collinson, at Te Awaite Station. The Police Gazette would increasingly make use of photography from now on. From October 1904 it was a police responsibility to photograph prisoners, and ‘mug-shot’ photographs were soon ordered to be taken both in profile and full-facial. A register of policemen who owned cameras and/or were acquainted with photography was drawn up. In areas where there was no suitable policeman, ‘tradesmen’ photographers were hired for the purpose. 13
The policemen-photographers were paid for each photograph, and those in charge of photography in the three main centres other than
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Wellington were compensated by being exempted from night duty (in the capital, the Finger Print Branch carried out this task). The circularising of photographs to police stations was streamlined in 1906, and from October 1908 this was replaced as a system of general notification by publication in the Police Gazette of pages of photographs of discharged prisoners and ‘notorious criminals’ from overseas who might visit New Zealand. These were paginated separately from the ordinary Police Gazette so that they could be bound together and filed, and were indexed at halfyearly intervals. Any long-term prisoners thought likely to escape were, at the direction of the district Inspector, photographed at the beginning of their sentences and the photographs sent to the Finger Print Branch. The visual identification measures set up in the first five years of the system’s operation did not need to be replaced until after the First World War. 14
Steady identifications of arrestees or suspects on the basis of preexisting photographs and/or fingerprint records marked good progress. When a person whose antecedents were not known to the local police was in custody charged with an indictable offence, the police would ask for a week’s remand in order to have his or her prints taken and forwarded to the Branch. If unknown there, they could be sent to Australia or to any other likely country. By 31 March 1904, ‘ll7 criminals who would otherwise have escaped as first offenders were by means of their fingerprints identified as previously convicted persons’. This included three identifications at New Scotland Yard and 10 in Australia.
But what was really needed to instil confidence in the identification system was a dramatic breakthrough: the conviction of a person solely on the basis of fingerprint evidence. This had not happened anywhere in the world, so far as was known, when in May 1905 John Clancy was convicted in Wellington for breaking and entering on the strength of a single finger impression found on a broken piece of window glass. This exactly matched his fingerprint as recorded in Auckland Gaol a few months before. His defence lawyer, Thomas Wilford, was later to become Minister in charge of Police. The case was heard before Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout, who sentenced Clancy to three years’ hard labour. The Commissioner used this example to proselytise amongst police who remained sceptical. He circularised a poster to all stations headed ‘lmportant Conviction Demonstrating the Value of the Finger-Print System of Identification’. Meanwhile, all major police stations in the country had been visited by a fingerprint expert who stressed the importance of scene-of-crime searches for prints. During the 1905-6 year, as a result, ‘35 finger-marked articles were submitted to the branch for identification’. 15
Acceptance of the system spread greatly thanks to a fingerprinting display at the New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch in 1906-7, Commissioner Dinnie having turned down the organisers’ original request for a display of the anthropometric system of identification. With the Dinnie family’s concentration on fingerprinting techniques. New
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Zealand s expertise at fingerprint identification became well known in international policing circles. When a detective from the colony visited New Scotland Yard in 1907, he heard Commissioner Dinnie spoken highly of in this regard. Under the Commissioner, it was said, there had been ‘effected notable improvements in the finger-print system of prison record and identification, and it is officially claimed that, in consequence of his elaboration of the system, New Zealand is in the forefront in the development of this service’. Furthermore, it was said, ‘every new achievement to cope with criminology is incorporated by him into New Zealand methods.’ In 1908 the authorities in Simla asked the Force for criminal records on any ‘thieves, sharpers and undesirables’ who might be on their way to India. By then, with all prisoners charged with indictable offences being fingerprinted, there was a base of over 6000 sets of prints in Wellington, and these could be correlated to previous convictions and to photographs. In that year, E W Dinnie established a police museum next to the photographic darkroom, using it - inter alia - as a specialist training aid for advanced scientific detection techniques. 16
The Finger Print Branch won such renown that there was jealousy even inside New Zealand detective ranks. At the 1909 Royal Commission into policing, Dunedin’s Chief Detective Patrick Herbert alleged that Quartermain’s pay was unfairly high, given that he had no experience of ordinary detective work and was not an ‘expert’ at all. Fingerprints were no more than ‘a very valuable adjunct’ to detection, not the be-all and end-all of it, and yet resources were poured into the Branch rather than into - say - an indexing system for photographs at district offices. ‘lt would appear that the success of the finger-print department is of far more importance to the Commissioner than the success of the detective department’. The Royal Commissioner was not happy about Quartermain’s recent ‘promotion’ to detective after only six years’ service, but praised the efficiency of the Branch - while recording that it was ‘a matter for regret’ and subversive of ‘true discipline’ that such an important position as head of the Branch should be held by the Commissioner’s son. 17
By March 1910 there were 10,905 fingerprint impressions in the New Zealand Police Force collection, including prints from some convicted persons in Australia and England. During 1910, 148 offenders were identified by fingerprints taken because of previous convictions. During the controversial trial of Joseph Pawelka for the murder of a policeman in 1910, the defence counsel attempted to dismiss the evidence of fingerprint experts. The judge decreed that fingerprinting was an exact science, and although in the absence of such evidence a murder conviction was not obtained, a very long sentence on other charges was secured on the basis of fingerprints. In 1911, a man gaoled for three months in Auckland for disorderly conduct was discovered through fingerprinting to be the suspect in a Foxton murder case some five years before. That August, the Commissioner approved a new public education campaign about the ‘science’, and headquarters staff spoke to many audiences.
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Facts and figures flew freely: for example, the chances of duplication were one in 30 billion when 15 points of resemblance had been found between two sets of prints. Judging by the newspaper publicity, most people were by now convinced. 18
There remained some doubts, fuelled by the occasional scare story - in 1909, for example, a claim that two South African men had been found to have identical prints was used to refute fingerprint evidence given in Sydney. Quartermain and other experts publicly derided the report, and when Commissioner Dinnie enquired of the Cape police he found - as expected - that the prints had actually been taken from the same man. From time to time, however, clever defences led to acquittals of those clearly identified by fingerprint evidence. Even the New South Wales Chief Justice (with the approval of the Dominion) was to claim in 1909 that fingerprint evidence alone was dubious because fingerprint uniqueness was not a scientifically proven fact. The Chief Justice of Victoria claimed in 1912 that a case before him which relied solely on fingerprint evidence should have been withdrawn because nature cared nothing for individuals, only types. When the Crown Prosecutor stated that a ‘black’ had been hanged on the basis of fingerprint evidence in the United States, he responded that it was ‘easy to hang a negro in America’. His remarks would be quoted for years, even though he was overruled by two colleagues. Prominent defence lawyer A C Hanlon was still claiming in 1939 that there were ‘possibilities of error’ in fingerprint identifications. By then the doubters were conspicuous only because they were a tiny minority. 19
Dinnie’s scientific and administrative reforms certainly boosted the police image in public eyes. But, once again, a very public and prolonged scandal detracted from achievements. From the outset the Commissioner had not been happy with the level of supervision of the rank and file, and in 1904 he had asked his Inspectors for suggestions for improvement. In March 1905 the police hierarchy discovered that Dunedin constables had been engaging in serious property crimes, most recently breaking into Dunedin’s DIC warehouse on the evening of 8 March. Before long, four constables were charged with various crimes. Such offences, Crown Prosecutor J F M Fraser stated, were more serious when committed by police than when civilians were the culprits. ‘lt was no exaggeration to say that the whole superstructure of the administration of the colony finally rested on the Police Force’. A lesson would have to be taught to those who brought into question the New Zealand police’s reputation as one of the least corrupt in the world.
The situation was not entirely clear-cut. In particular, the one-armed nightwatchman M Reddington, who had reported the constables, seemed far from trustworthy. There were continuing suspicions that other policemen were involved, and investigating detectives felt that an even wider circle of culprits might have cooperated with corrupt policemen in
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committing nocturnal crimes. The enquiries revealed other transgressions by the region’s police. The Port Chalmers constable admitted receiving a gold umbrella and other gifts from the wife of the publican at Middlemarch, at whose hotel he had stayed when on relieving duty. The woman’s visits and gifts suggested to the Commissioner that ‘immorality’ was afoot; in addition, he was suspected of cohabiting with another woman, he was in debt, and his work was not up to standard. Dinnie decided that he should be dismissed. Another constable could not account satisfactorily for property found in his possession, and had what Dinnie considered a ‘very suspicious’ relationship with his landlady; he was asked to resign, and dismissed when he refused to do so.
But the investigations centred on the four men brought to charge for the warehouse break-in, and were soon headed by Commissioner Dinnie, who travelled to Dunedin for the purpose. He interviewed all city and suburban staff, including the accused men on the understanding that any extra information gained from them would not be used until after their trials ended. The resulting report to the Minister, McGowan, found essentially that Dunedin’s relative tranquillity had led to slackness of discipline. This had been a common theme of commentators on previous police scandals in New Zealand, including the recent Nelson one. The report was a classic exposition of what later became known by scholars of policing as the ‘rotten apple in the barrel’ theory of police corruption. One ‘bad’ constable would ‘infect’ others around him if discipline was insufficiently tight and immediate steps were not taken to remove him.
The ‘rotten apple’ in this case was said to be Thomas Moses, a constable of less than a year’s service who had in turn ‘infected’ three colleagues of hitherto good character. That this had gone undetected could be seen in the final analysis as a consequence of the now prevalent benign/hegemonic mode of policing. The harsh modes of discipline over the public of the days of ‘occupation policing’, modes which had been mirrored in internal police discipline, had long since gone. In a sense, benign policing required greater vigilance by superior officers, to compensate for the absence of severe internal discipline. This had not been fully achieved over the Hume years, and now the new reform measures - tighter recruiting standards, a new officer echelon imbued with the ideals of the restructuring, and so forth - had proven to be harder to implement than Tunbridge, Dinnie or the government had imagined. 20
None of this was to say that benign policing was not the appropriate method for the current stage of New Zealand’s development. Dinnie was convinced that it was essential, and this attitude pervaded all his decisions - for example, his approach to transfers. Although it remained the rule ‘not to send Constables to localities where their relatives reside’, the Commissioner felt that ‘if a Constable performs his duties efficiently it is my experience that the longer he remains in one district the better, as the knowledge he obtains enables him to more efficiently perform his duties.’ Many of his decisions to transfer were punishments for ‘very unsatisfactory
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conduct’. The problem was, at a time when the condign elements of control were decreasing both inside and outside the Force, how to proactively prevent untoward conduct - or at very least ‘early identify’ the rotten apple in the barrel. A study of the Dunedin affair might provide answers. 21
Dinnie’s report to McGowan concluded that Moses had begun pilfering soon after joining the Force on 1 May 1904, and that he had persuaded his three co-offenders to commit a string of larcenies. It was now that the Commissioner discovered for the first time that the move towards the hegemonic mode of control had led inadvertently to a slackness of internal control by NCOs, in Dunedin at least. Sergeants - ‘the backbone of the Service’ - had let discipline slip, apparently under the impression that less strict controls on police meant that lesser standards of adherence to the rules were permissible, or that at the very least their surveillance of their men could lessen. They were ‘greatly to blame’ for the Dunedin scandal ‘in not paying more surprise visits ... during the night’; their timings had become systematised, and the men had accordingly become sloppy in their work habits. The Commissioner’s annual report in 1905 noted that ‘a number of the Sergeants serving are too old and inactive to efficiently supervise the men under them’.
Dunedin’s Inspector and Sub-Inspector were not ‘exempt from blame’ in the Moses scandal: ‘strict discipline and supervision has not been maintained, otherwise this state of affairs could not have existed so long’. A secret informant, a respectable businessman, had told Dinnie that Inspector O’Brien consorted with prostitutes and other of the city’s ‘lowest characters’, including the rat-catcher. He had pointed to a network of ‘bad apples’ at significant levels of the hierarchy: Chief Detective Herbert was allegedly a corrupt, drunken, gambling and immoral man who had driven his wife to prostitution; Detective John Cooney was said to be no better; Dunedin’s two commissioned officers allegedly used junior constables to frame respectable citizens. Dinnie did not pursue such allegations against individuals, but he believed that the informant’s assessments of the policemen involved in the scandal had ‘a great deal of truth’ to them.
Dinnie concluded that the system in Dunedin had broken down over time; thefts, he noted, had begun before O’Brien’s arrival, in Pardy’s day. There had been slackness in the vetting of applicants for the Force. Moses had been an inmate of Burnham Industrial School, and had two previous convictions, at the age of 13 for theft and at 18 for shopbreaking (when he had been arrested by none other than the then Detective O’Brien). Yet the Waimate police, when investigating his character in 1903, had conducted such a ‘slip-shod’ search that they had failed to discover these matters, even though they were widely known locally. Dinnie attempted to reduce the impact of such findings by noting that the system of enquiry had since become far more thorough. It was quite wrong for the public to conclude that there were numbers of ‘criminals
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masquerading in policemen’s uniforms’. But the system had to be tightened.
The government agreed. ‘Matter most serious and must be firmly dealt with’, McGowan minuted on Dinnie’s report. Pending the requisite tightening of discipline, the public must at least be reassured by the removal of the identified rotten apples. When Moses and James McDonald were charged on 16 March with breaking and entering the DIG warehouse, and receiving, the press were relatively protective of the police: people should not generalise on the basis of a mere couple of offenders. But then rumours spread, three more constables were suspended from duty, and two of them (Oliver Osborne and Edward Quill) were charged. In the event, when the cases came before the courts the Crown could not prove the breaking and entering and theft charges.
In the case of minor offender Quill the jury refused to convict despite a direction from the judge, but he was dismissed from the Force along with the other three. This was ‘precious close to a miscarriage of justice’, some commentators felt. The other minor offender, Osborne, had ‘practically made a full confession of guilt’ on a receiving charge, but the jury recommended mercy. However the judge characterised receiving as a more serious offence than stealing, since it encouraged another to break the law. In June Osborne received three years’ gaol, McDonald four years and Moses (given his previous record and that he was the alleged ‘planner and instigator’) five years, all for receiving. 22
Meanwhile the Commissioner could get on with improving police procedures; ‘proper police protection’ would be given to Dunedin people, he pledged, and that would, T trust, restore their confidence and support’. It was not to be that easy. ‘Public confidence in the force was rudely shaken by the revelations connected with the robberies’, so much so that ex-policeman Mallard and others argued that only a Royal Commission could ‘restore public confidence. The whole scandal discloses a tale of tangled tragedy and disorganised inefficiency’. Moreover, the court cases had not been sufficient to allay public fears; the full story behind the Dunedin burglaries had to be exposed before matters could be resolved and confidence restored. ‘The force has experienced a decadence since Commissioner Tunbridge left’, a Southland commentator claimed. Any reduction in the ‘extraordinary degree of confidence which must necessarily be reposed in the guardians of the law’ would encourage sizeable numbers of people to once again move outside the law, it was believed. Policing would then have to revert, at least partially, to its expensive pre-1886 methods.
Under pressure to convince the public that the rotten apples had all been removed, Dinnie had taken the investigation of the Dunedin police further. He had authorised an in-depth examination of Reddington’s activities and network of police contacts, and by early July more constables had been told that they would be sacked if they did not resign. Dinnie’s measures to restore ‘proper police protection’ to Dunedin included an
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assurance that all men ‘in any way implicated’ in untoward activities would be ‘peremptorily dismissed from the service’. The enforced resignees were given no chance to defend themselves. This provoked considerable civil libertarian criticism over the next year or so, particularly when ex-constable Alexander Juriss and others petitioned parliament for redress, and when one lost his new job in a mental hospital when his police antecedents were discovered and had to go overseas to seek work. McGowan was unrepentant: the Force must be ‘kept above suspicion’, and if the administration was ‘morally certain’ of guilt but could not prove it, the greater good demanded the removal of the alleged culprit.
Dinnie’s investigations confirmed many suspicions that the original depiction of Moses as the contaminant apple was far from the truth. He could not have been responsible for ‘the demoralisation of the others concerned, as they were engaged in such larcenies some time before Moses entered the service, and induced him to join them’. Dinnie ordered a close investigation of the Dunedin beat system, including interviews with the ex-policemen now gaoled in Dunedin. He found a wealth of the usual constables’ folklore about ‘the easiest way to work the Beats’, and heard from McDonald of an alleged network of police corruption throughout the colony, but concluded that the problem was in fact confined to the Dunedin district. 23
Dinnie felt that he could restore the policing of Dunedin to a standard which would satisfy the public by reintroducing close and conscientious supervision of the men. But - against his wishes - the government had concluded both that a public purging was required to restore confidence and that a commission of enquiry would best identify and secure any necessary structural and disciplinary reforms. The 1898 Commission had shown that the drawbacks of such a situation, particularly a shortterm loss of public confidence in the police, could be more than compensated for by the results. The Under-Secretary for Justice, Frank Waldegrave, drafted the terms of reference for the new Royal Commission: the circumstances of Moses’ enrolment; whether administrative laxity was a factor in the Dunedin case; the quality of the general system of control and supervision, down to the level of sergeant, in the Force.
The Commissioners (Christchurch Stipendiary Magistrate H W Bishop in the chair, and one of the 1898 Commissioners, Public Trustee J W Poynton) felt that since the Dunedin events had ‘somewhat shaken public confidence in the police throughout the colony’ they should range far in their enquiries, both geographically (as far as Auckland) and conceptually. The most sensational claims made to the Commission when it sat that July and August were by the gaoled former constables, whose lurid accounts now entered the public domain. Headlines such as ‘Robberies Going on Elsewhere’ and ‘Sensational Statements by Prisoners’ dominated the newspapers. Mallard and other critics dissected the shortcomings of the Police as they emerged. That the situation in Dunedin showed ‘disorganised discipline’ was one of the kinder comments.
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Internecine police disputes were once again exposed for all to see. The Dunedin commissioned officers denied the claim of a sergeant that he had notified them of transgressions by their staff. Another sergeant told the enquiry that he had, when in Dunedin, explained unavailingly that the beats were too large for proper supervision and that discipline was suffering. The enquiry threatened to turn into another 1898 Royal Commission, as tales were told of police inefficiency and worse being far from confined to Otago. An Auckland journalist told the Commission that even in his city, controlled by the harsh Inspector Cullen, police frequented pubs in uniform, went onto their beats drunk, and shirked their duty. Dinnie himself criticised the alleged laxity of O’Brien and his Sub-Inspector, Henry Green, while Cullen and Auckland’s Sub-Inspector Black attacked each other. Commentators now said openly that by focusing the enquiry on Dunedin, the authorities were creating scapegoats for a more widespread malaise in the Force. 24
Thomas Griffith told the Commission that when he had served in Dunedin the beats were so ‘vast’ and ‘unworkable’ that he and other sergeants had no choice but to make ‘appointments’ with men on the outer city beats. Other NCOs denied making such specific arrangements, but their evidence showed a ‘regularity’ of visits to the men which was certainly in violation of both the ethos of beat supervision and formal instructions. As Bishop pointed out, ‘appointments’ and ‘regularity of visits’ amounted to more or less the same thing. Evidence from other centres suggested that there was nothing generally wrong with the principle of beat supervision: irregular visits ensured that constables remained alert. But some of the beats in these centres were also too large. Sergeant Alexander Cruickshank of Wellington noted that with 14 large beats the men could make ‘a very good guess’ as to when he would visit. But it was clear that extreme laxity, and corruption amongst constables, was confined to Dunedin. 25
The Royal Commission’s report, submitted on 19 August and released on 22 September 1905, contained little that was unexpected. The Commissioners found some problems with both the system and its operational practice. It was a foregone conclusion that there would be a finding that ‘extreme laxity of control and supervision’ had allowed the Dunedin constables to commit criminal offences. The sergeants’ failure to make sufficient surprise visits, despite the reminders of their superiors, had left constables confident of being on their own for up to three hours at a time at night. ‘There can be no doubt whatever that the sergeants who have been doing duty in Dunedin for a considerable time past have not exercised proper control and supervision over the men under them, even after making every allowance for local difficulties.’ The Commissioners noted that ‘each sergeant in turn seems to have been drawn into’ the ‘lax system’ which had grown up over the years. But since there were always some sergeants who might ‘shirk their duties’, they in turn had needed
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better supervision by Sub-Inspector Green and - especially - Inspector O’Brien. The latter had done nothing to correct the problems that had been identified - that the constables knew approximately or even exactly when they would be visited, and that the beats he himself had laid out were too unwieldy to be properly supervised. These were the ‘local difficulties’ referred to by the Commission. The Commissioners’ recommendation that both be transferred was too mild for some commentators.
But although the commissioned officers had clearly been lax, in one sense they were scapegoats. There were now clearly too few constables available to carry out properly the beat system desired by the authorities. Smaller, more manageable beats would require more personnel, and no one was suggesting redeployment from the countryside. In the final analysis, the politicians who could have provided the funding for the necessary extra police were at fault. Perhaps this was why O’Brien successfully opposed his transfer. The Inspector had appealed on grounds of natural justice, arguing that the Commission’s recommendations on his career were based on closing statements to the Commission by Dinnie in Wellington, during which he and Green had not been present to defend themselves. This was a point Bishop himself later more or less acknowledged; the situation was murky enough for the government to leave the matter alone.
Perhaps the Commissioner had to take some of the blame, given his fairly unhurried response to a problem he had identified early on. Dinnie had told the Royal Commission that after his initial tours of duty he had felt the need to tighten the sergeants’ supervision over the men and the men’s supervision over the rapidly growing urban populace. In July 1904 he had asked Inspectors for suggestions for improvements, which had proved to be ‘not altogether to my liking’. Subsequently he had worked on a proposal for the consideration of the Minister of Justice. He had revised these draft recommendations after enquiring into the Dunedin scandal, and again after hearing evidence to the Commission. He focused partly on physical resources: each of the four cities required an extra sergeant (to supervise the night beats) and six more constables ‘to provide for the necessary reduction in the size of beats’. The Commission made this suggestion its own, noting that the cost would be ‘trifling’ and that in any case New Zealand had the cheapest force in Australasia. Many commentators said that the proposed increases were far too small to make much difference.
Central to Dinnie’s proposals for the reform of city policing was his view that the rank of Sub-Inspector should be abolished. Their tasks were ‘more onerous, exacting, and of more importance than those accruing to inspectors in charge of outer districts’. The districts would be supervised by a Superintendent at each of the four main centres. An Inspector reporting to this officer would control the city and its suburbs, his job including surprise visits to the men and significant prosecutions. Four
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Station Sergeants would replace the Sub-Inspectorate; on an extra allowance of Is 6d per day, they would assist the Inspectors and conduct ordinary prosecutions.
The Commission in effect endorsed these general principles, but not the details or nomenclature. They found that the Inspectors, and particularly the Sub-Inspectors, had too much ‘unimportant clerical work’, which impinged on their supervisory functions. An ‘additional officer’ at NCO level should be appointed to each of the four cities to assist in exercising authority over all sergeants and constables. At the end of the year the government announced its response to these recommended organisational changes. From 1 October, retrospectively, the Inspectors in the four centres were elevated to the rank of City Inspector. Four Station Sergeants would take up much of the office and court work presently performed by the Sub-Inspectors, enabling the latter to devote most of their time to the supervision of sergeants and constables on street duty. These appointments to ‘assist’ the Sub-Inspectors were made in 1906.
As for restoring public confidence in the police, Dunedin’s Crown Prosecutor had used surgical imagery: there was a need ‘to adopt the methods of the skilled surgeon, treating a case of cancer, and using the knife unsparingly until every trace of the disease is eradicated.’ The Commission stressed that this had now been done in that city: no men remained in the Force who had been implicated in the scandal, however slightly. It recommended that another Sub-Inspector besides Green be transferred: Patrick Black, because of his inability to get on with Inspector Cullen, Because Black’s work had been approved of by the Commission, he was sent to Dunedin, while the relatively disgraced Green was posted to the lesser centre of Timaru. Here he was later passed over for promotion in favour of his junior, John Dwyer. Black was replaced in Auckland by Douglass Gordon, promoted from sergeant to Sub-Inspector because of his much-praised work as instructor at the Mount Cook Training Depot. When the ‘most capable and painstaking’ Gordon died a few years later, Cullen gave him rare praise and pronounced his death to be ‘a great loss to the Department’.
The Commission’s most significant findings related to recruiting procedures. Dinnie had noted that these had recently been tightened, and the Commissioners implicitly endorsed these changes and rejected allegations that political influence had led to poor or criminal appointments. However, further changes were needed. In particular, each applicant should be required to make a statutory declaration that he had never been convicted, or to list his convictions. Fear of indictment for perjury, they felt, would help prevent people like Moses slipping through the vetting process. However soothing the Commission was about the constables in general, there was considerable public comment to the effect that ‘we are afraid that the general discipline of the force is not good and that many of the men are not sufficiently impressed with the gravity of their trust’, and some commentators felt that recruiting methods were still inadequate. In
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particular, those campaigning for the reform of the civil service and attempting to end Liberal government patronage in appointments to state positions did not accept the Commission’s basic contention that influence was not a factor in recruiting to and/or standards in the Force. 26
But by and large, however, the response to the Commission’s findings, and to the implementation of its recommendations, was favourable. Discipline in Dunedin improved enormously. Over 60 years later an exconstable recalled how, on being sent to Dunedin in 1910, he was told to cold-shoulder nightwatchman Reddington, believed to have been the mastermind behind the thefts. He found a ‘very strict’ system of supervision of the beat men, with many random visits by the NCOs. Senior police were to praise both the quality of the majority of the men and their discipline over the next few years. Moreover, commentators noted that despite its criticisms, the Commission was in general terms supportive of Dinnie. It had appreciated, for example, that he was attempting a general raising of standards, particularly among NCOs. The Commission had been told of an NCO who was ‘the laughing stock of the public of Dunedin’, and said by the men to be ‘incapable and ignorant’. As A J Mitchell said in 1905, ‘the moulding of the constable’ was in the sergeants’ hands; ‘without good sergeants’, Sub-Inspector O’Donovan agreed, ‘the discipline of the Police Force would soon fall to pieces’. Most observers felt that Dinnie was headed in the right direction on this issue, even if tardy on others.
One by one - beginning well before the 1905 inquiry - old, inefficient and perhaps corrupt NCOs were being either brought to heel or got rid of and replaced by younger and better men, especially in the cities. The level and quality of supervision was rising accordingly, although the process could be a slow one. One case study will suffice. William Ramsay had joined the Force in its founding year, 1886, and despite being under a cloud since 1897 and trying to protect Inspector Emerson during the 1898 Commission, had been promoted to sergeant. The 1897 problem had not been a minor one. Ramsay had been drinking with a group of his Wairoa friends who were farewelling 19 year old William Lindegreen. The next morning the youth, an excellent swimmer, was found dead in the river. Ramsay ‘investigated’ and stated that the drowning had been a suicide; Lindegreen had been embezzling money from his employer, and this had been about to be discovered. But rumours had it that Ramsay had murdered him because of their rivalry for the attention of clergyman’s daughter Euphemia Cato, and (backed by some of the press) the deceased’s family had demanded an inquiry. These demands had grown as it gradually emerged that Ramsay had not told the truth about several matters. He had not confessed to going rowing with Lindegreen that night; he had falsely denied being often drunk.
A detective had been assigned to investigate the case. Although he found no specific evidence of murder, Tunbridge had quickly transferred Ramsay from Wairoa on the ostensible grounds that he was ‘clearly
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becoming too familiar with a certain class’. Rumours about the ‘Mysterious Affair’ continued, and new evidence in 1899 saw an abortive campaign to reopen the inquiry. In 1906 Lindegreen’s mother repeated her claim that her son had been murdered by Ramsay, who was now a sergeant in Auckland. The detective based at Napier did not discount this, and T E Taylor began to campaign in the House against Ramsay’s ‘immorality’. In the end Ramsay was sacked, after 25 years’ service, for being absent from duty and falsely claiming to have visited his constables on the beat during that time. 27
CHAPTER 12
Preventing and Detecting
By the time such ‘old-school’ NCOs as William Ramsay were phased out, the new Dominion - the colony had changed its constitutional status in 1907 - was well and truly under hegemonic control. Police reports generally characterised the public as quiet and stable, and the disobedient minority were easily suppressed. Police commented favourably on recent legislation which had given the state more authority over the populace, such as the Habitual Criminals and Offenders Act which allowed prolonged incarceration, and provisions of the Police Offences Act which dealt with the ‘consorting together of vagrants and members of the criminal class’. So stable had the social base become that a large influx of immigrants after 1900, following years of low immigration, was absorbed without the disruptions that had previously characterised such movements of population. From 1903 new police were required to pledge themselves to a peace preservation rather than the old order imposition role.
Despite the reimposition of stricter discipline in Dunedin and elsewhere, life was steadily becoming easier for the men, and over and above that their needs were being reconsidered. They were now allowed to decline not only promotions, but also transfers (so long as these were not for punishment purposes). Dinnie noted that the state got ‘better work out of a man if he is pleased to go to a station instead of his having to go against his will’. In 1906 a long-desired major suburban station was opened in Auckland’s Newton. It was an imposing two-storey brick building, with a reading room, a dining-room, a sickroom, 15 cubicle bedrooms for single men and three sergeants’ bedrooms. That year too Christchurch’s two main district headquarters buildings were linked by a two-storey block, to relieve congestion. The new building had office space and a 38-room dormitory block large enough for the day- and night-duty men to be kept apart. The barracks replaced ‘old and insanitary’ quarters which had been in the ‘last stage of decay’ years before. There were medical facilities, and a recreation room/library. In the same year Dinnie authorised the issue at the four city headquarters of tins suitable for the rapid heating of tea, coffee and cocoa. This apparently small reform meant a great deal to men facing the rigours of the weather on the night beat.
The type of men who were succeeding in the policing hierarchy reflected the social stability of early twentieth century New Zealand. When Station Sergeant W J Phair was promoted to Sub-Inspector and replaced O’Donovan in Wellington in 1908, a newspaper described him
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as very much like his predecessor: the ‘bald headed, benevolent’ pair could easily be mistaken for travellers in ‘soft goods’. The ‘generous and genial’ Phair was said to be ‘more like a philanthropist than a police officer’. He was soon known for giving discharged prisoners ‘a bob or two to go on with on the quiet’.
There were similar pen portraits of other senior policemen at this time. When Sub-Inspector Dwyer was assaulted in 1908 by New Zealand heavyweight boxing champion (and Ned Kelly’s nephew) Jack Lloyd at pub closing time, and the two fought (Dwyer acquitting himself very well), the officer persuaded the magistrate to fine Lloyd rather than gaol him, since he had to support his elderly mother. Constable Tom Grace was known to many as ‘The Gentleman’. On his promotion to SubInspector in 1909, Chief Detective J A McGrath was described by the president of the Wellington Law Society as having ‘given a helping hand to many an unfortunate who had thought that he had not a friend in the world’. Minnie Dean’s only comment after being sentenced to death had been to thank McGrath for his ‘kindness’. The much-praised Station Sergeant Charles Hendrey (also promoted to Sub-Inspector in 1909) had ‘taken many a thrashing sooner than use the batons I have been supplied with’, as these could be ‘dangerous’ for offenders. This was true of the men generally, he said. He knew of only three cases in Auckland recently where policemen had used batons, and that was to control several men simultaneously. Even Cullen agreed - he preferred the use of fists, and it would be better to issue the American light baton.
Of O’Donovan, who was to become Commissioner, it was said that he would make ‘a good priest, or a country gentleman’. He could ‘fill any occupation at all that was looking for a quiet kindly man to work it’. Modest about his good deeds (he was loath to mention that he had brought up his brother’s children), he was a bookish ‘man of high ideals to look up to’, a perfect role model for the ‘irresponsible boys from the country’ who comprised the bulk of the new entrants. Of similar ilk was Dinnie’s successor, a professional bureaucrat of gentle demeanour. Dr John Findlay had succeeded as Minister in charge from 6 January 1909, stamping the seal of outward ‘benevolence’ even more firmly on the police. So idealistic was he in his zeal to ameliorate the criminal justice system that he was said to talk ‘ear-tickling platitude and airy flapdoodle’. None of this meant that the fundamentals of policing - the legal capacity to coerce - were altering, just their general presentation to the citizens as befitted a ‘settled’ community. 28
The police were however sometimes slow to appreciate the social stabilisation which enabled them to both reflect and impose ‘bourgeois morality’ to a greater degree than previously. When the 1906-7 Christchurch International Exhibition to promote New Zealand industry, science and art opened at Hagley Park, no fewer than 20 constables and 29 Permanent Artillery gunners, controlled by three sergeants, were sent to police the 40 acres of grounds, which were mapped out in beats.
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They were backed up by four New Zealand detectives and detectives from Sydney and Melbourne. A number of Australian criminals were stopped at Australian ports. Others who slipped through were ‘shadowed on arrival, and subsequently returned to Australia’. Within a month police numbers were greatly reduced. A mere four dozen offences were reported at the Exhibition, all of them trivial; there was not a single case of pickpocketing, and the occasion was characterised as ‘the most successful Exhibition ever held at this side of the Line’. An added bonus was the apprehension of two parties of housebreakers thanks to the use of scene-of-crime identification methods by the Finger Print Branch officer stationed at the Exhibition. The major crime was an ‘inside job’: Director of Exhibits Daniel Mclntyre embezzled £B7 16s and fled the country, only to be arrested by Chief Detective Mcllveney in Montevideo. 29
Mr Justice Chapman praised the police for the small amount of crime both at the Exhibition and in Christchurch generally. Certainly there had been strict police supervision, but the police themselves knew that the absence of crime was only a marginal consequence of policing, and mostly a product of societal trends. The ‘practically crimeless’ 23 weeks, during which almost two million visits were recorded, was the result (in Inspector John Dwyer’s words) of ‘the character and behaviour of the populace’. Even in frontier areas, social stabilisation was well advanced. When in late 1903 the Premier characterised the social order of the Taumarunui area as being in ‘a most deplorable state’, he was referring only to a degree of slygrogging and some accompanying drunkenness and disorder. Even in the cities, police spent much time investigating whether advertisements for potions for ‘lost manhood’ or cures for ‘diseases affecting the generative organs’ breached the 1892 Offensive Publications Act; or probing a ‘prevalence of promiscuous snowballing of women, children, aged people, and persons in charge of horses’; or stopping urination in the streets. A new Gaming Act had at the end of 1907 at last enabled the police to fully suppress both street betting and organised gambling houses, while later amending legislation was to give them the challenge of controlling bookmaking. 30
The state, through the police, continued to require ever stricter codes of public and private morality, which were attainable because of the increasing degree of social stabilisation. While leisure activities were encouraged, the administration of some of them was being re-examined by the authorities. Boxing, for example, was increasingly frowned upon because of its traditional association with gambling and fraud. In 1906 an Auckland boxing official accused Inspector Cullen of wanting ‘to kill the sport if possible’. Yet Cullen was a former participant in the ‘clean and manly sport’ who merely wanted it controlled ‘within legitimate bounds’, freed of the ‘criminal and hooligan element’ which tended to congregate around it. In the same year he established a ‘physical culture’ class run by wrestling champion Constable Arthur Skinner for the Auckland men.
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This was a major change, since Hume had discouraged athletic activities as interfering with duty. Thanks to Skinner’s efforts, a police gymnasium was established in Auckland, and he continued to encourage athletic pursuits on subsequent transfers.
There was still a long way to go before New Zealand police would have easy access to a range of sporting and other physical activities. When the Wellington men formally asked that the Force provide wrestling instruction and opportunity for exercise, and cited Skinner’s availability, little happened. But when Cullen became Commissioner he encouraged some forms of sporting prowess as being good both for the men per se and for the police image. There were, for example, champion police tug-of-war teams, ju-jitsu classes and a ju-jitsu exhibition team, top hammer throwers and other renowned athletes in the Force. Before and during the First World War, Andrew McHugh was involved in boxing (in which he was Auckland heavyweight champion from 1913 to 1915), tug of war, rowing and football; New Zealand heavyweight boxing champion Albert Pooley sparred with him in training at the police gymnasium. Even after the war, activities that might interfere with leave or performance, or reflect adversely on the Police, were discouraged, but there was strong approval of ‘manly’ and ‘amateur’ sports.
During his early years as Inspector in Auckland, Cullen had feared that Australian boxing entrepreneurs would increase the degree of professionalism - and therefore vice - in boxing. Unless clubs were run by ‘gentlemen of standing’ they would not be awarded permits. So zealous was he that Commissioner Dinnie had to remind him that bouts could not be prevented provided the law was being met. Undaunted, Cullen pressed for legislation to give Inspectors powers to refuse to register clubs and to deny permits for fights if clubs were indulging in ‘shady practices’. This meshed with a simultaneous campaign by the New Zealand Boxing Association for better regulation and the retention of amateurism, and in the end legislation incorporated elements of both approaches. 31
Dwyer considered that the policing of the Christchurch International Exhibition ‘should go a long way towards removing whatever prejudice existed against the honesty of the Police for some time prior to the opening’. This was partly a reference to the circumstances which had led to the public enquiries, but partly too a reflection of recent criticism of the police. Allegations that police had bungled a particular situation would often be used to lambast the Force as a whole. In October 1906 Papakaio schoolmaster W Rennie was shot dead in his bed. Convicted criminal J Findlay was arrested by Detective FitzGerald after being seen behaving suspiciously in the area. He was acquitted after a trial in Dunedin, partly because missing items had not been located, partly because of ‘certain witnesses deviating from their original statements to police’, and partly because of irregularities in police procedures. Press
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allegations of incompetence were accompanied by demands for an enquiry into police ‘amateurishness’. Dinnie himself took over the investigations.
It was said that when police reinforcements had arrived to investigate the murder and found no one guarding the scene, they had forced a window to gain entry. Upon realising that the murderer’s fingerprints were most likely to have been around the same window, they had become ‘panic-stricken’ and wiped off their prints - and presumably the murderer’s. The police at first suspected the event to be linked with Rennie’s ‘double life’, but after they concluded that the motive was burglary Dinnie had allegedly ordered the destruction of obscene photographs belonging to the dead man, thereby disposing of possibly relevant evidence. Worse, after the acquittal the police found the deceased’s bicycle in the nearby Waitaki River. Dinnie attempted to turn this into a virtue, in effect stating publicly that post-trial evidence could lead to another chance of putting the suspect away.
He directed his men to charge Findlay with stealing the bicycle, a watch and cheques; after two more trials, the accused was in February 1907 sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and classified as a habitual criminal. The press proclaimed loudly that the theft charges were just an ‘excuse’ to lock away the man everyone ‘knew’ to be the murderer, and even the Court of Appeal in effect acknowledged this. Although the Habitual Criminals and Offenders Act would enable the authorities to keep him behind bars after the expiration of his sentence, there was much comment to the effect that such circumventory measures should not have been necessary. Many felt that Findlay should have been hanged - and could have been if the police had been efficient. 32
Sometimes the police felt that they just could not win, as when the punishing of a murderer did not prove popular. The ‘well-bred’ Lionel Terry, an ‘English gentleman of military bearing’, had roamed the world before settling in New Zealand, having served - inter alia -as a mounted policeman in South Africa. The tall, dark, handsome ‘friend of Cecil Rhodes’ propagated hatred of Jews, of non-British races in general (including Maori), and particularly of the ‘yellow peril’. The last struck a chord amongst many New Zealanders who saw the potential for the ‘teeming hordes’ of Asia to be used as a cheap labour force and therefore a potential threat to the colony’s economic well-being. To dramatise his message, on 24 September 1905 he cold-bloodedly shot dead an elderly Chinese cripple, Joe Kum Yung, in Haining Street, Wellington’s Chinatown. His intention was to draw attention to his pamphlet The Shadow, which ‘exposed’ the ‘evil’ of mixing up races, and he gave himself up in a prearranged plan. Although he argued that killing a Chinese man could not be a crime, he was found guilty and (to the disapproval of many) sentenced to hang. Because of a strong jury recommendation of mercy for one ‘not responsible’ for his actions, this was commuted to life imprisonment. After a brief period in gaol, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital where he ended up believing he was the
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Messiah, one up on his father who believed he was the successor to Napoleon. He made four escapes from custody in the South Island, during which rural people helped him to evade capture. ‘Almost every person is in sympathy with Terry’, O’Brien wrote to Dinnie in 1907, ‘hence the police were sorely handicapped in effecting his capture.’ Letters acclaiming him as a patriot poured in to newspapers.
In Terry’s case, the strength of anti-Chinese racism in many sectors of the community had produced a double standard even over something as horrendous as a cold-blooded killing. In other instances police had the community on their side, but - to their consternation, especially in cases concerning ‘morality’ - their evidence could not persuade juries to convict. After a new-bom baby was strangled in Woodville in 1909, for example. Inspector Dwyer considered that the jury ‘shirked their duty’ in acquitting the youthful parents, given the watertight nature of the Crown’s case. The verdict had ‘caused widespread surprise and comment throughout the district’, not merely from the judge.
But given the increasing quietude of New Zealand society, the dangerous and bizarre situations police sometimes found themselves in stood out all the more prominently - and out of peril and adversity for one or a few policemen arose a sympathy for the police which helped counteract criticisms and police disappointments with the results of some of their court cases. In 1909 the steamer Penguin went ashore in a storm at the mouth of the Karori Stream, near Wellington, with the loss of 75 passengers and crew. Two mounted constables from Lambton Quay station galloped to the scene and helped survivors cross the flooded stream at great danger to themselves, before beginning the hazardous process of searching the wave-swept beaches for more of the 61 who were eventually rescued. 33
In 1905 police faced the violent consequences of a long-term feud between two farmers in the remote Murchison district. When Walter Neame brought a civil action against Joseph Sewell, the defendant railed in court against his alleged persecutor. Suddenly he shouted ‘l’ll blow him to blazes’, and moved towards Neame, talking of dynamite. His daughters persuaded him to leave the courthouse with the Lyell constable, Edward Scott, and Inspector Wilson. When the two policemen tried to overpower him, he pressed a button in his pocket and detonated an ‘infernal machine’ which blew him apart - pieces of his body landed as far as 150 yards away. In a ‘miraculous escape’ the constable was hurled 15 feet relatively unscathed, but Wilson and a bystander were seriously injured.
The Inspector had ‘a terrible wound in the forehead, and his face presented a fearful spectacle’. He was scarred for life. The bravery of the policemen was lauded throughout the land. When asked in the House about the possibility of awards for bravery, the Minister of Justice pointed out that ‘the risks incidental to the lives of all police officers and constables are often considerable, and it is necessary that discrimination should be
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exercised in singling out cases for special treatment’. It was a salutary reminder that, however stable society was, it was part of a policeman’s job to have to deal at any time with violent and marginalised elements, including those at the extremes of insanity. When Donald Scott was sent to Murchison he found it ‘a hard place to control’, especially when railway workers came to town to drink all their wages away. He had to teach them that it ‘did not pay to disobey’. There were 18 months of harsh confrontation before ‘they definitely respected me as the “Man” of the township’. 34
Violent incidents could occur on the smallest of provocations, although few were as serious as a riot in Christchurch in 1905 when a constable who arrested a drunk was set upon by a crowd of ‘hoodlums, including many footballers’. When reinforcements arrived they had to shelter in a shop with their prisoner (and by now another) as the hostile gathering grew alarmingly. Great damage ensued from the ‘Cashel Street Riot’. The local newspaper noted that though the populace was generally lawabiding, there was a minority whose ‘instincts array them against constituted authority, especially when it takes the form of a policeman’.
In 1908 Taumarunui’s Constable John Maher approached a young man who was leaving a train with what appeared to be a parcel containing liquor, an offence in the dry King Country, where police work remained dominated by liquor offences. When the man abused him and ran off, the constable chased and arrested him for using obscene language. The offender then launched a ferocious attack on the policeman, and almost managed to drown him in a drainage ditch. When Maher struggled free from the drain, he was kicked in the head and face, and his tormentor - William Loft - attempted to tear an eye out and rip his mouth open. By the time assistance arrived the constable was so battered that the local doctor did not recognise him. The oft-convicted Loft, it turned out, had been New Zealand’s ‘catch-as-catch-can champion wrestler’. Journalists described him as having a massive jaw and features of ‘the most repulsive description’. When he attempted escape in the Auckland Supreme Court it took 15 men (‘a solid wall of constables’) to subdue him. Loft received 20 years’ hard labour for the attempted murder of Maher, but was released after 10 and banished from the country. 35
In the month after Loft’s conviction Waitara doctor E J Goode got drunk one day and called on his neighbour Mrs Mary Klenner with a request for sex. When she refused he shot her twice - she later died of the injuries - and locked himself in his surgery with firearms. It was known that there was insanity in the family, and the local policeman quite ‘lost his head’ and refused to lead a band of willing citizens in storming the doctor’s house. It was not until the arrival of New Plymouth constable Lewis Mclvor that the surgery door was broken down and Goode overpowered. Wrote Inspector Wilson of the clearly insane doctor: ‘Owing to the accused’s social position etc. there is no doubt he will be represented by the best counsel'. The charging of men of local wealth and influence
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made the police despair, for they knew that they would have an uphill struggle to win a conviction. In this case, they were even forced to pay £7 8s 2d in damages to cover the cost of the damaged surgery door; Goode was found to be insane and ‘detained in a mental hospital indefinitely’. 36
In other cases, the police emerged well simply through having been associated with sensationalism. In April 1909 an informant told Dunedin’s Chief Detective Herbert that a friend’s daughter had married a ‘wealthy gentleman’ who seemed unable to pay his debts and who possessed women’s clothing. ‘lt will be Amy Bock’, said Detective Henry Hunt, referring to the ‘bridegroom’. He had been searching for male impersonator Bock since January on false pretences charges, and knew that she had gone south. He quickly left for the holiday settlement of The Nuggets, where Bock (alias ‘Archbishop’s nephew’ Percival Redwood) had ‘married’ the daughter of boarding-house proprietors. Bock, a 46 year old Australian with a string of New Zealand convictions dating back to 1886, was the colony’s ‘most successful confidence trickster’. Hunt knew her by sight and arrested her, whereupon gossip-mongers vied with one another to speculate about the consummation of the ‘marriage’. It is likely that the bride’s family had become suspicious about the contradiction between the groom’s alleged wealth and status and his relative impecuniousness, and the absence of family members at the wedding (his mother allegedly could not attend as her daughter was getting married on the very same day!), and had declined to allow consummation until matters were clarified.
In the event Bock received two years’ gaol on each of two charges of making a false declaration, and was declared a ‘habitual criminal’. The ‘plain, unassuming’ woman duped by the con artist (who had intended to abandon her at Bluff) secured annulment of the ‘marriage’ and eventually found happiness with the local Rabbit Inspector. Such cases were almost a pleasure for the police, providing positive press coverage and also adding colour to what were, increasingly, rather routinised working lives. The offender was a non-violent, even - as Dwyer noted - ‘moral’ woman who never fraternised with the ‘fallen women’ she shared cells with. She was apt, moreover, to distribute the proceeds of her frauds to ‘servant girls in the hotels and boardinghouses’, although this was perhaps not quite the Robin Hood gesture Dwyer believed it to be. 37
Occasionally police lives could be disrupted and even endangered for weeks on end. Such was the case in 1910-11 in the southern North Island, when social and policing chaos resulted from the activities of Just one man - Joseph (Joe) Pawelka. The case of the man who would become one of New Zealand’s most infamous and ultimately successful prison escapers embodies a number of crucial issues of crime, punishment and policing in early twentieth century New Zealand. The saga began in February 1910, when Palmerston North’s Detective Thomas Quirke and a constable arrested a 22 year old butcher of Moravian descent for
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housebreaking, entering and theft. Pawelka (often spelt ‘Powelka’ at the time) was an ‘enterprising young man who is charged with breaking into various houses and taking away everything from the floorcloths upwards’. Quirke claimed that ‘nearly all the effects in his house had been stolen from various places’ over a long period of time. Until then the intelligent but moody Pawelka had been considered of good character and an exemplary worker at the local abattoirs. He claimed that his household possessions had been purchased in good faith from a second-hand dealer. While on remand in Palmerston North’s Police Gaol, he escaped by scaling the yard walls. This led to his branding as ‘a very dangerous criminal’, and Inspector Wilson ordered ‘extraordinary measures to effect his capture’, which was quickly achieved. 38
Pawelka’s notoriety might have been short-lived had he not on 23 March escaped from the lockup at Wellington’s police cells on Lambton Quay. It was (correctly) surmised that he had returned to the Manawatu region, and he began to get the blame for most offences committed in the area, particularly after an armed hold-up on 2 April. ‘Highway Robbery Near Foxton. Was it Pawelka?’ was a typical headline during what was later billed as ‘Manawatu’s Mad Fortnight’. A ‘state of great excitement’ spread throughout the region, especially when on 5 April the Palmerston North High School and a furniture workshop were destroyed in separate fires, and another premises was also torched. By then New Zealand’s biggest manhunt to that time had begun. The town had been quickly ‘reduced to a great state of terror’, and sarcastic comments that ‘Powelka’s übiquity must be little short of marvellous’ were dismissed with a theory that he had ‘accomplices’. His alleged motivation was rage against society because of his arrest and/or insanity. He signed a note as ‘J Pawelka. A man against the world’.
Businessmen took to sleeping on their premises with firearms handy. Two mounted constables across the ranges in Pahiatua fired at a man they believed to be Pawelka. Citizen vigilante groups proliferated. Yet the number of crimes recorded during the period actually rose, some no doubt committed by two lads on the loose from the Weraroa training farm, others by copycat offenders. People in and around Palmerston North were soon ‘out with firearms assisting the police’. Commentators outside the district criticised ‘the most lamentable display of “nerves” ever witnessed in New Zealand’, but the local police welcomed citizen support. Police headquarters too treated the manhunt seriously, and before long there were 60 police and other authorised personnel out searching, and many more unofficial volunteers. Pawelka attempted to reconcile with his estranged wife at Ashhurst on 9 April but escaped when she raised the alarm. There was talk of calling out the territorials, even of drafting in regular soldiers.
On the evening of Sunday 10 April the police were notified that Pawelka was attempting a burglary at the house of Erie Hampton, his former employer. The house was surrounded, and a decision taken to
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rush it. An unarmed sergeant new to Palmerston North, John P H McGuire, ran across the front lawn and grappled with a figure he spotted in the doorway. Detective A G Quartermain and Hampton rushed around from the back. In the dark shots rang out, and McGuire fell with a stomach wound. The intruder escaped in the confusion. The newspapers were in no doubt as to what had occurred: ‘Joseph Powelka Shoots Police Sergeant Maguire’. McGuire was in a bad way, and died on 14 April. When questioned on his deathbed as to why he had not carried a firearm that night, he replied: T am glad I didn’t. I would not have used it, at any rate. I might have shot him, but I am better pleased that he shot me.’
The ‘quiet, unassuming’ McGuire was a former grocer who had spent 14 years on police clerical work (including as Wellington’s District Clerk) before his transfer to Palmerston North (‘he thought the outside work would benefit his health’) less than 48 hours before the shooting. Like Sub-Inspector John O’Donovan (in charge at Palmerston North), he epitomised the ‘new policeman’ attuned to the relative tranquillity of early twentieth century New Zealand. The crowds at McGuire’s stateprovided funeral (the procession stretched for three quarters of a mile) were told approvingly that he was ‘gentleness and kindness’ itself. Most police felt that he had been too gentle and kind; he had taken the new benign modes of control too literally. A new police maxim was to be heard for a long time: ‘Don’t do a McGuire’.
The shooting of McGuire focused public attention on disturbing aspects of the search for Pawelka. Many observers felt that the New Zealand police had become so accustomed to a quiet life that they were unable properly to organise a collective endeavour potentially involving violence; that, indeed, their search arrangements had been so amateur that they had created a strong possibility of violence where there had been little before. It seemed that, being unused to large collective operations, the police had indiscriminately brought in, or at very least allowed, armed vigilantism to supplement their endeavours, thereby opening the way to some of the very dangers that benign policing was supposed to avoid. It was said that McGuire had implemented in Ashhurst ‘the first piece of organisation which has been observable during the hunt’. In particular, questions surrounded the storming of Hampton’s house. It was suggested that it was headquarters fingerprint expert Quartermain (who had fired two bullets that evening, to the intruder’s one) who had accidentally shot McGuire, he being a man with no practical police training. 39
Immediately after the shooting, it was reported (although first Wilson and then the Commissioner ‘emphatically’ denied it), armed civilians were ‘snapped up’ by O’Donovan to ‘surround the whole neighbourhood’. This seemed to confirm long-standing fears that the police were playing with fire. Normally, indeed, they saw armed vigilantism as holding the potential for tragedy, and the defence of their actions during the search for Pawelka was that the civilian aid to the police was under strict
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control. Certainly the Minister had authorised the use of only ‘capable and reliable’ men, who were to be sworn in as specials. During the ‘miserably unpleasant’ night after the shooting of McGuire, O’Donovan did keep tight control over the volunteers, armed with a motley variety of ‘resurrected’ weapons, who were detailed to patrol specific streets. Next day, moreover, the instructor and his 16 probationers arrived from the Depot to help the police regain full control; a detachment of soldiers was also called in, along with more police reinforcements. Yet the fact remained that there had been, in the eyes of many observers, deficiencies of leadership, sagacity and organisational skills. ‘The confidence of the public in police administration will not be strengthened by the incidents which have taken place in connection with the escapades of the criminal lunatic Powelka’, was one of the milder comments. The first step, many felt, should be to ‘disarm the civilians who are wandering about Palmerston North with lethal weapons.’ 40
Policing had become so orientated towards a self-policed society that it seemed scarcely able to cope with even a one-person armed alarm, particularly if the culprit knew the countryside intimately and could get aid (as seemed to be happening in this case) from sympathisers. Inspector Ellison was now sent from Wellington to help Wilson reassert full control. On his arrival the Inspector began to get the volunteers off the streets, confining them in the interim to guarding ammunition and arms storage buildings. Justice Minister John Findlay made it clear that no more civilians were required, and that the authorities were taking steps ‘to prevent irresponsible and incapable people from joining the pursuit armed with dangerous weapons’. There was an implicit recognition by the police that they had erred, and hence were now drawing back from armed civilian support. They were also to ensure the return to Wellington of a troop of mounted Dominion Scouts (volunteer soldiers), sent by the Premier, who were led by an army officer who had recently featured in a military court of enquiry and whose bungling had only added to the general chaos.
When Findlay publicly denied rumours that McGuire had been shot by Detective Quartermain, the rumours switched to his having been shot by a vigilantist. But a more concrete manifestation of the danger of arming civilians occurred the day after the shooting. A quiet tobacconist from Pahiatua, Michael Quirke, brother of Detective Quirke, had officially joined the hunt in Palmerston North. After a drunk had pretended to be Pawelka in the Terrace End part of town, a rumour spread that the fugitive was holed up there. ‘The populace seemed to have completely lost their heads.... The whole town was Powelka mad, and nearly every other man was armed.’ Quirke went to the Terrace End, and was accosted by a police party. When he ignored or did not hear a challenge and ‘walked on flourishing a revolver in his hands’, he was shot dead by hotel proprietor Henry Overton, a friend of Detective Quirke who was also assisting the police.
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Quirke’s death caused commentators to all the more pointedly deplore the ‘insensate arming of a large proportion of the population’. From now on, the police made clear, the only armed civilian patrols tolerated by the authorities would be a few ‘selected’ volunteers properly sworn in as specials. Findlay asked the mayor of Palmerston North to ‘co-operate with the police in limiting the voluntary assistance of civilians to capable and reliable men’. The main search would now be conducted by a small ‘flying squad’ under Detective J J Cassells, and this scoured the countryside when sightings were reported. The reward for Pawelka’s capture was doubled to £lOO. 41
It was three days after Quirke’s death that McGuire died. The district coroner strongly guided his jury that if it so felt it should state that it was not Detective Quartermain who had shot the sergeant; on his deathbed McGuire had said that he did not think it was Quartermain, although ‘it may have been’. The verdict was that McGuire had ‘died from a gunshot wound wilfully inflicted by the person with whom he was grappling’, namely Pawelka. But many observers were unhappy. There had been undue political haste to deny that a policeman had fired the fatal shot, and the rumours which continued to fly were not dispelled by evidence eventually presented at Pawelka’s trial for the killing. McGuire family lore has it that Quartermain was responsible. Policemen who had served at the time volunteered that this was the case when interviewed 60 years later. There was increasing sympathy for Pawelka from people who felt that he was about to be ‘fitted up’. Such feeling actually escalated after he was captured near Ashhurst upon being flushed out of hiding by a subterfuge, after an alert probationary constable had spotted him during a ‘flying squad’ vigil in the area. The authorities were so pleased that the constable who physically detained him, John Gallagher, received a reward despite having been in charge of the Lambton Quay lockup from which Pawelka had escaped, and having omitted to tell another constable that the lock was faulty. 42
It was the murder charge which brought Pawelka the greatest degree of public sympathy. ‘Everyone I spoke to in Kimbolton’, where the fugitive’s parents lived, ‘seemed heartily sorry for Powelka, and all with whom he has had dealings say that Powelka was a thoroughly upright fellow, who could be trusted with anything’, reported a journalist before the capture. ‘We have no doubt at all that Powelka has been blamed for things of which he is quite innocent’, the Dominion editorialised after it. No one tried to pretend that he had been a hardened criminal. Indeed he had first come to police attention only the previous December, when he was charged with attempted suicide after falling out with his wife. Opposition to the murder charge grew when it emerged during his Supreme Court trial in late May that the police did not have a good case; E W Dinnie had insufficient evidence to make a fingerprint identification. The prosecution case was a circumstantial one, and although the jury
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stated that Quartermain had definitely not fired the fatal shot, it declined to convict Pawelka for murder. 43
Rejoicing amongst Pawelka’s supporters turned to dismay, however, when subsequently - after four more trials - he was found guilty of charges of breaking and entering, theft and arson, and received the extraordinary total of 21 years’ hard labour. Moreover he was declared to be an habitual criminal. On the expiration of his sentence he would be detained in a reformatory for as long as the authorities wished; that might be forever if he was still seen to be in a state of ‘dangerous abnormality’. This was widely seen as an ‘unjust and severe’ way of punishing him for a murder of which he had been acquitted. In pronouncing judgment. Judge Theophilus Cooper referred to a medical report available to him which had not been produced in evidence, and told Pawelka: ‘You alone know whether you shot McGuire’, A later Minister of Police recorded that ‘the severity of the sentence caused a revulsion of public opinion in Powelka’s favour and numerous petitions were signed’. Newspapers championed his cause, defence committees organised meetings and delegations, trade unions supported a fellow worker.
But the normally ‘humanitarian’ Findlay remained unmoved by pleas for a reduction in sentence, even after being pressured by a 20-strong deputation of MPs and prominent citizens. Amidst the general ‘hue and cry throughout the country’ over the sentencing, the influential New Zealand Times declared that condemning Pawelka to ‘something worse than death’ was a punishment which ‘bears resemblance to nothing so much as a clumsy attempt to wreak vengeance on a half-demented offender’. It was claimed that ‘never before in the history of New Zealand has there been such a general wave of indignation’. Like ‘McKenzie the sheepstealer’ before him, and George Wilder afterwards, he became a folk hero, symbol of fighters against authority. 44
Pawelka’s name was still very much in the public eye when, early on the morning of Sunday 27 August 1911, he escaped from the secure ‘condemned cell’ in which he was kept in Wellington’s Terrace Gaol. This was despite his being under special surveillance following three escape attempts. He was last seen fleeing through Kelbum in his white prison trousers, and was never again sighted by the New Zealand authorities. As late as 1963 he was still listed as ‘officially wanted’ by the police. Within a month of his escape, noting that ‘there appears to be a very great amount of sympathy for this man’, Wilson told the Commissioner that his recapture was therefore unlikely unless he committed more crimes. Although police made some efforts to look for him, it was a general opinion that ‘officials were not anxious to retake Pawelka’. No reward was offered for his recapture. The Pawelka family and long-time residents of Kimbolton have recently confirmed that, as the police suspected, Joe Pawelka hid out in the Kimbolton area, supported by family, friends and local residents. On 15 February 1912 - some weeks
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after the police had decided he had probably left the country - he left for Auckland, where he embarked on a ship headed for Canada. 45
The police had been vilified during the Pawelka saga, but they did make some gains from it. Fingerprint evidence had been vindicated yet again, being the ‘main factor’ in the conviction for arson, O’Donovan had emerged well in the eyes of the authorities, and was sent from Palmerston North to Invercargill as an Inspector, an important step on his way to what was generally seen as an inspired Commissionership. The biggest loss was that the criminal justice system was now seen as manifestly ‘unfair’ by very many people. The police and government would have to work hard to re-establish confidence in the authorities - and, by extension, at least to a degree, in preferred social behaviour. 46
That being said, ‘self-policing’ remained the norm in the Dominion, with police activities orientated mostly towards relatively minor public order and other offences committed by individuals who were usually ‘lawabiding’. Insofar as endemic crime existed it was normally perceived to be a big city (and, to a lesser extent, large town) phenomenon. Criminal ‘gang’ problems in the four centres were potentially serious enough for the police to take pre-emptive action by charging the leaders with ‘vagrancy, consorting with thieves’ and similar catch-all offences. People were given a glimpse of Wellington’s demi-monde in the publicity surrounding the throttling to death of a sailor outside a Courtenay Place urinal in 1908. He was found with ‘his person exposed’ in a doorway ‘much used by prostitutes as a convenient place for sexual intercourse’. At first police believed that he had been lured there by a prostitute, and then robbed and bashed. They later discounted this theory, feeling (although they could not prove it) that he had been killed while being robbed by ‘a gang known as the “kick” push’. The gangs were believed to be reinforced periodically by Australian criminals. In 1911 the Police Gazette published photographs of the ‘Stuttering Cock’ and other members of a gang of professional pickpockets said to have arrived recently from across the Tasman. 47
With ever stricter codes of morality required by the authorities and supported generally by the populace, police were increasingly drawn into taking stronger measures to suppress activities in red-light districts. The traditional police view was that it was impossible to eliminate prostitution. They therefore aimed to confine it to specific areas, enabling them to remove its ‘worst excesses’: But pressure from the powerful ‘social purity’ movement led to demands for greater than usual suppression. In 1906 the Christchurch and Dunedin police attempted to ‘clean up’ such areas. ‘Cleaning up’ became harder after a 1908 Supreme Court judgment which prohibited the authorities from designating premises used for prostitution by a single woman (as opposed to two or more women) as a brothel. This was confirmed by a keynote case in November 1910, when
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‘Camellia Ray’ (‘Madame Lecond’) was charged before Stipendiary Magistrate E Cutten with being idle and disorderly, and keeping a brothel in Auckland’s Victoria Street. Auckland’s Chief Detective Richard Marsack (who had replaced Martin Grace in 1904) testified that she had offered him sex for between 10s and £2 (depending upon the length of the encounter). There was a discount for him because he could speak to her in French and she therefore assumed him to be a fellow national. She had recently arrived in the Dominion, and moved into notorious premises recently rented first by ‘Humpy Williams’ and then by ‘Mrs Ford, the Onehunga Queen’. She had quickly leamt about the 1908 ruling. Despite police unhappiness, the fact was that legislative consolidation in 1908 had failed to close a loophole in the Justices of the Peace Act (revealed first through a judicial interpretation in the 1890s) to the effect that prostitutes could ply their trade legally if they lived and operated by themselves.
In circumstances of disorderly houses, however, police tended to use their own means of pressure. Cullen had told Ray during a crackdown on ‘disorderly’ prostitution in her area that she had a week to leave town, failing which she would be prosecuted as a ‘vagrant’. She refused; the police treated her prosecution as a test case. In the event a charge of being idle and disorderly was dismissed on the ground that she had plenty of money; on the brothel-keeping charge, she was acquitted by dint of the ‘one-woman brothel’ loophole. But the magistrate gave the police some advice: if they laid a fresh information against Ray for being a tenant who permitted her premises to be used for prostitution, they might succeed. When the police took up this suggestion, however, he had no choice but to endorse the defence’s contention that the word ‘permit’ referred to someone other than the tenant. The decision became a landmark one. There was now no doubt that one-woman brothels were legal. This was confirmed when Christchurch police made a similarly abortive attempt in 1911 to close down a one-woman brothel in Moorhouse Avenue. A Dominion-wide campaign was soon under way for new legislation to help the police crush prostitution.
Why should a prostitute living by herself, a writer to the Auckland Star asked, be ‘free to play the harlot with all and sundry?’ Legislation which ‘permits a wanton to jeopardise the business of those residing within the vicinity of her’ was imbecilic. ‘To say that any woman is to be free to ruin the vital manhood and womanhood of the nation, providing she maintains an exclusive reserved circle, is monstrous!’ Such sentiments were heard frequently and loudly, but over the next few years legislators seem to have despaired of finding any wording which would fully legalise the suppression of prostitution.
The police, as often happened, tended to get the blame, and so their image suffered as the campaign to remove one-woman brothels raged. Police were able to press charges of convenience against prostitutes who operated premises where alcohol flowed freely or rows were prevalent.
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but they were scarcely to blame if prostitution continued openly, for most one-woman brothels were well-conducted and hence impervious to legal challenge. They could only put informal pressure on the prostitutes and their landlords, and from time to time they did so. But landlords got high rents from prostitutes, and - as a future Police Commissioner lamented - ‘as soon as one lot is hunted out by the police, the landlord lets in another worse than the last’. The stakes were high. The infamous Madame Lecond’s normal charge was £1 for 10 minutes, and she had taken out a mortgage on a £535 house. The police remained thwarted in their quest for ‘common decency and morality’, and one-woman brothels became all the more blatant.
Many of the prostitutes established tobacconist, soft drink, chocolate or sweet shops. These neither displayed nor sold many of the wares they claimed to be dealing in; small children would be turned away from ‘lolly’ shops by the proprietresses, who had no wish to deplete their token stocks. The police would take action over such shops only if neighbours complained. As the Commissioner put it of a ‘shop’ owner in Wellington’s Willis Street, ‘a legal difficulty prevented her from being prosecuted, but other steps were taken to get her to vacate the premises.’ Police might inform ‘innocent’ landlords, for example, who might then evict their prostitute tenants. But if a landlord wished to retain such a tenant, the woman kept an ‘orderly house’ (police evidence that this was so for one brothel was that the prostitute ‘doesn’t have Maoris on the premises’), and neither landlord nor prostitute could be intimidated, the police had no way of fulfilling their expected role as the guardians of public morality. 48
Controlling the seamier side of New Zealand life fell, of course, disproportionately upon the detective wing of the Police Force, and upon beat men placed on temporary plain-clothes duty. Many police gained a taste of undercover work while still at the Depot, recruits being used not only for training purposes but also because they were still unknown to the ‘criminal fraternity’. In the late 1890s, acting principally on complaints from the manager of Ruahine Station, Sergeant Dwyer secured two probationers to suppress the slygrog shops established to serve the navvies working on the main trunk railway line. They masqueraded as workers at the station. Once ‘well established’ there, they ‘came with the older hands to Taihape on Saturday nights and mixed and danced with the crowd, and soon wormed their way into the graces of the Sly-grog sellers, and got as much drink as they wanted.’ Convictions followed. When Richard Allan and another constable from the February 1905 intake secured the conviction of slygrog sellers, they were given (typically for the liquor cases which dominated much undercover work) monetary rewards.
At a time when Commissioners still tended to shield their staff from ‘the inconvenience of having prying reporters at our heels’, detectives
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could become feted by the press and thereby improve the Force’s public relations. Wellington’s Detective Charles Broberg, who was lauded in the newspapers as ‘Bro’, ‘ran as a pair’ with Detective Nixon (‘Young Nick’) in the early years of the century. Another detective in the capital was renowned for his surveillance of the Haining Street Chinatown area, and when he was transferred the press expressed satisfaction that ‘FanTan duties’ had been handed on to Broberg. 49
The 1906-7 Exhibition had heightened the profile of detection amongst the public. Because Melbourne’s Chief Commissioner T O’Callaghan had warned that ‘many of the thieves and cheats in this City are saving their money for the purpose of going to the Exhibition’, New Zealand detectives had assiduously surveilled (in conference with ships’ Chief Stewards) all disembarking passengers from Australia. This was widely and approvingly publicised. The New Zealand and Australian detectives at the Exhibition kept a high profile watch at the gates, and barred ‘undesirables’ from entering. Whatever the real reasons for the lack of crime in the complex (which had six miles of passages), this was considered a great tribute to detective as well as uniformed skill at the time. 50
Detectives remained the elite of the Force, and it was still regarded as a promotion to move from constable to detective rank - and conversely, as a ‘degradation and punishment’ for a detective to be ‘reduced’ to uniformed work. The ‘sleuths’ drew much reward money from court awards and elsewhere, and other perquisites were available. Marsack, for example, got a free trip to England (paid for by the law firm Bell Gully) in an insurance case. There remained a great deal of jealousy towards detectives amongst the ‘preventive police’. But their duties could be tedious and boring. In 1904 it was Broberg who was given the job of tracking Collinson’s killer, McKenzie/Ellis, at remote Te Awaite. McKenzie had ‘lived a nomadic life in the wild bush country’, and had gone to ground. Broberg undertook a long and gruelling search in the Wairarapa before responding to reports nine months later that someone had been stealing from bush camps in Hawke’s Bay, a hundred miles to the north. Broberg travelled there with two others, disguised as a swagger, and found McKenzie sheltering in a whare. The successful police hunt was depicted as ‘the most remarkable in the criminal records of New Zealand or any other British colony’ because of its ‘tenacity’ in the face of ‘seemingly impenetrable odds’; the murderer was hanged. It was soon after this chase that Broberg, now considered the expert at catching armed fugitives who had fled into the bush, was first put on the track of ‘The Maori Outlaw’, Matenga. 51
Despite their elite status, higher pay and perquisites, detectives had for years been unhappy that their promotional horizons were low. The four Chief Detectives had particular grievances. They superintended all branch work, conducted their own cases in the courts, and dealt directly with the Inspectors. Yet they were merely the senior of the detectives in each city, their title nominal and carrying no extra remuneration. In 1904
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Dinnie brought the peculiarity of the situation to the attention of the Minister, and argued that they should be elevated in both rank and pay ‘to give them authority to properly supervise and control the men under their charge’. The position should be made ‘an appointment’, with a salary rising to 15s 6d per day. McGowan accepted these arguments, and from 1 September 1904 a rank of Chief Detective was created - although they were still numbered positions and therefore of lesser status than commissioned officers. 52
No doubt partly because of his own background. Commissioner Dinnie did much to boost the profile and status of detective work. In 1906 the new position of Acting Detective, a kind of probationer for fully-fledged detective work, was created: 17 were appointed. In 1909 the flamboyant Broberg was made a Chief Detective, which raised the branch profile even more than had the elevation of W B Mcllveney to the same rank two years earlier. Yet whatever the status of detectives, they worked inside a structure which did not allow them to reach the top echelons of the Force in their detective capacity. To better himself in the long run, for example. Chief Detective McGrath had in 1909 to switch, on promotion, to the uniformed branch as a Sub-Inspector. This was announced by Minister Findlay as resulting from his decision to treat ‘the two branches of the service as one’ for promotion purposes, although his caveat that this did not imply that the previous rigorous division was unfair was an indication that little if anything had changed in any fundamental sense. Promotion in this fashion had not been possible under McGowan, who insisted publicly in 1908 that Chief Detectives must revert to the uniformed branch before competing with their colleagues for a Sub-Inspectorship. This reflected the strongly held views of the uniformed men. McGrath was promoted on Dinnie’s recommendation of his ‘splendid qualifications’, and he turned out to be a success.
But after a decade-long trial, the abolition of classes within the detective branch had clearly created many grave difficulties. Detectives had no way of comparing their position with that of members of the uniformed branch, their ‘higher status’ being fixed only by their higher pay and their performance of duties of a special nature (which might include taking charge of an enquiry when working with constables senior in service). A later enquiry cited an 1889 circular to conclude that prior to the abolition of the ranking system, 1/c to 3/c detectives had been equivalent in rank to 1/c to 3/c sergeants; 4/c detectives had been equal to constables in rank, but given their higher pay and special duties even they had a ‘higher status than that of a constable’. Since 1898 the relationship between ranks in the two branches had, however, become cloaked in ‘obscurity’, but new detectives had mingled with the pre-1898 ‘sleuths’ and ‘imbibed their ideas of equality in rank with uniform sergeants’.
Broberg argued in 1909 that the practice had always been that the position of detective was at least equivalent to, if not higher than,
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uniformed sergeant. He cited pre-1898 examples of the return to sergeant rank from that of detective being ‘considered degradation and punishment’. When a sergeant asked for a definite ruling that sergeants were superior to detectives, Dinnie noted that if a detective was sent to the sergeant’s sub-district, he would be subordinate to the sergeant despite his higher pay. In actuality detectives were not of higher rank than constables - just of ‘higher status’ within the rank. Men should have been ‘appointed’ (not ‘promoted’) to the higher status of detective within the rank of constable from the outset.
Detectives were dismayed at the implications. Their only internal promotion route remained that to Chief Detective, from which the sole way up (itself a new and experimental one) was to be promoted back into the uniformed force as a Sub-Inspector. If the Chief Detective was therefore equivalent in rank to a sergeant, detectives clearly ranked with constables. They were alarmed at the ramifications of the whole situation for their careers. Any movement back to the uniformed branch could only be a reversion to the humblest of ranks, as it was unlikely they could get promotion to sergeant; meanwhile, as Chief Detective Marsack pointed out, all things being equal they would have to wait 17 years for promotion to Chief Detective.
Detectives therefore prepared a campaign with two separate demands that were not mutually exclusive. The priority was for detectives to be allowed to more easily move back into the uniformed arena on promotion, given the limited career opportunities inside the detective branch. Such a system had worked well in Australia, where the chiefs of police of Victoria and New South Wales were former detectives who had risen through the ranks. The other aim was to establish a career structure, with equivalent ranks to those in the uniformed branch, inside the detective wing of the Force. The lack of these conditions of service was said to have put many good men off joining the branch despite its attractive perquisites.
The uniformed men’s ‘prejudice’ against detectives, who ‘felt a cut above us’ (a uniformed man later recalled) even though some of them ‘couldn’t catch a sick duck’, hampered detectives’ aspirations. Of the uniformed officers, only ex-detectives McGrath and O’Brien strongly supported the ranking of detectives. Even ‘friends’ had violent professional animosities, as bitter exchanges between Chief Detectives Broberg and Marsack on the one hand, and Sergeants John Dart and Bartholomew Sheehan on the other, at the 1909 Commission indicated. Broberg branded NCOs’ views on the position of Chief Detective as ‘preposterous’ and ‘untenable’: the position was the only one for which the regulations required ability, and it was equatable to Sub-Inspector. In turn. Dart and others ridiculed this view as being ‘not reform, but revolution’. Many men stayed in uniform and forewent the higher remuneration of detection because to enter the detective service was to enter a discrete branch of policing with narrower responsibilities. The Auckland Sub-Inspector
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controlled 101 staff and 85,000 people, while his Chief Detective counterpart controlled a mere six detectives and four acting detectives.
Dinnie too did not rank Chief Detectives with Sub-Inspectors, on the grounds that they needed more experience in uniform before becoming eligible for the Inspectorate. But even allowing them to aspire to the SubInspectorate produced opposition. NCOs had complained about McGrath’s promotion, because as a result of it the pool for officer positions had five Chief Detectives added to it, whereas by now only the four most senior sergeants were eligible from the uniformed branch. These Station Sergeants had far more experience in uniformed work than had the detectives. Since the detective branch comprised only 6Vi percent of the Force, it was argued, its members should not have an equal or even better opportunity to rise to commissioned office. The new Minister’s willingness to meet the detectives’ wishes would remove from the ‘backbone of the service’ the ‘chief incentive to efficiency - a reasonable chance of promotion’. The document which the Auckland sergeants presented to the Commission was headed ‘Plain Clothes v. Uniform’. This ‘sergeants’ manifesto’, a detective testified, damaged the ‘happy family’ atmosphere that Cullen insisted on in his district.
Detectives claimed that they were worse off than sergeants; their responsibilities were greater, their hours longer, and they had no chance of getting an easy country billet with free rent and extra emoluments. The 1909 Commission noted that since 1899 not only had an extra Chief Detective position been created, but detective numbers had increased from 11 to 30. Its report recommended that Chief Detectives should not have the status of Sub-Inspectors (so presumably the equivalent status to NCO in detective ranks was the Chief Detective function); and that before becoming eligible for plain-clothes duty, a man needed to have done two years’ uniformed duty. After continuing agitation by the detectives, in March 1911 Dr Findlay announced a big concession: they would become eligible after 10 years of detective service for promotion to a new rank of Detective Sergeant, which would be created on 1 May. The big snag - apart from the fact that only four men met the service requirement - was that the promotion would be at the recommendation (on grounds of ‘merit and efficiency’) of an Inspector, and a number of detectives felt that uniformed men were not qualified to judge them. Nor was this the interchangeability between the two branches that had been demanded by many detectives.
But Dinnie had pointed out that promotion should generally be confined within each branch. Otherwise, if a sergeant and a Chief Detective were of equal ability, the latter would win out in promotional competition because of his high profile in court work and so forth. Yet the Chief Detective might be out of touch with front-line uniformed work, and a detective lifestyle would have induced lax disciplinary habits - which, perhaps, had led to O’Brien’s problems in Dunedin. A compromise linkage between the two detective demands had been proposed by
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Wellington detectives: that Chief Detectives be appointed Sub-Inspectors in the detective branch and have an equal chance of promotion to Inspector. Up to that point there would be internal promotion, with Acting Detectives renamed Detective Constables, able to aspire to both sergeant and Senior Sergeant level within the branch. In the event the new arrangements fell far short of this, bringing neither extra rank equivalents nor equal chance of promotion to Inspector. 53
All the same, a 1919 committee of enquiry concluded that the change had ‘put an end to the uncertainty which had surrounded the comparison of a detective’s position with that of a sergeant in the uniform branch’, and was in that sense beneficial to detectives. This was of course a retrospective analysis. Detectives resented the ramification of the new rule that their promotion to sergeant dated only from their elevation to detective sergeant. Their chagrin was understandable, for when they had transferred as uniformed branch constables to a detective rank it had been gazetted that they were being ‘promoted’. Some argued that when their detectives’ salaries reached the equivalent of those of uniformed sergeants they should automatically be designated as sergeants. At the 1919 enquiry. Detective Sergeant F S Cox contended that it had been a mistake to create his rank, because it reduced detectives’ status to equivalence with constables. The enquiry dismissed such grievances as ‘erroneous’, but they reflected the discontent felt by detectives over the intervening years, discontent which a ‘compromise’ solution in 1914 had done little to allay.
The new rules also disturbed relativities between the Chief Detectives and the rest of their branch. They resented the narrowness of the gap in perquisites between their rank and the new rank. The Minister himself felt that their argument that they should receive the same housing allowance given the four senior NCOs was a reasonable one. In the event, their house allowances were increased to £5O (Auckland and Wellington) or £45 (Christchurch and Dunedin) per annum. From 1 May 1911 six senior detectives were made detective sergeants: William Campbell of Greymouth, Peter T McMahon and James Mcllveney of Auckland, John Cooney of Thames, Tudor Boddam of New Plymouth, and James Siddells of Wanganui. A seventh, J J Cassells, was elevated that November. They were to form a formidable backbone for the detective branch; by mid 1912 one of them, McMahon, was a Chief Detective. But discontent rumbled on. Some of the detectives appointed since 1898 had lost seniority in comparison with uniformed sergeants promoted during that period, while conversely there was also jealousy that some of the new detective sergeants had reached NCO level with less service than their uniformed equivalents. More fundamentally, the new rank had fulfilled only one of the detectives’ demands. 54
CHAPTER 13
Regulating Society, Regulating Police
The aging James McGowan had continued as Minister of Justice, and therefore in charge of policing, in the Liberal Cabinet formed after the death of Seddon, despite predictions that Sir Joseph Ward (who became Prime Minister on 6 August 1906) would drop him. Ward had appointed the erudite left-Liberal lawyer Dr (from 1911 Sir) John Findlay to the Legislative Council and made him Attorney-General. It caused disquiet when in the 6 January 1909 reshuffle Ward removed McGowan from the ministry (elevating him to the upper house as consolation) and made Findlay Minister of Justice as well. As the Southland Trades and Labour Council put it, it was ‘undemocratic’ to give the important portfolios of Justice and Police to a member of the upper house. In an ‘enlightened’ community, these responsibilities should be held by a man elected by and accountable to the electors. The present system, said future Justice Minister J A Flanan, was ‘a blow at responsible government’ and ‘subversive of true democracy’. That Findlay was a well-known reformist on prison issues filled some police and commentators with trepidation, others with hope. Appropriately enough he took up his new office in the year that Hume was at last compulsorily retired.
Hume had still believed at the turn of the century that prisons were purely for retribution, and so had McGowan. It was now intended to make penal life less harsh, more ‘scientific’ and categorised (an exclusively women’s prison was established in 1916), more effectively rehabilitative by suiting the sentence to the individual. Findlay’s visionary gaze faced in the same rationalising and humanising direction as the reforms of police conditions and expected police behaviour. A modernising bureaucracy would make the institutional and social environment more scientific, benign and (most of all) efficient. 55
The growth of bureaucratic agencies of control both reflected and accelerated the self-disciplining of society. These agencies frequently had functions which impacted upon police duty. Thus, paradoxically, societal stabilisation did not necessarily mean a decreasing workload for police. It could mean that new policing requirements replaced obsolete ones. The prototypal ‘welfare state’ agencies which had been established (particularly by the Liberals), for example, could require complementary action from the police. Applicants for Veterans’ Homes were assessed by police not just on their incomes but on attributes required of both good citizen and good inmate - ‘sobriety cleanliness and respectability’.
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It was police who enforced the Juvenile Smoking Suppression Act, who collected most of the money from parents for the maintenance of destitute, criminal and neglected children in the Industrial Schools and then the reformatories (the two forms of institution were separated in 1900, with the former to be for destitute children only), and who visited homes licensed under the Infant Life Protection legislation each evening to check whether adequate sleeping accommodation had been provided for the children. In Paeroa in 1906, typically, the police were asked by the magistracy to ensure that Old-age Pensioners did not frequent pubs,‘as the pension is not given to people for the purpose of spending in drink, and must not be wasted’. Much police time had been spent checking on the virtue of would-be Old-age Pensioners ever since the introduction of the pension. 56
From time to time the burden was relieved, collectively or for individual policemen, as the Crown appreciated the operational ramifications of some of its new measures of social control. By 1906, for example, the Education Department had substantially taken over the burden of supervising children placed out from Industrial Schools and of handling enquiries from parents seeking to regain control over children in care. By 1908 it had been agreed that the Education Department would supervise Infant Life Protection inspections. When Constable William Patton, in sole charge at Lower Hutt, asked in 1904 to be relieved of the duty of clerk of court and bailiff. Inspector Ellison agreed that he had enough ‘real’ work (i.e. not bureaucratic duties) to occupy two full-time policemen. Eventually a second man was posted to the station, although Patton had to keep doing most of the ‘extraneous’ work. However much their numbers waxed and waned, there were always plenty of duties which professional police regarded as marginal to policing, or not proper police work at all. Henry Scott recalled of his stint in the Chathams from 1910 that in conditions ‘primitive in the extreme’ he held no fewer than 19 official positions. 57
Another constant requirement remained the focus on the regulation of liquor consumption, despite the inadequacy of the legislation. Tunbridge had often advocated a rationalisation of the liquor laws, but the political procrastination which reflected the lack of a public consensus continued, and legal chaos still prevailed when his successor took over. Indeed Dinnie was put through a baptism by fire on the liquor issue as soon as he arrived. An early statement by the new Commissioner that the liquor laws needed review was interpreted by prohibitionists and temperance campaigners as supporting their contention that the government should give the police virtually open slather to suppress excesses. Some saw him as supporting Tommy Taylor’s loudly expressed view that politicians were deliberately preventing police from doing their duty on liquor laws, police having allegedly been stopped by Seddon from prosecuting men guilty of liquor breaches in Newtown, Wellington. Dinnie was forced to publicly rebut this interpretation.
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Given this initial furore, Dinnie had to proceed all the more cautiously on the liquor issue. Although the 1904 Licensing Acts Amendment Act, for example, went some way towards tightening up liquor regulation along the lines long advocated by heads of police, early in 1905 Dinnie warned his men to take ‘great care and discretion’ in administering it - knowing that the parliamentary and executive branches of the Crown did not want too stringent enforcement. The Act should be regarded as a permissive one, and police should ‘prevent the Public being unduly molested or harassed’ by ‘action taken unnecessarily’. Police powers with respect to persons found on licensed premises after hours were now so wide that care needed to be taken to ensure that the law did not become a means of oppression. Police should not automatically charge late-night imbibers, particularly such people as servants and lodgers.
The government, and therefore the police, could not afford to alienate the (still sizeable) drinking sectors of society. Publicans, a powerful force in the land, were not necessarily to be charged for minor offences; warnings should be used as much as possible. A body of restrictive police practices grew. In 1905, for example, it was decreed that if an arrested drunk denied his condition, the watch-house keeper must get corroboration from a superior if he wished to continue to detain the man. All in all, given ambivalent societal and governmental attitudes, tightened liquor laws, while welcomed, could create even more complications for the police. So did the increasing success of the prohibition movement in getting districts to vote ‘no-licence’ (e.g. Invercargill and Oamaru in 1906, Masterton in 1909).
People determined to get liquor would do so, and endemic evasion of the law in dry areas continued. Brewery depots and then breweries were established at Waikiwi, on the edge of the dry Invercargill area, and to them travelled youths and men who got drunk on the roadsides or in the surrounding paddocks. Constable William Baker donned many disguises in his efforts to stamp out slygrogging at Utiku, near Taihape. ‘Nearly every stranger standing about the vigilant constable’s height is closely scrutinised to make certain that he is not Baker in disguise.’ Men in dry areas got ‘a very hard time’, the son of one remembered; that constable saw himself as ‘absolutely alone among the rough characters who were so threatening that I believed at times my life was at stake. Any reputable person conversing with me would automatically be labelled an informer or police spy’. 58
While it was not possible to satisfy extremists on either side, police methods on the liquor question were inexorably altering in line with the increasing ‘civilisation’/consensualisation of New Zealand society. Increasing state regulation was part of this process, and this in turn stimulated civil libertarian trends, some of which became reflected in police practice. In 1904 Dinnie banned the employment of private persons to detect slygrog selling clandestinely, on the grounds that most people found such trickery ‘repugnant’. Not that this was taken too far, for
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police from other districts would continue to act under-cover if necessary. Moreover, reports continued that police were ‘trapping’ people into violating the liquor laws, particularly by disguising themselves as swaggers and persuading new-found friends to take them to slygrog operations.
But the general trend towards greater civil liberties was unmistakable. In 1905 the Commissioner ordered police to actively facilitate prisoners’ access to lawyers. The Police Gazette, under his regime, went into greater and greater detail on the intricacies of the law by publishing law reports, which often highlighted the protection of rights. In 1906 the police hierarchy agreed that when juvenile offenders were brought before the authorities, wherever possible they would implement a ‘forward step’ instituted by the Justice Department and deal with the culprits outside a regular court sitting. Children would not be kept in gaols or lockups. If not bailed, they were to be placed with benevolent organisations. From 1911 the police orientation towards the mentally handicapped became more focused on treatment. 59
With the increasing acceptance of ‘bourgeois morality’ throughout society, the policeman’s role as ‘moral exemplar’ became all the more demanding. The Dinnie administration was not pleased when it found a string of allegations against police canvassed in court, some of them (e.g. for assault) being upheld. Examples were made of some who transgressed, even before the 1905 Dunedin events and the resulting Royal Commission. In Dunedin itself the police leadership had already taken a tough line by in 1903 reducing Sergeant Griffith to the rank of constable and transferring him to Invercargill for breaches of the regulations (this proved somewhat counter-productive, as many citizens who had known him refused to accept his guilt and demanded a public enquiry).
In 1904 Christchurch’s Constable James Bunting was dismissed for breaching regulations prohibiting ‘immorality’. An enquiry into his case by Inspector Gillies had found ‘a very unsatisfactory state of proceedings as regards the morality of at least a number of Constables’ in the city. A ‘wicked girl’ of 26 (nicknamed ‘Rough Rider’) with three illegitimate children had been visiting constables on their beats after midnight. Bunting, who had a record of offences, had allegedly left his beat to visit her ‘for immoral purposes’ in her Cranmer Square servants’ quarters, to which he gained access by ladder. Gillies had relied on the evidence of her ‘respectable’ employers over and above that of three policemen and a nightwatchman, so little faith did he have in some of his men. When Bunting demanded an enquiry into the charges against him, it was denied in order to stop the ‘public from gaining a knowledge of what is best kept to the Dept.’ In the same month as the Dunedin constables were found to have carried out serious property crimes, two Wellington constables were committed for trial for perjury during the trial of James Kennedy on a charge of being idle and disorderly. Although in the end it was said to be a matter of mistaken identity, the judge criticised the police for
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bringing incorrect evidence before the court. In 1909 two policemen were suspended after complaints of assault from a man and his wife; both constables were fined, and one of them was gaoled. 60
Commissioner Dinnie continued to strive to improve standards in the Force. ‘During my tours of inspection’, he noted in 1905, ‘I regret to say I have observed constables and some sergeants lolling about when in the witness-box giving evidence, instead of standing erect.... Nothing is more indecorous than behaviour of this description by the police’. He felt that ‘this unseemly habit’ tended ‘to lower the police status’ in a period of rising societal expectations. Two years later, despite the post-1905 Commission tightening of discipline, he was having to warn the men about a more serious matter: ‘unjustifiable arrests’ based on false identification or inadequate evidence. This was not good for the public image of the Force, and caused ‘no end of trouble’ in terms of compensation, as well as being clearly unprofessional. The arresting constable, he lectured, ‘is entirely responsible for any action resulting from an illegal arrest’. If there were any police negligence in such an event, ‘severe punishment must inevitably follow’. 61
With the quality of sergeants having already been targeted by 1905 as a means of ensuring better behaviour by beat constables, Dinnie was soon turning his mind to the next level of the hierarchy. The SubInspectorship had continued to be a not entirely happy innovation, especially given endemic friction over issues of demarcation. This had spilt over into open hostility in Auckland in 1905, with New Zealand’s most senior Inspector, John Cullen, at loggerheads with Sub-Inspector Black (‘Sensational Statement by Mr. Black’ and ‘Friction with an Inspector’ were typical headlines). Soon, all business between them was being conducted in writing only, an echo of previous feuds elsewhere. The 1905 Royal Commission’s finding that neither party was at fault was an implicit indictment of the position of Sub-Inspector as it currently existed - or at least of how it had been allowed to develop in one city as a result of vagueness of definition of its responsibilities. Tunbridge had kept the specifications reasonably open to allow the Inspectors to work out arrangements to suit their districts, but had underestimated the downside effects of human agency. The Commission, as a result, declared the role of Sub-Inspector to be an ‘unsatisfactory’ one.
There had also been problems when Sub-Inspector Mitchell arrived in Auckland. He had ‘ideas about his position that did not coincide with mine’, Cullen said. As Black noted, Cullen had felt Mitchell wanted to take on too much responsibility. Black too little: one could seemingly not win. In Dunedin, the Sub-Inspector had no control over the detectives, even in O’Brien’s absences. Such a ‘division of authority’, in the view of a knowledgeable observer, must lead to ‘disorganised discipline’. Instead, moreover, of the Dunedin and Wellington Sub-Inspectors having a handson role running the Force in the city and suburbs, the Inspectors did much of this work themselves - leaving the clerical and court work to the
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Sub-Inspectors. Wellington’s Sub-Inspector O’Donovan told the Commission that he did virtually none of the duties he thought he should carry out. He felt that direct control of the streets and the out-stations should be an essential part of his work. A detective considered that the SubInspectors were ‘the worst off men in the Police Force’ because of the uncertainty about their role.
The 1905 Royal Commissioners’ recommendations reflected a widespread demand for at least one extra senior NCO in the big centres to carry out clerical and supervisory work (including receiving visitors), allowing the Sub-Inspectors to make more visits. The replacement of Sergeant-Majors by Sub-Inspectors had not worked. What was needed was a revival of a senior NCO rank to complement the work SubInspectors should be doing. Concomitantly, more court work could be taken on by the Chief Detectives. These arrangements would enable the Sub-Inspectors to exercise more control over NCOs and take over both hands-on and important clerical duties from their superiors, while relieving them of minor administrative burdens.
Whatever the problems of supervision in the cities, the Commissioners apparently believed that the system generally was a valuable one. It needed fine-tuning rather than ditching, and the government could therefore make minimal alterations. With Dinnie’s desire to remove the position of Sub-Inspector and create that of Superintendent thwarted by the government’s general acceptance of the Royal Commission’s report, he now sought to get his best men into Sub-Inspectorships - elevating for example A H Wright, the Chief Clerk and Accountant at headquarters, at the beginning of 1906. In the absence of major reorganisation, boosting the efficacy of the Sub-Inspectorate should prevent any more Dunedintype fiascos. Dinnie was particularly disappointed that his suggested Superintendents emerged only as the new rank of City Inspector with an increased salary but responsibilities confined to the four main districts, but he continued to examine the problem of appropriate demarcations of duty between commissioned officer positions. He worked closely with the four City Inspectors, conferring with them in Wellington in early 1906. 62
When Dinnie was told in late 1905 he could introduce the senior NCO rank advocated by the Commission, he sought men who were not currently involved in main-centre methods. Four sergeants were promoted to the new rank of Station Sergeant (originally gazetted as Senior Sergeant) on 1 March 1906; Thomas King, who was transferred from Oamaru to Dunedin; William Phair, moved from Rotorua to Wellington; Samuel P Norwood, sent from Wanganui to Christchurch; and Charles W Hendrey, who was shifted from suburban Newton to Auckland city. The promotions did not necessarily do the promotees a favour. King’s rent payments rose by 3s 6d per week, and his salary was less than he had been initially promised. When he resisted the promotion, Dinnie told him that it was a
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stepping-stone to further advancement. With few exceptions, vacant Sub-Inspectorships would now be filled by either Station Sergeants or Chief Detectives. But in 1909 King had still not made Sub-Inspector, unlike Norwood (who was behind him on the seniority list), and remained lumbered with the ‘most irritating and unpleasant work’. Worse, he was now completely answerable to Norwood, with duties which were allegedly never adequately defined. 63
In the same month as the Station Sergeants were appointed there was a rationalisation in the size of districts. Rumours that the Commissioner was considering semi-centralising control of the police by abolishing the districts in favour of four regions presided over by ‘Chief Superintendents’ had been boosted by Dinnie’s advocacy of Superintendents to take charge in the four main centres and by the elevation of the city Inspectors to their new rank. The rumours had been exaggerated, but the hierarchy had been considering alterations in the district system along regional lines. In the event, no doubt partly because of pressure from outer areas, this was dropped, although Auckland and Wellington districts were expanded. Auckland acquired 10 stations from Napier and now included places as far afield as Opotiki, Te Whaiti and Tokaanu, while Wellington absorbed the Nelson region, which did not seem to be run satisfactorily from Westland. 64
This piecemeal tampering soon proved to be inappropriate. In particular, the Auckland District was already too large, as Tunbridge had noted as far back as 1898. On 16 May 1907 a new Thames District, headed by Inspector N Kiely, was formed, comprising 20 stations and including the Bay of Plenty stations transferred to Auckland District the previous year. This did not prove to be an adequate restructuring. Dinnie (with Cullen’s acquiescence) had argued for a district centred on Hamilton, from where the King Country liquor trade might be better controlled, but McGowan overrode him, arguing that the Hamilton area was easily accessible by train from Auckland. Cullen felt that Thames had been chosen as the headquarters of the new district merely because the Minister lived there. Even its Inspector stated openly that his ‘unimportant’ district had been created for political reasons and should include (as originally planned) all Waikato stations as well.
Thames District was to survive several later suggestions that it be abolished. In 1911, for example, when Sub-Inspector Wright took temporary charge (following Kiely’s transfer to Christchurch) and was promoted to Inspector, there was a Cabinet investigation of its viability. Dinnie and his successors were, however, often able to reappraise and adjust district boundaries to meet local or national needs. Control of Tapanui and Clinton stations was moved from Dunedin to Invercargill at the beginning of 1907, for example. In 1908, prompted by the temporary residence of the Governor in the town, an officer was sent to take charge of Palmerston North, a railway junction that had become the fifth largest
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population centre in the Dominion. It had been ‘giving a lot of trouble on account of a large number of criminals making it a resting place owing to the prosperity there’.
Less necessary stations were being closed, while new ones were being opened, especially to keep pace with suburbanisation. In line with the official intention to phase out district constables, part-time posts were from time to time elevated to stations manned by regulars: Cheviot at the beginning of 1906, the Chatham Islands from 1 December 1907 (the elderly Rayner, district constable for four decades, having been diagnosed with cancer; he was to die within three months), Karamea in 1908, Stewart Island in 1914. But Dinnie was flexible enough to use the part-time institution when necessary, albeit reluctantly - transferring Waikaremoana’s district constable to Frasertown in 1907, and setting up new part-time police posts at places like Waikari and Ongaonga, both of these in 1908. Royal Commissioner H W Bishop noted wryly in 1909 that the 1898 Commission had predicted that the then 15 district constables would disappear in time, but there were now 22 of them. The occasional disaster in remote areas, on top of ongoing low-key police work, seemed to remind the police authorities that it was better to have some permanent police presence than none at all; in 1902, for example, the Houhora district constable, John Bowman, had intercepted a vessel in order to rescue 73 survivors from the Elingamite, which had foundered three days before with the loss of 45 lives. But after Dinnie’s time there would be few such appointments - two in 1911, then no more for another seven years. 65
Dinnie and his successors were also not averse to continuing to use supplementary muscle, when required, by swearing in special constables. Two guides at the Waimangu Geyser near Rotorua, for example, were made specials to better prevent tourists endangering their safety (and the reputation of the Crown-promoted tourist venture) by - as some had done with fatal results - ignoring signs and warnings. In 1910 four Harbour Board employees were sworn in under the provisions of the Harbour Boards Act. Others continued to be sworn in under such legislation as the Police Offences Act, and for municipal, animal welfare and other purposes. Justices of the Peace, usually working with police, continued to swear in specials ‘for ordinary purposes’, viz (in the words of A H Wright) ‘where riots, tumults or crimes are reasonably apprehended’.
Businessman H K Hovell of remote Te Araroa was, by arrangement with the local magistracy, a ‘special constable’ in the early years of the century, liaising with the Port Awanui police station 30 miles away. When a regular constable was stationed at Te Araroa in 1916, Hovell continued to act as his assistant. All the same, the police were not generally happy about JPs making ad hoc policing arrangements, especially given the low level of legal/policing knowledge of the magistracy in remote areas. The 1898 Commission was told about an elderly runholding
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JP who appointed specials during a disturbance at a ‘bachelor’s ball’ in his woolshed, but did not know how to do so properly (thereby protecting them from any legal consequences of manhandling people) and merely notified them that they were specials. The Police were determined to continue professionalising policing activity throughout the country. 66
Immigration into New Zealand increased steadily after 1900, peaking in 1908 at 18,306 people; the country was prospering thanks to high prices for primary exports in the British markets and the growth of dairying in favoured regions. At the end of 1903 there were 630 regular police in New Zealand; eight Inspectors, four Sub-Inspectors, the sole remaining Sergeant-Major, 57 sergeants, 526 constables, 21 detectives and 13 probationers. Auxiliary staff comprised 22 district constables, 10 Native Constables, four matrons and four surgeons. Nearly half of the regulars were stationed in what were in colonial terms ‘metropolitan’ areas, which approximately matched the distribution of population. Increasing urbanisation and suburbanisation brought with it unremitting pressure on the authorities to implement better police coverage in the cities and large towns, which were seen to need special attention because of the belief that their social discipline was looser. Particularly in slum areas, there was thought to be a link between overcrowding, disorderliness and criminality.
In 1908, for example, there were calls for more effective policing of the capital’s Te Aro area, ‘probably the roughest quarter of the town’. A long line of commentators had urged more police in the city, which was at times allegedly left ‘practically unprotected’ (to the extent that there might be only half a dozen men on duty in inner Wellington). Yet the capital, with a total of 93 men covering the city and suburbs, was in fact ‘better policed’ than before, having recently acquired 10 more constables and another detective. Auckland authorities and observers waged a long campaign for more police in the largest centre, as did Cullen himself. There had to be a limit to growth, the government would frequently point out, certainly in a period of societal stabilisation. Dinnie and McGowan scoffed at ‘silly’ allegations that it was not safe for women to walk in the cities at night; people seemed to want more police for the sake of it. A Chathams JP, E R Chudleigh, visiting Christchurch in 1912, depicted its Saturday night street life as ‘the most orderly crowd in the world’, and he was hard to please. All the same, there was a general consensus amongst top police that more men were needed to do the job properly. The Commissioner agreed with Cullen in 1911 that, in proportion to population, Auckland (in Chudleigh’s eyes ‘the most criminal town’ in the country) should have more police. But this was not enough to ensure that Cullen’s demands were met. 67
In 1900, fully 70 percent of recruits were New Zealand-born, compared to 20 percent a decade before and none in 1880. This trend had been welcomed by senior police as far back as Commissioner Gudgeon’s time.
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Apart from the fact that they were believed to better understand the rhythm of actual and desired behaviour in the colony, native-born men were thought to be less mobile than immigrants, and therefore more appropriate role models in a society aiming for stability. ‘What is required in this colony is a thoroughly New Zealand Police Force’, Hume argued in 1891. On the other hand, it was commonly believed that ‘the colonial youth does not like discipline’, particularly if he was from an urban area. To counteract this, recruiting officers continued to follow Tunbridge’s prescription and give preference to raw, brawny young men from the countryside; they could ‘break them in properly’.
There was an unresolved debate about whether married men should be sought. ‘A young man can pick up his swag and go away’, whereas (it was said) married men had ‘a stake in the country’, were more ‘reliable’, and ‘sooner settle down to discipline’. But married men were generally older and therefore thought to be less amenable to training. A typical description of an ideal constable envisaged him as ‘a fairly big man, a noted wrestler’, a young man who ‘has shown himself to be made of good stuff’ by his attention to obedience and deference. But ‘emptyheads’ such as the ‘simple going young man’ James McDonald could be susceptible to education in other than the desired patterns of behaviour. It took the hierarchy quite some time to appreciate this. What most surprised Dinnie about the conversion of the Dunedin men to crime was that they had been so easily contaminated. 68
Once this problem had been realised, the obvious prerequisite for the successful education of the relatively unsophisticated and unintelligent new constable was a predisposition towards the norms of prevailing morality. The first step following the Dunedin police scandal was to reassure the public that such men were being selected. This was not easy; the Dunedin imbroglio ‘again arouses the suspicion that appointments to the police force are governed more by influence than by the personal fitness and good character of the applicant’, one commentator opined, echoing a widespread belief that Seddon’s patronage machine still clanked along unhindered.
This was definitely an unfair allegation, at least with regard to the Police. Tunbridge had vigorously fought political influence, and it was clear that a pro-government MP’s recommendation of Moses had played no part in his appointment. Dinnie claimed that he had never allowed influence to affect an appointment or advancement, and no one was able to prove otherwise. He had railed against attempts to use influence to stop transfers, and on becoming Commissioner had greatly tightened vetting procedures for recruits. Moses could probably not have slipped through these had he joined since that time. According to the Commissioner, who had to make many such public reassurances, the reformed New Zealand selection procedure ‘exceeds in strictness that of any other Police Department and cannot well be improved upon.’ Dinnie had 300
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screened candidates on his waiting list and so could pick and choose. He was to further tighten procedures, and would soon require a second inquiry to be carried out when a man was selected from the waiting list, since a year or two might well have elapsed since the initial enquiry. The candidate’s employment history would be checked by contacting all his former employers. What was now needed to prevent ‘wrong attitudes’ entering the Force was better vetting of the would-be recruits in terms of their potential correctness of beliefs and behaviour. An effort was made to ensure this. 69
Once a morally promising young man had been selected for entry, the question was how best to imbue him with desired police attributes - the use of ‘wise discretion’, for example-and knowledge. Sergeant Douglass Gordon at the ‘Mount Cook Police Training Depot’ had been pondering this at the time of Dinnie’s arrival. The regulations decreed that the recruits should be able to pass a Standard Four examination, but the situation had changed since the reasonably satisfactory first drafts. Reflecting the lowering of police pay relative to that of other occupations, the recruits’ intellectual quality was often so low that the first three weeks of the course were devoted to ‘cramming’ so they could pass the examination. At the end of the course, as a consequence, men emerged with no more than ‘a very superficial knowledge of the Statutes and kindred subjects’, not to mention of ways of thinking and behaving suitable for societal role models and official coercers.
The educational requirements were too high, Gordon concluded; men who had great difficulty passing examinations could make good policemen. He had ‘found it a rule that it is the hard working man who is deficient in education.’ Dinnie, however, wanted to emphasise the importance of having academically able police, and instructed Gordon to focus attention on recruits’ reading, writing and spelling, as well as on knowledge of police duties (he discounted geography and arithmetic; one candidate had achieved nil marks in the latter subject). The Commissioner believed that a degree of intellectual capability was both part of being a good role model and also integral to important police attributes such as the ability to wisely use discretion. Gordon had an uphill task. In August 1904 he reported that five of his current batch of 10 probationers were below standard; the Force would have to attract young men who were better educated in the first place.
One examinee had misspelt three-quarters of the words in a simple dictation test, ‘some so badly that they appeared to be words in a language foreign to the writer’. In their first set of examinations, the probationers’ marks out of a possible 610 had ranged between 158 and 403. Dinnie had little choice, in pressing circumstances, but to pass such men even when their final examination results were poor. They could leam on the job - and anyway, ‘our probationers ... as a whole compare favourably with those in other Police Forces.’ In the 15 intakes from 1902 to 1905
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inclusive, totalling 168 men, only one recruit was actually failed (although another nine were either discharged or resigned in the course of their probationary period). 70
James Cleary of Dunedin had his name entered on the Candidates’ List in May 1905, after his five testimonials were checked. He later passed a medical examination by the local Police Surgeon, and that November was summonsed to Wellington (at his own expense). At the Mount Cook Depot Sergeant Gordon supervised a tight regime: after the 6 am rise there was fatigue duty, breakfast at 8 am, class at 9 am, with drill and exercise finishing off the morning from 11.15. Classes recommenced at 1.30 pm, with exercise at 4pm and tea at 5 pm. The men were free in the evenings until bedtime at 10 pm (or later with permission), and on Saturdays after 3 pm and Sundays after a morning parade. Cleary was ‘Hauled over the coals’ when he took too long to get his uniform fitted, an introduction to the punctual habits required of policemen. After three weeks he had to sit a general examination, after six weeks the ‘Police examination’. A near contemporary recalled that it was difficult to keep up standards in the cramped living and working conditions at the Depot. ‘They used to work you to the limit to try and break you down’, another recruit later remembered.
The 1905 Commissioners visited the Depot. ‘Excellent work is carried out here under most disadvantageous circumstances. It appears to us most important that a properly equipped depot should be provided. The present quarters are entirely too small for the recruits and duty-men together, and no proper conveniences exist to enable the Instructor to do full justice to his valuable system of instruction.’ Not only was a better physical environment needed, the Commissioners reported, it was time to obtain a much higher ‘calibre’ of recruit. It therefore urged a raising of entry standards, a recommendation in line with Dinnie’s aspirations, albeit far from the circumstances of most of the sought-after recruits.
The level of knowledge needed to join the Force was consequently raised to Standard Five, where it was to remain for nearly three decades. By notice of 13 November 1905, those selected for a probationary course had to produce evidence of having attained this standard, and a more thorough investigation into their antecedents was also set in train. To help offset the resulting decline in recruiting, former policemen did not now necessarily have to undergo retraining. The new entrance level could therefore be applied more rigorously, and as a result recruiting ‘tapped a different class of the community’. It was also true that ‘those willing to work can earn more money as labourers than in the Department’, so potentially good policemen were lost because of poor remuneration. The numbers passing through the Depot were kept down, in any case, by the lack of enough space to train large batches. Dinnie was able to persuade the government, backed as he was by the report of the 1905 Royal Commission, that a better Depot was needed, and in 1906 a section in Rintoul Street, Newtown, was acquired. But new and better-
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equipped barracks there were not constructed until the latter half of 1908. The probationers were now able to do the full two months’ course, which had often been cut by a fortnight because of the lack of room at Mount Cook. Although the new barracks was not officially connected with the small Wellington South station. Sergeant William Mathieson kept an eye on the men during the evenings.
Dinnie had remained conscious of the importance of the whole ambience of the training regime, and the need to inculcate the new men with all the desired virtues. In February 1906 he reminded Wellington’s Inspector Ellison of his obligation to ‘devote a little attention to and supervision over this Branch of the Service’, with these factors in mind. Dinnie was also seeking the ideal instructor to replace Gordon on his promotion to Sub-Inspector, and his choice fell on a 34 year old clerk in Cullen’s office. The well-educated Constable John W M Dart had passed examinations qualifying him as a solicitor in 1905, and in March 1906 he was appointed to take charge of the Depot. In a move which caused disquiet and suspicion of use of influence, since he had been in the Force only six years. Dart was promoted to sergeant - above 300 longerserving constables - from 1 June 1906 in order that his status would befit his new job. The ‘stem’-countenanced Dart, an athlete as well as a scholar, jeered at his men to harden them, and made them take runs to the top of Mount Victoria carrying heavy packs. But his emphasis was on studies, following O’Donovan’s original prescription and Dinnie’s wishes (as was that of his successor from 1911, Sergeant John McNamara, who made the men ‘learn like a parrot’). Dart was to become a famous police trainer, tasked with improving the ‘general intelligence’ of the Force as an integral part of the advancement of its efficiency. 71
Dinnie appreciated that the development of a more competent force could not rest with recruits alone. He was determined to make selfimprovement an ongoing facet of all policemen’s careers. Inspector Gillies in Christchurch ran successful educational sessions for the men. In August 1906 the Commissioner reinstated weekly one-hour instruction classes in the four centres, as recommended by the 1905 Commissioners. They would be run by Sub-Inspectors or Station Sergeants, and were compulsory for those of less than a year’s service, with others encouraged to attend voluntarily. In his first annual report Dinnie had recommended the introduction of examinations to test the abilities of constables recommended for promotion. Now, an optional examination would be held every January, and ‘future selections for promotion or appointment to positions of trust in the service will greatly depend on members’ qualifications as shown by these examinations.’
The classes and examinations focused on specific statutes, procedures such as the fingerprint system, and the need for police to comply with certain standards of behaviour. These standards embodied the appropriate image of the exemplar policeman in an age of hegemonic social control.
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In effect, they were modernised restatements of the ‘Maxims’. The men were to be physically presentable, externally disciplined enough still to be able to engage in ‘smart and military saluting’, internally disciplined enough to resist the temptation to gossip on the beat. Through showing a civil and respectable demeanour, even when dispersing crowds, they were to gain the confidence of the public. They were to be prompt, strictly obedient to orders, truthful; they were to ‘stand at attention or erect’ when in the witness box, for ‘nothing is more distasteful’, it was reiterated, than to ‘observe a constable in uniform lolling about when giving evidence’. 72
The first of the new optional examinations (involving two three-hour papers) was held in January 1907, but with few candidates. Seventeen were successful, and later in the year, men on the pass list began to be promoted to sergeant. Yet this was not sufficient incentive for many men to study for, sit and pass the examinations. There was widespread awareness that men who had passed these and/or previous examinations were not necessarily selected for promotion; and that some promoted men did not possess examination passes. Critics who had said that unless examinations were compulsory for promotion, ‘crawling and pimping’ to the bosses would continue, claimed vindication for their stance. In 1908 only 14 of 28 examinees passed; in 1909, 17 again. Although Dinnie stressed the importance of the examination system in September 1909, and predicted that passes would soon be a prerequisite for promotion, that November there was an announcement - perhaps prompted by the Minister, following scrutiny of promotion practices by the recent Royal Commission - that the annual examination was being suspended.
Why had the system not worked? This was partly a legacy of the recruiting policy’s stress on obtaining rural labourers. These were unsophisticated, found it hard to adjust to some role-model behavioural requirements, found mastering the paperwork required for success in examinations difficult. Inspector Ellison complained in 1909 that the policy of placing graduated recruits in Wellington before their stationing was a ‘mistake’, for it left the capital city reliant on recruits and men with very short service. They did not know how to direct traffic, and their nervousness led them into abrupt encounters and ‘trivial unpleasantness’ with the public. One man who had been taught wrestling ‘practised rough treatment on more than one prisoner, one elderly weak man having been badly bruised’. They were just too unsophisticated, en masse , to cope with the New Zealand equivalent of the big city; only after a long period of close supervision would they be good policemen. Few of the ‘intelligent’ rural ‘empty-heads’ sought by Dinnie came forward, so the typical recruit was not fully suitable for a modernising Force. 73
There was another reason for the failure of the examination system. Newly attested constables were usually posted to the big inner-city stations, a practice recently endorsed as working well. But new men, given that they were largely from rural backgrounds, longed to get out to
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the one-constable country stations, or at very least to the relative freedom of the suburban stations, or to a position as a mounted constable, which generally meant regular hours and day work only. Such posts were in ‘great demand’ among constables with growing families, and were seen as promotions by the men. Postings to one-man stations, allegedly achievable by ‘seniority and merit combined’, meant relative separation from superiors. Those in the countryside had plentiful land on which to grow vegetables and run a horse, cow and fowls; perhaps time for some (illegal) secondary work; usually avoided wearing a uniform (also against the rules); had no fixed hours and in many cases enjoyed extra emoluments; and had rent-free station houses.
One man did not apply for promotion from Rawene to Auckland because it would have meant losing £ 130 per annum in extra remuneration
- bailiff’s fees, and the salary from six other appointments, including clerk of court and deputy registrar of Old-age Pensions. The well-regarded and intellectual constable Lewis Skinner turned down promotion in order to stay on in the country to give his family of five a healthy way of life. His daughter recalled that he was proud of the fact that he could provide all their vegetables, eggs, fruit and milk, ‘and he still had time to spare’ for scholarly pursuits, to enjoy the native bush, to act as agent for the Public Trust, to find ways of keeping youths out of ‘trouble’, and so forth. A new constable recently arrived from Scotland told his fiancee that if ‘a man gets a station ... he is better off than a Superintendent at home’. A country policeman had ‘a very free and easy life’.
Once they were in such situations, significant numbers of men were loath to be promoted, for an NCO position meant, in return for a small raise, being stationed in the inner city in a more stressful job, with set hours, no house provided, and no extra emoluments. Rents were high, since sergeants had to live near their post, and the house allowances were insufficient to fully cover them. In effect then, promotion meant - at least at first - a net remuneration cut coupled with a lowered quality of life. Indeed, ‘some of the most capable Constables are in country stations and will not leave’. There was little incentive to sit examinations, except for the very ambitious who looked at matters in a long-term sense.
Commissioner Dinnie was a firm believer in the old adage that sergeants were ‘the backbone of the Service, and good Sergeants mean an efficient Police Force’. He therefore fought to make service as an NCO more desirable, to attract at least some of the able country men (while realising that men like Skinner could never be tempted). He secured quicker increments for sergeants from 1 September 1904. Following the 1905 Royal Commission, moreover, from 1 October all 72 NCOs (including the Sergeant-Major, and the four sergeants elevated to Station Sergeant) received a pay increase, and further ‘inducements’ followed in 1906. But all of this did little to overcome the initial reluctance of many men to engage in promotion-orientated betterment, even though
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in reality it was quite possible for sergeants to get charge of the larger country stations after two or three years on city street duty.
The basic problem remained: the men sought after for policing, and attracted to it at a time when police pay was falling relative to the cost of living and wages elsewhere, were often not highly intelligent or ambitious, and longed for a rural or quasi-rural existence. The 1905 Commission’s deliberations encouraged, for the first time, widespread debate about the adequacy, or otherwise, of a Force based on recruitment from rural milieux and offering labouring wages to constables. A commentator noted that they should be paid enough ‘to keep them respectable’, and depicted the 7s per day basic wage as inadequate for this purpose. The Dunedin scandal was significant. ‘lt is the falsest of false economy to place constables who are notoriously underpaid in positions of temptation’, both pecuniary and (because young constables could not afford to marry) sexual. 74
While it obviously suited the government to keep police constables’ wages low, had this been clearly counter-productive for public order they would no doubt have been raised. But Dinnie and other senior police advisers were imbued with the remuneration philosophy of both the ‘new police’ and the more overtly paramilitaristic forces; it was not ‘good’ for constables to receive even relatively high pay, for to offer too much would attract the wrong type of men. In any case, Dinnie felt that New Zealand rates compared favourably with those paid across the Tasman, and planned only marginal alterations to alleviate concern among the men, and hopefully attract the ‘more intelligent’ rural youth. In 1906 he decided for example that the men could be encouraged in ‘their somewhat onerous duties’ by condensing the time it took them to reach the maximum constables’ pay. In a measure which would ‘suffice for the present’ and cost a mere £931 per annum, increment intervals were reduced from 1 November. Such measures did not necessarily attract good recruits or fully quell discontent. It did not go unnoticed, for example, that most police forces had more frequent increments.
At the 1905 Commission the rank and file, supported by some NCOs and officers, argued the case for better pay. The cost of living had risen by between a quarter and a third over the last six years, but pay had remained static. A particularly strong case was made for married constables in the cities. Their superiors wondered openly how these men could survive on the basic constable’s pay, particularly those with children. Some constables and NCOs had got into debt because of their loss of purchasing power. A constable testified that when he joined in 1879 his 7s per day - the starting rate now, over a quarter of a century later-could buy more food at a time when rent was cheaper. Sub-Inspector Black said that were he a young man he would not join a Force which paid less than the day rate for labourers. It was no wonder that the quality had declined.
The current situation particularly discouraged the married men who were seen by many as the most appropriate recruits in a time of social
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stability. No doubt under political instruction, Dinnie was defensive on the issue, saying only that the constables’ rates were under consideration. Curiously, despite all the evidence, the Commissioners were unsympathetic, particularly to the single men’s cause - although they did conclude that perhaps married men should be given the lodging allowance after only a year’s service rather than three, and this recommendation was implemented from 1 October. Thirty-one qualified at once, alleviating a major grievance (although married men in their first year of service were still forced to live, in the later words of a retired Superintendent, in ‘shacks in the slum areas of the cities’). The Commission’s reluctance to recommend pay rises produced criticism in the press, one commentator citing the adage, ‘good men are cheap at any figure, and worthless men dear at any figure’.
By 1907 even Dinnie was acknowledging that a7s per day base rate at a time of rising living costs would not attract the desired type of recruit. Thanks to the stringent vetting procedures and higher entrance qualifications, only a small waiting list remained after each probationary batch entered the Depot. Moreover, despite the filtering most of the candidates - like the majority recently recruited - were of ‘an inferior class of men, such as bring discredit on the Department’. An examination of the list had revealed ‘few remaining eligible applicants’, for it was ‘principally the indolent who now apply’. The best of the newer men were soon lured to better-paid jobs elsewhere, in any case. The shortterm expedient of taking men with previous service straight onto the staff was useful, but some of these proved very unsatisfactory. Dinnie decided to recommend a 6d per day pay rise as a longer-term solution. He had a hard argument with the Minister, since the projected increase would have to be implemented across the board to maintain relativities. He stressed that there had been ‘practically no increase’ in police pay since before the establishment of the Force. In this time other pay rates had risen, and the cost of living had increased by some 50 percent. ‘Considering the prosperity of the Colony, and facilities for active energetic young men obtaining employment earning good wages, the present rate of pay in the Department is no inducement for such men to join it’. 75
Cabinet found such arguments compelling and endorsed the Commissioner’s recommendations. The result was a new base rate of 7s 6d per day (£136 17s 6d per year) and a basic rent allowance of £lB 5s per annum, operative from 1 October 1907. The new scale ameliorated the situation, although many (including Cullen) had argued that much more would be needed to get ‘a better stamp of recruits’. The new rate had not caught up with recent cost of living rises, and still fell short of labouring wages, which were at least 8s per day in 1909, so agitation continued.
Meanwhile Dinnie had been keeping a close eye on the interests of other groups inside the Force. In 1904, for example, he secured better pay and shorter increment periods for Sub-Inspectors and Chief Detectives,
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whose ‘onerous duties’ and hours that were ‘frequently long and exacting’ necessitated extra incentives. Sub-Inspectors received another pay increase the following year (to a salary maximum of £3OO, with a house allowance of £5O), and were given annual increments in 1906. The Commissioner was keen to raise the Sub-Inspectorate out of the doldrums into which it had quickly lapsed because of its initial imprecise terms of reference, and boosting its status by increasing its salary was one way of doing this. Matrons too were increasingly seen as indispensable, yet only Wellington’s had risen above the £lOO salary established in 1895. From 1 July 1908 a new maximum of £l2O was decreed, equivalent to the pay of Gaol Matrons, ‘whose duties are no heavier’. 76
By 1908 the increased pay rates and extra perquisites were still not retaining police or procuring recruits of adequate quality. To try to keep men in the Force, Dinnie notified them that August that they needed his permission to apply for outside jobs. This only increased the level of discontent. Even the Commissioner, desperate for ‘good new blood’, was now questioning the wisdom of the heavy recruiting focus on rural labourers. He asked his men to look out for ‘thoroughly respectable steady’ young men wherever they could be found, and to convince them of the advantages of a policing career. In effect, ‘every policeman was a walking labour bureau’. This policy had some success, and men from a slightly more diverse range of occupations began to enter the Force. But the basic problem of inadequate pay remained. By January 1909 Dinnie was recommending another increase in pay (and house allowance) of 6d per day for men and NCOs, £lO per annum for officers, and an extra shilling for probationers. The government, however, remained unreceptive, and Dinnie had to continue to make the most of what he saw as inadequate human resources. The improvements he had introduced were not enough to save him from intense criticism. 77
New Zealand Truth had long excoriated Dinnie for his ‘scandalous maladministration’. He was a ‘leech on the public purse’, a ‘bigoted bounder’, and so forth. By mid 1907 it was demanding a Royal Commission to enquire into his policing regime. In February 1908 public pressure forced the Commissioner to appoint Christchurch’s Sub-Inspector Dwyer to investigate what had become known as the ‘Gisborne Police Scandal’. That a junior officer had to investigate allegations against men reporting to a superior officer (Inspector Macdonell) did not augur well for an objective outcome. But despite ‘all kinds of opposition by the Police and their immediate friends’, Dwyer did ‘the toughest job I ever had to do’ conscientiously. After four days of investigation he reported ‘scandalous’ behaviour to Dinnie. But the Commissioner dealt with the offenders in an ‘inept’ and soft fashion in the eyes of many observers (and Dwyer). Only one constable, John Irwin, was sacked, and he had already been convicted for using undue violence on a drunk. Detective W Maddem was reduced to constable, and two policemen were transferred.
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Truth asserted that since the ‘almost senile supervision’ of the alleged harasser of the people ‘Muckdonell’ (the ‘Bumptious Boss Bobby’) was at fault, he should have been punished (he retired later that year) - and that some of the evidence against the ordinary police had been concocted by Dinnie’s ‘sneaks and spies’. Dwyer later felt that the whole affair had damaged Dinnie’s career.
In the same month Truth claimed that Christchurch policemen were considering a strike against Dinnie’s leadership which they were confident police in other centres would join. Some of the opposition to the Commissioner seemed to be no more than nativist prejudice against Scotsman Dinnie and his alleged favouritism towards fellow Scots and Freemasons, although much of it emphasised the poor quality of new policemen. There was by now so much dissatisfaction both inside and outside the Force - exacerbated by discontented police feeding Truth stories - that MPs were becoming involved in calls for reform. One case in particular aroused a great deal of attention.
A drunken Ernest Bourke was found unconscious and dying in a Westport stables. At first the local police - despite clear signs of a human attack - thought he had been kicked by a horse. When they changed their minds their suspect was young William Connelly, who later on the same night had been incarcerated for smashing the windows of a shop after being refused service because of his drunkenness. Connelly claimed that his cell-mates that evening, Scandinavians Olaf Halinen and Anders Anderson, who had been arrested for jumping ship, had earlier paid him to take Bourke to the stables. They had allegedly assaulted and robbed Bourke when he failed to produce money he owed them for selling contraband tobacco. They were charged, and their alibi that they had been in a local theatre, although supported by witnesses, was disbelieved by the police. The magistrate who ‘reluctantly’ committed them for trial clearly believed Connelly to have been the sole murderer, and the Supreme Court judge at the trial saw the Crown case as a ‘seething mass of contradictions’.
Yet the two seamen were convicted and gaoled for seven years for manslaughter. Subsequent enquiries by the Norwegian Vice-Consul and other supporters led to a charge by their defence counsel of perjury against Connelly. Although he was defended by the Crown Solicitor and supported by senior policemen, and the judge virtually directed an acquittal, Connelly was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ gaol. Connelly then allegedly confessed to Chief Detective W B Mcllveney that he alone had robbed and assaulted Bourke. The case was raised in parliament, and on 30 September 1908 Cabinet ordered the release of Halinen and Anderson. Neither was compensated for false imprisonment, and Anderson died a fortnight later, having been ill since his incarceration. Eventually, in May 1909, Connelly stood trial for the killing of Bourke. Prosecution witnesses gave some rather suspect evidence, which defence counsel A C Hanlon probed skilfully to suggest payments by police or
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others in return for contrived evidence. The defence presented a great deal of evidence which seemed to point to Halinen and Anderson being the killers after all.
The jury nevertheless convicted Connelly of manslaughter, and despite their recommendation of mercy he received an additional three years’ gaol. The rights and wrongs of the case are still in doubt. Whatever the truth, the police and Crown’s changing line did not reflect well on their competence. Mcllveney, in particular, only recently elevated to ‘Chief Detective of the Dominion’, was lambasted for his stewardship of the whole case. His attempt to defend the initial convictions on the grounds that the two foreigners did not sufficiently protest their innocence was ridiculed. Why, it was asked, did the police insist on prosecuting them despite the wealth of evidence pointing to the guilt of another? Mcllveney’s apparent determination to get convictions at all costs was to be discussed for years to come.
In 1909, ongoing publicity over the Westport case, and the conviction of two Wellington constables for assault, acted as a catalyst for Dunedin Central’s Liberal MP, the Reverend James Arnold, to brand the Force as being in a ‘deplorable state’. That it was a government politician who made the charges was seen as most significant, and even pro-police commentators were saying that discipline should be made more ‘stringent’. Under the nose of the strictest Inspector of all, the Auckland men were getting drunk in barracks; in the Inspector’s own words, you could not go upstairs ‘without tripping over empty beer-bottles in the passages’. Even after a surprise search and the subsequent forced resignation of two men, alcohol continued to be smuggled in.
Dinnie claimed in his annual report of 4 June 1909 that, despite all the critics, ‘the Police Force of the Dominion compares most favourably with any other Police Force, and ... our system is superior to many’. Attacks on him in the press emanated from ‘a personal and vindictive’ source and were ‘intended to mislead the public’. He had treated them ‘as merited - with silent contempt’. But within a fortnight came an attack that could not be so treated. On 15 June, using material from Truth, Arnold made ‘sensational statements’ in the House about dissatisfaction within and with the Force. In essence, he claimed that there had been a detrimental flow-on effect from the poor quality of entrants. He cited cases of inappropriate recruiting, including of an Australian criminal. The redoubtable T E Taylor added further instances to Arnold’s examples. There was no doubt that inadequate men had entered the Force, usually because Dinnie had been so desperate for recruits that he had taken men on probation before inquiries could be completed. 78
The Prime Minister leapt to the police administration’s defence, noting among other things that many applications to join had been rejected in recent times. While acknowledging that mistakes had been made, he observed that undesirables had been rooted out. Commentators noted that unsuitable appointees had generally been recent arrivals in
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New Zealand; the shortage of good local recruits had led to risks being taken. Arnold and others drew conclusions that in effect vindicated recent contentions by Dinnie: to get better men would require both increased pay and improved conditions. The latter would include a working week of less than seven days, more emphasis on promotion on merit, and the removal of ‘non-police’ work, ‘which lessens their selfrespect and lowers them in the opinion of those whose regard they value’. Even observers satisfied that recruiting standards were reasonably adequate were uneasy about the allegations that promotions had been based on criteria other than merit. The best men would shy away from a Force in which they could not advance through excellence in the workplace. Dinnie, under attack from all sides, now pushed the government for an independent public enquiry to clear his name. 79
New criticisms were meanwhile being made, fed by dissatisfied police. The staffing of the Commissioner’s office by regular police (a practice borrowed from Dinnie’s Scottish experience) had led many ‘active’ men to argue that those doing what was essentially ‘clerical’ work should be redesignated as civil servants. It was said that this would free up more men for ‘real’ police work, but the actual reason for opposing the system was that the Commissioner’s staff were believed to be too powerful. Relatively junior ranks had been able to exert influence over senior police out in the field. It was said that ‘sometimes unpleasant questions of seniority arise’, in particular when Sub-Inspector Wright took de facto charge in the absence of the Commissioner. There was a strong feeling amongst the Invercargill and other staff that Dinnie should be ousted, as (in Arnold’s later words) Wright was the man really ‘ruling the Department’. The Sub-Inspector acknowledged that he gave instructions to superiors in Dinnie’s absence. Such a situation, in the eyes of Cullen and others, was subversive of discipline - and potentially encouraged the inferior officer to ‘get into intrigue’. The promotions of various policemen at headquarters had caused ‘very great dissatisfaction throughout the service’, Cullen believed. So had the promotion of district clerks and their elevation in status over sergeants. At the very least, Wright should be posted elsewhere.
On 19 June the government acceded to the growing demands for a Royal Commission. The Police, in Dr Findlay’s words, needed to be ‘above any public suspicion of negligence or impropriety’. H W Bishop, the Dominion’s senior magistrate, was considered the best person for the job, particularly given his role as chair of the 1905 Commission. He reluctantly agreed to constitute a one-man Royal Commission. Dinnie later believed that Under-Secretary for Justice Frank Waldegrave and powerful friends had ‘engineered’ the Commission. He told his son that it was Waldegrave who had secured an instruction whereby the Commissioner now had to report to the Minister of Justice through the permanent head’s office, thereby making Waldegrave de facto as well as de jure head of policing. His motive was allegedly to increase his own salary
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because of the extra responsibilities, and thereby increase his superannuation (he was only three years from retirement). When Waldegrave failed to secure a higher salary, said Dinnie, he determined to bring the Commissioner down and take full control of policing. An alternative explanation for the instruction that Dinnie work through Waldegrave is that, given the increasing criticism of the Commissioner, he needed to be watched closely by someone who had the confidence of the government. 80
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CHAPTER 14
The Force Under Renewed Review
Many in the Police were upset that, once again, every tiny hiccup in police operations would be held up to public scrutiny and that people would generalise on the basis of extreme cases. It would reinforce the syndrome whereby (in Inspector Black’s words) ‘the Police Force has always been the butt of a good deal of ridicule’. Christchurch’s Inspector Gillies felt that each Commission affected discipline so ‘considerably’ that years passed before things reverted to normal. He and others believed that the ‘self-respecting men who are the bone and sinew of the Department’ resented such public intrusion into the police occupational subculture, and all because of (in Dinnie’s words) ‘a few malcontents’. Nevertheless nothing could now be done except to try to get the most positive results possible out of what would undoubtedly be a long and harrowing series of hearings. And so they proved to be. As in 1898 and 1905, there were some extraordinarily frank public appraisals of superiors, itself a reflection of how far the policing system had evolved since the Constabulary days.
Eyebrows were raised at the appointment of a single Commissioner, particularly given that it was Bishop, who had been publicly suggested as Dinnie’s successor when rumours spread that his contract would not be renewed. There was more puzzlement when the terms of reference were not as wide-ranging as had been promised. Bishop was debarred from looking into any matter previously ‘investigated and determined before any judicial or other lawfully constituted tribunal’, or any forced departures from the Force. ‘lt is usually recognised that when Commissioner Tunbridge relinquished office the force was in a high state of efficiency, and, rightly or wrongly, the impression is held that it is not in that state now.’ To find the cause of this ‘degeneration’ would surely require a completely open investigation.
The terms of reference were a compromise between a narrow investigation of specific charges and an open slather approach, and as such had been approved by Dinnie. Bishop’s public response to criticism showed, however, that the formal parameters scarcely mattered: there could still be a ‘full and free’ inquiry, because he was able to investigate the recruiting and career of men removed from the Force. He later openly wondered if he had been appointed because policemen were more likely to trust him than anyone else. Findlay attempted to ensure frank proceedings by giving public assurances that any truthful evidence given in
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good faith would not prejudice a policeman’s career. But Dinnie accompanied Bishop on his visits around the colony, and his right to cross-examine intimidated potential witnesses, some of whom had provided information in confidence. Some of his own men did however openly criticise him. Bishop soon had to caution him about his propensity to interrupt critics, and made clear who was in charge: ‘I do not recognise your status in connection with the Commission at all, unless it may be in respect of any charges made against you personally.’ Relations between the two quickly deteriorated, Bishop stating quite openly that ‘the Department is on its trial’, and several times rebuking the Commissioner for his attitude towards the Commission and his critics. 81
Bishop’s displeasure at Dinnie’s severe questioning of some of the witnesses became even greater when he displayed a ‘very hostile’ (in Bishop’s words) attitude towards Arnold. When the latter alleged that E W Dinnie had been given six months’ leave on full pay, the Commissioner responded that he had set ‘a little bit of bait for such as yourself to bite at.... We laid a trap for men who are interfering with the Department.’ This, Bishop said in his report, was an ‘extraordinary assertion’. In fact, the Commissioner’s son had 36 days’ leave on full pay owing him, but the Commissioner had recommended (and former Minister McGowan endorsed) only a month - and that to catch up on fingerprint improvements at New Scotland Yard and buy new ‘paraphernalia’. The Commissioner accused the MP of ‘deliberate falsehoods’, and while he later withdrew this, McGowan and documentation confirmed his account of the leave situation. Bishop agreed that it was understandable Dinnie was annoyed at Arnold, but it was ‘very foolish and ill-advised’ to accuse the MP of lying. In fact Arnold had assisted the Commission, and Dinnie had impugned Bishop by opposing MPs being allowed to question police during the hearings. 82
An incident near the beginning of the Commission set a sour tone for the proceedings. When the Wellington police heard of allegations of misconduct against them by Arnold, and of certain decisions by Bishop, some 40 NCOs and men met and unanimously expressed their ‘full appreciation of, and confidence in’ Dinnie. They in effect expressed no confidence in Bishop, noting that he had ‘publicly acknowledged’ that his 1905 Commission had ‘framed its report severely dealing with officers at least partially from newspaper reports of its proceedings’. They resolved that, ‘having regard to the apparent seriousness of the situation’, they would employ counsel to represent them at the Wellington sittings, ‘so that the protection of the individual and collective rights of all concerned may be insured, and that justice, fairplay, and truth may prevail.’ Such a grave breach of etiquette enraged Bishop, who alleged that this ‘absolutely improper’ decision had been ‘engineered’. This was probably a veiled reference to Dinnie and/or his headquarters staff, and the Commissioner distanced himself at once from the Wellington men. When the hearings opened in the capital, their legal counsel had to apologise for their
Police identification photographs of Joseph (‘Joe’) Pawelka, taken at the time of his arrest for breaking and entering, and theft, in February 1910. New Zealand Police.
Joe Pawelka’s fingerprints, taken on his arrest, loomed large in his trials. While the Crown failed to procure his conviction for the murder of Sergeant J P H McGuire, Pawelka received the heavy sentence of at least 21 years for property crimes. He escaped in 1911 and was never recaptured. New Zealand Police.
W J Phair, promoted to commissioned officer in 1908, one of the ‘new breed’ of officers. Mrs B Book.
Native Constable Te Kepa Tawhiao, involved in monitoring the activities of Urewera prophet Rua Kenana, stationed in Whakatane 1906-20. Whakatane Museum.
The Gisborne police complement c.1910, Native Constable George Pratt at right. Christchurch Press collection, Alexander Turnbull Library.
Mount Cook police station, Wellington, 1910. New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
The first police promotion examinations in Christchurch under the 1913 regulations, supervised by Superintendent John Dwyer (one of the four original appointees to Superintendent rank earlier that year) at the Supreme Court on 24 September 1913. Christchurch Police Museum.
Commissioned officers posing with the champion Auckland police tug-of-war team 1912. New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
Horopito police station, established 1908-9 during the building of the North Island main trunk railway line; with visiting constables W G Wright of Ohakune (with Mrs Wright) and H Beattie of Taihape (at right). Mrs R Miller/Mrs E Manor.
Police station at mining town of Waiuta, Westland, First World War period. New Zealand Police.
Supervising voting on election day, 1908. Wanganui Museum.
The first Police Matron, Sarah Beck, stationed at Wellington Central 1895-1918. Miss W Collins.
The staff at Mount Cook police station, Wellington, 31 August 1912; Arnold Buttenvorth, interviewed for this book, third from left at rear; Inspector J W Ellison, fourth from left seated, with Detective Sergeant J J Cassells to the right of him, D Holmes.
The government depicted as preempting a resurgence of police unionism in March 1914 by giving police a pay rise. Prime Minister W Massey is saying to the Minister (‘Nurse Herdman’); ‘For goodness sake stop that brat from making such a noise.’ Herdman offers the pacifier: ‘Here you are dearie, nicy, nicy’. The Bulletin, Auckland, 26, 1914/B Thomson.
Commissioner Frank Waldegrave, 1910-12. New Zealand Police.
Funeral cortege of Constable Francis Mackle, Te Aroha, December 1912. T Mackle
Constable Charles Gordon Smyth, leader of the abortive police union, the New Zealand Police Association, 1913. R Kerr.
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‘unwise’ action and explain that it was based upon incorrect reports that the hearings were being used to ventilate personal grievances. B3
As in previous enquiries, the men organised to present their case. The first witness. Constable George Scandrett, represented the aspirations of the Invercargill men for better pay and allowances. They attributed the poorer quality of recent recruits to the lack of decent remuneration. It was a typical presentation, and - also typically - local NCOs and officers generally endorsed their suggestions. Throughout the colony there was a uniform request for more pay, with some, like Sub-Inspector O’Donovan, suggesting a starting salary of 9s. Sub-Inspector Dwyer believed that if there was parity with crack overseas forces, the figures would be 12s or more. Witnesses noted that while the public wanted ‘men mentally, physically, and morally almost without blemish’, the low pay and bad conditions ensured that policing was still (in Inspector Black’s words) ‘not looked upon as a very honourable calling’ despite recent gains in status. The discrepancy between public expectation and reality was all the more glaring, given ‘the flourishing condition of the country’. Dinnie himself wanted all pay rates reviewed. 84
Many other grievances about conditions and allowances were expressed during the Commission: 12 days’ annual leave plus the occasional Sunday or other day off was universally regarded as inadequate, and a number of police pointed out that they did not get any Sundays off (and thereby became ‘social outcasts’). Up to 21 days’ leave was demanded, and many wanted guaranteed regular Sunday leave, perhaps once a month. The Dunedin men felt that they were still marked by the stigma of the 1905 scandal, and suffered in terms of promotions and in having restrictions imposed on them which did not apply elsewhere - such as, in the case of married men, having to wear uniforms while travelling to and from work. Throughout the colony the men sought free uniform maintenance, free boots (as recommended by the 1898 Commission), an increase in various allowances undermined by inflation, the abolition of petty regulations.
Some rules which should be ‘cremated’, such as that forbidding travelling more than a quarter-mile from the station without permission, had already been in effect suspended - but their retention in principle was an objectionable throwback to the fully military discipline of a past era. Three of the four Police Surgeons were said to be inefficient, and in the case of Auckland’s Dr Edward Sharman, Cullen supported the criticisms: the surgeon ‘hated me as the devil hates holy-water’, he said. The Auckland men preferred to get medical treatment privately, even though they had to pay for this. Sharman had requested and been given a judicial investigation a year before, but the results had languished with the government ever since. Whatever the truth of allegations against him, a very unsatisfactory situation clearly existed. 85
Throughout the Commission hearings there was underlying tension about Dinnie’s ‘headquarters brigade’. Attempts to prove the successful
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use of political influence almost always failed, and there was no concrete evidence that Dinnie had been excessively subservient to his Ministers. But in Wellington in September, Constable Michael Greene, an Otago veteran now in charge of weights and measures matters for the New Zealand Police, alleged that Chief Clerk/Sub-Inspector Wright was ‘practically the Commissioner. The Commissioner is only so by name.’ Sergeant Mathieson of Wellington South agreed that this had been the view in Invercargill (‘Dinnie was merely a figurehead’), and stated that when he came to Wellington he had seen it justified: a constable turned down by Dinnie for a station had secured it thanks to the man who was ‘really the Commissioner’, Wright. Resentment of Wright was said by the Wellington NCOs to be behind attempts by discontented men to bring about the Commission through a letter-writing campaign, but when their delegate (Sergeant Charles Kelly) attempted to explain that the men were not ‘familiar’ with Wright (as had been alleged by Greene) Bishop riposted: ‘We shall not agree on that, and I do not want your opinion on it.’ Superior officers should not, for example, play billiards with subordinates. Greene portrayed Dinnie as an ‘honest and conscientious’ man who had been ‘usurped by his Chief Clerk’, the man through whom men sought, and got, promotion.
Few believed the testimony of a Freemason constable that all allegations made during the Commission were part of a Catholic conspiracy ‘to have Mr Dinnie removed, and a Roman Catholic appointed in his stead.’ Bishop sneered at any allegations that masonry or religion affected police work. Many felt, however, there was some truth in this, and also that a Dinnie ‘spy’ system operated throughout the land. It was widely believed, for example, that Acting Detective Norman Abbott had supplied information on Cullen and Sheehan to Wright and Dinnie (in response, Abbott said it was ‘Dirty Barney Sheehan’ and other malcontents who used ‘pimping and crawling’). The Commissioner himself acknowledged that he obtained information from many sources, not just through formal channels. A key informant was believed to be Chief Detective Mcllveney, who from headquarters undertook specialist investigative duties (including on matters concerning other government departments) anywhere in the colony. In general, witnesses wanted the Commissioner’s staff to be disinterested non-swom men. 86
There was also a widespread view that the district clerks and their assistants continued to constitute a privileged elite: they too should be civilianised, or have a separate ranking system. Such a solution would remove the objectionable situation whereby constables or NCOs in effect gave orders to superiors. Clerical work was seen as an easy ride to the Inspectorate. Most serving Inspectors had been district clerks, who tended to be fast-tracked for promotion. They received a Is per day allowance, but worked only from 9 am to 5 pm, with Saturday afternoons, Sundays and public holidays off. Selection for these ‘pampered’ positions which constituted ‘the plum of the service’ was believed to depend on favouri-
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tism. Some district clerks had been given so much power by the Inspectors that ‘the tail wags the dog’.
The Commissioner, heading what aspired to be a modernised bureaucracy, was convinced that significant clerical training was a ‘necessary qualification’ for the higher ranks. He, Wright, Dwyer, Gillies, and the Napier District Clerk (Sergeant Denis Cummings) all argued that the need for confidentiality, knowledge of systems and financial trustworthiness made it essential for clerical staff to be uniformed men. It was of ‘extreme importance’ that career-minded policemen could cope with such positions; they were the ‘hardest-worked men in the Department’ despite their easy hours, had the most responsible jobs, and actually suffered financially in comparison with their comrades who obtained country postings. Cullen, a defender of old policing values, felt that ‘too much has been made of the clerical staff’, and that unless men undertook such work for no more than two or three years they became ‘fossilised’ far from the realities of the street. A man who could not get to grips with clerical work within six months was a ‘duffer’: Dinnie was wrong to believe that it took years to make a good district clerk, and it was unwise to promote on the basis of clerical work. The specialisation inherent in modem bureaucratic theory was anathema to Cullen: men should be rotated in and out of that and other facets of police work. The clash between the two exponents of ‘bureaucratised’ and ‘paramilitarised’ policing was a stark one. Bishop showed where he stood by expressing puzzlement at the arguments of Dinnie and his supporters. 87
Underlying the whole Commission was the issue of what qualities were desirable in policemen, and this was intimately related to the question of entry-level qualifications and attributes. While the argument focused at one level on pay and conditions, a parallel debate occurred. Many advocated dropping the Standard Five requirement, arguing that this had - rather than increase quality - provided too small a selection pool for the Force and therefore let in unsuitable elements. A sergeant noted that he had ‘seen some of the best policemen in Otago thirty years ago with very little education, but with a good deal of common-sense’, and the unreconstructed disciplinarian Ellison agreed: ‘Some of the best men in the service could barely spell their own names when they joined.’ Those who advocated lowering or even abolishing any specific educational requirement included both police of the ‘old school’ and a few ‘modem’ ones such as the founding instructor at the Depot, O’Donovan, who had had to grapple with the results of a small recmiting pool.
There were however many supporters of the fifth standard: ‘strength without brains and intelligence is a danger’, and the public now expected more than ‘main strength and stupidity’ in a constable. Inspector-General of Schools Hogben felt that it would be dangerous to lower the standard, and current instructor Dart agreed: those who stopped at Standard Four were ‘too dull and stupid to take advantage of their opportunities’. Auckland’s District Clerk Wohlmann summed up ‘modem’ thinking: ‘lt
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is generally conceded that the educated man makes a better policeman than the illiterate one’. Dinnie’s advocacy of the improved entry standard in 1905 had by now been tempered by experience. The Standard Five requirement was ‘only on its trial so far’, and through it the Force was ‘apt to lose a great many men of the farming class who might turn out the very best constables’. The police authorities had for some time been considering lowering the entry qualification. McGowan had declined, although he later changed his views because of the ongoing problem of getting sufficient good men: the fifth-standard requirement should be waived at the Commissioner’s discretion. Cullen was among those who supported such flexibility. 88
The last Commission hearings were held in Wellington in mid September. Relations between Dinnie and Bishop had so deteriorated that when the time came for the Commissioner to present the final evidence (for which he was given a fortnight to prepare) he arrived with a lawyer to advise him if he was asked any ‘objectionable’ questions, Dinnie claimed that both the records and the evidence revealed a Force ‘highly efficient and well disciplined’, and that no other force or government department could undergo such searching enquiry and emerge ‘so stainless’. There was always dissatisfaction over promotions, but only a few ‘agitators’ were really disaffected; a few ‘immoral’ new men had been sacked; the forger recruit from Australia had been taken on pending further inquiries to make up numbers, at a time (March 1908) when the Force was very short of potential entrants; Arnold had grossly exaggerated scenes of disorder in the Wellington barracks; Taylor had not turned up to substantiate allegations against an Auckland policeman; there had been no evidence presented to show that the public were dissatisfied with the police. Never before had enquiries into candidates been so ‘exhaustive’; Dinnie personally chose the recruits from the list of candidates who had passed the vetting process, and before entering the Depot they also needed a medical pass from their district’s Police Surgeon. There was an examination after the men were first taken on, and again before they graduated; those who failed were discharged. He agreed that the probationary course should run for three rather than two months; he had already recommended this to the government. 89
In response to the many calls (even from headquarters’ Chief Detective Mcllveney!) for the civilianisation of the central staff, Dinnie pointed out that this would make no real difference. All Chief Clerks in the civil service signed ‘routine documents’ on behalf of their permanent heads, and Wright carefully distinguished between these and cases needing the Commissioner’s attention. In the past, there had been complaints that the Chief Clerk was a civilian. Cullen had railed against the headquarters staff because he had allowed his ‘personal animus to overcome his better judgement’, as was confirmed by his bad relations with both Auckland’s Chief Magistrate and its Police Surgeon. Dinnie noted that the three specialised ‘clerical’ appointments (Depot instructor. Police Gazette
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editor and storekeeper) were key positions that brought them constantly into contact with the men. Promotions to these positions did not in any way interfere with ordinary promotions. Bishop had however openly shown his hostility to a uniformed headquarters staff during the hearings. 90
Many witnesses before the Commission had expressed dissatisfaction at the promotion system. Men who had passed examinations had not been promoted, men who had not passed had been elevated. It continued to be widely alleged that influence had been successfully used by those who were promoted. In a keynote parliamentary debate in 1901, Seddon had endorsed the 1898 Commission’s strictures against MPs and other dignitaries attempting to use undue influence to effect internal police changes (while noting that from time to time it was legitimate for MPs to make recommendations), and Dinnie had later presented a ‘nil’ return to parliament when asked to list MPs who had sought to bring pressure to bear on him over appointments. But Detective James Siddells had summed up the views of many police: if influence was not rife, it was hard to see the rationale for many promotions.
Men were particularly upset at the promotions of Muggeridge (who was no good as a storekeeper anyway, said Cullen) and of Sergeant Cummings of Napier, who had been promoted above 230 others. Many witnesses cited the case of Constable Michael Leahy, passed over by successive Commissioners. Some told of how they had been denied promotion allegedly through the use of influence: Constable Alexander McGilp, stymied by Rawene’s Resident Magistrate Clendon because McGilp had called him a coward during the ‘Dog Tax Rebellion’; the much-praised Constable Timothy Donovan, treated ‘cruelly, wrongly and unjustly’ by McGowan, who was allegedly pressured by politicoliquor interests in his own constituency. Stipendiary Magistrate Charles Kettle reiterated his 1898 testimony in affirming his belief that influence was still used, and even Dart felt there was some truth in this and that the examinations were ‘a farce’ because they counted for little.
In the course of the hearings the Royal Commissioner noted: ‘There is not the slightest doubt about influence being used; the only thing is the extent to which it is effectual.’ Dinnie agreed that there was ‘ample proof’ that policemen frequently sought out political and other influence, and the fact that politicians and other important people did not discourage them had ‘a bad effect on discipline’. It was clear that many police felt influence could work, but he knew of no case where it had any effect at all; it was disappointed influence-seekers who had now chosen to ventilate their grievances through a Royal Commission. Although McGowan and Dinnie both stressed that the Minister had always endorsed the promotion lists handed to him, many felt that the requirement was repugnant in principle as well as giving the wrong signals to seekers after political influence. The most popular suggestion was for an Appeal Board to which disappointed candidates for promotion could resort. Dart called for a system of qualifications which could be made legally binding.
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Cullen felt that introducing examination prerequisites, including in practical police work, would suffice to remove influence. Dinnie denied that anything except efficiency motivated his promotion selections, which were based on Inspectors’ recommendations. There could be no hard and fast rules; it all depended on merit and efficiency, and ‘seniority when the conditions are otherwise equal’. The constables cited had been unsuitable or too old. He did however support the idea of a compulsory examination for promotion to NCO. 91
From the beginning, Dinnie had reacted adversely to even anodyne criticism from within or outside his Force. His most vitriolic attack on any policeman was on Cullen. Yes, the Auckland District was run thoroughly and efficiently, but Cullen’s comments on Dinnie’s headquarters staff, vindictive and ‘actuated by malice’, showed that at very least he should not have charge of such an important district. Dinnie’s lawyer had to restrain the Commissioner by asking him a loaded question, getting him to agree that the fact that Cullen expressed animosity towards his Chief Clerk did not impugn his efficiency. Indeed, Cullen was ‘one of the best officers I have’. This exchange was virtually the highlight of Dinnie’s concluding evidence to the Commission. Bishop scarcely bothered to cross-examine him. He had already made up his mind. 92
What was the overall state of the Force as depicted in the hearings? At one extreme, Dinnie defended the quality of his men and their work almost unequivocally. McGowan and others were upset that such an allegedly good Force did not get ‘the credit it ought to receive’ from the public. Sergeant Michael Donovan believed the Force to be in better shape than ever before in his 33 years in it, and influential figures such as Broberg and Wright agreed. Respected men such as Sub-Inspectors Phair and Hendrey insisted that the most rigorous enquiries possible were made into applicants, and Dinnie noted that in the preceding year only 137 of 387 had been found to be suitable after the completion of these investigations. Despite ‘old guard’ critics of the alleged new laxity, men who had joined in the 1870s (including Inspector Mitchell) were convinced that the standard of the Force was now far higher; some veterans agreed, but added that the mood of the times did not encourage young men to ‘knuckle down’ to discipline.
Two factors were involved in this latter judgment. First, Constable William Calwell, representing the Wellington men, noted that ‘a great many men no longer young ... have a very exalted opinion of what they were and what they could do in their youth’. They had now ‘steadied down’, and criticised the young men for doing the very things about which they told nostalgic tales! The higher ranks, in fact, generally felt that expectations of discipline were now stricter than ever, albeit not so ‘harassing’ and military. This qualification was the second factor. Stipendiary Magistrate Kettle summed up the assessment of many in complaining that the ‘general bearing’ of the new men was ‘not of that
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military stamp I should like to see’. But the Force was no longer a military body riddled with military-style behavioural requirements. A few astute observers hit the nail on the head: discipline was now stricter in a general sense because of new societal expectations. There was naturally a time lag in the Force fully reaching such standards, particularly since enough adequate men could not be found because of poor pay and conditions. Hence the recent high number of misconduct cases. If there was a consensus, at least amongst the officers, it was expressed by the hard-to-please Ellison: the state of the Force had been improving since Tunbridge’s arrival, but would improve more if the best men could be attracted into it. 93
Dinnie’s striving for a bureaucratic efficiency suited to the benign direction of societal and therefore police evolution had been partially undermined by his inability to fully root out the laxity which inevitably tended to surface in such situations within groupings of men in service. Partly because of the difficulty of finding good recruits, he was generally neither willing nor able to wield against recalcitrants the ‘mailed fist’ in his ‘velvet glove’, except immediately after the Dunedin revelations. By 1909 even the Commissioner was beginning to feel that the men might be ‘too well treated’ in some respects. The reluctance, from Dinnie down, to sack men unless they were totally unreconstructable, displayed - in the eyes of Bishop - ‘too much delicacy’.
Early in his rambling report. Bishop in effect castigated Dinnie for not having finished the revision of the 1887 regulations, many of which were ‘entirely obsolete, useless, and ineffective, and in some instances positively absurd as applied to the present day.’ The demilitarisation/ bureaucratisation of the Force had been hindered by an antiquated set of parameters. Dinnie might have been forgiven for feeling that Bishop’s objective was to attack everything about his regime; surely the actual state of the Force rather than its formal framework was the priority? In another example of this approach, Bishop attacked as ‘an element of weakness, and therefore of danger’, the informality of the ‘arrangement’ whereby Sergeant Mathieson looked after the recruits at night on Dart’s behalf. This, the Royal Commission reported, should have been systematised by Dinnie. In response to Arnold’s ‘conduct and motives’ being ‘broadly impugned by the Commissioner of Police’, Bishop could ‘see no reason to doubt that Mr. Arnold was prompted by the best motives, and only acted as he did in the best interests of the Force.’ 94
Bishop highlighted the case of a constable enrolled under Tunbridge in order to launch a savage attack on Dinnie for his alleged ‘extraordinary lack of judgment’ (and for giving false information to the Commission). Tunbridge had been persuaded to let the man stay on, although he was a former bookmaker and spieler. Later he came under suspicion of stealing from a drunk, and Dinnie had then transferred him to the area where he had been a bookmaker. When Dinnie later considered further charges against the man, he merely ‘strictly cautioned’ and re-transferred him.
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The case was much talked about in the Force; the man who exposed the culprit had allegedly been scapegoated, and suffered reprimand and financial loss. ‘A more extraordinary position for a Commissioner of Police to take up in respect to a constable whom he practically admits is utterly discredited, and whose honesty he himself seriously impugns, I cannot well imagine.’ Eventually, the constable was allowed to resign, thereby getting back three-quarters of his superannuation contributions. This was ‘one of the most glaring instances that I have come across of inept administration. This sort of thing does a lot of harm.’ 95
In going through the various unsatisfactory appointments drawn to his attention by Arnold (including that of a constable living with his wife’s sister, a man ‘uncovered’ when his photograph had been listed in the ‘missing friends’ column of the Police Gazette upon inquiry by his wife two years before), Bishop lost no opportunity to criticise Dinnie and his top echelon, particularly Wright, Bishop felt that unjustified risks had been taken by enrolling men before full enquiries were made, and the ‘desire to get men of previous police service, so as to dispense with training in the depot, has resulted most mischievously.’
On the question of political influence, the report was not particularly coherent. There was no ‘positive proof of political influence having been the determining factor in any act done, as regards an individual or locality’, but in recruiting too much weight had been given to MPs who knew little of applicants. Although there was no concrete evidence of the use of undue political influence, however. Bishop had deduced that it occurred. A man subsequently dismissed after being convicted of assault had misbehaved in Auckland and merely been transferred to Wellington, where he had brought ‘utter disgrace’ on the Force. T doubt very much if he would ever have been accepted if it had not been for the backing he received from a member of Parliament.’ A man who was ‘a thorough bad lot’ had been taken on in 1905 after strong and persistent recommendations by an MR Police had reported on him unfavourably, and Bishop concluded that ‘political influence’ must have been the deciding factor in his appointment. Though Bishop was not prepared to say that the Force had suffered through political influence, the feeling that it prevailed had had ‘a very mischievous effect’. The solution was for the Minister and Commissioner to be strong men able to resist pressure. Over and above that, police enquiries had not prevented ‘perfect blackguards’ from entering the Force. It was dangerous to rely on written testimonials and discharges from other forces. More searching investigation was needed. 96
Such enquiries should be conducted by the Inspectors, to whom applicants should have to apply in person. This would largely stop the admission of the type of men who had been referred to ‘scathingly’ by various officers. Bishop decided to recommend retention of the fifthstandard entry requirement, but with the Commissioner allowed to introduce ‘a little more elasticity’ by waiving it in certain circumstances. The Commission supported the assessment of Dart, Dinnie and others
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that the length of Depot training should be increased to three months, and that even those with previous police experience should be required to undergo a month’s training. Bishop felt ‘very strongly’ that to procure the type of steady recruits needed in a post-frontier society, married probationers would have to be offered 7s 6d per day. This was a matter of ‘great moment’; in the two years to the end of June, less than a quarter of enrollees had been married. No recruit, moreover, should be ‘finally enrolled until he has completed three months’ probationary service on the streets’, a reform which had been advocated by a number of witnesses. Attendance at the weekly classes for men of less than two years’ service should be made compulsory. 97
Bishop did not fully support the Commissioner’s and others’ recommendations with regard to generous across-the-board pay rises. It would be too expensive to give salary rises all round, but to maintain standards there should be an increase in constables’ pay. The base rate should be Bs, rising to 9s 6d in three-yearly 6d increments. A suggestion for a grade of ‘senior constable’ for men with 30 years’ excellent service, who would earn 6d per day extra, should be investigated because of the frustration felt by policemen who were too old to be promoted. He recommended that policemen with over five years’ service should receive 15 days’ annual leave, and that there should be Sunday leave. He empathised with night-duty men who had to attend court early the next morning, noting that most offenders were drunks who pleaded guilty anyway; surely those who declared their innocence could be processed later in the day?
Bishop recommended increases in house allowances for married men and sergeants, to keep pace with rent rises, and an increased travel allowance. He noted that the Commissioner was drafting new regulations to remove one of the grievances which reflected the clash between the old concept of police status and the new requirement of respectability: that NCOs were reimbursed at the steerage rate for travel by steamer. Bishop advocated the immediate building of a gymnasium at the Depot and in those centres that lacked one. This would enable the ‘working off’ of ‘the exuberance of spirits peculiar to young men of a certain age and constitution ’ which might otherwise find ‘outlets in undesirable channels’. A Physical Instructor, perhaps Skinner, should be appointed to work in the centres and at the Depot. 98
The men were not pleased by some recommendations or the absence of others. Some of their submissions had been ignored, others (such as the ending of lights-out in the barracks) rejected. On the vital issue of promotions, moreover, the protesters got short shrift. ‘No hard and fast rule can be laid down to govern promotions or anything else in the Police Force. Successful administration must depend on the exercise of discretion and a sound judgment, and on the possession of knowledge.’ Yet Bishop clearly felt that the Commissioner had been wanting in these criteria. Dinnie had relied too much on Tunbridge’s suggestions, and had not got
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the right men into the right positions. There was much resentment in the Force about some of the promotions to NCO, and a ‘great deal of this discontent and dissatisfaction is, in my opinion, entirely well founded’. There had been ‘inconsistent, inequitable, and apparently quite unwarranted instances of promotion’, and the Commissioner was wrong to say that merit and seniority had prevailed. Muggeridge’s promotion had been ‘an egregious act of injustice’ to many of the 273 men who were senior to him, and a district clerkship should not be ‘a short cut to promotion’ as it had been for Cummings.
It was ‘radically bad’ practice to do such - and other inequitable - things, which destroyed the men’s confidence in the Commissioner. Given ‘equitable administration’ there would be no need or demand for an Appeal Board. In the final analysis it all depended on the Commissioner. One scarcely had to read between the lines to see that the Royal Commissioner felt that the Police Commissioner had to go. In the wake of a Commission that must have seriously affected internal discipline, what the Force needed was a Commissioner able to exercise ‘great tact and discretion’. This was not Dinnie, Bishop believed, noting that the Commissioner had accused an Inspector - implausibly - of giving ‘false and unreliable evidence on oath’. Dinnie himself had given ‘misleading’ evidence, had impeded the course of the Commission, had shown ‘ineptitude’, and could not get on with at least two of his senior Inspectors (O’Brien and Cullen). In his relationship with Cullen, he had shown himself to be ‘lacking in a due sense of proportion’, an indication that his ‘judgment ... is seriously wanting’. The report was a sustained and vicious attack designed to achieve Dinnie’s resignation or sacking."
Bishop did acknowledge Dinnie’s undoubted honesty and integrity as the head of police, but nevertheless believed that what had been a ‘highly efficient’ Force under Tunbridge had in six years become highly inefficient. Dinnie had neither removed the Oamaru sergeant (which action he had characterised as ‘absolutely essential’ a year ago) nor insisted that the Sergeant-Major in Blenheim properly enforce the licensing laws and stop drinking to excess; it would be better to send the latter on leave until he reached retirement age next year than to allow such a ‘public scandal’ to continue. As the Commissioner seemed ‘quite unable to realise the gravity of the position’. Bishop recommended that the Minister insist on action. Dinnie was wrong to offer transfers and promotions to some and wrong to transfer others frequently, thereby creating ‘a feeling of insecurity which is bad for the efficiency of the Force’. Dinnie in effect was offering an amalgam of old and new policing practices, and being condemned for both - as well as for allowing men to get away with gross misconduct, drinking and the like. T am convinced that a good deal of drinking goes on amongst the younger men in the Force’, yet Dinnie did not regard this as a serious matter and excused leniency and ‘inequality of treatment’ of offenders. This had led to the presence of ‘a most dangerous element in the Force’, and was a disincentive to men who
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behaved themselves. As for the practice of punishing men by transfer without loss of status or money, that was ‘almost grotesque’. 100 The Royal Commissioner went against the recent trend and agreed with Cullen that the small districts should be reabsorbed: Invercargill into Dunedin, perhaps Greymouth into Christchurch when the transalpine railway was completed, and Thames back into Auckland. He approvingly quoted Cullen’s remark that whoever had created Thames District had ‘no knowledge’ of the area - so it had probably been dreamed up in the Commissioner’s office rather than by McGowan for his own political reasons, as had been commonly believed. 101
Bishop felt that three of the four Station Sergeants were unworthy of promotion to Sub-Inspector, an ‘extraordinary departure from the original clear intention’ of the 1905 Commission that only men qualified for such promotion would be appointed. No wonder uniformed men felt threatened by the detective branch, with five Chief Detectives eligible for promotion to officer rank. The Station Sergeants should be replaced by a rank of ‘senior sergeant’, which might comprise 25 of the current 58 sergeants and would constitute the promotional pool for commissioned office for the uniformed men. This followed long agitation by NCOs. It was in line with suggestions by many top policemen, including Dinnie, who had expressed his intention to rename and greatly expand the senior NCO rank, thereby enabling greater supervision as well as providing a fairer recruiting ground for officers. There was no need, contrary to Dinnie’s view, to make clerical experience a prerequisite for promotion to officer rank. 102
Bishop found it ‘astounding’ that the Commissioner branded complainants as ‘agitators’ and claimed there was no ‘general dissatisfaction’ in the Force. Not only was morale particularly affected by the headquarters staff holding police rank (Inspectors Mitchell and Cullen had summed up feeling among the police well), it was a costly use of sworn staff. The Sub-Inspector, four sergeants (including the Gazette editor and storekeeper), two constables, the Finger Print Expert and his detective assistant, and the Chief Detective, cost the state £2493 12s 6d per annum. He noted that Sub-Inspector Wright, while able, was generally distrusted and was thought to dominate the Commissioner and advance his own favourites. Headquarters must be reorganised: Wright, three sergeants and two constables should go back to ordinary police work, and the ‘sinecure’ of Chief Detective should be abolished. 103
Curiously, despite all the vitriol he heaped on Dinnie, Bishop found the Force to be ‘thoroughly efficient’ in measurable ways, such as that the apprehension rate had risen from less than 90 percent in 1898 to 95.5 percent. After checking all the records, he endorsed the assessment of senior police that the general conduct of the men was good, and he was satisfied with their moral standards, albeit there could be an improvement in drinking habits. The Force was ‘a credit to the Dominion’ and compared favourably with any in the world. Corruption did not exist. ‘Admirable
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material, badly handled’, an editorialist summed up. Bishop seemed to see no contradiction between this conclusion and his lambasting of so many of the practices within the Force; nor did he pay any attention to the problems the Commissioner had in attempting to attract good men at a time when cost-of-living increases had left police pay behind. These problems had been exacerbated by the expansion of the Force. In the last decade the number of constables had increased from 475 to 619, in a sworn Force which was 805 strong on 1 July 1909. Of these constables, 225 had less than four years’ service, with 73 in the Force for less than a year. (On the other hand, more than half the Force had served for at least 10 years.) At a time of population expansion, Dinnie had managed to increase the ratio of police to population from 1:1388 in 1903 to 1:1308 in 1909. Even in Bishop’s eyes, Dinnie was seemingly not an unmitigated disaster. Might he therefore survive? 104
CHAPTER 15
‘Native’ and Other Problems
In the first decade of the twentieth century the New Zealand policing role formally branched out into the South Pacific. Former Commissioner of Police W E Gudgeon, British Resident in the Cook Islands since 1898, became the Resident Commissioner in the Islands in 1901 when they were annexed by New Zealand. In his capacity as head of policing in this colony of a colony, he was tasked with melding traditional and British/ New Zealand modes of policing. In doing so he faced problems similar, in some ways, to those which had prevailed within New Zealand in the past. When the first British Resident in the British Protectorate of the Cooks, former New Zealand Liberal politician Frederick Moss, arrived in 1891, each district maintained its own tribal enforcement mechanism, designating up to a third of the adult male population as police. In essence it was a village vigilantist system of ‘moral’ police controlled by chiefly ariki who rigorously enforced the ‘blue laws’, a code which combined indigenous customary law with a repressive London Missionary Society code of behaviour. The parliament of the Protectorate, guided by Moss, gradually removed the most rigorous of the ecclesiastical laws and (while respecting the rule of the ariki) replaced them with more ‘acceptable’ codes, and brought the police more under control. Moss was also able to persuade the rulers to let him, in 1894, introduce into each district paid police who reported to the local judiciary, reducing the reliance of the police on fines for their remuneration.
Gudgeon had been sent by Seddon to prepare the ground for annexation. He continued Moss’s general policing policy, gradual supersession of the ‘traditional’ system by a new ‘professional’ system. Upon annexation, Gudgeon gained almost total power in the Cook Islands, subverting chiefly power by divide-and-rule means and ‘keeping the people subdued’ (in the words of a recent Police Commissioner in the Islands). Niue (Savage Island) was administered from the Cook Islands, and five ‘Native Assessors’ were placed in control of its justice system. Policing basically comprised traditional chiefly control, slightly modified by the requirements of New Zealand officialdom. In 1902 Gudgeon took a further step towards state control of policing in Niue by giving Government Resident Agent C F Maxwell 11 pairs of handcuffs for use by approved policing personnel. When in 1903 a separate administration was established for Niue, Maxwell, now the Resident Commissioner, continued the policing policy already established, but appointed one of the men as Chief Constable. Meanwhile, on the main island of the
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Cooks, Rarotonga (population 2400), there were seven paid police, including three in the administrative centre of Avarua, also including a Chief Constable. By 1909 the inadequacy of the ‘traditional’ strand of policing in coping with smuggling, gambling and ‘bush beer’ offences induced a decision to tighten professional control. Gudgeon therefore appointed a European as Chief Constable. William Mcßimey, a former Quartermaster-Sergeant of the Royal Artillery who had spent a brief time in New Zealand, was selected. But the workload proved so great - Gudgeon was a hard taskmaster - and Mcßimey so resistant to obstructive bureaucrats and unnecessary laws (such as a 9 pm curfew on the roads) that he resigned after six months.
Gudgeon’s successor, Captain J E Smith, sought help from the New Zealand Police Commissioner in finding Mcßimey’s replacement. A former South African policeman, Wellington court orderly W R Reynolds, was sent in February 1910. Later that year he was dismissed by Smith for allegedly being provocative to the Islanders (and therefore dangerous; ‘if they chose to rise they could wipe the Europeans out’) in suppressing ‘drunkenness and rowdyism’. When he and his successor Frederick Holmes (1911-13) needed extra support they swore in specials, and when specialist advice was needed they called in the New Zealand Police. By now, the Cook Islands paid police were attired as New Zealand police, complete with white helmets. Chief Detective W B Mcllveney travelled to Rarotonga in 1911-12 to prepare and present an indictment charging a man with murdering his wife in Avarua (and to act as counsel for the defence!); the man was found guilty of manslaughter.
New Zealand police expertise was also sought after in other Pacific territories. Commissioner Dinnie in 1907, for example, agreed to act as the intermediary in recruiting two single New Zealand constables for the Fiji Constabulary. Andrew Gregor and Alexander Earl, men of short policing experience, were appointed sergeants in the Fijian Police. That year a British Resident was appointed to control, together with French authorities, the newly acquired New Hebrides; a New Zealand man was ‘left in the group to organise a police force’. 105
In New Zealand itself the policing of the indigenous population no longer loomed large for the authorities, except in predominantly ‘Maori districts’ or during an occasional significant ‘emergency’. Maori were - at least on the surface - living and comporting themselves ‘acceptably’. Although their social structures remained tribally-based, they had adjusted to both the public order and (to a lesser degree) the private belief codes required by the Crown. Their resistance to pakeha mores and modes of behaviour was manifested in such subtle ways that the authorities either did not know or did not as yet care. Most Maori lived in the countryside, sizeable numbers of them far from both urban centres and the heavily farmed areas on which the country’s prosperity was based. The continuation of traditional ways of doing things in isolated pa could be tolerated so long as the general socio-economic rhythms of New Zealand’s
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agricultural/pastoral capitalist democracy were not impeded. Indeed, Maori could actively aid development by becoming active in the economy, particularly as rural seasonal labour. This modus vivendi between Maori and the colony’s politico-economic system was a relatively delicate one, and could be endangered by many factors. When racial trouble loomed, the police were at the frontline restoring harmony. In Dannevirke, for example, the three-man police detachment had to intervene to stop Tasmanian bush-fellers taunting local Maori. They then had to ward off an attack on the police station by the enraged bush-fellers. 106
When from time to time Maori overtly and collectively threatened the ‘desired’ ways of doing things, special measures were taken. In particular, the authorities remained aware of problems in the Hokianga area. When Ngapuhi chief Iraia Kuao (who had supported the Crown at the time of the ‘Dog Tax Rebellion’) threatened to shoot rival claimants to the Tautoro Block near Kaikohe, it was in symbolic defiance of the state, for a previous agreement he had made with his Maori ‘enemies’ had been sanctioned by the Crown. He chose the issue to show that he did not now recognise the ‘pakeha law’, did not concede that the Native Land Court could decide ownership of Maori land. He asserted that the rangatiratanga guaranteed to Maori by the Crown in the Treaty of Waitangi allowed Maori customary law to operate in such circumstances.
The Police Commissioner feared another armed rebellion in the Hokianga. Inspector Cullen’s staff were instructed to conduct close surveillance, and four Maori specials were sworn in to help effect this. Kaikohe’s Constable Timothy Cahill reported that the followers of Iraia Kuao had stockpiled a great quantity of arms and ammunition, and were target shooting; local pakeha were increasingly alarmed that their lives and work might be endangered. To take an expedition to seize the hundred warriors involved, Cullen figured, would lead to a blood bath. Kuao’s ‘remote and isolated bush settlement’ at Tautoro could only be approached by single file through the forest, and it was later estimated that 500 police/soldiers would have been needed to overwhelm it. More subtle tactics were required.
Cullen discovered that a contingent of rival Rarawa would be meeting the Ngapuhi claimants for a discussion of the land dispute on 12 September 1903. It was decided that armed police would surround the meeting, descend upon it by stealth, and seize Iraia Kuao and his people. If the chief got wind of this or did not turn up to the ‘peace talks’ for other reasons, the Crown would have to be represented in force at a court session scheduled to hear the case two days later, in order to pre-empt or resist an armed raid. Forty soldiers under the charge of a sergeant, and 10 constables, were ‘secretly’ sent to the area, under clear instructions from Dinnie that violence was to be a last resort, but ready to assist the police at the intertribal meeting or the court hearing. E C Blomfield, the local magistrate, arranged for the ‘peace talks’ to be held at a spot suitable for a surprise police descent. While mounted police spied upon the site at
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Matakohekohe, Cullen sent for the bulk of the police/military reinforcements, which were encamped at Ohaeawai. The Maori arrived and commenced their meeting, the mounted police cut off retreat by fastening the gates on the road leading from Matakohekohe, Cullen surrounded the meeting with the reinforcements, and Kuao and 19 of his leading supporters were arrested.
The indicted men were charged under section 8(3) of the 1882 Justices of the Peace Act, which prohibited threatening behaviour. As a condition of bail, the chief agreed to his followers’ arms and ammunition being handed over. He realised that his symbolic stance had backfired, and a deal satisfactory to all sides was arranged. The ‘rebels’ were convicted but not gaoled, and the Rarawa and other chiefs acted as guarantors for 12 months’ good behaviour. In return for such a lenient attitude by the authorities and the help of the rival tribespeople, Kuao peacefully attended proceedings relevant to the contested block and cooperated with all parties. It had been, in police eyes, a model operation. Disruption and cost had been minimised; peace had returned.
But the police felt that a watch still needed to kept on Ngapuhi, who had ‘always been rather inclined to ignore the law whenever it suited their purpose to do so and if they again found a stubborn agitator, such as Kuao was, to rally round, they might cause considerable uneasiness among settlers as they did in 1903.’ Hence when tribespeople requested return of the confiscated arms after Iraia Kuao’s death in 1908, on Cullen’s advice the Minister agreed only to return fowling pieces; Kuao’s son Mira, who now led the ‘rebels’, was allegedly ‘just as big a disturber as his father’. This was an ethnocentric perspective which paid no heed to the reasons for the persistence of resistance to the pakeha system over many decades in the Hokianga; but the police were not tasked with understanding, just with getting results. 107
In the suppression of the Hokianga dissidents in 1903, valuable aid had been provided to the state by two local part-time police. District Constable William King and Native Constable Beazley. When from 1906 Rua Kenana ‘set up as a prophet’ (as the police put it) in the Urewera, it was District Constable Andrew Grant (the storekeeper, postmaster and blacksmith at Te Whaiti) who reported on Rua’s monthly meetings in his ‘capital’ at Maungapohatu. Andy Grant was married to a Maori woman, and spoke the language fluently. The reports were at first comforting for Grant’s superiors, as the community was said to be ‘run well’ and expressed no defiance towards the state. However, Grant reported, Rua’s ‘attitude became more defiant as the time went on’. As a result of surveillance by a part-timer intimately involved in local affairs, the police had identified another potential area of ‘rival sovereignty’. Rua ran a tight and orderly movement throughout the Urewera, with strict laws and rigorous enforcement procedures. It was to pre-empt the development of a rival state under the ‘New Messiah’ that the police
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would focus on enforcing laws (such as those relating to dog tax and slygrog) about which they would not normally have cared too much in such a remote area. 108
Through surveillance by local police, often part-timers, the Crown attempted in many areas to forestall armed conflagration. In some areas, half-caste regular police constables - Foxton’s Frederick Woods, Napier’s John McAlister, Rotorua’s William Neil - were asked to conduct special ‘native liaison’ and surveillance. It was because of the particular knowledge of sensitive areas possessed by pro-Crown Maori, moreover, that the Native Constable system did not as yet completely disappear. Some part-time Maori police were phased out in favour of regular police as areas became more ‘settled’, such as happened at Waipiro Bay in 1907, but new Native Constable stations were occasionally established - one at Tuakau, run by David Moore, in the same year.
In 1909 there were five Native Constables in the Auckland District, three in Thames, two in Napier, their salaries ranging from £2O to a full-timer on £137, the longest-serving man being at Tuparoa (27 years). So important was the position regarded in Gisborne that in late 1910 the Commissioner actually exercised his little-used powers to deny the area’s Native Constable George Pratt permission to marry, his fiancee not being ‘a suitable wife’ (local whites persuaded the Commissioner to change his mind, but meanwhile Pratt had changed his). Perquisites were given to some Maori police to persuade them to stay on. In 1911 Whakatane’s Native Constable Te Kepa Tawhiao was given a 25 percent salary increase, taking him to £5O, and he and his Ruatoki counterpart were provided with free material to make uniforms. Between 1900 and 1913, 19 Native Constables were appointed, the institution having received a reprieve as a result of localised need. Thereafter, however, there were very few appointments (the last being in 1933), and the institution ended on 21 August 1945 when the last appointee, R P Hira of Te Kaha, was sworn onto the regular staff - becoming the first full-blooded Maori regular policeman in the twentieth century - along with Te Whaiti’s Louis Bidois. The first mixed-race man to achieve officer rank in the New Zealand Police Force, William Carran, was enrolled as late as 1920. 109
Intelligence obtained by part-time Maori police could be supplemented by non-paid informants within Maoridom. Te Pouwhare of Ruatoki, for example, represented the views of anti-Rua factions inside Tuhoe. There was ‘much sorrow’ from within ‘this mad tribe’, he told the government, that it had not yet moved in force to suppress Rua’s defiance of the Crown. In 1914 two Maori applied for the post of Native Constable at Te Kaha. Te Raina Kingi, ‘a very trustworthy, quiet and intelligent Christian chap’, was given the position as a result of his past unofficial assistance to the police. Eventually his dedication to a job almost impossible to do part-time, patrolling a rugged 60-mile area that was inter alia ‘a Native No License district’ as well as running a farm, drove him insane and he hanged himself over a cliff; there were no applications for the vacancy,
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and policing in the area suffered for years until a young Maori returned soldier volunteered for the job. In some districts pakeha constables leamt much of Maori ways, sometimes by becoming members of the Maori Councils: Constable John Bagrice of Levin for example became a member of the Raukawa District Maori Council in 1908; in March 1911 Constable Timothy Cummings replaced Constable James S Willcocks as an official member of the Matatua District Maori Council at Whakatane, and the following month Constable George Clouston replaced Thomas Hickman on the Maori Council at Opunake. 110
Maori still living in tribal areas resisted the pakeha idea of an ‘ordered way of things’ in many subtle fashions, including by utilising the concept of semi-professional policing for their own purposes. New ‘resistance’ movements were not immune to this. The Maori Parliament movement of the 1890s had its own police, as did the Kingitanga. The Ringatu faith founded by Te Kooti instituted its own office of pirihimana; its marae police reported to the tohunga and enforced religious observances, regulated cooking and sleeping arrangements, controlled liquor consumption, levied fines for untoward behaviour. Such policing activities were - although they fell far short of the policing norm, which stressed assimilationist enforcement - considered by the pakeha authorities to be better than nothing. At least they checked behaviour considered disorderly by both Maori and state authorities. 111
The police attempted, wherever possible, to act as ‘civilising’ exemplars amongst Maori. The indigenous population were still subject to discrimination under the law, and differentiation in policing practices with regard to non-discriminatory laws, both of which the authorities used to suppress any apparent Maori attempts to be too different from the pakeha. The 1880 Arms Act was often used to deny Maori arms and ammunition. Not only was their possession potentially dangerous to the state, but - in Cullen’s words in 1908 - ‘firearms in the hands of exciteable and passionate natives are a source of danger even to the natives themselves’. 112 Discriminatory laws did not just deny Maori access to certain goods and services imported by the pakeha; from time to time, laws were enacted which sought to suppress Maori customs deemed to be inappropriate in a stabilising society. By the turn of the century a number of influential police were coming to the conclusion that the most serious impediment to ‘civilisation’ amongst Maori was the influence of their ‘thought policeman’, the tohunga (healer, spiritual guide, or - in the minds of many pakeha -‘witch-doctor’).
The 1907 Tohunga Suppression Act followed a long police campaign to the effect that the legal tools at their disposal to suppress the ‘evils’ of tohungaism were inadequate. There had been a few successes. In 1901 Detective J J Siddells procured a manslaughter conviction for a female tohunga who had given traditional sea-water treatment to a consumptive, and three years later he succeeded in a similar case against a male tohunga. Meanwhile, Maori Councils had been empowered to regulate
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tohungaism. But the 1907 legislation was passed because the politicians, encouraged by the police, saw tohungaism as both an impediment to Maori modernisation and integrally linked with the increasing defiance of the state by Rua Kenana. Urewera and Bay of Plenty Maori were forsaking their cultivations and workplaces to follow Rua’s teachings, which repudiated many pakeha mores. In the event, an accommodation between Ward and Rua allowed land alienation to proceed temporarily in the Urewera. But under the Act the police gained much greater powers to move against dissidence backed by tribal religious/medical teachings, although because of the sensitivity of the situation the Native Minister was given the final decision on whether to prosecute. To suppress the tohunga was to strike at the roots of Maori value systems, and should be attempted only when really necessary to enforce the new mores upon the tribes.
In the early years this was normally done only following advice by ‘friendly Maori’, with the Crown shying away from using the legislation to suppress Rua, for example, because of the difficulty of collecting evidence against his practices in his mountain stronghold. In 1910 a chief complained that a ‘half-caste’. Jack Epiha, was practising as a tohunga and ‘doing great harm among the natives along the Waikato river’. Cullen was annoyed that Native Constable Moore had not reported this, concluding that he ‘cannot be attending to his duties if he allows a tohunga to carry on business in his own district’. Mercer’s Constable Frederick Waterman was assigned to help Moore investigate. In this instance, the fact that many Maori as well as the police believed Epiha to be a fraud made it much easier to suppress him. Patients had died after being prescribed salt-water immersion for fever, and his cure for an alleged makutu upon a woman was to induce her to leave her husband for himself. He was put out of action by being convicted and released on penalty of being ordered up for sentence if he misbehaved in any way. He had also to pay the prosecution’s costs, and was fined for selling liquor to Maori women. Siddells concluded from this and another case that the judiciary had sanctioned the interpretation that ‘when a person claims to have power from the spirits the offence is complete’. He and other policemen were all for a total clamp-down on tohungaism.
But others who were closer to Maori were less vehement. Opunake’s ‘good Maori Linguist’ Thomas Hickman was sent to investigate the case of female tohunga Puna’s practice at Meremere, near Hawera. She too was said to use cold-water bathing to treat the feverish, including typhoid victims, and she claimed to heal through the spirit of her deceased sister. He concluded that the alleged offender, a nurse, was ‘the smartest Maori woman it has been my lot to meet’, and recommended no action. Inspector Wilson affirmed that there was ‘nothing to show that this woman claims or exercises other than human power’. But pressure to prevent ‘Nurse Puna’ practising came from pakehaised Maori headed by one of the most powerful Maori politicians in the country, Apirana Ngata. The authorities
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moved against her, and the testimony of a white doctor at Patea that her work was ‘beneficial’ (she advised giving up smoking and drinking, encouraged dieting and cleanliness, and worked closely with him) did not prevent prosecution. But Nurse Puna’s sentence was light (£lO plus costs), the magistrate feeling that the Crown’s purpose had been achieved by her public promise in court that she would never depart from doctors’ orders in carrying out her nursing activities.
Siddells was unimpressed. ‘Gaol seems to be the only way to break down the prestige of a recognized tohunga. Paku & Hera who were sent to gaol for tohungaism are now completely neglected.’ But the Commissioner requested only that police ‘keep an eye on this woman’. He made no attempt to make a broader issue out of tohungaism, and so the police and their Minister continued to use the Act pragmatically. It was even used against those pakeha who gained large Maori followings by offering all-purpose cures based upon spiritism. In a later case of some notoriety a Maori clergyman complained about the activities of pakeha midwife Mary Hill (‘Nurse Hill’) of Grey Lynn in Auckland. Police investigation revealed that 300 ‘patients’ a month were being diagnosed by ‘clairvoyance’ and hoping to be ‘cured’ by herbal remedies. Detective Thomas De Norville concluded that she was ‘a fraud and ... nothing better than a Tohunga’. ‘Nurse Hill’ was entrapped into ‘treating’ two visitors, a Maori nurse employed by the Health Department and Native Constable Moore. Since she already had a conviction under legislation banning fortune-telling, she now received six months’ gaol. But the tohunga suppression legislation was in general used to promote the government’s assimilationist policies, and to this effect was still being utilised against Maori faith-healers and the like until recent times. 113
To all intents and purposes, however, by the time New Zealand ‘came of age’ in 1907, Maori were sufficiently assimilated - or if not, sufficiently isolated from mainstream New Zealand life - for the state policing apparatus to pay little heed to them. In the far more turbulent society of the past, the discretionary power of the individual policeman over Maori and pakeha had often been shared with others, given that the policing of instability often required a collective police presence. In a ‘settled’, increasingly Europeanised society, policemen were most often on duty by themselves. It was because they were frequently the lone negotiators of social control at grass-roots level that the police authorities were determined to raise entrance and training standards, and reminded serving police from time to time about their discretionary responsibilities; in 1905, for example they were cautioned that ‘mere poverty and distress must not be treated as vagrancy’. Such directives could proliferate during the policing of the stabilising society. 114
When Cullen was considering the interception of Iraia Kuao in 1903, he requested that the police be armed with carbines or rifles which - being typical young New Zealanders - they were ‘nearly all ... familiar
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with the handling of’ for recreational purposes. Their regulation revolvers, he said, were of Tittle use in the hands of men who are not in the habit of using them. I know from experience that the Police never have done any revolver practice’, let alone had any occasion to use them in the field. The .45 calibre revolvers on issue were in any case outmoded technology, their non-replacement an indication of the infrequency of their use. On 4 October 1905 it was announced that in future police would not be issued with revolvers upon enrolment. Senior ranking officers and detectives alone would be routinely issued with the new Smith and Wesson .32 calibre revolvers. In emergencies, firearms could be obtained from police armouries. From 1912, Lee Enfield magazine carbines were purchased for this purpose. Meanwhile, the concept of the police as a reserve army against (mostly) external aggression had well and truly died when late in 1909 a new Defence Act established a military system based on compulsory training (the ‘territorial’ army). 115
Concomitant with the disappearance of military functions from the police, the growth of a largely self-policing society, and the generally decreasing ratio of police to population, police methodology was becoming more sophisticated in many spheres. Some police, like D Cummings, who leamt at the feet of the administrative expert A H Wright in Wellington, became expert prosecutors; like his mentor, Cummings would one day become Commissioner. Headquarters people continued to acquire more power within the Force as communications improved and the Dominion’s policing system became ever more centralised. The Chief Clerk had much devolved power, symbolised by representing the Commissioner on important police occasions such as McGuire’s funeral. Just as a largely self-surveilling society still needed surveilling by police, so did the police themselves, and headquarters watchdogs grew strong because of their Force-wide knowledge and their control over such matters as telegram communications. 116
Despite the relative sophistication of policing in a settled society, however, the financial constraints upon the full and rapid utilisation of modem bureaucratic and technological techniques were frustrating for many police. Where there was ‘no immediate necessity’ for a country station to have a telephone, they had to continue to rely on phones owned by others - and put up with problems such as (in Tolaga Bay constable Donald McLeod’s words) a phone ‘tapped at the different villages it passes through’. In 1903 the administration purchased some electric torches and lamps and pronounced them ‘a great improvement on the oil bullseye, as regards cleanliness, etc’, especially as the regulation lamp had ‘a tendency to make a man sick’. But electric lighting remained a ‘luxury’ because of the cost of battery maintenance, and in 1911 the administration was still investigating cut-price options in London and elsewhere despite the strictures of the 1909 Royal Commission. In 1905, all Dunedin and three Christchurch suburban stations were yet to be connected by phone to their central stations. Not until 1911 did the
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Auckland wharf police get a much-needed launch, and then only because the Harbour Board provided it.
In the final analysis, police still often had to fall back on their strength or their doggedness. The desired modem policeman was the ‘quiet, unassuming’ exemplar of good behaviour and intelligent disposition who could also ‘get his man’ (without fuss, preferably) when the occasion arose. Such a model policeman was the above-mentioned Constable McLeod. He was considered intelligent, and he was certainly determined; for three months during a harsh winter he had stayed silent and alert in a tent in the Raukumara range during the search for Hare Matenga, unable to smoke, cook, or keep warm during the day, in severe weather which included snowstorms. In view of their low remuneration and poor working conditions, many police were remarkably dedicated." 7
CHAPTER 16
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The 1909 Commission’s hearings had made for sensational headlines, and produced many ramifications. A disrated detective claimed to the Commission that he had been transferred from Lyttelton after pressure by the local MP because he had been too assiduous in preventing pilfering by wharf workers. The workers and the MP had protested vigorously about this ‘slanderous and spiteful attack’, and resolved to make submissions themselves. Truth railed against the ‘snub-nosed head of the department’ sacking two policemen for mere ‘beery idiocy’ during the hearings. Many agreed with the Otago Daily Times in finding the ‘spectacle of the public washing of departmental soiled linen’ very unfortunate. By mid August, there was public speculation about Dinnie going and who might replace him. Some observers, however, examined Bishop’s strictures on Dinnie critically: for example, for all the praise of Tunbridge, Dinnie’s checking procedures were much stricter. Truth agreed that Bishop had departed from normal evidence-gathering procedures, but that this had been necessary to get at the truth. It declared itself surprised at its own past ‘moderation’ towards Dinnie in the light of the Royal Commission’s indictment of him!
Prime Minister Sir Joseph Ward was out of the country throughout the hearings, and he needed time to absorb the developments on his return in late September. The release of the Commission’s findings when they were laid before Parliament early in November provoked even more sensational reporting than had the hearings, stimulated by attacks on Dinnie in the House by his arch-enemies Arnold and Taylor. The latter described him as ‘one of the most grossly incompetent public officials’ ever. Commentators noted that the generally good reputation of the Force made it all the more unfortunate that there had been laxity in his recruiting and leadership. Predictions of his resignation, enforced or otherwise, escalated.
It did not seem to be a foregone conclusion, for Bishop clearly had a ‘set’ against Dinnie. The Otago Daily Times openly challenged the Royal Commissioner’s impartiality, while others were more circumspect: because Dinnie had been preoccupied with justifying himself rather than promoting reform, perhaps his showing had been ‘less prepossessing’ than it might otherwise have been. But even those taking a critical stance towards Bishop and the anti-Dinnie politicians tended to remark on Dinnie’s ‘weak and vacillating’ behaviour as a head, particularly his alleged inability to resist political pressure in selecting recruits. ‘There is
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no branch of the service in which firm and courageous administration is more necessary than ... the Police Department’. For all that Bishop had been antagonistic toward Dinnie from the start, most felt that the administration of the Force had been ‘feeble and inept’ and reorganisation was necessary. By 5 November it was being reported that members on both sides of the House were of the opinion that Dinnie had to go, and that the government was considering placing the Force in the hands of a public servant, probably Waldegrave, as an interim arrangement. There was a general feeling that it was time for a New Zealand policeman to be professional head of the Police - but that, given the problems with all the leading Inspectors that had been revealed in the Commission, a transitional period was needed. In the meantime, it was expected that Cullen would become the senior professional policeman and act as the administrative head’s right-hand man. 118
Dinnie was busy preparing to fight the Commission’s report and the demands for his resignation, allegedly with the help of his embattled headquarters staff. On 8 November he presented his written ‘observations’ to the Minister of Justice, and asked for them to be forwarded to Cabinet and tabled in Parliament so that they could be read in conjunction with Bishop’s report. Dinnie worked through Bishop’s criticisms of him. He had been accused of doing ‘nothing’ about promulgating new regulations, but he and his Chief Clerk could prove that a great deal of research and consultation had been done since he had first signalled his intention to revise them in May 1906. A completed draft had been ready for distribution to the Inspectors in May 1909, and he was now considering a conference of Inspectors to examine their responses. He had been attacked for accepting at face value parchment good-behaviour certificates issued by other forces, but what else could he have done? As for criticism of the lack of a system for supervising the Training Depot at night, what was done at Wellington South followed the practice at Mount Cook, which no one had criticised, and was in any case under the control of the District Inspector. These examples are a measure of the validity of a number of Dinnie’s responses. On the question of regulations, there was room for some criticism but Bishop had exaggerated; on the others. Bishop had seemingly found fault for the sake of finding it.
In the case of the policeman ‘wife-deserter’ unmasked accidentally through the appearance of his photograph in the Gazette, Dinnie showed quite convincingly that he could have done no more and that Bishop had ‘carefully suppressed the facts, with what object I will leave others to judge.’ He dissected Bishop’s comments on the various individual cases with (sometimes) surgical ease. There had been other misrepresentations and suppressions by the Royal Commissioner to suit his own prejudices. In the case of the alleged use of political influence to get an individual into the Police, Dinnie showed that he had been selected before receipt of the MP’s letter. T submit that it is very regrettable that Mr. Bishop has
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so seriously misrepresented the facts in this case’. Dinnie hinted at collusion between the magistrate and Cullen, the former having cited something said by Cullen which was not in the minutes of the Commission or in the files. (Elsewhere, he noted that he saw for the first time in Bishop’s report a written criticism of himself by Cullen; and that only Auckland was criticised by Bishop for the extent of drinking among the men.)
Dinnie claimed that his alleged scapegoating of an informant had nothing to do with him: the transfer had been a ministerial decision, and Dinnie had no choice but to fine the man for insubordination when he refused to go. The alleged procuring by MP R Houston of a place for an unsatisfactory man could be disproved from the files - and indeed Houston had complained in writing that Dinnie ignored his recommendations, something which tied in with Bishop’s comment elsewhere that Dinnie had refused to bow to political pressure on internal Police matters. Bishop was quite wrong to conclude beyond ‘the slightest doubt that the word of the member has gone very far in many cases’. Dinnie had invited him to the office to examine the files, but he had never turned up. ‘There was not a tittle of evidence before him from which he could draw such a conclusion, and I challenge him to quote a single instance justifying his allegation. There never was a time in the history of the New Zealand Police Force when political influence had less effect.’ There was sympathetic press comment about this refutation after its publication. 119
Dinnie’s observation that many of the attacks on him were for his accepting reports by his subordinates (T am not superhuman’) or not knowing of the existence of material on files (how could he know everything ?) was clearly fair comment. As for his thoroughness, of 1175 applicants for employment in the five years to 31 August 1909, 605 had been rejected after enquiry and inspection; so much for the strictures on him by some of his officers and endorsed by Bishop. He applied the same test to the selection of men for promotion: who was the best judge of the qualities needed by a sergeant, the Commissioner or the magistrate? He also noted that Bishop had offered no alternative to the present promotion system. Dinnie observed that he had been condemned for not disciplining a sergeant over an accusation which was unfair in the circumstances (much time having elapsed) and could not have been considered by a court: ‘it would be interesting to know’ how Bishop would have dealt with it as a magistrate. Dinnie pointed out that the Invercargill District had been re-established in 1902 because ‘a trial’ of working it from Dunedin since 1891 had proven unsatisfactory. Dinnie agreed with this decision by Tunbridge, and backed their joint knowledge of policing matters against Bishop’s. 120
The Royal Commission had stated that Dinnie had dealt ‘far too leniently’ with most cases of police drunkenness. The Commissioner riposted that since Bishop had read all the defaulters’ sheets, he would know that the regulation cited had ‘never been literally enforced since it
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was made in 1887’. And for good reasons. In 90 percent of cases, the alleged police drunk would have been sober from a civilian point of view; any sign of liquor on a man meant that he was considered unfit for duty, and in such cases dismissal was not appropriate in New Zealand or anywhere else. Since he had been Commissioner he had discharged 33 men who had brought discredit on the service through drunkenness. As for Bishop’s condemnation of the practice of transferring men who had erred, this was the system before Dinnie’s time and in other forces. ‘lt is essential to the success of a Police Force that the men should be respected, which cannot be the case where the public know the man has been punished for misconduct.... The question is again one of opinion as to administration, and I claim that a well-established system that has been in vogue ever since a Police Force existed should not be condemned on the opinion of an inexperienced observer.’ 121
Bishop had said he would give the Minister a list of men who had been ‘unaccountably’ passed over for promotion. In the event, only three names had been given, and Dinnie justified each decision. He noted that Bishop felt that education was not a prerequisite for promotion, but as the guardian of the needs of the new policing bureaucracy in a stabilised society he could declare that ‘there is nothing that lowers a Sergeant in the eyes of his subordinates and the public so much as the want of education.’ In cases where Bishop’s recommendations were sensible they had been long anticipated: the magistrate’s ‘alarm’ over the rank of Station Sergeant was ‘quite unnecessary’, for it had been altered to Senior Sergeant in draft regulations a year ago, and his recommendation of the creation of Superintendents had been on Dinnie’s public agenda for a long time. 122
Dinnie was particularly indignant at the aspersions cast upon his headquarters staff. He noted that it was Bishop himself who had first referred to alleged dissatisfaction, ‘a most improper and biassed assertion’ that had presumably been fed to him by malcontents. Having ‘made up his mind before the Commission opened’. Bishop had not mentioned allegations that Wright’s promotion had caused an upset until he reached Auckland, when ‘lnspector Cullen at once agreed with him’ - another broad hint at collusion. Bishop had condemned fingerprint expert Quartermain’s promotion to Detective in April 1909 over the heads of other good plain-clothes men, but this was ‘a rash and inaccurate statement’: Quartermain was senior to those mentioned. As for Bishop’s ‘profound impression’ of ‘simmering discontent’ with Wright since his promotion in 1906, actual evidence had been produced by only two policemen. Yet Bishop called for Wright to be turned out of the office, ‘his character blasted’!
The Royal Commissioner had claimed that the Chief Detective position at headquarters was largely a sinecure, but Mcllveney had ‘successfully handled a number of important and intricate criminal cases’ and no one had challenged the position during the enquiry. Bishop had attacked
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Muggeridge’s promotion, and recommended his return to uniformed duty: this was ‘a most unjust and unwarranted attempt to injure a hardworking, zealous officer’. ‘lt is an established rule in all Police Forces that Constables who are detailed for important staff work should hold at least non-commissioned rank.’ It would be no use giving the storekeeper or the district clerks extra salary without promotion, for they would then lose seniority as regards future promotion. With regard to the alleged high expenditure on headquarters staff, Dinnie showed that the clerical staff was at about the same level as in 1882, although the work had trebled since then. As for a civil service clerk being able to soon pick up headquarters duties, it was a ‘most amusing’ idea, ‘so absurd that I will leave it at that’. 123
Some of Dinnie’s observations were special pleadings. By his own admission, there was more evidence than that of two ‘discontented’ men of dissatisfaction with Wright: Cullen’s, for example. But his accusations that Bishop had come to the Commission with preconceived ideas, and that he had lost no opportunity to slap Dinnie down, could scarcely be gainsaid. Bishop could find nothing to criticise about the Finger Print Branch, so had resorted to accusing Dinnie of wrongly boasting that he had set it up. Dinnie had not said that, but that he had in effect reestablished it after a false start in the prisons administration. Bishop had said that none of Dinnie’s justifications for having a sworn headquarters staff had ‘any foundation in fact’. This ‘emphasises Mr. Bishop’s opinion of his own infallible judgment. He might have allowed me to know something about a business that I have been trained in all my life.’ The issue came down to who had ‘sound judgment and knowledge’ of policing, a magistrate with no practical policing experience or a professional policeman?
Dinnie concluded by quoting various favourable comments by Bishop on the state of the Force. ‘What more, may I suggest, could be desired? According to Mr. Bishop, everything is good except the man who has been responsible for the result’. He noted that he had been in charge when 429 of the current staff had been appointed. ‘Am I to take no credit for the flattering remarks applied to the Force by Mr. Bishop? If the Force was corrupt, inefficient, immoral, or otherwise deficient, I should be the first one to be blamed’. But since it was none of these, should not the Commissioner get the credit, he asked, appealing to ‘the sense of justice in the Government’. It was a powerful polemic. The government, however, refused to table it in the House, on the grounds that to do this would be unconstitutional. Many ‘respectable’ people now supported Dinnie’s request for its tabling, which would open it to the same public scrutiny as Bishop’s report. But Findlay’s response to a delegation which waited on him on 16 November showed that the writing was on the wall for the Commissioner.
‘A Royal Commissioner in our law’, Findlay said, ‘has almost all the powers of a Supreme Court judge. He is expected to proceed according
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to the recognised canons of British impartiality, to hear both sides, to suspend his judgment until all that can be said by one side or the other has been said, and, as far as I know, that course was followed by Mr. Bishop.’ His report was ‘not an ex parte statement at all. It is in the nature of a judgment of a high judicial officer.’ Cabinet would consider the report which, whatever view might be taken of it, was written ‘impartially to the best of his honest judgment’. It was of small comfort to Dinnie and the many police and others who backed him that Findlay stated he would get a fair hearing, and indeed that his report would be published in full.
This was quickly done, arousing great interest and not a little sympathy, but given its intemperate language he had clearly become a political embarrassment. His removal was only a matter of time, and he was offered the job of Inspector of Prisons, only to see this withdrawn. Dinnie refused to resign. The government’s response was to unilaterally accept a resignation offer he had allegedly submitted verbally before the enquiry, making it operative from the end of the year. He was given six months’ leave on full pay, followed by a new official position in compensation: president of the Tokerau District Maori Land Board. After this position was abolished in 1914 he worked as a private investigator in Wellington. Former senior police (such as ex-inspector Harry Feast, a well-known private investigator in Christchurch from 1882 to 1902) had spent long nights in bushes and outside houses seeking evidence of adultery and the like, but this was a long way from the kudos of Dinnie’s Scotland Yard days. 124
In announcing, on 22 December, what he made no attempt to hide was an enforced resignation, Ward praised Dinnie’s service, his character, and his integrity, but declared that the public interest had to come first; the Commission’s report was ‘against the Police Commissioner’, and there must be no possibility of friction within such an important department of state, or between it and other officials. There had been such a problem with the position of Commissioner that the government had decided that Under-Secretary for Justice Waldegrave, a career bureaucrat, would become Acting Commissioner, and thus the first New Zealand-bom head of police. As permanent head of the Justice Department since 1896, he had been acquainted with policing for a number of years. He would be assisted as soon as possible by ‘a chief inspector of police’. Ellison and Cullen had long been touted for the top professional police job, but once again the London Metropolitan Police was contacted with a view to importing another senior policeman. This was never followed up, perhaps because of widespread opposition to repeating this course of action.
Dinnie denied publicly that he had tendered his resignation to become operative after the Commission. He had told Findlay that he had previously intended to resign because of the placing of the Force ‘under the Justice Department’, for without direct access to the Minister he could not carry out his duties to his own satisfaction. ‘After the commission was set up I entirely abandoned my intention to resign, as I thought the inquiry might
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be followed by some alteration in the system, especially in regard to dealing with correspondence.’ He called for a further enquiry, but no one was listening. (In 1915 - with Truth sneering that he had found his ‘true level’ as a private detective - he even sued the Crown, unsuccessfully, for wrongful dismissal.) The Prime Minister’s main stated reason for ‘accepting’ the ‘resignation’ was, people noted, a ‘feeble’ one: if there was friction inside the Force it was not normally the Commissioner who was dumped. 125
The major result of the Commission was not the gradual implementation of a number of its recommendations, for many of the subsequent innovations would have occurred sooner or later anyway. It was the removal of Dinnie, the last of the Commissioners (bar during interim regimes like Waldegrave’s) who had not risen through the New Zealand ranks. For Taylor, Waldegrave ‘commands the respect of almost every one who knows him’, and had the ‘quiet influence’ necessary to restore peace among the ‘conflicting elements’. But few believed that the government really intended not to have a professional Police Commissioner in place soon, and in gloating at having helped get rid of Dinnie’s ‘wretched, wobbling, weak-kneed administration’, Truth depicted the Waldegrave solution as a ‘temporary expedient’. The obvious nominal or at least ‘working head’ of Police was the senior Inspector, Cullen. But his reputation for being quarrelsome and his iron-tight disciplinary methods made Ministers cautious.
Moreover, although the old charges of a Catholic conspiracy had scarcely emerged during the 1909 Commission, it was still considered to be problematic to give a top job (Commissioner or Chief Inspector) to a Catholic like Cullen, O’Donovan (already being talked of as a future Commissioner) or Mitchell (who had had aspirations for some time). Most importantly, Cullen had been shown during the hearings to be lacking some of the characteristics that might be expected of either a ‘working’ or a de jure head of police. Waldegrave had already been closely associated with policing, and Inspector Ellison was close at hand for practical advice. It was reasonable to expect that whoever became the Chief Inspector would eventually take over most of the responsibilities exercised by Waldegrave, but such an appointment was never to be made.
Meanwhile, the new situation quickly caused technical problems, for under the law only a formally appointed Commissioner could exercise certain powers - such as the fining or other punishment of offenders within the Force. As a result, Waldegrave was given the full powers and title of Commissioner. He was a man with a reputation for departmental efficiency, and his ascendancy was followed early in February by the long-awaited decision - resulting from the Royal Commission’s recommendations - that in principle the head office positions should be held by civilians rather than sworn policemen. The new Chief Clerk, C E
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Matthews, formerly McGowan’s private secretary, would oversee a gradual transition as vacancies came up. Waldegrave was soon seen to be doing a reasonable job, and his transitional regime lasted until his retirement in 1912. Under Waldegrave the police were seen very much as an adjunct of the Justice administration, even to the extent of their designation: ‘Department of Justice (Police)’. Matthews, a disciple of Findlay, was to make his career in the Justice bureaucracy. 126
The new Commissioner had to fight the same battles as Dinnie in his pursuit of bureaucratic reform, and especially of adequate policing resources. But, armed with the Commission’s report, Waldegrave was able to make police service so much more attractive that former policemen still remembered him with fondness 70 years later. In March 1910 Findlay - following the Royal Commission - announced a big increase (3s 6d per week) in the house allowance for constables and sergeants in the four centres, higher relieving/temporary allowances for men on duty away from their station for more than a week, increased travel allowances, and more comfortable travel by sea or rail. The perennially discontented Dunedin men were happy to get the popular Inspector Mitchell as their replacement for the long-discredited O’Brien, whom many believed to be guilty, inter alia, of favouritism. At once the conditions of work improved for those on the beat - rostering alterations ensured more frequent Sunday leave, for example, albeit not as generous as under a 1910 British law which aimed to phase in one day’s rest in every seven. In April 1911 the Commissioner gained tighter control over recruitment and training when he placed the sergeant-in-charge at the Training Depot on the headquarters staff. He gained permission to enlarge the Depot so more recruits could be accommodated, a gymnasium was built (as Bishop had suggested), and both drill instruction and physical training were improved. 127
Waldegrave inherited a waiting list so small that many of the accepted men would be taken into the Depot within a couple of months. Enquiries about candidates’ pasts could often therefore not be made until they were already probationary constables. Existing educational standards were at first maintained, however: some potential entrants without the Standard Five examination were forced to wait until they had attained it. Following the Royal Commission’s recommendations, from mid 1910 enrolments were to be made at district offices, with all candidates being interviewed by an Inspector. Enquiries would be made locally into those who seemed satisfactory. But good work opportunities elsewhere were still abundant, and so the standard of recruits remained poor and flexibility of educational attainment crept in. The best that Ellison could say about an English applicant was that he ‘looks to be somewhat better than the average run of London sailors’, yet in August 1911 Waldegrave accepted the young man as a serious candidate. Sergeant John McNamara, who had become Depot instructor the previous month, reported of him that he was ‘anything but brilliant. He is a very slow learner’. He felt, however, obliged to
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recommend him for the Force on the grounds that he might nevertheless turn out to be a good beat policeman. A pay rise for married probationers (to 7s 6d per day) was welcome, but did not help single recruits. The fundamental problem was that a police career remained financially unattractive. Waldegrave felt that more rapid increments would be better than an increase in basic pay, but there was increasing pressure from the men for an all-round raise.
When the politicians at last conceded that constables’ pay rates needed to be improved, they adhered to the view that the general policy of recruiting single young men of rural labouring stock did not justify even relatively high Depot salaries. Men of the ‘right stamp’ should be prepared to make a few sacrifices in their probationary period. The increases in house and travel allowances in 1910 had been used as an excuse to defer consideration of the 1909 Commission’s recommendations for an increase in constables’ pay and the frequency of their increments, but by 1911 pressure had become too great to resist. From 1 January 1912 the base constables’ rate would be 8s per day, fully 2s more than that for single probationers. This followed Bishop’s recommendations, as did the accompanying move to three-yearly increments of 6d per day. Moreover the Commission’s suggestion of the possibility of a return to long-service pay for constables had been taken up and improved upon. Their 9s 6d after nine years would rise to 10s on receipt of their 14-year long-service medal, and to 10s 6d after 20 years, given good conduct and efficiency. It was a relatively cheap reform, thanks to the exclusion of the other ranks - they would get a rise when it could be afforded. 128
Perhaps partly because of the niggardly attitude towards probationers’ pay, the standard of recruits continued to be a problem. Six months after the introduction of the new rates, an Irish labourer was signed up despite a report by McNamara that his character and acceptance of discipline was no better than ‘Very Fair’. His education was ‘Very limited. Somewhere in the vicinity of a 3rd standard school boy’. The Force, therefore, got a man assessed to be of ‘no outstanding features.... He is a plodder and nothing more’, but it accepted him because he ‘may become useful’. Such a policeman was better than no policeman, and although he was hardly the required moral exemplar, in an increasingly self-policing society he could be ‘useful’ as a coercer of residual marginal elements who did not conform, or of generally well-behaved people who occasionally violated the law. Given that the Force was gradually becoming more attractive as a long-term career, at least for those who survived their early years, the continuing recruitment of men of ‘brawn and little brain’ had long-lasting ramifications. One man who had joined at the turn of the century did not resign until near the end of the Second World War. Of the 86 men taken on in 1910, eight made it to Senior Sergeant or above. Some of course were men of talent; one of the 1910 intake, J Bruce Young, became Commissioner. But many were not. 129
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Means of reward for effort other than pay and allowances were reexamined during the first decade of the century. The monetary reward system continued, but was not favoured and was mostly confined to liquor cases, although success in sensational cases might still be rewarded by way of lump-sum money, pay increases or promotion. But detectives, by the very nature of their work, tended to monopolise these opportunities. In 1904 Broberg received a money reward and two pay increments after capturing the murderer Ellis, although it was Waipawa’s Constable James Willcocks who had discovered his whereabouts and planned the stakeout. In 1905 several policemen gained increments as reward for successes, including Acting Detective Alfred Ward, who was made a full Detective. Some members of the uniformed branch emerged with rewards. In 1908 Constable Robert Moriarty chased an armed would-be murderer and bailed him up, overpowering him after his revolver failed to fire three times. For this ‘great bravery’ he was given a 6d per day increase which was to continue until he either reached the maximum for a constable or was promoted. Constable Mclvor received a similar reward for overpowering the mad doctor Goode the following year.
By this time, however, general policy was for good services to be potentially rewarded. A ‘note in favour’ on a personal file would be taken into account for promotion purposes. Even for the capture of Pawelka in 1910, the money reward was a mere £lO, split between a sergeant (£3) and constables (£1 10s or £2 each). In 1909, when Constable Bird Evans of Christchurch applied for an accelerated increment for meritorious conduct - he had risked his life by arresting a murderer who was trying to commit suicide (at the same time dealing with ‘an escaped lunatic who appeared on the scene’) - his officers strongly backed this as an incentive for others to show such ‘pluck’. In one of his last decisions. Commissioner Dinnie disagreed. Constable Evans’ ‘reward’ (a note in favour) was the same as that given the constable who arrived at the scene to collect evidence.
Monetary and promotional rewards had fallen into disfavour for a reason which had long been appreciated in the Force, and which had been much aired at commissions of enquiry. In 1910 Constable Andrew Thompson of Palmerston North applied for a monetary or promotion reward for his role in the hunt for Pawelka. Inspector Wilson opposed this in principle; such rewards caused ‘a lot of ill feeling & jealousy’. Commissioner Waldegrave agreed. When Thompson repeated his application in 1912, Wilson summed up the view now held by most of the hierarchy: T am totally against the system of promoting men for similar actions at the expense of and over their superiors. It gives very great umbrage and causes discontent. After all that has been said against this system at the various commissions I hoped it had ceased.’ When the new Commissioner upheld Wilson’s recommendation, and Thompson asked for a ministerial decision, the Minister agreed that the constable’s attitude amounted to ‘insubordination’. 130
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Meanwhile, that incentive which the police had thought was sacrosanct, their pension, had also come under critical scrutiny. The early reports had been of a ‘prosperous’ Fund, and so the police had agitated for a reduction in their contributions. The resultant shortfall could be made up by placing to the credit of the Fund the amount the government had saved in compassionate allowances; this would also enable meagre benefits such as those paid to widows to be increased. Dinnie and some of the Inspectors supported such demands, but the early reports of the Board of Administration noted that the Fund appeared to be prosperous mostly because many of those eligible to retire had not yet done so.
As agitation for lower contributions continued, the first of the required triennial actuarial reports on the Fund had made pessimistic reading: for the scheme to remain self-supporting, contributions would need to almost double! To be sure, the Government Insurance Department’s Acting Actuary P Muter acknowledged, current income far exceeded outflow and therefore his report would be received ‘with a certain amount of incredulity’. But, he explained, as a pension fund became well-established the ‘aged and medically unfit members receiving pensions must increase from year to year until they bear much the same proportion to the staff on active service as the infirm and old in the colony bear to the remaining adult population. Even a rough examination of the accounts shows that before many years are over the pensions and allowances will exceed the contributions’, and this problem would be an ongoing one.
At the end of March 1905 all seemed to be well on the surface. The Fund totalled £24,875 11s 2d, with only £4138 12s 8d being paid out annually. But the scheme remained actuarially unsound, and there were some specific demographic glitches: rather more men than originally expected were retiring unfit before the age of 60, and few of the life pensioners (there were 53 of them by 1906) were dying. Like Tunbridge before him, Dinnie stressed the amount being saved in compassionate allowances - almost £15,000 in total by 1906 - and the continuing growth of the Fund. His enthusiasm was not echoed by Morris Fox, who that year presented the second triennial actuarial report. He stressed that the ‘income from contributions increases very slowly while the outgo for pensions and allowances increases very rapidly’. While the ‘accumulated funds will still continue to increase slowly for two or three years longer, they will then attain their maximum, and afterwards will diminish year by year, in an increasing ratio, until they cease to exist’.
What had been foreshadowed in 1903 was now crystal clear. T have no fault whatever to find with the form of the Provident Fund itself, which I look upon as suitable and satisfactory in every way, and very similar to what is provided for in many other bodies of employees in other parts of the world. It is, however, seldom possible for the employees themselves to pay the whole of the heavy contributions necessary to purchase the benefits provided by such funds. That the contributions in this particular case are insufficient for the purpose is plainly evident
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from the fact that the whole of the accrued funds are not nearly enough to meet the well-understood liability connected with the few pensioners who have already come upon the Fund’. The Fund was not guaranteed, and an actuarial point of unsustainability was inevitable unless (as Poynton had noted during the 1905 Commission) parliament allocated money to it. By 1908 the excess of income over expenditure had dropped to only £2OOO. The Fund was definitely on the road to collapse. The government did not want to have to bail it out.
The police and railways superannuation schemes had established a momentum which culminated in November 1907 with the passing of legislation establishing the Public Service Superannuation Fund, the government altering the two earlier funds’ contribution rates for new members to match those of the new scheme. Policemen who now joined the Police Provident Fund aged 30-35 would henceforth have a slightly better deal, those aged 35-40 and 45-50 a slightly worse one. But the government’s long-term aim was to integrate policemen into the general public service scheme. Section 40 of the Public Service Superannuation Act provided for the police to be balloted about the absorption of their Provident Fund by the general scheme. Should a majority be in favour of this, the amalgamation would proceed. Dinnie circularised the Force early in 1908, noting the advantages of the police switching to this new scheme: it was government-subsidised, and would offer a better deal for much the same contributions. It offered a maximum retiring allowance of 40/60ths of income, compared with the 36/60ths of the Police Provident Fund. Men had only a limited time in which to choose whether to transfer. 131
The rank and file, however, were wary about joining the general Fund. Such was their level of mistrust of the authorities that many felt that trickery was in the air, particularly over the longer service required to reach the maximum allowance. Police in the four cities began to meet and circulate petitions opposing the Force being brought under the 1907 Act. Some officers argued the case for the public service scheme. Wanganui’s Inspector Wilson felt that the new measure was ‘much more liberal than our own PR Fund’, although he did consider that it should be more generous towards police injured in the execution of duty. Increased contributions would be required from only a few, and the maximum allowance would be higher and calculated as an average of the last three (rather than seven) years’ pay. Wives and families of men dying from natural causes would receive ‘a most liberal provision’. Such arguments won over most of the men in his district. Not all senior police held a favourable view of the proposal, however. Chief Detective Herbert in Dunedin considered that it was a young man’s scheme, that police who had contributed to their own Fund would be relatively disadvantaged compared to new contributors, particularly those outside the Police whose benefits would be funded partly from the £30,000 Police Provident Fund reserves.
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Police on both sides generally agreed that they had not been given enough time to decide between the schemes, particularly since apparent ambiguities remained. The tension grew after 50 city and suburban men met in Christchurch and supported two resolutions. First, to establish a committee to seek legal advice on the 1907 Act; second, that in view of ‘vagueness and indefmiteness’ any decision should be delayed. In the face of such views, the projected poll was dropped in February 1908. The police administration had conveniently discovered that the Act did not definitely provide for previous police service to be counted towards a pension, and it would take time to draft an amendment to allow apparently excluded branches of the state machine to participate fully in the new scheme. 132
The resulting delay only allowed the opposition to consolidate. On the basis of a legal opinion, the Wellington police resolved on 13 March that the Force should not come under the 1907 Act. They asked instead that the government pay into the Police Provident Fund a sum in proportion to what it intended to provide to establish the public service superannuation scheme. The debate became even more vigorous. A Wanganui detective was convinced that the government would never be persuaded to bail out the inherently unstable Police Fund, especially as ‘when occasion requires us to act, we are not organized’. To stick with it would be to live in ‘a fool’s paradise’, for ‘the trend that public opinion has been following’ was that the state should not assist its servants with their pensions. ‘We must admit that the man that bakes our bread, or the man that kills our meat is as necessary to the machinery of State as a Policeman or Post Official. To my mind there is danger ahead for all our Pension Funds unless they are self-supporting’, and in the circumstances the best way to receive protection was within the broader public service entity. 133
It was now announced that the state would grant an additional £3OOO per annum to the already subsidised Public Service Superannuation Fund should it absorb the Police Fund. The government was doing all it could to foster the removal of the separate police scheme, but by now the majority of police were opposed to this. Prime Minister Ward responded by dropping the police clauses from projected public service amendment legislation, and instead set out to convince constables that the unsoundness of their Fund, and its therefore uncertain future, meant that they would be wise to transferee masse to the general scheme (an option the government could reinstate).
Muter’s triennial actuarial report of 1909 overtook this process of persuasion. It admitted that the previous projections had been too pessimistic: the Fund totalled more than had been anticipated, ‘partly owing to the large increase in staff in recent years, the improvement in the rate of interest earned, and also to the pensions being less than expected’. But the essential message was the same as before, that ‘the margin between the receipts and expenditure has continuously diminished’ and that funds would soon ‘continuously decline in the absence of any
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subsidy’. Like many police superannuation funds at this time, ‘the scheme is not self-supporting, and in fact it cannot be made so without robbing it of all its utility’. The government had subsidised the Public Service Superannuation Fund by £20,000 per annum, the teachers’ superannuation scheme by £7OOO. At the very least, it should now give the Police Fund the £3OOO per annum that it had already agreed to add to the Public Service Fund should the police join it, though this sum would need to be increased from time to time.
Such recommendations were of course posited on the Fund continuing in existence, but the tenor of Muter’s report determined otherwise. There was also a precedent near to hand: the New South Wales Police Fund had become insolvent. The government had by now embarked on the retrenchment of the civil service, and so was unwilling to spend more money on the police. As it was, the Force had escaped cost-cutting measures, although a planned increase in numbers was postponed until 1911-12. The government decided unilaterally that from 1 April 1910 ‘the members of the Police Force will become contributors to the Public Service Superannuation Fund’, which now operated under consolidating legislation of 1908. The balance of the Police Provident Fund, which had reached £32,204 7s Id, was transferred to the general Fund, from which payments to the 87 current and all future pensioners would come. This absorption was one of a number of steps by which the Police, although now operating under the 1908 consolidation of the Police Force Act of 1886, which specifically excluded them from the ‘Civil Service’, became less distinct from other arms of the New Zealand state.
The Solicitor-General ruled that policemen who had served in previous forces (including the Constabulary and the Permanent Militia) immediately prior to joining the Police would have such service credited, and it was later agreed that men in police or military service within a year before joining the Force could pay into the Fund the equivalent of five years’ contributions. Although the subsequent Police Association was to claim that the merger had been against police wishes, the fact that all existing rights and benefits of men in the Police Provident Fund were preserved helped them accept the fait accompli with some equanimity. ExSuperintendent Donald Scott later recalled, however, that there was widespread discontent that they had received no refunds of their contributions to the Police Provident Fund. This grievance quickly became part of a body of subcultural lore about pensions. By 1928, Commissioner W B Mcllveney was reinterpreting the 1910 merger as having occurred because the Fund had become so healthy! Section 23 of the Public Service Classification and Superannuation Amendment Act of 1909 cemented the new situation in place (although there were to be later finetunings) by firmly subsuming the Police Provident Fund within the Public Service Superannuation Fund. Inspector Ellison defeated Sergeant Dart and Chief Detective Herbert in a ballot to determine the police representative on the Public Service Superannuation Board. 134
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The administration welcomed the new Fund for other reasons than the ending of its worries about the old one. There was now more flexibility and this, inter alia, allowed the Police to rid itself of men who were surplus to requirements. The sergeant at Lawrence, with nearly 33 years of service, was considered too inefficient to be retained. ‘lt is useless’, wrote Commissioner Waldegrave, ‘to keep men of this stamp in the Force as they bring the Force into disrepute and don’t do their duty’. Such men could readily be retired on public service superannuation with the Minister’s consent. But the new situation was by no means perfect, either from the point of view of the rank and file members or from that of the hierarchy. Widows and families of members who died in the course of duty were no better off than on their previous ‘pittance’, which was seen as iniquitous in an organisation whose members’ duties ‘constantly bring them in contact with desperate characters’ and who ‘have to take risks that others do not’.
In the event, parliamentary grants under the Workers’ Compensation Act supplemented these meagre rates: £5OO for the children of the widower Constable Henry Hancox (drowned on duty in 1910), the same amount to the widows of Constables John Doyle (died in 1913 of injuries received while arresting a prisoner) and Denis Mahoney (burned to death in an Upper Hutt fire in 1914). Cabinet granted £5OO to Mary McGuire, widow of the sergeant shot dead in the hunt for Pawelka. But resentment remained about the principle of low returns for widows and their families, tainting a system which - by and large - created a sound pension fund for the police. Whenever police were placed in danger, as when they helped rescue the survivors of the Huntly mine explosion (in which 43 miners died), the controversy was rekindled. 135
‘The Headquarters Staff was broken up on my taking over the duties of Commissioner, and the Head Office is now manned by civilians’, reported Waldegrave in the course of explaining how he had put Bishop’s recommendations into effect. But he had soon found - even with Matthews as Chief Clerk - that initially he needed Sub-Inspector Wright’s expertise and institutional memory if he was to run the Police in addition to the entire justice system, as well as to finalise the regulations. He also discovered that he could not be übiquitous within the Force, something that Bishop had seemed to think possible for Dinnie. In May 1910 Truth alleged that when a prominent Christchurch businessman/JP/ Freemason/ local politician had been run in for drunkenness on a Saturday night, the books had been falsified to hide his identity. Rumours had been rife, and indeed Taylor had already brought the case up with Findlay. After vociferous campaigning by opponents of political ‘puli’, it was revealed that the man in question was B P Manhire, the mayor of Sydenham. His name had been entered in the charge book, and he had also signed the bail book. On the Sunday evening, local MP T Davey had called on
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Inspector Gillies to ask him to do what he could to keep Manhire’s name from being called in court.
Gillies had instructed the watch-house keeper to alter the name in the charge book to James Brown; when he declined, senior NCO James Johnston had done so under orders. The relevant page of the bail book was destroyed, and a fresh bond was taken in the name of Brown. On 5 July Davey gave an explanation to the House, claiming that in asking Gillies to ‘do what he could’ he had not been requesting a breach of regulations, and that he had been speaking as a private citizen rather than an MR By now it was being alleged that the watch-house keeper had been punished for his disobedience by being put on street duty, something denied by Waldegrave and Findlay. The pair did however confirm in a report to parliament that the Manhire incident had occurred.
Cabinet considered the issue and noted that Gillies had taken ill. He would be given three months’ sick leave, another three months’ leave of absence, and would then retire on superannuation, having by then completed the requisite years of service. Kiely would replace him. Enormous public praise was heaped upon Gillies. ‘His record with the exception of the incidents referred to has been a very long, able, and successful one, and entirely without blemish.’ He had, a commentator noted, been ‘treated with all possible leniency’. But the message was clear: an ugly face of influence had been revealed, a case made worse by the fact that Davey seemed to have had no idea how far an MP’s wishes might be acceded to. Truth asserted that Gillies had succumbed to ‘pull’ because he was ‘an enthusiastic Orangeman and a prominent freemason’: ‘Dinnieism’ was continuing to undermine Waldegrave’s efforts at reform.
Waldegrave had been quick to institute an enquiry, and he and the government ignored a campaign by what Truth depicted as the Christchurch monied class to restore Gillies’ honour. Findlay had been firm that there would be no ‘practices in which wealth and influence would play an important part’; ‘strict and sustained discipline’ was essential. Davey too suffered, losing a good chance of becoming parliament’s Chairman of Committees. Official disapproval of even the inadvertent use of ‘pull’ had been registered. Meanwhile, having implemented reforms which had improved both the lot of the men and their efficiency, Waldegrave was increasingly content to leave the day-to-day running of the Force to the headquarters staff and Ellison, coordinated and mediated by Wright. The journal which remained most interested in policing felt that Wright’s pernicious influence as the alleged orchestrator of ‘Dinnieism’ was responsible for a slowing of the pace of reform. But even Truth now doubted the need for a Chief Inspector. 136
By the end of 1910 it was clear that the Force was working well enough for some of Bishop’s specific recommendations to be ignored. What was needed was a reorganisation of the higher positions, particularly given several retirements. Dwyer had already replaced the retired Inspector E Macdonell in 1909, while the bete noires of the ‘Dunedin scandal’.
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Sub-Inspector Green (now of Timaru) and Inspector O’Brien, were both forced to retire in 1911 along with Inspector Gillies. Early that year there was a round of promotions and a reshuffling of responsibilities. SubInspector Wright, having assisted in the transition to the new regime, was (amid controversy) promoted to Inspector. However, he was sent to the unimportant Thames District (which was not to be disbanded, despite Bishop’s recommendation), from whence Inspector Kiely was transferred to Christchurch. Following the Royal Commissioner, the boundaries between the Christchurch and Dunedin Districts were again altered, with the four stations in the Oamaru sub-district transferred to Dunedin. SubInspector Norwood replaced the popular O’Donovan, who went on promotion to Invercargill (and in 1912, on to Napier). Sub-Inspector Phair was sent from Dunedin to Timaru, while Inspector Mitchell was transferred to Dunedin. Bartholomew Sheehan, much resented by his colleagues because of his accelerated promotion to Sub-Inspector, would assist in Wellington. 137
Once the commissioned officer ranks had been reallocated, attention was turned to the next level. More senior NCOs were needed, as Dinnie and the Royal Commission had argued, and eventually the government agreed to this. Commissioner Waldegrave formally endorsed the name of Senior Sergeant for the highest NCO rank, and expanded its membership greatly to create an echelon of senior NCOs throughout the country, all of them eligible for promotion to the Sub-Inspectorate. On 1 August 1911 there were 16 promotions to Senior Sergeant, On the list were a number of men who were to become significant members of the Force: William H McKinnon, William Fouhy, Samuel Dew, George Hastie. The Force now comprised, as well as constables, nine Inspectors, six Sub-Inspectors, 20 Senior Sergeants, some six dozen sergeants, five Chief Detectives and seven detective sergeants. The administration was reasonably satisfied that after the structural, personnel and stationing changes of the past few years, the higher echelons of the Force were in good shape. This included good physical shape; following Bishop’s recommendations, medical examinations now preceded all promotions to sergeant. 138
By mid 1911, some were saying that the 1909 Commission had achieved very little: it had led to the weeding out of ‘ancients’, and to a gradual disbanding of the ‘headquarters brigade’, but the Manhire case and other matters showed that at least some political influence remained. Conversely, there was said to be little interest in policing in Cabinet, given Findlay’s long trip with the Prime Minister to the Imperial Conference in London that year, and his leadership aspirations. When he ceased to be Minister of Justice in December (having resigned from the Legislative Council to contest a seat in the House, with the leadership in mind, but failed to win election), policing control became once more a subject of keen speculation, even trepidation. Many police were said to be dissatisfied with recent transfers and promotions, with favouritism allegedly displayed, with punishments for those who had only done their
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duty (the constable who had resisted Gillies’ pressure to falsify the Christchurch charge book had been moved to an out-of-the-way West Coast station), and with the slow-down in reform. In August, Arnold complained in the House about the ‘great delay’ in bringing about stillurgent reforms: where were the new regulations? Dinnie had been sneered at for saying that they were taking time to prepare, yet now almost another two years had passed. Waldegrave’s improvements in pay and conditions had not gone far enough; how could the right men be attracted into the Force when constables still earned less than labourers? 139
During 1911 even the former critics of Dinnie had become irate at the lack of progress under Waldegrave and Findlay. Some felt that matters had not improved at all in certain important areas. For Truth and its ilk, ‘the curse of Dinnieism’ had survived the departure of the ‘imported nuisance’ himself: his ‘Orange and Masonic gang’ had been sufficiently entrenched to prevent good Catholics and non-extremist Protestants from getting in or getting promotion. The Royal Commissions had found few or no such religio-political barriers, and the most the critics could do was to highlight the odd case of police favouritism towards co-religionist civilians. Even Gillies’ protection of Manhire had more to do with the man’s status as a mayor and JP and his friendship with a politician than with the ‘awful influence’ of Orangeism and Freemasonry. But for Truth, the matter was clear: the system of direct ministerial control through a civilian head had failed. To be sure, favouritism and influence had been partly rooted out, but the ‘ex-Dinnieite’ Sergeant Cummings had been given an allegedly unwarranted promotion to an easy billet over many better men. In fact, it was claimed, the recent appointments to the new rank of detective sergeant had been by neither merit nor seniority. ‘ln nine cases out of ten, Mr Bishop’s recommendations have been flouted, or, where they have been given effect something has happened to mar that effect’. 140
When Waldegrave’s impending retirement was announced in early 1912, criticism stepped up. Seething discontent within the Force was reported. ‘Favoured officers’ like Mcllveney were getting plum jobs, while good young men were being driven from the Force by ‘cliquism’ and so forth. Truth tried to characterise Waldegrave in ‘poetry’; ‘The Department known as Justice was by him firmly bossed. But as New Zealand’s Policeman Chief he was a holy frost.’ The journal dismissed speculation that Chief Clerk Matthews was a suitable successor: a civilian head was clearly not viable, as (presumably, like Waldegrave) he would have to rely too much on information from his Inspectors. Yet Truth went on to nominate Bishop as the man to put the Force ‘on a solid footing’. Under him, the promising Inspector O’Donovan (an outside contender for the job even now) could be trained up for the ‘Boss Bobbyship’, Observers apparently believed that the senior Inspector, Cullen, was still not an acceptable choice, although in fact Ward’s Cabinet, in its death throes, had endorsed him. Fearing attack for promoting a fellow Catholic
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at the very time he was fighting for his political life, Ward delayed the announcement. He then left office on 28 March leaving uncertainty in his wake, as the incoming Liberal government began toying with alternatives to Cullen. But despite all the criticisms, uncertainties and difficulties, it seemed incontestable that ‘a better spirit prevailed throughout the Force’ as a result of the purgative experience of 1909 and its aftermath. Whoever took over the helm would have an easier task than the job that had been foisted on Waldegrave. 141
Waldegrave had, in effect, scarcely been a Commissioner at all, but more like the Chief Inspector originally envisaged. He had often taken orders direct from Findlay, so that, in one sense, politics intruded more than ever before - although in another sense, the use of influence through back-bench MPs could be more readily countered because of ministerial control. Indeed, in between hurling brickbats, even Truth was prepared to acknowledge that useful reforms had occurred, albeit it was now time to consolidate these under a ‘professional’ head of police. Few critics disputed that the combination of Waldegrave and Findlay was a considerable improvement on the past. But the praise on the Commissioner’s retirement was muted, even from anti-Dinnie quarters. He had always been seen as no more than a transitional figure. 142
The personalities and methods of Commissioners Tunbridge, Dinnie and Waldegrave had all been suited well enough to the evolution of the Force, which itself reflected the evolving nature of New Zealand society. They were modern police bureaucrats, rather than the soldier/ administrators of the past. They increasingly looked to brain rather than brawn in their men, to the use of wise discretion and minimum force rather than overt coercion. In the overarching Crown strategy for the control of both races, the Police would normally operate at the passive or ‘benign’ end of the continuum of controls available to the state. But the authorities were always alert to the fact that overtly coercive tactics should remain ready for use whenever necessity arose; the iron hand would indeed soon re-emerge from the velvet glove.
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PART FOUR
Industrial Unionism, Police Unionism, 1912-1913
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CHAPTER 17
New Commissioner, New Government
Waldegrave relinquished the offices of Commissioner of Police and Under-Secretary for Justice on 31 March 1912, although it was on 17 April 1912 that the ‘interim’ administration actually came to an end and the senior commissioned officer in the New Zealand Police Force, John Cullen, became Commissioner. He was appointed under the short-lived (March-July 1912) Liberal government of Thomas Mackenzie by former Dunedin lawyer J A Hanan, the Minister of Justice. The Ministers had dithered over the appointment, perhaps partly because Cullen was a Catholic. On 4 April Auckland’s Catholic Bishop Cleary received ‘information from a very reliable source’ that ‘Cabinet is contemplating the appointment of Mr Bishop’ instead of Cullen, who had in the past allegedly ‘been passed over in favour of men inferior to him in every way’ because of his faith. Probably a more significant reason for Mackenzie’s indecision was Cullen’s infamous propensity for quarrelling with most people he came across, and perhaps a feeling that he would stamp a too-confrontational image upon the police. On the other hand, industrial tensions had been rising, and a Commissioner prepared to make robust use of the iron hand was seen to be required. There was no doubt, moreover, that he was an able and expert policeman, and he had kept out of controversy since the Royal Commission of 1909; these factors overrode qualms about his Catholicism, particularly after Ward reacted to Cleary’s intervention by lobbying Mackenzie and the other Ministers.
Cullen’s appointment was a very significant development; for the first time since the founding of the Force, a man had risen from the ranks to become head of the service. Previously the government had adhered to a common philosophy outlined by Raymond Fosdick (writing on European police systems) in 1915: ‘the man who has entered the force as a constable seldom has the breadth of vision or the point of view essential to the satisfactory performance of the supervisory functions attached to the office.’ Elements in the press lauded the new development, and Cullen himself drew attention to the ending of the age when heads of police were military men or ‘experts’ from outside New Zealand. Soon it was to be an adage in the New Zealand Police that the humblest of trainees could rise to become Commissioner. It was a fitting change, now that New Zealand was no longer a colony, and no longer needed a policing service which was orientated towards the military. Moreover, as Fosdick
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noted, bringing in outsiders to senior positions ‘dulls the spirit and perhaps the effectiveness’ of the rank and file.
Cullen’s appointment was fitting in an even more significant way. Political qualms about his style had been overridden because it was a time when the state was concerned at threats to its hegemony, not now mainly from Maori but from the growing and increasingly militant working class. While the policing strategy remained overarchingly benign, the tactical shifts required to suppress proletarian militancy would push the entire strategy back some way towards the coercive end of the control continuum. Cullen was the right man for the job in these circumstances. His ability to move tactically along the coercive continuum when the state needed this was skilful, informed by his knowledge and experience of the strategy of the past. While he acknowledged that the ultimate policing strategy in a ‘civilised’ community should be that of the velvet glove, he did not shrink from - indeed seemed to thrive upon - coercive confrontation.
Irishman John Cullen had been a policeman all his adult life. He had served for seven years in the rigorously coercive Royal Irish Constabulary before joining the New Zealand Constabulary Force during its formation in 1876, at the age of 25. He was a rigidly ‘upright’ character, always prepared to sternly discipline those who fell short of ‘correct’ standards. When in 1891 Sergeant Cullen was instructed by Seddon to deal with Maori by ‘Firmness and decision’, he hardly needed such a lesson. He frequently clashed with people, both police and public, who did not live up to his own standards, or who had the temerity to disagree with him. ‘A man in my position must have a certain number of enemies’, he asserted. Many found him to be ‘absolutely soulless’, and he was the subject of many complaints, even after he had reached high office. Expecting the ‘highest’ standards of behaviour in society, he believed that life in the Force should be the prototype for this; so disciplined should policemen be that all should look up to them. In this way he combined the ‘new police’ concept of the exemplar with his own views of appropriately disciplined personal behaviour, which were more stringent than those of his predecessor Commissioners. He had opposed policemen being given the vote in 1886, for the public should see them as the purest of apolitical bureaucrats and respect them for it. It would not have crossed his mind that his view of the ‘correct order of things’, superintended and if necessary imposed by his apparently impartial constables as it was, could be perceived in the broadest sense as itself highly political.
Cullen’s career progression had been delayed by the seniority system operating in the late nineteenth century. When the Napier JPs, for example, had suggested that his services to the state deserved promotion above 2/c sergeant. Commissioner Hume had not obliged. Finally, however, he had benefited from the death by ‘apoplectic fit’ of the recently appointed Inspector John Pratt in September 1897. He was appointed 3/c Inspector at Greymouth, an appointment which had gained the approval of old-
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time officers such as Broham. Then, in another lucky break, he was in 1898 transferred as relieving officer to the colony’s largest, most turbulent and most populous district, Auckland, Waikato and the Bay of Islands. By the time Hickson retired that December, New Zealand’s newest officer had proven his worth in a rough assignment, policing having fallen into ‘a state of great disorganization’ under his predecessor, and he was confirmed in charge. 1
As the officer heading the Auckland region, Cullen had come frequently to government attention. His tough, no-nonsense strategy was seen as what was needed for the most unruly urban area in the colony. He was, moreover, a skilled police tactician, as illustrated by the peaceful way in which the visit of the American Navy’s ‘Great White Fleet’ to Auckland passed off in 1908, according to all reports because of Cullen’s ‘vigilant and forebearing oversight’ during a week of great public ‘excitement’ and intoxication. One secret of his success was the maintenance of a comprehensive surveillance network of his ‘friends’ inside and outside the Force, an ‘espionage’ system condemned even by senior officers as ‘unscrupulous’. He introduced a similar system to the Commissionership.
The Commissioner also had to be able to exercise hands-on control, and Cullen - who had aspired to the top job in both 1903 and 1909 - was perceived to know more about policing than any of his rivals for the position. That an Irish Roman Catholic had come to head the most significant coercive force in the country would have been unthinkable in the past, when widespread suspicion of Irish Catholicism existed as a result of the Fenian scares of the 1860s and 1870s. But few believed Cullen to be anything other than a loyal servant of the state. And in any case, now that society was seen to be stabilising, and any identifiable mass threats to order were scarcely from Irish Catholicism (whatever rabid Orangeite Protestants might say), there was no cause for alarm. 2
Soon after Cullen’s accession to the Commissionership, Hanan asked him to provide a paragraph for the Governor’s speech regarding any police legislation which might be introduced. Cullen felt the need for a re-examination of the whole statutory and regulatory basis of the Force. As a senior Inspector he had long held that the 1886 Act upon which the Police was based (albeit consolidated in 1908) was ‘badly in need of amending’ to meet the changing times and encompass the last 14 years of police reforms. He now asked his Inspectors for suggestions for change. With the ratio of police to public so low, his respondents generally sought greater power - or at least certainty - for the constable, who was now more than ever before ‘acting alone’. Ellison’s comments on section 7 of the 1908 Act, for example, were that the men should be allowed to arrest all drunken, idle and disorderly people and all persons disturbing the peace. The Dunedin and Christchurch officers wanted the time allowed for complainants against the police to pursue their complaints shortened. Wright implicitly acknowledged that the police occupational subculture endorsed actions often proscribed by the formal rules - and suggested
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altering the rules rather than the practice. The civil libertarian strand in society had gone too far.
There was, in short, a toughening of the police attitude in the air. This reflected not only the difficulties of the ‘policeman acting alone’ but also awareness of the potential problems of social disorder in New Zealand. For many years the industrial conciliation and arbitration system had ensured quiescent labour relations, but now many workers viewed the corporate state machinery introduced by the Liberals as ‘labour’s legiron’. A number of unions had pulled out from the conciliation and arbitration system and strikes had begun again in 1906, with the great Blackball coalmining strike occurring in 1908. There were three dozen strikes between 1908 and 1913, and employers now became champions of arbitration. All around the developed world, labour militancy was on the rise. Despite an amendment to the Arbitration Act in 1908 which enabled the system to survive, Cullen, rightly, predicted a massive showdown between capital and labour. In this atmosphere the opposition Reform Party, more right-wing than the Liberals (though adopting many of their policies), came into office on 10 July 1912, albeit without a clear majority. 3
Quite apart from a perceived need to give police greater operational leeway in the changing social climate, some of the Force’s internal regulations remained anachronistically harsh. Revised draft Police Regulations had been in circulation long before Cullen became Commissioner. Dinnie had claimed insufficient time to revise them fully, and so for two years Sub-Inspector Wright at headquarters had tackled this task in his own time. The 1909 Police Commission had characterised many of the existing rules as ‘entirely obsolete, useless, and ineffective, and in some instances positively absurd as applied to the present day’, echoing Wright’s testimony that some were ‘ridiculous and unwarrantable’. When Alexander Cruickshank bid farewell to Dannevirke in 1910 after years of police service there, he noted that he had never been able to enjoy a social evening at anyone’s house, as ‘the rules of the force forbade friendships’.
Commissioner Waldegrave had done more work on the revised draft in 1911, attempting to encapsulate Bishop’s recommendations. He held Sub-Inspector Wright in Wellington partly to help him with this task, and then consulted other commissioned officers before handing the regulations to the Crown Law Office for comment. But the new Commissioner had long been concerned that the mellowing of society, and the recent waves of police reforms, had led to a counter-productive degree of loosening of the paramilitary ethos. He sensed what scholars much later analysed as a tension between the quasi-military organisation of police forces and the professionalisation of policing. Insistence on the former tended to hamper the latter. Conversely, the trend towards professionalisation required some degree of departure from the old organisational certainties. In a time of potential or actual civil strife, he and the political authorities could not tolerate any further substantial move in this direction. After a
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great deal of fine-tuning and alteration by Commissioner Cullen to meet the requirements of the new government and the industrial situation, the much-revised regulations were issued on 10 February 1913, operative from 1 March. The new rules had taken so long to emerge. Justice Minister Alexander Herdman explained to the men, because as well as being reflective of the New Zealand experience they had also been compiled from - and were therefore in tune with new developments in - rules and regulations elsewhere in the British Empire. 4
The new regulations showed no signs in certain areas of a slackening in formal discipline to meet the reforming atmosphere of the recent past: when constables married without permission in Cullen’s time, for example, they were still required to resign, petty discipline in the single men’s barracks continued to cause resentment, and rules were put in place ‘to enable bodies of police to move in concert when required in a smart military manner.’ None of this came as a surprise to observers of Cullen’s style of control over the police in the Auckland District, which had in the eyes of many been ‘strict military discipline, ludicrous and cruelly unnecessary in many of its aspects’. If anything, under the new Commissioner enforcement of internal police discipline was tightened in order to meet the new requirements of ‘bourgeois morality’: a constable with a ‘bad’ record was sacked for frequenting a brewery and soliciting cheap beer, barracks were to be run (Truth commented) like temperance hotels, and the number of ‘Dismissed for Misconduct’ cases increased.
However, the new regulations did partially reflect the increasingly benign face the New Zealand Police presented to the population, and the administration’s related desire to make them a ‘contented body of men’ (in Herdman’s words). They aimed at raising the standard of intelligence and conduct all round. Leave was increased to 15 days per annum (as recommended by the 1909 Commission) and could be accumulated for three years (although the much fought for guarantee of regular Sunday leave was not granted). Allowance was now to be made for many more intelligent constables and sergeants than in the past to do clerical work at district offices, thereby preparing them for the paperwork they would face when they gained promotion as well as ensuring that clerical support remained in tune with front-line policing. As a rule, there would now be a four-yearly turnover in these positions. The new regulations were generally welcomed as constituting an improvement in conditions for the men and in the efficiency of their control of order and regularity, despite Cullen’s resistance to implementing too liberal and ‘modem’ a regime.
In one area, however, the new regulations were attacked for a ‘modem’ requirement; as part of the quest to improve the image and functioning of the Police, they included a strict new prerequisite for promotion. Regulation 423 stated that ‘No man who has not passed the examination shall be recommended for promotion’. There was a great deal of reaction, some of it inspired from within the Police, to the effect that this would make the Force too different from its paramilitary past (and some suspicion
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from the labour movement that incompetent police would have their promotions rushed through before the new provision came into effect on 1 October). Herdman responded quickly: critics were wrong to suggest that the new regulations meant ‘promotion by examination and nothing else’. Apart from ‘elementary tests of intelligence’, the old factors would still to be taken into account: seniority of service, good conduct, zeal and integrity. The examinations would merely weed out the men who were ‘incurably dull’ from those who possessed ‘normal intelligence’. Some of ‘the most efficient of modem British police forces’ had much more difficult examination requirements, and the New Zealand ones were now similar to those of the London and Glasgow forces. ‘Modem conditions’ made examinations an essential prerequisite for promotion. ‘Communications are constantly being received from all parts of the world, business is becoming more complex and difficult, and the duties of the police officer of to-day are varied and complicated. He must be able to understand communications received, and he must be able to answer them intelligently.’
The new examinations, Herdman noted, formed part of the Reform government’s campaign to end political influence in the promotion of state servants. ‘To the active, intelligent policeman the new regulations will be acceptable, and if he gives his mind to his duty he will stand the test of examinations without the least difficulty. To the man who is both indolent and dull the examinations will prove a stumbling block, and this was deliberately intended by the authors of the new rules.’ The Minister had visited several stations since the gazetting of the regulations, and invited any police with grievances to speak out. ‘Apart from a few isolated cases’, he claimed (with exaggeration, for there was quite a degree of internal opposition to aspects of the changes), ‘the bulk of the force are well satisfied with the new rules.’ The Minister was ‘anxious to remove all cases of discontent, but at the same time, in the interests of the country, I am bound to see that discipline is maintained, and that a proper spirit of duty prevails.’ The new regulations, ‘framed with due regard to the best police regulations in existence’, would help turn a ‘good’ and ‘effective’ Force into one that was ‘better still’. 5
The Police Offences Amendment Bill circulated in July 1913 was calculated to enhance police powers in industrial disputes. Opponents called it ‘purely a piece of class legislation’, designed to aid the police to break strikes. The Commissioner’s suggestions included the long soughtafter right for the police to swear in specials (with the authority of the Minister). At very least (this was Kiely’s suggestion) the police should be able to call on the public to help them in times of difficulty. But the motivation for a new Police Force Act was more general than the need to pre-empt difficulties of public order. The old Act was so ‘manifestly out of date’ that parts of it derived from the 1846 Constabulary Force Ordinance. It sat oddly in relation to other criminal justice system legislation of recent times, for example. The mode of policing required
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for a society that was in general terms stabilising (but in which sectors had the potential to rapidly destabilise) was different from that required in 1886. The post-1898 Commission reforms needed both formal encompassing, and some stiffening in view of recent societal developments. After a long gestation period, ‘An Act to provide for the Establishment and Regulation of the Police Force’ was passed on 15 December 1913.
This rationalised some procedures. The use of specials, for example, previously provided for by the 1882 Justices of the Peace Act, was transferred to the new Police Force Act. But it did not go as far in the direction of modernisation as might have been expected, because of the industrial turmoil which had by then erupted and its suspected ‘contamination’ of a number of police. For example, while there were new protections for staff, these were of a fairly anodyne nature. More rights for men charged with offences were tempered by the disallowing of lawyers or advocates to represent them. New internal committees of enquiry were not open to rank and file or ‘union’ members. A Board of Appeal was provided for, but since the Minister had ‘unfettered control of the Force’ he could veto its decisions. Appellants could be ordered to pay costs if their appeal was considered frivolous or vexatious. Opposition spokesperson Hanan, while welcoming the general direction of the new provisions, noted that the Victorian and Irish forces had been used as models for many of the clauses - and they were scarcely suitable models for generally tranquil New Zealand. The intention, as the Crown later acknowledged, was in fact to ‘strengthen and not weaken’ the power of the Commissioner over his men.
Conversely, the Minister’s powers vis-a-vis the Commissioner were strengthened. During the long period of social stability since the 1880s, hands-on power had gradually devolved to the Commissioner. The strong intervention of the past by the Minister on behalf of the political executive had become increasingly unnecessary. Ellison and others had therefore pushed for formal recognition of this, through a wording change to the effect that the ‘Commissioner shall, under direction of the Minister, have the general management and control’ of the Force, and their views were reflected in the 1913 regulations. But hands-on ministerial control had been a feature of much of the Waldegrave period, and of the industrial turmoil of 1912-13, and so such wording did not appear in the new Police Force Act. The Commissioner would have ‘the general control of the Force’, a similar phrase to that of 1886. Management could be subjected to ongoing ministerial intervention if and when necessary.
The Force had been excluded from Herdman’s Public Service Act of 1912, which embodied Reform’s campaign promise to set up a unified state bureaucracy free from political patronage, explicitly in order to retain the Minister’s ‘unfettered’ command of policing - which was far too important a state function for the political executive to lose the capacity to intervene whenever necessary. Few in parliament questioned
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the power retained by the Minister in the 1913 Act, although some radical observers attacked it for giving ‘absolutism’ to the Minister and for treating the constable ‘as if he were a hireling mercenary, and not a man who has chosen the Force as an honourable profession.’ In the attempt to get a modem, bureaucratic force which yet preserved the paramilitary discipline seen to be necessary, the Act was not modem enough: even the ‘brutal’ Royal Irish Constabulary had some more liberal regulations, it was claimed. The police were, moreover, still not allowed to combine or - to howls of protest from the parliamentary opposition - to actively participate in politics, other than by voting.
Such points were mostly theoretical/constitutional in nature, but there were to be some practical problems with the Act, too. It did not fully incorporate all the reforms of recent years. The rank of Senior Sergeant, for example, was not mentioned, only ‘sergeants ... of different grades’. Later, men would claim that the Senior Sergeant position was no more than a grade of the rank of sergeant, as the position of detective was a grade of the rank of constable. Following the 1919 enquiry the position was designated in the regulations as a rank, but it still had no statutory basis and continued to create confusion within the career structure. Despite such problems, however, the Act was in general terms in tune with the requirements of its time, and was to last (with amendments) until 1958. 6
The Prime Minister, dour Ulsterman William Ferguson Massey, and the more excitable but reputedly ‘upright’ Irish Catholic Cullen became close colleagues, and Cullen was generally granted what he felt he needed to do his job properly. The fact that Herdman, Minister in charge of the Police until 1918, was a close personal friend of both also helped. Herdman and Cullen ran the policing regime tightly and cooperatively. When the wartime coalition National Ministry was formed by Massey on 12 August 1915, and Herdman was succeeded as Minister of Justice by the Liberals Robert McNab and (in 1917) Hanan, the policing portfolio was kept under Herdman’s auspices, he having retained the post of Attorney-General. Massey was determined to keep the key levers of state coercive power firmly in Reform hands while class and great-power conflicts continued. Meanwhile, police headquarters staff had continued to operate under the Justice Department, as allowed by the Acts Interpretation Act of 1908.
Cullen was well served by a stratum of experienced officers, two of whom - S P Norwood and W J Phair - had been promoted to Inspector after only four or five years as Sub-Inspectors. Most useful of all was the Inspector on the spot at Lambton Quay in Wellington, Ellison, a disciplinarian after Cullen’s own heart who was put in charge of decision-making in Cullen’s absences. The new Commissioner had long felt that there was a missing rank near the top of the Force - that the Inspectors in the major cities had actual and potential responsibilities
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greater than those of the other Inspectors which should be recognised by more than just higher salaries. He had been impressed in 1905 by Dinnie’s argument for superior officers to be stationed at the four main centres, and submitted to the 1909 Commission that four Superintendents should be created with jurisdiction over the whole country (with four Inspectors reporting to them, and Sub-Inspectors at six or seven other centres). Now he was Commissioner he did not divide the country into four districts, but early in 1913 he received permission to elevate his four senior Inspectors in rank. 7
Ellison (who had been recognised as officer material 25 years earlier) in Wellington, Dwyer in Dunedin, Kiely in Christchurch and Mitchell in Auckland (he had replaced Cullen there when Inspector Wilson, nearing retirement, had asked to stay in Wanganui) became Superintendents. ‘Your duties’, Cullen told them, ‘will be to a considerable extent administrative, with strict supervision over all ranks in your district.’ They would work through new Inspectors in the four centres. They were to be Cullen’s eyes and ears, as well as those to blame for any overall shortcomings in the Force. The officer ranks were reinvigorated by promotions to meet the new arrangements, which were embodied in the revised regulations, Sub-Inspector Hendrey was transferred from Auckland to Wellington on promotion to a newly created Inspector position, while Sub-Inspector McGrath was similarly promoted and transferred from Christchurch to Auckland. Senior Sergeants James Johnston and W H McKinnon were promoted to Sub-Inspectorships in their place, in Auckland and Christchurch respectively.
The new ‘headquarters brigade’ built up by Waldegrave was now gradually dismantled in a drive by the new Commissioner to surround himself with those he found amenable. This had begun with the transfer of powerful Chief Clerk Matthews to the same position in the Justice Department. Eventually a civilian clerk who had joined in 1910 under Waldegrave’s civilianising drive at headquarters, R F (‘Dick’) Madden, was made Chief Clerk in 1914. He remained in this position for a long time, and became very powerful by retaining Cullen’s confidence. Madden was, however, the only civilian to attain such power in the Force. The public service reforms of 1912 meant that civilian staff were ultimately outside the control of the Commissioner. To have people of real power in such a position was unacceptable to Cullen, so the civilian staff at head office were henceforth mostly typists and filing clerks. 8
With the Superintendents taking overarching responsibility for the main districts, those beneath them could better carry out the desired ‘close supervision’. Inspectors, Sub-Inspectors and Senior Sergeants were all required to live at police stations. Superintendent Mitchell had to move out of his Inspector’s residence in Auckland’s O’Rorke Street to make way for Inspector McGrath. Beneath this stratum, ‘young and energetic’ (ideally) NCOs exercised appropriate control over the men. A tightening of supervision, something normally associated with military
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formations, paradoxically allowed the modernisation process - always potentially in trouble because of the large amount of discretion given relatively unsophisticated men - to proceed apace, except in periods of civil strife.
Regulation 96 of 1887 had permitted the wearing of white helmets and other gear rather than shakos in summer, and in Auckland District and elsewhere white helmets, trousers and gloves had been authorised accordingly. But a 1911 recruit from Scotland could be forgiven for feeling that the general New Zealand uniform was much like that of the paramilitary French gendarmerie. Now, as if to symbolise the recent trend towards modernisation, a uniform change was effected to Cullen’s own design: the old military-style shako was to be replaced by blue helmets, a non-military style tunic with pockets and high collar was to replace the old pocketless, low-collared tunic, and Cullen personally designed a new police badge. The public noticed a big chance in the image of the New Zealand policeman as helmets gradually replaced shakos. 9
CHAPTER 18
‘Unusual Circumstances’: The Waihi Strike, 1912<sup>10</sup>
At the time of the fall of the Liberal government in 1912, a strike in the goldmining ‘company town’ of Waihi in the southern Coromandel had been going on for a month. The success of the Blackball miners’ strike had led to the formation of the first New Zealand Federation of Labour (the ‘Red Federation’), which the Waihi goldminers had joined in an attempt to gain better working conditions. Their withdrawal from registration under the Arbitration Act in 1911 and their subsequent successful direct negotiation with the mine-owners gave impetus to the burgeoning hopes of unionists and socialists throughout New Zealand.
The Waihi employers retaliated by encouraging the formation of a new union by some of the engine-drivers employed in the mines. Once a union was registered under the Arbitration Act, all workers in the appropriate category were brought back under the operations of the Act; the Waihi workers recognised that acquiescence in the formation of the ‘arbitrationist’ (‘scab’) engine-drivers’ union would lead to a company onslaught on the miners’ union itself. The Federationist unionists at Waihi and surrounding areas struck on 14 May 1912, refusing to return until the disbanding of the ‘scab union’ was insisted on by the company. The company took a hard-line stance in what was a naked struggle for power: it would only deal with unions registered under the Arbitration Act. This closed the mine and began a dispute with Dominion-wide ramifications.
All participants were conscious that it would be a struggle without compromise. Knowing that the might of the state as well as of employers was against them, the strike’s leaders were all the more careful to keep a tight rein on their members’ activities. They particularly made sure that no one used coercion in their ostracism of the ‘scab’ engine-drivers. But there was a climate of anti-unionist hysteria in the land, intensified by the strongly anti-strike stance of the press. Escalation of what became a symbolic struggle between capital and labour seemed inevitable. There was an ominous new factor too: the overtly anti-union propensities of the new Commissioner of Police, whose attitude was revealed in his use of such expressions as ‘Red Feds, and other undesirables’. In such matters, Cullen’s views coincided very closely with those of the new conservative government and its employer allies."
Thames District Inspector A H Wright, like Waihi’s Sergeant Wohlmann (who talked of the ‘admirable self-respect and restraint’ of
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the workers in ‘unusual and trying conditions’), was pleased at the conduct of the strike. But by the end of July Commissioner Cullen was anticipating a need for large-scale police intervention, claiming that the strikers were ‘likely to cut up rough and resort to intimidation and lawlessness at an early date’. Wright responded to Cullen’s request to look into this by reporting that ‘not one act of lawlessness of any kind has been committed’, and there was no reason to expect any. The strike committee had ‘assisted the police in warning the men to conduct themselves properly’ and ‘would, I am convinced, have resented any increase of Police’. So long as the owners did not try to open the mines with ‘free labour’ he could foresee no problems.
A fortnight later, in mid August, Cullen ordered that Auckland and Thames District men be secretly prepared for possible service in Waihi, following a report by two Government Commissioners which was hostile to the strikers and called for more police to stop alleged intimidation of arbitrationists. It is clear that leaders in business and government wanted to precipitate a showdown with militant labour by reopening the mines, and it is equally clear that Cullen was sympathetic to such views. When plans to break the strike through the use of scab labour were first rumoured towards the end of August, the strikers increased their hostility towards the arbitrationists. Strikebreakers were taken on at the Waikino battery, near Waihi, on 2 September. The strikers established pickets and the handful of strikebreakers were shielded from contact with the strikers by police.
This use of ‘blackleg labour’ by the employers, said to have been encouraged by the government with the support of the Commissioner of Police, dramatically altered the tone of the strike. The situation grew suddenly very tense, and strikers and their families intensified their shows of contempt towards the ‘free labourers’ by systematising their ‘following-up’ techniques - constantly shadowing them on the streets and abusing them for their betrayal of their fellow workers. In response to this beginning of the ‘War of the Rosettes’, police reinforcements in the form of ‘strong and muscular’ constables headed by Senior Sergeant W H McKinnon (who had been in charge in Waihi until 1911) were sent at once to Waihi, and Cullen himself arrived on the scene. He ordered that McKinnon remain at Waihi for the duration of the strike, and arranged for further police to be sent and for 10-man squads, led by NCOs, to be on stand-by in various population centres in case a civil emergency developed.
Two days after the first police reinforcements arrived, the company announced that it would open the Waihi mine with free labour were adequate protection available. Cullen arrived in town the next day (7 September) with yet more police, and declared following-up to be illegal. He ordered the Waihi police to use their discretionary powers to get tough on the strikers, and that very night the first summonses for following-up were issued. The charges were for breach of the peace.
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insulting language and assault, although police giving evidence acknowledged that nothing more serious had occurred than some ‘jostling’. A prosecutor imported from Auckland spoke on Cullen’s behalf: ‘it is now to be clearly understood that the police will remain here until the strike is over’, and tough action would be taken. The 150 police on stand-by could be brought in within 24 hours.
Stipendiary Magistrate Francis Frazer found that the first batch of accused had been the leaders of an incident involving the following-up of an engine driver (although that was strongly contested), and bound them over to keep the peace for a year on sureties of £lO each. They declined to pay these, and were gaoled in Auckland. They were quickly followed by three union leaders, including miners’ president Bill Parry. Workers throughout the country were outraged. Tension increased considerably and the Liberal opposition questioned the introduction to Waihi of a big police presence, which it saw as provocative. When strikers continued to appear before Frazer, to meet the same fate, they argued that being bound over to keep the peace was not a realistic option for them because of police hostility to their cause. The Federation of Labour’s Robert Semple summed up unionist views: ‘The employing class is not content to fight a fair fight, but has resorted to the use of the police and class-biassed magistrates’.
Cullen’s public interpretation of the police role naturally differed: the interests of ‘law and order’ in Waihi required the police to protect anyone who wanted to work, and he would bring in as many reinforcements as necessary to effect this. But his actual agenda was more proactive than this, and he told his Minister on 18 September; ‘By continuing our present line of action I think the strike will collapse within a week of Waihi Mine starting operations.’ Ever more police were coming in, despite - or because of - the strikers being allegedly ‘very dispirited’ because of the gradual disappearance to gaol of their leadership. Cullen clearly felt that Wright was inclined to be too soft on the strikers, and urged him not to ‘risk being short handed’; sometimes he unilaterally sent reinforcements upon receiving alarmist reports, even if these contradicted Wright’s assessments that he and his men were firmly in control of the town.
By late September 45 strikers had been gaoled in Mount Eden, and dozens of police were stationed in Waihi, instead of the normal six. Wellington police sent to Waihi were replaced by recruits from the Depot, who wore ‘civvies’ apart from helmets and issue overcoats. With the company scouring the countryside for men prepared to be strikebreakers, and the number of strikers at liberty diminishing, the balance of power was changing. On the night of 30 September, scabs defaced the Union Hall with impunity, thereby expressing their growing confidence. A greater degree of confrontation became inevitable when the mine-owners announced that the Waihi mine would reopen on 2 October, a matter on which they had been having discussions with
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Cullen. The Commissioner and Wright arrived to preside over the event, as did 20 more police, bringing the number of ‘magnificent specimen[s] of physical fitness’ on duty on the day to nearly 80. 12
In organising a system of pickets (‘Sergeants’ headed four ‘contingents’, while the women had ‘a roving Commission’) and other actions, the miners and their wives sought to avoid violence. They openly declared that they would not give the forces of the state any excuse to crack down on them, although they were forthright in characterising the police role as being to support ‘scabbery’, something which upset many of the constables. They did not physically intervene when the police escorted the strikebreakers to and from the mine, but the string of court appearances - for ‘insulting language’, such as calling out ‘Scab!’ - began again. The intensity of following-up increased as a reaction to police readiness to lay charges, and on the second and subsequent days after the mine was reopened the company laid on horse-drawn brakes - protected and driven by police - to convey the ‘free labourers’ between the mine and their homes. Because the scabs could not now be personally confronted at the mine entrance, strikers and their womenfolk and children besieged their homes and boarding-houses. The gaoling of strikers who refused to find sureties (they were spirited out of Waihi at night to prevent any opportunity for demonstrations) continued, to reach a total of 69.
By 7 November, Wright was able to report that a degree of quietness had returned to Waihi, particularly following a show of police strength after they had felt that the strikers were gaining too much latitude. This had come on the previous Saturday night, when the main street (Seddon Street) had been thronged with people, and scab leader James Delaney had been followed-up by a crowd which included women and children. The full force of most police in town had cleared the demonstrators by ‘direct’ and - many said - brutal means, including a mounted charge by half a dozen ‘Cossacks’ led by Arthur Skinner, Cullen’s man on the spot. The incident heralded a much tougher stance towards the strikers from the authorities now that there were more strikebreakers than Federationists in town. ‘Twas then the boys in blue woke up’ and ‘handed blisters’ to those who had ‘defied New Zealand Law’, wrote a would-be poet - a constable stationed in Waihi. The strike committee now took much greater care not to provoke scabs or police.
The situation changed dramatically after increasingly close collusion between the police and the company leadership. On Friday 8 November, at Waihi, Commissioner Cullen met Charles Rhodes, the local director of the Waihi Gold Mining Company (which had been urging Cullen’s presence in the town), and the president of the new Ohinemuri Mines and Batteries Employees scab union. Four hours later, instead of being taken to their homes in brakes after the working day as usual, the free labourers, protected by police, marched in procession down from the mine and along Seddon Street in (in Cullen’s words) ‘a most formidable and impressive display’ which gave the strikers a ‘great surprise’ and caused
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‘consternation’. This (and the next day’s) demonstration was organised by the mine authorities in consultation with Cullen, ‘so as to give the workers confidence in themselves, and their surroundings’: police would ensure they could walk the streets without harassment.
The next morning, Saturday, police-driven brakes collected the men from their homes in the normal fashion, but dropped them in town. The scabs then marched past the Miners’ Union Hall to the mine, flanked by police. After the 12.30 pm knock-off, police escorted the several hundred marching ‘blacklegs’ to a ‘patriotic’ rally, after which they ‘took over’ the town. Many fights broke out with strikers, and an attempt was made to attack the Miners’ Hall. Cullen told Herdman approvingly that the strikers were ‘thoroughly cowed now the workers now outnumbering them and being inclined to be aggressive’. ‘The workers now dominate the position and can hold it if they stick to the ground they have won.’ Cullen also wired Herdman: ‘Am getting workers to march through main street going to work in morning and will keep police in background as much as possible so as to get workers to have confidence in themselves to go about without police protection’.
The strikers noted that it was Cullen who broke up the attack on their hall, which had been instigated by the scab leader Walter Harvey. However sympathetic the police might be towards the scabs, the miners felt that their role of impartially ‘preserving the peace’ would not be too drastically departed from, even after a police manifesto following the mounted charge on 2 November stated that in future groups of disorderly persons would be acting ‘entirely at their own personal risk’: ‘the authorities have been reluctantly forced to the conclusion that the patience and good natured tolerance hitherto extended to these misguided persons has been misconstrued into evidence of weakness and a warrant for further licence.’ Similar measures to the mounted charge would be used if necessary ‘without any warning’. The authorities in Wellington publicly denied the existence of this ‘Police Intentions’ ultimatum, although it can now be seen in the archives; it was an ominous portent of things to come. But the miners were still relying on the major coercive state agency operating as a bureaucracy wielding impartial, impersonal power. In terms of the official ethos, the ‘preserving of order’ would not encompass threats to the rights - or the lives - of individuals.
On the Monday morning, the brakes again dropped off the free labourers in town, and they then marched en bloc to work. In what was clearly a premeditated move, they attacked the pickets on duty outside the mine. Cullen gloated that the ‘workers’ had ‘dealt out many cut faces bleeding noses and black eyes’ to the strikers. ‘lt was very laughable to see the ... strikers running at the end in all directions.’ According to the accounts of the pickets involved in this bruising and bloody encounter, and other evidence, at least some of the police, particularly mounted men, sided openly with the attackers; some accounts even have Cullen personally attacking a miner, Oliver Noakes, who had been weakened by
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a mob beating and was being (it was said) pinned down by scabs when punched in the mouth by the Commissioner. Cullen’s version was that there had been ‘so many fights and rushes that all the police could do was to rescue strikers who were being thumped and prevent others from getting thumped.’
The Commissioner had in effect made a public statement that he ‘wishes the free labourers to develop confidence’, the rabidly anti-strike New Zealand Herald reported. Some pickets managed to reach the safety of the Miners’ Hall, where they had to repel another attempt to break in; meanwhile, strikers’ wives and children were also being attacked by the scabs. When the latter finally went to work an hour late, the strikers met and discussed what to do now that the police were openly ‘on the side of the enemy’. It is clear that the actions of Cullen’s men were increasingly departing from the norms of policing as they had developed in New Zealand. But these were not normal times. That morning Cullen wired to Herdman that if the strikers ‘were obnoxious this evening I feel sure they will be chased again. The present state of affairs will soon terminate matters’. 13
That Monday afternoon, Cullen and McKinnon visited the Miners’ Hall and talked with the three main union office-holders, acting president Herb Kennedy, his second-in-command Wesley Richards, and secretary Tom Franklin. Cullen persuaded them to withdraw their pickets for 24 hours in the interests of dampening down the disorder to which his own instructions had contributed. They agreed, in order to prevent a repetition of the morning’s events, Cullen having said that the balance of forces precluded his being able to guarantee their safety if they presented any show of strength to the strikebreakers. That evening no pickets greeted the procession from the mine. This gave the strikebreakers more confidence, which was ‘gratifying’ for Herdman.
That night scabs stormed the union hall at Waikino, even though the police station was across the road. Gelignite added to the general damage inflicted in the attack. Three men stayed overnight to protect the Miners’ Hall in Waihi, one of them being relieved at 6 am on 12 November by Frederick George Evans; others soon arrived, including four women. Since picketing had been temporarily lifted, the occupants of the hall stood outside the front entrance to watch the morning procession, secure in the Commissioner’s promise at the meeting with their leaders of protection from attack. The night before, however, the police warned a businessman with premises across the road from the hall to make sure that he did not let his children onto the streets in the morning.
When the marching strikebreakers, flanked by police, suddenly swung in a clearly planned manoeuvre towards the hall, all but two of the strikers went back inside. The procession then stopped, apparently by prior arrangement. Miners Henry Southey and Arthur Richards were attacked by Harvey and others, an action allegedly provoked by striker insults to the processionists (this is doubtful, and in any case the scabs
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were certainly insulting the strikers). Both got free, and Southey managed to get into the hall. Without warning, the scabs attacked the hall, forcing open the door; a shot or shots rang out, from what side or sides has never been ascertained, one of the attacking strikebreakers (T H Johnston, the first man to sign on when the mine reopened) receiving a pellet in his leg. The mob burst in, led by Constable Gerald Wade and accompanied by other police, including the Commissioner. The occupants of the hall fled out the back, pursued by police and scabs, some of the latter armed with firearms and batons.
There are many versions of what happened next, but it is certain that Wade batoned Frederick Evans to the ground. Some testified that this was just after Wade had been shot in the stomach - allegedly by Evans - while others said that it happened before the shot that hit the policeman, and that this shot actually came from the notorious Harvey ‘the Pug’. It is clear that Evans was viciously attacked by scabs, including Harvey, as he lay injured. When Sergeant Wohlmann got to the downed striker he was ‘bleeding from the face and seemed hurt’; ‘it was with the greatest difficulty the police present (myself assisting) kept the crowd away from Evans’. Witnesses later claimed that Harvey had planted his revolver on Evans during this attack, to make it appear that it was the striker who had shot at Wade, although it is also quite possible that Evans or another striker had fired out of sheer terror. The constable was rushed to hospital, while the unconscious Evans was taken to the police cells. Here he languished on the floor until he was transferred to hospital late in the morning, as soon as a doctor arrived and pronounced him to be in a very bad way. On the evening of the following day the 31 year old Australian died, leaving a wife and two children. He was the first (and so far only) person to die as a direct result of confrontation between police and workers in an industrial dispute in New Zealand. ‘He died for his class’, reads the inscription on his tombstone. Constable Wade, it turned out, had not been seriously injured (although he received £lOO as ‘reward for his courageous conduct’ and in compensation for his injuries). Meanwhile, Waihi had become a town of terror.
The mob of strikebreakers had severely beaten any of the fleeing strikers who they could catch. No one worked the mine that ‘Black Tuesday’, and there have been suggestions that a day off had been arranged in advance. Gangs of scabs roamed the streets, searching out strikers and their allies. Reports suggest that although the police apparently prevented one or two lynchings, they were not too particular about preventing the beatings; that they gave the strikebreakers freedom for a day, ignoring assaults which would normally be seen as of much greater seriousness than the ‘abusive’ language and following-up which had been landing strikers in Mount Eden Gaol. Miners’ leader Herb Kennedy managed to get onto a train, ‘protected’ by police who watched him being badly beaten before throwing him into a luggage van. Strikers
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claimed that police as well as scabs assaulted them, although some of the police tried to prevent this.
The violence became more purposeful after the scabs held a meeting in the Miners’ Hall early in the afternoon. The Herald reported the arbitrationist leader Michael Rudd as stating that ‘no other course was open to them and after having given consideration to the tactics adopted by the reds, the seizure of the hall had been decided upon’ (although later it was to be denied by all concerned that there had been a prearranged plan to attack the hall). The free labourers spoke of their decision ‘to clear Waihi of undesirables’.
At the meeting, Rudd named dozens of ‘aggressive followers of the red flag’ and gave them 48 hours to get themselves, their families and their possessions out of Waihi. Gangs of men delivered the ultimatum to their homes. They had no choice but to comply, their names ticked off as they boarded trains; the police supervised the operation. An attempt by the expelled Federationists and their allies to regroup at Karangahake was prevented when the police confronted them and moved them on. The ousting of the ‘reds’ continued for the next few days in Waihi and Waikino, some of the scabs having been exempted from work. These, including ‘the Pug’, went around evicting not only strikers and their families but also the wives and children of the gaoled strikers. Children of strikers were beaten on their way to school. The Dominion’s press, which blamed the whole business on the ‘Red Feds’, applauded the ‘cleansing’ of Waihi. The Federation advised its followers that it was safer to leave town. Not one arrest was made during this period; observers noted that dozens of strikers had gone to gaol for refusing ‘not to boo any further’.
When evicted families complained to the police about being run out of town, they were told that the mob had been out of the control of the authorities; yet Herdman stated publicly that he had been advised that no extra police were needed. Those strikers and their families who defied the scabs and stayed on, or who had no money to get out, were denied access to the food stockpiled in the Miners’ Hall. This was still held by the free labourers who, with police present, had stolen union records after Cullen had broken into the union office during the seizure of the hall; a warrant had allowed the opening of the safe. The Federation, unions and socialist societies had to smuggle money into Waihi to help the strikers and their families survive or leave, because Federationists and their allies arriving by train were sent packing by the scabs. By the end of ‘Black Week’, most of the strikers and their families, perhaps as many as 1800 people, had had little option but to leave.
Evans’ inquest was held by Waihi coroner William Wallnutt, a JP and journalist whose newspaper columns had been not only openly sympathetic to the strikebreakers but also virulently hostile to the strikers. The government refused to replace him, or move the inquest to a more neutral venue. Although the Federationists claimed that the scabs, and specifically
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Harvey (who had had a baton that day), had murdered the miner, the verdict by the Jury of ‘highly respectable citizens’ (Cullen’s expression) on 15 December was that he had been killed by a baton blow by a constable acting in a justifiable way in the execution of his duty. They had listened to the rabidly anti-striker Dr George Craig, not to other doctors whose evidence was consistent with a verdict that death had resulted from injuries inflicted by the scabs. They had been guided by a coroner overheard by an MP discussing the result in advance of the evidence, and ridiculing witnesses who had another version.
Federation lawyer P J O’Regan pointed out that if any of the scabs involved in the ‘illegal act’ of storming the hall had inflicted the blow that killed Evans, they would have to be charged with murder; in telegrams to Herdman, Cullen had noted that after the baton blow the crowd ‘took Evans in hand and dealt out more punishment’, and that Evans’ concussion of the brain, as diagnosed in the lockup, was ‘the result of the rough handling given him by the mob’. The Crown autopsy found that Evans’ death had been caused by a single baton blow to the back of the head, while the Federation autopsy found that it was the cumulative result of baton blows (including one to the front of the head, said to have been delivered by Harvey) and a beating.
A Federationist delegation, with future Prime Minister Peter Fraser as its spokesperson, visited Prime Minister Massey and demanded to know ‘why with the connivance of the police a reign of terror has been instituted in Waihi’. They wanted a commission of enquiry, and assurance of a safe return to Waihi for those who had been expelled. Massey ignored the recent events in Waihi in promising that the police would protect all law-abiding citizens. The Federation alleged a plot by police, mine-owners and ‘blacklegs’ to smash both the strike and their own organisation. The United Labour Party suggested that there was strong evidence of ‘criminal connivance’ at high police level ‘in the promotion of the very crimes which Mr. Herdman’s Department is supposed to exist in order to prevent’. Herdman publicly claimed that the strikers alone had been at fault, that the ‘reign of terror in Waihi came to an end when Mr Fraser and his fellow federationists took their departure from Waihi, and the citizens are now living a peaceful, civilised life’.
Whatever the recriminations, the state and the employers had clearly won the confrontation at Waihi by main force. The Federation obtained the release of the 63 strikers still in Mount Eden Gaol, and the strike was called off at the end of November, when a number of miners returned to Waihi. Only a few recanting strikers were taken back into the mine. The Federation’s lawyers had expressed amazement that those who had acted ‘in such a flagrantly illegal manner’ by violently invading the Miners’ Hall had been allowed to retain possession of it: this was a ‘public scandal’. The hall was seized back on 3 December, and the arbitrationists were told that the police would intervene if they attempted to regain possession. Almost a month after the union documents and money from
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the safe and office were seized by the police, and given to the arbitrationists, the union’s lawyers secured their return. The union declared that it would have won the strike ‘had it not been for the intervention of the Massey Government, with its armed forces and open approval of scab lawlessness’. Most Federationists eventually left Waihi for good, and pay and conditions at the mine were reduced. 14
The government had become nervous about the role of the police at Waihi on the day of Evans’ felling, and its alarm increased as demonstrations of Federationists in Auckland (particularly on the occasion of Evans’ funeral) highlighted the fact that the police had been used (as one protest put it) ‘not for the purposes of keeping order, but apparently in quite the opposite direction’. On ‘Black Tuesday’, Cullen had wired to Herdman that the strike was undoubtedly over and that ‘if Wade’s injuries are as light as the doctors say they are the victory will be cheap’; in breathless telegrams he told of the outflow of strikers, who had realised ‘that [their] position here in future might be made as uncomfortable as they made it for others’. Herdman’s public statements were strongly pro-arbitrationist and supportive of Cullen: the scabs had been provoked into attacking the hall.
Yet even a few voices in the anti-strike press were asking difficult questions; why had none of the scabs who had behaved in an intimidating fashion been arrested, particularly those involved in the beating of Evans or the assault on Kennedy (an ex-policeman) when he was under police protection (eventually two were charged over this assault). The New Zealand Times speculated about the uproar that would have broken out had the Federationists committed the activities of 12 November and the following days. A back-tracking Herdman actually felt the need to instruct his Commissioner that ‘no distinction must be made between arbitrationists who have broken the law and Federationists’. Perhaps to cover his own complicity, he was soon asking tough questions of his friend: ‘report on the steps which were taken by Police to prevent forcible seizure of Miners Hall and documents by arbitrationists also upon steps taken by Police to prevent intimidation by arbitrationists’. Cullen attempted to get the ‘right’ legal results by attending court cases and intervening overtly in proceedings. He was still writing self-exculpatory reports to his Minister in 1913.
When parliament first sat after Black Tuesday - in mid 1913 - prolabour MPs claimed that the police/govemment tactics at Waihi had ‘set their seal on lawlessness and disorder’. Scabs ‘were given clearly to understand’ that from the Saturday onwards they were ‘at liberty to attack the strikers at any time they liked, and would be backed up by the police in doing it.’ Police used, said John Robertson, tactics ‘calculated to provoke disorder’, such as marching scabs four-abreast along footpaths. It was ‘an accepted fact’ that the police role was to ‘assist one side in the dispute, and to help the employers to bring about the end of that strike.’ He noted that had Cullen not persuaded the pickets to withdraw from the
Constables arrive to reinforce local police during the Waihi miners’ strike, 1912. Alexander Turnbull Library.
Police escorting strikebreakers (‘scabs’) on a brake at Waihi, 1912. Alexander Turnbull Library.
The miners’ union hall, Waihi, 1912; patriotic slogans painted overnight by ‘scabs’ have been altered by strikers to ‘God Save J B King’, an Industrial Workers of the World publicist. Alexander Turnbull Library.
Women say goodbye to their imprisoned men at the Waihi lockup door, 1912 Auckland Institute and Museum.
Constables keeping an eye on matters in Waihi during the strike, 1912. Waihi Arts Centre and Museum.
Waihi, 12 November 1912 (‘Black Tuesday’), the morning that ‘scabs’ and police stormed the miners’ hall. Alexander Turnbull Library.
Strikebreakers marching from the mine under police watch, Waihi, 1912 Waihi Arts Centre and Museum.
A police file photograph of a ‘scene of crime’ reconstruction of F Evans’ alleged shooting of Constable G Wade behind the union hall, Waihi, 1912. National Archives.
Frederick George Evans, striker, who died of wounds received subsequent to the storming of the Waihi union hall on ‘Black Tuesday’, 1912. Dick Scott collection, Alexander Turnbull Library.
John Cullen, Commissioner of Police, 1912-16. New Zealand Police.
Constable John Doyle, who died of injuries after an attack by a drunk at Shannon, 1913. New Zealand Police.
Superintendent Nicholas Kiely, transferred to Auckland during the 1913 Great Strike. New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
Mounted special constables at their Mount Cook headquarters, Wellington, 1913 Great Strike. Alexander Turnbull Library.
Mounted regular and special police on escort duty during the Great Strike Wellington, November 1913. Auckland Public Library.
A day-duty squad of special constables en route for Auckland’s wharves to relieve the night-watch during the Great Stake, November 1913. Auckland Public Library.
Water patrol, uniformed and special constables, 1913 Great Strike. Auckland Institute and Museum.
Regular police lead special constables along Bowen Street, Wellington, 1913 Great Strike. Alexander Turnbull Library.
Mounted specials wheel to charge stone-throwing rioters in Featherston Street Wellington, November 1913. A number of injuries ensued. Auckland Public Library
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hall, there would have been so many men guarding it that no one would have been panicked into using firearms in self-defence. In the event, the courts were to come to the obvious conclusion about the break-in to the hall and its safe; these actions had been illegal.
The government brazened things out. The difficult questions were never asked in any public enquiry. The government’s attitude after Black Tuesday had been expressed in a statement by Massey that he had ‘the fullest confidence in Commissioner Cullen, who has been given a free hand to do everything possible to maintain law and order’ in Waihi. The Prime Minister had initially been willing to have an enquiry; that this never happened suggests the possibility that it might have proven embarrassing for the government. The contention by the Evans family’s lawyer Jerry R Lundon before the inquest (at which he was denied the chance to provide evidence) that the events of 9, 11 and 12 November were all part of a concerted conspiracy by the highest authorities could never be tested. 15
The strike and its aftermath were a reminder that the police operated within a political definition of ‘order and tranquillity’. The activities of the strikers would normally have been seen as minor compared to the rampages of the scabs on Black Tuesday and the days thereafter, rampages condoned - or at least tolerated - not just by many police on the spot but also by the Commissioner of Police and his political superiors. The state’s repressive machinery did what the ministry believed to be necessary in the long-term interests of its perception of ‘order’, even if that meant, for a period, breaking all the formal and informal rules normally imposed upon society. This is usually understood but unstated by authorities, but Lord Scarman has recently enunciated the principle: priority must be given to ‘the duty of the police to maintain order’ if Taw enforcement puts at risk public tranquillity’. In 1898, Thomas Thompson had agreed with an opposition politician that he had broken the law on recruiting police: ‘The interests of the public service demanded it’. But the government soon began to resile from such a position after the killing of Evans. Moreover, under pressure from the Federationists and their legal counsel, police were forced to take some action against the worst offenders amongst the free labourers, albeit rather tardy and grudging action.
Walter Harvey, for example, was convicted late in November for a breach of the peace, and was due to appear later for assault, i.e. presenting a revolver at strikers at Karangahake. The Federation also pressed for him to be charged with perjuring himself at the inquest into Evans’ death. Lundon had argued (with some evidence) that Harvey had shot Wade. ‘The Pug’ claimed that he had never had a revolver in New Zealand, but the police themselves knew of at least two guns which had been in his possession. Just before Christmas 1912, Harvey was followed to Auckland, where he purchased a ticket to Australia. The police tried to persuade him to stay in the country, but because there was no warrant for his arrest they had to accept his assurance that he would return before his
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scheduled court appearance for assault. An attempt by Cullen to intervene came after he had been allowed to depart. The day after he embarked, an information about his perjury was laid on Crown Law advice, and he was arrested on his arrival in Australia on an extradition order.
The police had laid the perjury information very reluctantly. Wright had accepted that Lundon had ‘proved beyond reasonable doubt’ that Harvey had lied at the inquest, ‘but whether his false evidence amounted to perjury is another matter’. He felt that Harvey had not ‘wilfully intended to mislead the jury on a material point’, it was just that he was a ‘highly excitable’ man who had been led astray while responding to Lundon’s ‘abuse’. Wohlmann claimed that despite Harvey’s involvement in ‘the street fights’, he had ‘been, generally, well behaved’ during his four months in Waihi. Some said that Harvey had threatened to expose a plan to seize the hall. Whatever the reason for the police attitude, few were surprised that they presented the perjury charge rather half-heartedly, even though they had discovered that Harvey had previous convictions under another name (and had recently been sacked as a warder in the Avondale Asylum for breaching the rules).
The jury seemingly took their cue from the authorities - including the judge - and after a brief retirement acquitted Harvey of perjury on the grounds that he had been suffering from ‘severe mental strain’. The magistrate told the police privately in advance that he felt the assault information should have been withdrawn, and Wright only went ahead as a matter of form, instructing Wohlmann not to press the ‘trivial’ assault charge too forcefully. Although the magistrate had little choice but to find Harvey guilty, he declared it to be merely a technical offence committed in ‘a spirit of bravado’, and fined him a token £l. By contrast, Federationist Arthur Doyle received two months’ gaol for presenting (but not firing) a revolver when attacked by scabs. When on 18 February 1913 the arbitrationists once again seized control of the Miners’ Hall, the police regarded it as a civil matter and refused to intervene. 16
Some curious developments arose out of the Waihi events. Wounded strikebreaker T H Johnston seemed to have second thoughts about his role, and claimed to be in possession of information damaging to the police. On the infamous Dr Craig’s diagnosis, he was whisked away to an asylum in mid December. It was said that this was how the police prevented yet another man from telling the world that the attack on the hall had been premeditated. The ostensible reason was that he had confessed that his supposedly accidental recent wounding of his wife had actually been a murder attempt. It was noted that three weeks had passed between ‘confession’ and incarceration, a period during which the police had allowed him to stay at large and give evidence against the Federationist accused. Avondale Asylum’s Medical Superintendent, Dr R M Beattie, declared Johnston to be sane. Early in 1913, he escaped; on his recapture he was released on leave and then discharged. His case received great
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prominence when he petitioned parliament (unsuccessfully) for compensation for wrongful committal and detention.
All police who had served in and many ‘respectable’ people resident in Waihi were asked early in December to make statements about the conduct of strikers and police, an exercise which achieved what was intended. In answer to a questionnaire, many local dignitaries solemnly affirmed that the strikers’ language was shocking and their behaviour menacing, that the police were never violent but protected free labourers from violence in a splendid display of self-control. Some 85 police (not all who had been stationed in Waihi presented reports) confirmed this too. These accounts by both constables and civilians were to counter widespread criticisms - including in parliament - that actions of the state had inflamed the confrontation and led to the orgy of violence during and after the storming of the hall.
Wallnutt, for example, revealed his lack of objectivity by knowing that if it had not been for the big influx of police at the time of the opening of the mines, and their sterling behaviour, ‘the small band of workers would have been kicked to death by the howling hundreds of demons who immediately surrounded them’. Some police did acknowledge that strikers had been chased through the streets on Black Tuesday, but argued that the police had protected them from serious danger. Few New Zealanders at the time had the chance to read accounts written from the Federationist perspective, but in 1913 The Tragic Story of the Waihi Strike (mainly written by Harry E Holland, later to be the Labour Party leader) was published and became a best seller. The lesson of Waihi for practitioners of the class struggle - the extent to which state power could be exercised if the existing social order was deemed to be under threat - became for a time a precept of the New Zealand labour movement. 17
The Waihi affair cast a long shadow. The Dalmatian M N Kuluz tried for years to obtain naturalisation, but was denied this as a result of police reports that he had been a ‘noted agitator’ at Waihi. Wohlmann (by then a Superintendent, soon to be Commissioner) characterised him in 1929 as having been a ‘lawbreaker’ during the strike. When the Labour Party came to office in 1935 he revived his claim with his ‘old Friends’ from the strike days. The Minister of Internal Affairs - former Waihi miners’ leader Bill Parry, who had been sentenced at Waihi for using provoking language two days after Kuluz - gave him naturalisation in 1937 at a reduced fee. Speaking in parliament some five years before this, Holland had summed up the view of the Labour Party: at Waihi in 1912, ‘Lawlessness and disorder ran riot under police protection. The police were not to blame; the Government of the day was to blame.’ He sheeted back responsibility to where, in the final analysis, it lay. 18
CHAPTER 19
The First New Zealand Police Association
The experience of the 1898 Royal Commission had accustomed the police rank and file to meeting and acting collectively, but the Tunbridge reforms - particularly the provision of superannuation - had defused any volatility. As discontent grew under Dinnie, agitation to remove the ban on combinations revived. A sergeant told the 1905 Commission that the constables and men should be allowed to elect representatives to take submissions about ‘grievances and hardships’ before the Commissioner. There was talk of a strike amongst Christchurch police in 1908. The various improvements which followed the 1909 Police Commission again helped temporarily to defuse moves towards collective organisation which had emerged from rank and file activity during and between the 1905 and 1909 Commissions. When hundreds of public servants were made redundant in November 1909, the police were spared.
But as police pay rates continued to fall behind the cost of living and worker militancy increased, so too did police dissatisfaction with their lack of representation. A push towards collective action was in any case an inevitable consequence of the professionalisation of the Force, which had in part the purpose (and the effect) of establishing policing as a lifelong career. Similar pressures across the Tasman led to officially recognised police unions being established in South and Western Australia by 1912, while a clandestine union in the London Metropolitan Police was suppressed in 1912-13.
Given the long-term stabilisation of society, and the accompanying ability of the state to take over time a more benign approach towards its citizens, many policemen began to yearn for a concomitant relaxation of the most repressive of those internal police rules that were still enforced. As they saw organised workers re-emerge as a force to be reckoned with, some of them began to consider that collective action would be necessary if they were to ‘humanise’ their conditions of service, and perhaps even increase their remuneration. Organising submissions to the Royal Commissions built up such a collectivist ethos that in 1909 the Auckland rank and file even had the temerity to criticise the magistracy. For the combinationist-minded men, there were constant reminders of the paramilitary basis of policing. When an exhausted new constable cavilled at being given more work by Wellington’s head of police, John Ellison,
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he was told sharply: ‘When you signed on for the police force, you signed on for 365 V* days a year, and any bloody thing I give you less than that is a privilege!’
As a trend towards collective action by the police strengthened by 1912, several factors emerged to make the situation volatile. Cullen’s use of police to (in effect) break the Waihi strike caused some disquiet among men schooled to believe the mythology of the Force - that police were neutral arbiters in sectoral/class disputes, there only to preserve the peace. While most remained opposed to militant unionism as their attitude towards the Federationists at Waihi showed a number were unhappy about supporting scabs, particularly those who were known to be criminals. Some noted the durability of labour movement solidarity, even in its hour of defeat following Evans’ death. For others, the definitive turning-point was circulation of the new regulations, the original draft having been tightened by Cullen and Herdman to stress the paramilitary role of police in a time of industrial strife. Not only did these perpetuate some of the old Draconian conditions of employment, they even derogated from existing rights - by forcing men to undertake drill on their days off, for example. 19
Cullen believed that the announcement of a major round of promotions to NCO rank from 1 March 1913 might deflect criticism by reminding constables that promotion was possible if they kept in well with the hierarchy. This was not enough, and nor was the announcement of a pay increase from 1 April for all but the rank and file (and Chief Detectives), declared to be a ‘catch-up’ consequent upon the constables’ 1912 pay rise. This had been planned by Waldegrave, and was logical enough: the constables’ pay increase had meant that the top constable’s pay of 10s 6d per day equalled that of a junior sergeant. Now, the base rate for the latter was raised to 11s. There was also an attempt to remove some anomalies. The new regulations included matters long fought for, indicating that gains were possible, but the concessions fell far short of what police desired - much more leave, for example. There was also discontent over other matters, including Cullen’s propensity for giving ‘plum’ mounted police jobs to former Royal Irish Constabulary men, and most of all over pay. Herdman argued that the treasury was too depleted to give another rise to the rank and file, but what rankled most was that officers’ pay rates increased as well. The more militant of the men saw this as an effort by the bosses to reward the already well-paid, qualifying them for higher superannuation pay-outs. This was the final straw for a number of constables and a few NCOs, who quickly emulated the collective activities of the organised working class, and of unionising policemen in Australian states and the ‘Mother Country’.
Cullen’s (and now Mitchell’s) allegedly repressive regimes in Auckland had produced the most militant subculture of all the police districts. The new regulations permitted no hope of meaningful unionisation. Regulation
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174 stated bluntly that ‘combinations shall be severely dealt with as being subversive of discipline’. Cullen, moreover, had said openly in February 1913 that pay rates were generally reasonable enough, particularly for men in country stations with access to perquisites, and an increase could not be afforded: there was no hope of action without organised agitation. When Herdman visited Auckland and heard of the grievances, he invited police to discuss them with him without any possibility of victimisation, but the rank and file felt too intimidated to do so. The activists were by now meeting secretly with moderate union leaders, especially the ‘respectable’ Arthur Rosser JP, and contacted fellow thinkers in the other three centres. It was decided to minimise confrontation by forming not an industrial union but a ‘professional association’. The New Zealand Police Association was launched at a large meeting at the Auckland Trades Hall on 11 April, with its ‘organiser’, Rosser, present. It had been decided that the married men should not yet expose themselves to the expected wrath of the administration, but some 50 of the single men who attended were prepared to support the Association. Press statements released over the next few days detailed their grievances, including low pay and the ‘constant encroachment made by the Department on the private life and time of the men’. Their motto was ‘Stand Firm’.
A model set of rules for the consideration of branches was soon printed on the press of the ‘N.Z. Worker Co.’ The preamble stressed that the Association was not ‘in antagonism to the Department’ but wished ‘to urge in a proper and respectful manner the alterations and improvements which should be made to ensure the better working of the Service and the comfort and convenience of those who work for it’. It stated that it had no links with ‘any other organisation political or industrial’ and that membership would be ‘a guarantee to the officers that the duties of such member will be fulfilled thoroughly and well’. The rules fell over backwards to stress professional standards and behaviour, to ‘promote concord, and NOT discord, antagonism, or hostility between officers and men’. Membership, while open to applications from all NCOs and men, would be selective. The entrance fee would be 2s 6d until the Association was recognised by the Department, when it would rise to ss.
Most contemporary reports depict Superintendent Mitchell as an oldfashioned disciplinarian who imposed to the letter all the formal, often petty restrictions on the men; in other words, he apparently (together with Senior Sergeant Dart and others) drove the men towards unionisation. His initial response was to declare that the meeting had taken him by surprise, and that membership of the Association was a breach of the regulations. He presented the Auckland men with a questionnaire. What were their grievances? Had they been at the Trades Hall meeting? Who did they know to have been present? Receiving little information through this approach, he stated that if the men foreswore the Association their
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complaints would be fully investigated. Meanwhile, they were ‘sticking together in a manner which would charm [Red Fed leader] Bob Semple’. There were soon suggestions, however, that Mitchell had come to see the benefits of a police union (it would provide a ‘pressure valve’ mode of discussion with the men, for example), and was giving the associationists covert support. Herdman and Cullen seemed to believe this, or at least that he had been too soft on his men and therefore allowed them to think they could unionise with impunity.
In Wellington the administration tried to forestall incipient police unionism by assembling as many as 90 NCOs and men and asking them what their grievances were. They were too intimidated to say anything very substantive. By 15 April some were complaining to the press about ‘unnecessary pin-pricking’. As with the Auckland men, their grievances were a mixture of the old (e.g. low pay, promotions ‘by favour’) and the new (e.g. examinations which might have no actual bearing on their work). A constable told a reporter that ‘at the present time there is more discontent in the force than at any previous time in its history.’ Similar comments were soon being made to journalists by Christchurch men. The administration’s response was that ‘the great bulk of the force is still faithful’; the unionists were only a small minority of young malcontents. ‘The chief disturbers are really in their apprenticeship.’ The discontented claimed that Herdman kept promising to investigate grievances, but nothing ever happened. In turn, Herdman reeled off the reforms implemented since the government had taken office 10 months before: new regulations, anomalies removed from the pay scale, a more comfortable uniform, new legislation drafted. There was still more to be done, but meanwhile ‘rebellion won’t be put up with’. But ‘rebellion’ continued, with thriving branches formed in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, while a few individuals stationed at places like Palmerston North joined too.
Cullen now went north and paraded the men of the largest city. On 25 April he asked for their grievances, assuring them they had ‘nothing to fear’. He apparently hoped to identify the disaffected by hearing a series of individual grievances. But the men responded collectively through spokesmen, and a list of grievances was presented: the ‘absurd inadequacy’ of pay that put them on ‘a lower plane than those engaged in the most menial of occupations, and does much to reduce our prestige’ ; inadequate allowances for married men; no meal time on night duty; lack of an impartial tribunal to hear grievances; a need for more Sundays off and more leave generally; and so on. The Commissioner gave no guarantees, especially on pay matters, because of the ‘existing financial stringency’. He reportedly lost his temper, and Association activist Thomas Smith later recalled that he ‘said many hard things which had to be swallowed’. He finished with a barely veiled threat: ‘lf men are not satisfied they are at liberty to resign’. He visited the three other main centres with a similar message.
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In the climate of escalating industrial unrest, the government viewed police union activities as tantamount to the Red Feds gaining supporters in the very body of men which might be needed to spearhead their crushing. ‘Since the Waihi struggle’, said Herdman, ‘a steady effort has been made to sow discontent in the ranks of the police’, who were the ‘only protection that the people of a country have in time of industrial trouble’. At the very least, if collectivising tendencies among the men were allowed to go unchecked, the police might be ineffective in another showdown with militant unionism. When Herdman was shown specimens of membership cards, to be posted to Rosser at the Auckland Trades Hall, his response was that ‘this sort of thing will not be tolerated’, and he and Cullen now set out to smash the clandestine union. ‘ln the event of any Labour trouble happening in New Zealand the police must be under the direct control of the Commissioner and the Government, so it may as well be understood quite clearly now that I shall not permit Mr Rosser or any other Labour leader to interfere with the discipline of the force or to sow the seeds of discontent amongst its members’.
The conservative press rallied behind Herdman’s battle cry, despite Rosser’s (correct) protestations that the Association was entirely a creature of the police themselves and had nothing to do with the Federation of Labour. T am acting as the buffer between the department and the men, just as other Labour men are ready to act in a similar capacity in other centres, and as soon as Mr Herdman or the commissioner will decide to recognise the association we as outsiders will drop out of it.’ But far from recognising the union, Cullen and Herdman decided to make an example of ‘Charlie’ Smyth, who had only joined the Force the previous year. Constable Charles Smyth had arrived on a requested transfer in Auckland on 31 March, allegedly to be at the centre of police union activity. He had been selected as Auckland Branch secretary of the new Association, and had both presented the men’s grievances to Cullen and protested that the Commissioner’s threat was surely incompatible with the assurances given. This had enabled Cullen to identify a ‘ringleader’ among the unionists and accuse him of being ‘insolent in his manner towards me’. On 30 April he was ordered to transfer at once to Greymouth, the town on the rainy and relatively lawless West Coast which was often used for ‘punishment’ transfers.
Even the rabidly pro-Cullen Truth called this the Commissioner’s ‘worst move in his life’. The order to transfer stated that Smyth’s role in the Association had lost him the trust of his officers and sergeants. At the station, ‘although Authority and waxed moustaches frowned severely on Smyth’, he was given a presentation and cheered off by his comrades, and the Association was lauded. In June he was notified of his dismissal from the Force, with four days’ notice, for minor misdemeanours (‘abandoning his post’ while guarding timber trucks on the wharf, and ‘making a false entry’ in the station book as to the time he returned to the watch-house) for which the last offender of a similar nature had been
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fined ss. Smyth was clearly being invited to resign to avoid the stigma of dismissal. He chose instead to force Cullen to sack him, so that in appealing he could expose ‘tyranny’; ‘though the dogs of war were let loose’ on him. Truth predicted, ‘the last has not been heard of him.’
Rosser represented Smyth in his appeal. The former policeman characterised his dismissal as ‘a glaring instance of victimisation, and but another manifestation of the characteristic insolence and intolerance of the oligarchy which dominates with such despotic sway the subordinates of the Police Force.’ He noted that in all other known cases of deserting one’s duty for short periods, cautions and fines had been the full extent of the punishment - and many of these men had had other blemishes on their conduct sheet, unlike himself. In any case, he had innocently mistaken the time, and had witnesses to prove it. In the interests of the ‘purification of the police system’, he would ‘expose to the public to what lengths the police oligarchy would go’.
Herdman, denying that the dismissal had anything to do with the events in Auckland, stated that there was a clock in full view in the watch-house. (Yet later in the year he noted that ‘a man going off his beat or not turning up for duty would be trifling misconduct... and for these offences a constable is liable to a fine.’) Smyth’s appeal was, predictably, dismissed. Despite his clean defaulters’ sheet, Herdman blackened his name in an ‘unmanly’ way under cover of parliamentary privilege. To clear himself from insinuations that he was dishonest, Smyth demanded an investigation. Newspapers and unions campaigned on his behalf, and some MPs took up his case - and that for a police union - in the House, but no inquiry was granted. Smyth then petitioned parliament, again to no avail. The Reform Party Handbook published in 1914 alleged that ‘it was pretty conclusively shown that he had entered the force merely to expedite the formation of the Police Association and to secure its adhesion to the Federation of Labour’. Smyth returned to his trade as a baker. He remains known to this day as the ‘patron saint’ of police unionism.
After Smyth’s transfer, the Minister himself addressed the Auckland men. Despite his promise of no victimisation for Aucklanders who spoke up (a guarantee he later denied having given), several who voiced grievances were to be transferred from the city, on the grounds that they had persisted with union affairs after the Minister had told them this would not be tolerated. One resigned rather than move to Westport; another had recently paid his own expenses to transfer to Auckland. In Christchurch a minority of men refused to sign a document which expressed their ‘entire confidence’ in the police administration. One of them. Constable Charles Baylis, was soon asked to resign, ostensibly because he wished to marry an unsuitable woman (a divorcee); it was reported that a constable who had defied the administration in similar circumstances had remained in the Force.
Meanwhile, late in May 1913 Herdman made a detailed and blunt response to the various allegations about the state of the Force which
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Cullen had heard at his meetings around the country. He countered claims that pay was too low by pointing out that unmarried new constables received free quarters, fuel and light, which brought their 8s per day up to 9s 6d in real terms. The worker, moreover, did not get paid for seven days of every week, including holidays. The constable could aspire - at the very least - to an easy billet in the country, and retire on a pension. The New Zealand police would probably soon be as well off as any in the Empire. Sunday leave and the amount of time spent on police duties in the men’s own time needed to be at local discretion, although there was an indication to officers in charge that these should be liberalised. The Police Force Bill had provision for a review of breach of discipline findings in certain circumstances. Leave was now generous, and the local practice of allowing night-duty men time for refreshment would now be made official. All men could have their individual or collective grievances examined if they stated them in writing (but not through the union), and the ‘influence of the politician has been strictly excluded’. Men who were still discontented should tender their resignations, which would be accepted.
Herdman concluded his statement by reiterating that the ‘Police Force differs from every other branch of the public service’ and could not encompass ‘any organisation formed upon union principles’. What if there were ‘a widely extended and well-organised attempt to set the law at defiance? In such an event the Government and the commissioner must rule unfettered by any interference from any association.’ Some commentators applauded the ‘manly spirit’ and ‘courage’ of his reply, while others condemned its ‘autocratic’ tone. No one doubted his determination to crush police unionism by any means at his disposal. These included forcing new appointees to state in writing that they would not join or contribute money to the ‘supposed Police Association’.
In mid June, Herdman announced a new round of small reforms which, he hoped, would head off the police union movement: there would be a monthly allowance of 8s 4d for food; 15 minutes’ ‘snack time’ for hot tea, coffee and ‘eatables’ was now officially available for those on night duty; overtime (except that for court prosecution purposes) could be accumulated until it reached eight hours, when a day off would be allowed; the Railways Department would once again be asked to allow free travel for police. But in late June ‘Dominion organiser’ Rosser toured the South Island, and claimed that the two branches there were thriving, and that only three of all the men in Dunedin and Invercargill had stood out of the Association. The Association circularised all MPs with information, gave numerous press interviews - including to the Maoriland Worker - and had left-wing MPs attempt to get recognition of the Association into the Police Force Bill. This attempt was doubly doomed once major industrial trouble broke out, particularly given reports of some police siding with rioting strikers and their allies. When Bill Parry allegedly said in mid November that he had taken ‘a very active
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part’ in the Police Association and was sorry it was ‘not working in full swing’, government belief in a Federation of Labour conspiracy was strengthened.
Meanwhile, with the Association clearly not going away despite the government’s carrot and stick approach, the administration found a way to allow a face-saving (and ‘safe’) compromise. Regulation 174 of 1913 had, on the surface, rescinded the 1893 allowance of membership of the Public Service Association (which had become defunct anyway) by forbidding ‘combinations’. Herdman now had discussions with the new Public Service Association, which was in the process of rising from the (ineffectual) Civil Service Association and became fully established nationally that September. The government ascertained that the new PSA was ‘managed and controlled by responsible Public servants occupying high positions’. Therefore the police, Herdman announced in July, could join it to protect their interests subject to ‘reasonable conditions’. Like the first PSA, the CSA had ‘functioned essentially as a small committee of senior officials’, which was all that could be expected in a ‘politically controlled’ bureaucracy. The ‘neutralisation’ of the public service under the Public Service Act 1912 had prepared the way for broader-based professional advocacy activity. The PSA did seem to offer ‘moderate’ police unionists some hope for the future.
A list of 58 Auckland and Palmerston North members of the Police Association survives; among them were future Commissioner J Bruce Young and future Superintendent A McHugh. But membership of the Association destroyed the careers of some who were discovered or even suspected at the time, and activity in the branches dissipated. By late July Herdman was claiming that there was no remaining dissatisfaction in the Force. Although later in the year the Social Democrat Paddy Webb pledged in the House to continue to help the police unionists organise, they did not survive long as a clandestine movement. The ‘witch-hunts’ against those suspected of sympathising with strikers and rioters during the Great Strike of 1913 dealt a decisive blow to any lingering hopes of success. 20
CHAPTER 20
A ‘Most Arduous Time’ for the State: The Great Strike, 1913
The events at Waihi had shown that the government was ‘only too eager to use the full force of the State against the rebels’ of the Federation of Labour. A typical contemporary observer claimed that the 29-week strike would have ‘proved incalculably disastrous to the social life and industrial organisation of the Dominion’ had it succeeded. There is rare agreement among historians that the Federationists were the victims of a government determined to destroy its class enemies. The Federation was now on the defensive, its funds exhausted and its membership falling. But it sought to seize the initiative by unifying the organised labour movement as a prelude to a fight-back against the forces of the state and capital. Large numbers of non-Federation unions participated in a conference called by the Red Feds in January 1913, and in mid year a new United Federation of Labour and a Social Democratic Party were established.
Leading employers decided to strike at the heart of the union movement before the United Federation had a chance to consolidate, even though within it the reformists had won out over the revolutionaries. This went on over a period of time, with the government assisting in various ways. It was in this context that the Police Offences Act was amended to make illegal many of the strikers’ tactics at Waihi. There were several possible venues for what many considered to be an inevitable trial of strength. One was in the coalmining town of Huntly, where the Federationists had regrouped after ‘Black Tuesday’. Herdman and Cullen had quickly sent in 50 police by special train to illustrate ‘very clearly’ to the Red Feds ‘that they are not going to be allowed to run this country’. Inspector Mitchell, officer in charge of the region, had taken the view (after consulting Social Democrat MP John Roberston, and the local union executive) that ‘the presence of my men in Huntly at this time is likely to create the very trouble that I am anxious to avoid - namely, they may be an irritant and produce disorder.’
Mitchell had realised that the mine-owners intended to sack Federationist workers in order to force them into an arbitrationist union organised by the mine manager, and told the owners that ‘we are not here to be the tools of your company’. He had kept his police contingent in plain clothes and mostly out of town, to reduce tensions, and liaised with the union. ‘The presence of the police averted a strike’, Herdman declared.
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A more accurate judgement is that Mitchell’s actions had dissuaded the mine-owners from provoking a definitive showdown against the Federation at that time; he had threatened to pull all police out of Huntly if the sackings went ahead. When in October 1913 the Huntly employers felt strong enough to take on the Federation and began firing workers, the confrontation between capital and labour did not occur there, thanks partly to Mitchell’s even-handed regime. It came closer to home, in the seat of government. 21
Wellington’s 1600 watersiders were locked out after a slopwork meeting held on 22 October to discuss support for a strike by their shipwright allies, itself the result of an aggressive Union Steam Ship Company refusal to honour a 30-year practice of giving a travel allowance to the workers. The employers clearly wanted to use cheaper scab labour, and on 24 October introduced free labourers onto the Wellington docks. Picketing ‘wharfies’ broke through the wharf gates and prevented the unloading of a ship. Strikes escalated around New Zealand as sections of organised labour met the challenge. This was probably tactically unwise in view of the current configuration of forces in the ‘class war’. Surplus labour was available in abundance, and the union movement was illprepared and divided despite the ‘unity conference’. Herdman was soon to write that ‘the real centre of the struggle’ was in Wellington. ‘lt was recognised from the outset that if the trouble could be stamped out here it would gradually diminish in other places.’ On 25 October the Minister ordered a number of rural police into the cities, and appealed for patriotic people to lend them horses. ‘Our experience at Waihi’, said Cullen, ‘showed that at such times as these one mounted constable is worth 20 on foot’. 22
On 26 October over a thousand strikers prevented work on the Wellington wharves, and then marched to the Basin Reserve, storming the gates so they could enter and hold a protest meeting. That the government was more interested in crushing the union movement than getting the wharves working was indicated by its next moves. It claimed that the regular police could not cope, although Cullen, whose intelligence sources kept him posted on industrial developments, had not taken any extra policing precautions in the lead-up to the strike or concentrated his men in the port cities. The two traditional ways of supplementing state coercive muscle in times of extreme disorder (which did not yet exist) were to enrol special police, and/or call in the military. As Herdman now drew in regular police to the cities, he called for men to register as specials, and had Cullen ask his officers in country areas to try to drum up recruits. Although Massey contacted the right-wing New Zealand Farmers’ Union about the availability of men to provide scab labour, the aim was far more ambitious than that of reopening the wharves: the government agreed with a number of employers that the time was ripe to finally smash a Federation which was supposed to have caved in at the time of Waihi. 23
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The government knew that the easiest way to do this was to use the military. When the Permanent Militia had been redesignated the Royal New Zealand Artillery in the reorganisation of the Dominion’s defences in 1909, the Defence Act of that year had incorporated the old provisions for the last-instance use of the military as police. The military leadership were far from enamoured of this legislative provision to resurrect something that had in practice fallen into abeyance. In October 1913, moreover, the New Zealand forces were temporarily under the control of Colonel Edward Heard, who during service in Ireland had seen the dangers of involving the military in civil affairs. He feared that the conscript Territorial Force would be drawn into the industrial disputes. This would create problems of discipline, for many Territorial soldiers might sympathise with the strikers; moreover, public support for the very concept of the Territorials, which was already under fire in some quarters, would decline further. The military should be used in industrial disputes only in the ‘very last resort’, when the civil authorities could not cope with rioting that threatened ‘lives and property’. This was the accepted position in the forces of the Empire. What Heard did not yet appreciate was that the issue was now, in the eyes of the civil authorities, far more than the policing of an industrial dispute; it was overt class warfare. 24
Heard arrived in Wellington from the South Island on 28 October to discover that Massey, Herdman and Cullen had recommended to the Governor, Lord Liverpool, that artillerymen should be placed on beat duty in Wellington to free regular police for strike duty on the wharves. Seeing this as the thin end of the wedge, he ‘most strongly objected’. Since the situation was not one of ‘last resort’, he complained to Minister of Defence James Allen, who authorised him to oppose the action. To Massey, Herdman and the Governor he ‘protested in strong terms and begged that the Royal N.Z. Artillery be not called out.’ Massey claimed that there was little choice, given the inadequate number of regular police and a ‘disappointing’ response to the advertisements for specials. Although specials could be called out compulsorily, all agreed that this would be unrealistic in a context of industrial struggle.
Heard suggested a course of action which would give the government what it wanted. Soldiers would not be used except in extreme emergency, but instead the military infrastructure would be used to secretly raise specials, especially in rural areas. Specials had proven so effective in crushing industrial unrest in Britain that in 1911 police forces had begun to establish pools of trained specials able to be called on at any time. Heard put it thus: ‘if I was given a free hand and no questions were asked, I would get as many mounted special constables as were required from the country districts [into Wellington] in a short time’. The political authorities were quite willing to accept this compromise. 2s
There was no reason not to expect results, given past experience with specials in New Zealand. As recently as late 1912, following Black Tuesday, mass civil disorder had been expected surrounding Evans’
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funeral and a speech by Massey in the Auckland Town Hall. Cullen had supplemented police power with sworn specials. Both recent practice and classical police riot theory held that detachments of mounted men made the most effective specials. All but the boldest of rioters fled before horses’ hooves; the foot specials could then penetrate in formation to disperse those who were left. Not only would the military organise the recruitment of specials in the rural Wellington region, they would drum up foot specials in the city (inter alia, by using their contacts in gentlemen’s and athletic clubs), and extend these services to the rest of the country if required. The political and policing authorities were convinced - one might say, determined - that this would be required. 26
The decision to swear in specials en masse in times of civil disorder was never a welcome one for regular police unless it was absolutely necessary. Many of the rank and file were unconvinced that specials were needed on this occasion. They knew that they would be ill-disciplined and ‘cause a lot of damned trouble’. Many policemen had ‘no grudge’ against the strikers, so long as they obeyed the law; but the specials would be motivated to ‘crack the heads’ of their class or ideological enemies, the militant workers. Regular police would have to rescue specials from the results of their own precipitate and foolhardy actions. ‘When some “specials” are provided with batons, they fancy they are empowered to do a lot of things, and sometimes their actions lead to trouble that could be avoided by the use of a little forbearance and reason’, a senior policeman recalled. ‘A great deal of bitter feeling and riotous conduct’ could be expected whenever specials appeared.
Heard’s grumble that the police administration had failed in its ‘duty to be in touch with all that goes on’ and hence to adequately prepare the regulars missed the point, for it was based - like the policemen’s analyses cited above - on the traditional police role of suppression of disorder. Cullen knew well what was happening in the days leading up to the strike. An escalation in short-term disorder was deemed necessary in the interests of medium- and long-term order. The cancer that threatened the body politic had to be surgically removed - without anaesthetic, if necessary. On the continuum of state coercive measures, policing tactics swung temporarily back to overt coercion - even provocation. Heard himself worked this out eventually. After pondering as to why the call for reinforcements had not gone out until after there had been confrontation on the Wellington wharves, he confided in his superior: ‘as this may have been a matter of policy, perhaps it is not proper to criticize it’. The ‘measures to meet the situation were taken almost too late to recover the control which had been, but never should have been lost’. Had these not proven adequate, there is not the slightest doubt that Heard’s military organisation would have been used to vigorously suppress the organised labour movement. 27
As it was, Heard’s ‘compromise’ involved subterfuge at the highest level. The Commander of the Wellington Military District met the
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commanders of all his Territorial Force mounted rifle squadrons at Palmerston North on 29 October. They were to persuade their own men, as well as others in their areas (‘the Settlers, farmers etc’) to enrol as mounted specials, something the local police had failed to do. To help prevent matters getting out of hand. Heard withdrew all small arms issued to Territorials (ostensibly for inspection). The recruits would be armed and trained systematically. Large numbers signed up, probably half of them Territorials.
The Police Force was responsible for the logistics. But in Cullen’s words, when specials began to arrive the police had ‘neither the camp equipage or the experience that would enable them to arrange for the quartering and messing of the men’, so the defence forces were called in for this too (those involved were later paid handsome bonuses). At the beginning of November - by when several ‘riotous’ incidents had occurred - Major R Beere of the 5th (Wellington) Regiment had 834 (unpaid) ‘foot special police’ on his books, including many public servants who were guarding departmental buildings at night. They were divided into four companies covering the different areas of the capital; most of their officers, and some of the men, were Territorials. In the event they were usually deployed, by arrangement with the leadership of the mounted specials, on auxiliary police work (patrolling wharves, guarding buildings - including ministerial residences) rather than in their classical riot-control mode of ‘cleaning up’ behind mounted charges. 28
On the morning of 30 October, the first 30-strong contingent of mounted specials - derided by the labour movement as ‘Massey’s Cossacks’ - had appeared on the streets of Wellington. Then and later Colonel Heard was perturbed by Commissioner Cullen’s apparently reckless tactic of exposing specials, to the strikers and their allies without sufficient backup. Cullen, as always, knew exactly what he was doing. So did Wellington’s Superintendent Ellison, whose detestation of the ‘Criminal Agitators’, ‘Red Ruffians’ and ‘Red Firebrands’ thought to be leading a Federation conspiracy to topple the state rivalled Cullen’s; so did his Inspector, Hendrey, a ‘friend’ of Cullen’s. Allen and Herdman had, in the interests of distancing the military from policing as much as possible, supported Heard and declined to allow the Defence Department buildings on Mount Cook to be used as the mounted specials’ base. The Police Force arranged for them to be put up at the Post and Telegraph Stores on the waterfront. While 20 of them went to the Lambton Quay police station to be sworn in, 10 left guarding their new headquarters were attacked by a crowd of strikers who pulled down part of the fencing. They retreated to the police station under a hail of missiles. Allen and Heard were then pressured by the Prime Minister into allowing the mounted specials to use the Mount Cook complex. The military were being dragged ever further into the conflict. 29
On the same day, again to Heard’s amazement, foot specials were sworn in ostentatiously at the Town Hall. The almost inevitable happened.
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Some swaggering and long baton-swinging (‘sheer foolhardiness’, said the anti-striker New Zealand Times) by men with new-found powers led to one of them being chased by an angry crowd into Whitcombe and Tombs’ bookshop. Regular police came to his aid, one of them (Constable G W Murray) being badly injured before the shop’s management restored order by presenting firearms at the crowd. The ensuing destruction of property on Lambton Quay had ‘never been witnessed in Wellington before’. Late in the afternoon, a crowd assembled in Post Office Square near the wharves, the gathering place of the strikers. When several dozen mounted regular and special police paraded through the crowd (again inexplicably, to Heard) there was the usual name-calling but nothing more provocative, according to eyewitnesses (although Sergeant Lott O’Halloran, in charge of the escort, claimed that missiles were thrown and shots fired). Suddenly the mounted specials wheeled and charged in what one observer called a ‘cowardly, wilful’ attempt to create a riot. In the House, opposition leader Ward noted that the ‘cavalry charge’ had mown down and injured ‘respectable’ people who were in the Square out of curiosity. Although people were incensed by the charge and the freely swinging batons, however, most were wise enough not to take on the mounted ‘troops’ and their horses - or to provoke a reading of the ‘Riot Act’. After the crowd dispersed, Constable J Wroblenski was found to be ‘somewhat seriously injured’, and a police horse to have a gunshot wound to the shoulder. Riot and disorder were to continue in Wellington for many days. 30
The next day, 31 October, Cullen phoned Heard to warn him that the crowd was advancing on the Mount Cook buildings where the ‘Cossacks’ had been quartered. Heard had no choice but to seal off Buckle Street at its Taranaki and Tory Street intersections with Royal New Zealand Artillerymen armed with rifles and machine-guns. He could not contemplate pitched battles between specials and strikers, nor could he endanger the various defence installations on Mount Cook. Day after day, angry crowds faced armed soldiers. The military had been dragged much further into the matter than it had wanted. By this time the government was also attempting to involve the Royal Navy. On 28 October HMS Psyche had entered Wellington harbour, and the Prime Minister and Governor, claiming that bloodshed could be expected at any moment, had asked Commander H C Carr if he would land armed forces to assist the police if necessary. He agreed that he would do so if a situation of riot was officially declared, and notified the Admiralty that officers and men of both the Psyche and HMS Pyramus, which he had ordered to Auckland, would be placed at the disposal of the government in that event.
The Admiralty found it difficult to believe that the request fulfilled their criterion for intervention to aid the civil power, viz that such action was ‘necessary to avoid bloodshed or massacre’, a doctrine affirmed clearly by Home Secretary Winston Churchill during a recent British strike. It left the matter, however, to its man on the spot - with a warning
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it was reluctant for the Navy to get involved in industrial disputes, especially in the Dominions. At the time of the storming of the Post and Telegraph Stores on 30 October, however, there was a hiatus in the provision of supplementary state muscle, few specials having yet arrived. Superintendent Ellison therefore arranged to provide Carr with his criterion for intervention: William Riddell, a Stipendiary Magistrate, was ready to read the ‘Riot Act’.
In telling the Admiralty of his willingness to help out in these circumstances, Carr strengthened his hand by stating that blood had been shed, in addition to citing the formal request from the judicial authorities for his aid. In the event, the ‘Riot Act’ did not need to be read. The parading of some two dozen armed seamen on the wharf caused the strike committee to withdraw their supporters; they were reluctant to give the Crown an excuse to bring the full might of the state upon them. On the same day, armed sailors from HMS Pyramus patrolled the Auckland wharves to protect free labourers unloading a ship. In the two main centres, then, the state had now revealed the full arsenal at its disposal. Massey and his advisers and colleagues alleged that the smallish number of insurrectionists amongst the strikers posed a threat to the sovereignty of New Zealand. Use of the Navy, however marginal {Pyramus' s crew also helped the scabs by floodlighting evening work on the Auckland wharf), had played its part in intimidating the larger number of workers who were believed by the authorities to have been misled by the labour leadership. Whether or not the hard core were mostly revolutionaries or mostly militant unionists did not much matter: the decision had been made to definitively suppress organised labour. From now on, specials would be the shock troops. 31
The spotlight was now firmly on the detested Massey’s Cossacks, the ‘outcast scum from the country, brought down to bludgeon citizens into submission to the Government’ in the words of retired bureaucrat Tregear (although when he was pilloried by pro-govemment elements, the phrase transformed itself into ‘outcasts come from the country’!). Strike leaders spoke defiantly of resistance to state aggression, generally meaning specials when referring to police. Harry Holland told the crowds at the Basin Reserve on 26 October of his advice to Australian miners: ‘lf they hit you with a baton, hit them with a pick handle, and have the pick at the end of it.’ A week later he advised men from the Psyche that if they were ordered to shoot, they should aim their guns according to their class interests. ‘The uniform police’, moreover, ‘can deal a staggering blow by tearing off their uniforms and standing with the watersiders.’ Meanwhile future Labour Minister Bob Semple made a similar point to Aucklanders, and all Wellingtonians had received a copy of a wharfies’ appeal to the police not to betray their class.
Federation president and Seamen’s Union secretary Tom Young told a rally: ‘lf the police use their batons, the unionists should give it back to them - and make it a double-header’. To applause, he continued that if
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‘there is any reason to incite people, I’ll incite them’ and lead up to 15,000 armed men against the authorities. At government direction, detectives had been investigating ways of putting away ‘ringleaders’. When the specials had managed to ‘contain’ the situation the regular police moved in and arrested not only Young, Holland and Semple, but also future Prime Minister Peter Fraser, George Bailey (the chairer of strikers’ meetings) and Industrial Workers of the World (‘Wobblies’) organiser Tom Barker. Young and Holland received the longest sentences, a year each for sedition. Many other strikers and sympathisers were convicted for various acts arising from ‘the troubles’. 32
The mounted specials were all the more hated because when they first came into town they were a disorganised, often drunken rabble. Hotels in Auckland and elsewhere were kept closed (to the chagrin of hoteliers) because of the ‘dangers’ if specials as well as strikers got too much to drink - which they managed to do anyway. The regular police had so much work regulating the strike that it soon became apparent that they could not organise and discipline specials, whatever their formal control of them. The military once again stepped in. Officers of the New Zealand Staff Corps and NCOs from the New Zealand Permanent Staff (the two organisations which jointly trained and administered the Territorials) organised the mounted specials into squadrons and troops and appointed officers over them, almost all of them Territorials. The military undertook the feeding of the mounted men and their horses, and their equipping (at Police Force expense). Training programmes in ‘military policing’ brought at least some control over the wayward behaviour of the young men. In overall charge in Wellington was Colonel Stuart Newall, a veteran of the Anglo-Maori Wars and the ‘Boer War’, the man who had led both the invasion of Parihaka and the crushing of the ‘Hokianga Dog Tax Rebellion’. He was soon given as second-in-command Colonel Andrew Russell, Commander of the Wellington Mounted Rifles Brigade (and half-brother of the former Minister in charge of the Police), who was in effective control of the mounted specials.
The fact that there were many Territorials amongst the specials made their training a little easier. But many of the specials were far from ideal personnel to wield the powers of the ancient office of constable, even after a weeding out of the worst elements in mid November. Cullen spoke of ‘undesirables’ in the Auckland camps as late as 11 December. Some even had criminal records, although such men were usually made free labourers rather than given constabulary tasks. On many occasions specials behaved in an untoward fashion, assaulting shopkeepers who refused to serve them, batoning heads at random, chasing a man into a private house and then assaulting the owner and wrecking the place. When magistrates accepted the word of ‘cockatoo constables’ over others, there were undoubtedly some miscarriages of justice, and resentment built up far beyond the levels that had existed before their arrival in town. There were many accounts of specials provoking rather than suppressing
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violence. One special, recruited in Levin, recorded with gusto the ‘fun’ he had in batoning five ‘ruffians using foul and abusive language’ towards his troop. He wrote of many ‘cracked heads’, the use of ‘a stockwhip on crowd with good effect’, and a ‘baton full in the face’ for a man trying to rescue his downed mate.
As the Cossacks marched into Wellington they were invariably met by hostile ‘reception committees’. When intelligence reports told the strike committee, for example, of a column of specials planning to enter the capital at night along the Hutt Road, the ‘ Wobblies’ made preparations. Barbed wire was stretched across the road. When the specials were halted by the wire, men hidden on the hillside rolled boulders down upon them. When specials appeared on the streets, not only would they be showered with missiles, but the strikers and their allies would cover the road with marbles, tacks and other materials, and would sometimes manage to unseat a rider by entangling a horse’s legs with ropes. 33
By 3 November, with a thousand mounted specials having arrived in Wellington, a crowd besieged the Buckle Street complex where they were encamped in insanitary conditions, many in tents. The biggest crowd was in Taranaki Street, the strikers and their allies having been joined by anti-authority elements from the neighbouring Te Aro slums. By nightfall ‘things began to look very ugly’, albeit the confrontation was mostly verbal. Commissioner Cullen arrived, and ordered regular police to clear the roadway. This was resisted and missiles flew; Cullen then had a hose turned onto the crowd. During the melee Sergeant-Major J Thompson of the Artillery, which continued to guard the entrances to Buckle Street, was severely injured in the head by an iron bolt or a rock.
As always in such situations, accounts of what happened next are confused, confusing and contradictory. It is clear that Cullen ordered the mounted specials to charge the crowd, which included many women, children and elderly people, allegedly after shots were fired at the police. People were batoned and trampled to the ground, and some of the specials almost certainly fired weapons. Cullen denied this, and secured censorship of the Dominion's account of the incident; but it is certain that shots were fired at the specials from windows and under verandahs. The crowd had not dispersed, just redeployed. ‘To launch mounted men unsupported by others on foot in the dark at the crowd was an error of judgment’, Heard recorded, for people took refuge under verandahs, in doorways, in recesses which men on horseback could not reach. The shower of missiles, including the odd bullet, continued. A junior officer of the military guard received a pellet from a pistol; two civilians in the crowd were also wounded by bullets. From a pro-striker shop at the comer of Taranaki and Arthur Streets, J P Hassett allegedly fired shots at Cullen himself. Although later acquitted of attempted murder, he received a long stretch for participating in a riot. ‘lt was surprising that the casualties were so few’, Heard felt. In the event the situation, worsened by Cullen and the Cossacks, was saved by Major J E Hume, commander
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of the Artillery guard, who persuaded the crowd to disperse before lives were lost. 34
Cullen was unperturbed by all the criticism at the brutality of his specials, many of whom were reportedly drunk: ‘we cannot allow people to gather and block the thoroughfare.... The reading will have to be kept clear at all costs. Crowds are not going to take possession of the streets.’ Some of the strikers later launched a raid on the Royal Tiger hotel in Taranaki Street, breaking all its windows, for its proprietor had allegedly been ‘shouting’ specials. A mounted constable was ‘severely injured’ by a brick during its defence. On 5 November came what in the eyes of the authorities was ‘the most serious riot of all’ during ‘the Great Strike’. That day Heard told the employers’ organisation, the Citizens Defence Committee, that the mounted specials were getting restless. They had come into the capital ‘to break the strike and protect workers on the wharves’, but the loading of produce was yet to start. Before long, ‘specials would probably melt away to their homes’. The employers had been waiting for an adequate concentration of specials, and now decided to open the wharves with free labour the following day. Massey crowed that ‘we have got the upper hand’; now, with the specials ‘out in force is the time to have something definite before they are compelled to return to their homes’. The eagerly awaited showdown was at hand. 35
That very day, moreover, the strikers would be taught by a demonstration of might what the state could do. Thirty racehorses had arrived for shipment to Lyttelton, and it was decided that Cullen would send 800 mounted specials to load them at once, even before the scab labour arrived to resume normal port operations. Yet again Heard was puzzled by Cullen’s tactics: the specials marched in a huge column through busy streets, ‘assailed by a multitude of strikers and strike sympathisers’. The rear of the column was especially vulnerable to attack from projectiles, and a tram drove into it. The rear contingents’ patience snapped, and they charged into the crowd again and again; ‘many skirmishes took place, the chief weapons being batons on the one side and road metal on the other’. Many innocent passers-by were injured, particularly where the action was hottest, in Featherston Street. Once again the battles went on longer than usual because members of the crowd were able to throw things from positions where they could not be reached by mounted men. Cullen meanwhile kept the foot specials under cover nearby, ensuring the continuation of riot and making all the bloodier the eventual victory of the forces of the state. 36
In time the specials reached the wharves and shipped the racehorses. The Battle of Featherston Street proved to be the last serious incident in Wellington. Cullen had achieved his purpose. ‘The would-be rioters were entirely cowed and reduced to order.’ Next day, when loading of the Athenic commenced, supervised by many mounted and foot specials and regular police, the picketers held back. Instead, strikers and their supporters marched in the streets. There were many more incidents in Wellington in
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this most serious industrial dispute in New Zealand history to date, but the threat to the ‘social fabric’, deliberately exacerbated in the short run by the authorities so that it could be put down all the more definitively, was to all intents and purposes over.
But the strike itself was expanding throughout the country, including to the traditionally militant towns on the West Coast. In Auckland it was to reach explosive force. The wharfies there had walked out on 28 October in solidarity with the Huntly strikers; next day, some exercises in smallscale strikebreaking began and pickets attempted to prevent the unloading of imported fruit. Superintendent Mitchell had refused to play the Massey/ Cullen game: his regular police could cope with any contingencies, and so he did not require specials. He promised that pickets would not be interfered with, so long as they complied with the law, and arranged for the fruit to be tmloaded. Like Ward, Mitchell felt that the unnecessary or premature appearance of specials would be tantamount to ‘establishing what was practically a civil war’: he had been ‘one of the principal agents in preventing serious outbreaks’ in a ‘situation which bristled with possibilities for riot and irreparable damage’. Mitchell met with and publicly praised the watersiders’ union for their ‘very graceful action’ in actually offering to protect the unloading of the fruit, noted that provocation by free labourers led to trouble, and supported the strikers’ right to picket peacefully. These views had the effect of dissuading scabs, and so were creating a ‘false impression’, Crown legal officer Selwyn Mays wired to Cullen on 30 October. 37
Auckland’s Citizens Defence Committee under mayor C J Parr did not want to fully reopen the ports unless overwhelming state force was available. Auckland employers agreed with the government that the interests of long-term ‘order’ required a definitive crushing of the Federation. As Massey put it, ‘we cannot afford to buy peace at any price. Any settlement arrived at should be such as will prevent a recurrence of these troubles’. On 31 October, the Prime Minister told the chairman of the Auckland Harbour Board, J H Gunson (his, and Herdman’s, friend), that he should swear in specials whatever Mitchell’s views. Cullen gave Parr overall control of procuring the specials, although the police remained nominally in chaise: the Commissioner would replace his Auckland Superintendent with ‘a competent police officer’. In Cullen’s eyes Mitchell was not competent because he clung in abnormal times to the normal police practice of non-partisanship in disputes. Mitchell’s perspective was similar to that of the world’s ‘progressive’ police leaders, such as Arthur Woods, soon to be made New York’s police chief. In Huntly he had refused to let police be used to enforce the mine-owners’ personnel policies upon militant unionists; they were there to preserve order only. He was out of tune with the government’s desire to remove the threat posed by the Federation as a perceived rival for sovereignty.
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The way Cullen put it was that Mitchell ‘let strikers do as they liked’. The Auckland Star took a different view: his tactfulness had prevented widespread disorder, even riot. Cullen perhaps had other motivations too. After all, when Mitchell had been sent to Auckland to serve as a Sub-Inspector under Cullen, the two had clashed about the amount of responsibility possessed by the subordinate officer. Moreover, evidence had been given at the 1909 Commission that the ‘very able’ Mitchell aspired to the Commissionership, and many of the rank and file appeared to believe that Mitchell ‘can hardly make a mistake’. Many of his characteristics - including a disciplinarian bent - were shared with Cullen. Others were decidedly not; his alleged clandestine encouragement to the Auckland police in their attempt to form a union, for example.
Complaints from Parr, Gunson and other employers about Mitchell’s alleged lack of enthusiasm for protecting local commerce gave Cullen the chance he needed to humiliate his rival and remove him from the most senior Superintendent’s position. On 1 November Mitchell was summonsed to Wellington and placed on special (‘holiday’) leave, and Superintendent Kiely from Christchurch was put in charge in Auckland for the duration of the industrial trouble. Labour MP Robertson regarded this as ‘sure evidence that the authorities do not desire to avoid strife and bloodshed’. On 11 November the Auckland Harbour Board asked that Mitchell be permanently removed from the city. Although the response was that Mitchell could not be ‘interfered with unless he commits himself in some way or other’, on 19 December he was notified of his transfer to Dunedin. Kiely was kept on in Auckland, and Inspector Dwyer was promoted to Superintendent to replace him in Christchurch. The transfer of Mitchell to a (comparatively) ‘one-horse district like Dunedin’ was, a later commentator said, like an ‘lrishman’s rise’, and Mitchell was now seen as a strange phenomenon, a kind of ‘rebel’ in higher police ranks. 38
The New Zealand Farmers’ Union, its base drawn from the same social stratum as Massey’s Reform Party, had long been promising the government that it was ready to mobilise rural labour for whatever needed to be done to win ‘the war’ against organised labour. On 25 October its journal proclaimed that the ‘sooner a good fight comes the sooner will peace reign’. Its leaders had recently discussed with the Prime Minister their role in defeating a waterside strike, and its branches now organised men for both the special constabulary and scab labour. Soon more than 2000 mounted specials had been recruited for Auckland, with the first 500 (from the Waikato) arriving on 5 November, the day of the Battle of Featherston Street. By the following day 1500 were encamped in the Domain.
Heard’s instructions to his Auckland regional officers ensured that the military helped in the recruiting campaign, and as in the other centres the mounted specials’ commanders were mainly officers from the local Territorial mounted rifles units. The commander of specials, however,
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was the Auckland Farmers’ Union’s octogenarian president. Major D H Lusk. Their tactics were less provocative than those employed in Wellington, now that the state’s might had carried the day in the capital. As in Wellington, the military looked after their needs and trained them. The number of mounted specials in camp at the Domain and elsewhere was to reach 1800. 39
More than 500 foot specials were also enrolled in Auckland, headed by Territorial officers and 10 NCOs from the Permanent Staff. Additionally, in the first week of November, 22 farmer specials were sworn in by JPs at Buckland to form ‘a sort of vigilance Committee to patrol the district at night’, four specials patrolled Pukekohe at night because when Auckland hotels were closed during the ‘riots’ many ‘undesirables’ came out in search of drink, and nine farmers were sworn as mounted specials at Albany. On 8 November, two days after the opening of Wellington’s waterfront, Lusk (who had seen action as an officer in the Forest Rangers as long ago as 1863) led 800 specials in the successful seizure of the wharves (and ransacking of the union offices). This led to a general strike in the city (New Zealand’s first), which the Federationist unions had warned would occur if the port was reopened.
Soon, 10,000 Auckland workers were on strike, and the city was virtually idle. On 10 November the United Federation of Labour called a one-day nationwide general strike to oppose ‘the gigantic conspiracy to smash organised labour’. Cullen was in daily communication with Kiely, urging him to take a harsh line against picketing and gatherings of strikers, and checking on the suspect ‘loyalty’ of Auckland’s regular police. It was a doomed struggle for the workers because the Wellington events, the mobilisation of scab labour elsewhere under the protection of state coercive forces, and the legal blocking of arbitrationist unions contributing to strike funds, had led many unions to concede that the cause was already lost. Even here Gunson believed that the Federation was already ‘broken’, and indeed men soon began to drift back to work.
On 23 November Auckland’s general strike was declared over, and there and in other places it was largely the transport and wharf unions that stayed out; but skirmishes and rioting continued. The Auckland authorities began to reduce the numbers of specials, although discharged men were kept on stand-by in case they were needed again. By 19 December, when the Auckland watersiders went back to work, there were only 130 specials still patrolling the wharves, and these were at once paid off and their camp disbanded. In case of future trouble, the Auckland branch of the Farmers’ Union, with government acquiescence, had created a ‘Farmers’ Union Constabulary Corps’ to preserve farmers’ rights and help maintain the ‘rule of law’ - although the farmers were not unhappy that the events of 1912-13 had proven that the state could dispense with the ‘rule of law’ if it deemed this necessary. 40
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In relatively quiet Dunedin, Dwyer and a magistrate had on 17 November begun to swear in 300 foot and some 400 mounted specials, in response to the call from Wellington. The foots were paraded and then dismissed until called upon, and only a proportion of the available mounteds were asked to encamp at Tahuna Park: their numbers reached 151. Dwyer refused to aid the Commerce Protection Society in drawing up elaborate plans, complete with barricades, for a massive show of strength to accompany the reopening of the wharves. Like Mitchell, he believed that with tactful leadership the regular police could control matters. The specials would only come in as backup. Apart from an exercise in which Dwyer got 200 specials to the wharves in 1 2Vi minutes, the mounted men mostly languished in their camp. Dwyer later commented that he was a policeman, not a ‘Sunday Soldier’. The most he would do was to have his men escort scab labour from the railway station to the wharves. Information obtained by his spies in the premises where the strike committee met and in the Commerce Protection Society meant that he had little need to make use of specials, and they were disbanded on 8 December, subject to recall if required.
The Commerce Protection Society told Herdman that Dunedin’s regular police had done a ‘magnificent’ job in reopening the port without use of specials. Dwyer spent no more than £2OOO on specials compared with Auckland’s declared figure of £47,000 and Wellington’s £29,000, which were probably underestimates. Because his foot specials were not used for active service, they did not need to be paid. When one of his sergeants and three constables, all of them sympathetic to the strikers, allowed the wharfies to prevent unloaded goods from leaving the docks, Dwyer did not discipline them, because it was ‘a bad time to come to loggerheads’ with a section of the regulars. Ex-policeman M Joyce JP congratulated Dwyer for being ‘the solitary saviour of peace’ amongst the police hierarchy. 41
In Christchurch the Red Federation had not been strong, albeit less weak than in Dunedin. Christchurch’s strike committee declined to endorse the call for a general strike, and relations between wharfie pickets and authority were initially happy enough. The Employers’ Defence Committee however feared trouble when the port was reopened. At the end of the first week in November the police agreed with the mayor and the employers that in 10 days’ time a camp should be established for up to 2000 specials. The Officer Commanding the Forces in the Christchurch District undertook to assist in this ‘without it being known that he, as Officer in Command of the Mi litary, is doing so’. The Defence Committee quickly began selecting free labour for the port, but by 17 November (when all was ready to encamp the volunteers, as planned) it needed an incident in order to ‘justify’ concentrating large numbers of specials. On 18 November, therefore, scabs were sent on to the wharves in provocative fashion, and the wharf workers’ pickets obligingly provided the excuse by seizing some railway wagons. This led to a ‘near riot’.
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Mounted volunteers had already been recruited, and began riding in from the country on the same day. They were put up in two camps run by the Permanent Staff at the Addington Showgrounds and in Lyttelton, with a third added later in central Christchurch. Right-wing runholder Colonel Robert Chaffey had been selected by the mayor of Christchurch, in consultation with police and military authorities, to superintend the mounted specials. They had military officers assigned to run their units - as did the foot specials, whose ranks included all Christchurch public servants, who had been compulsorily enrolled. Their numbers peaked at 599 mounted men and 777 foot specials.
Sub-Inspector W H McKinnon (the rabidly anti-strike officer who was temporarily in charge in Christchurch) hoped - as did the employers - that the port could be reopened with the help of regular police alone, and - the back of the Federation now having been broken - Cullen was in agreement with the use of minimal force (with firmness). In the event, reports that some strikers were armed led to a decision to go in with strength. Cullen’s instructions were unambiguous: ‘lmpress upon all the Police that eyes of public are upon them and that they must at all risk uphold reputation of Force. If an attack is made upon either uniform men or specials let all hands wade in with batons and use them with energy’.
On 25 November 400 ‘cavalry’ specials (some armed with hidden revolvers and others posted at strategic points en route to deter ambush) and 300 ‘infantry’ moved in under cover of darkness to fully open the port, securing both ends of the Lyttelton rail tunnel. They ‘invaded’ the port, occupied the wharves, and installed several dozen free labourers - whose ranks would later be supplemented by specials themselves. Chaffey had instructed his men to be prepared to use extreme violence towards protesters, and Heard and Cullen had had to prevent him issuing rifles to some of his men. At the wharves, ‘Commandant’ Chaffey superintended port operations with over 100 mounted specials and some 150 foot specials, plus some defence staff and regular water police. He consistently resisted orders from Wellington to gradually reduce the numbers of specials.
Incidents were not confined to Lyttelton. When a contingent of specials deliberately detoured to march past Christchurch’s Socialist Hall during a meeting, the strike leaders ensured that there was no retaliation. But a special who batoned a wharfie friend of young James Stark was dragged olf his horse and hit with a beer bottle; Stark escaped to the West Coast but was arrested on his return to Christchurch four months later. Specials tried to stop socialist candidate James McCombs from addressing electors during the Lyttelton by-election; McCombs was elected an MR By 3 December it was clear that the strike was broken in the area, and the number of mounted specials was reduced to 300. From 13 December the only specials left were those camped at Lyttelton, and the last of these were sent home at the end of the year. The Christchurch operation had cost £22,000. ‘ln retrospect’, wrote Lyttelton’s historian, ‘the show of
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force appears unnecessary’. He felt it to be a ‘reflection of fears aroused by the amount of disturbance in Wellington’. It was more likely to have been a reflection of the government’s and the employers’ desire to present an overwhelming phalanx of state might against the labour movement. 42
Specials were also used in smaller urban areas. Five professional men and a farmer were sworn in Tauranga, for example, and a couple in Whangarei. Outside of the four centres, however, state authorities held the gravest fears for Westland. They frequently told the police in the region to swear in as many specials as were needed, and viewed with alarm the reported intention by militant unionists to disrupt mining and commerce; they knew that the West Coast was the Federation’s stronghold. On 17 November Inspector Phair heard that miners were going to oppose the opening of Hokitika’s port the next day, so had 89 specials sworn in. They were not needed; perhaps, Phair speculated, the miners did not turn up because of his show of determination. When Herdman and Cullen told the Westport authorities to use as many specials as required to open their port in mid December, the mayor and local police noted that the West Coast was different from the rest of the country because of its high proportion of working-class people. Some dynamiting and arson had occurred at Denniston, where the mine company had attempted to break the strike. They ‘would find great difficulty in getting specials to enrol. Would strongly urge that extra police be sent at earliest.’ Twenty-five regulars headed by McKinnon were sent by steamer, but when they were delayed in transit some specials were scraped together - and were not needed.
Fearing disruption to the opening of Greymouth’s port after five weeks of idleness, the police and judicial authorities there faced an even graver problem than that which confronted their counterparts in Westport; ‘the farming interest is not strong, and consequently the number of mounted specials obtainable is comparatively small’. Any demonstration would be huge in view of the large mining catchment area, and the Stipendiary Magistrate could find only a hundred volunteers, all of them from outside Greymouth itself. These needed to be supplemented by foot specials. Alone in the Dominion, the Greymouth authorities were forced to subpoena citizens to be sworn in as foot specials. Some had been willing enough, but on the suggestion of the Employers’ Defence Committee the JPs enrolled ‘indiscriminately’ to conceal those who were ‘anxious to assist’ but could not volunteer as this would be ‘suicidal, for business or other reasons’. In all, 370 were sworn in, ‘some under protest’; four refused and were fined £5. Again, the expected riots did not eventuate, again - it was suspected - because of the state’s clear intention to open the ports at any cost - and, no doubt, because it was clear that the organised labour movement had been crushed elsewhere in the Dominion. It would be futile, if heroic, to continue to confront the state head-on. 43
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‘I am quite satisfied that there will never be industrial peace in this country as long as the Red Feds are allowed to control matters or even interfere’, Massey had written to Gunson on 11 November. Specials had become a key means of ensuring that such ‘control’ or ‘interference’ was definitively suppressed. It was a classic example of overt class confrontation. The mounted specials wielded thick rough hardwood batons, 2 feet 4 inches long, which frequently thudded against the heads and limbs of strikers and their allies. Fully 85 percent of the Christchurch specials could be said to belong to the middle class. The public, particularly the unionised public, were aware of the generally working-class milieu of police recruitment, and of the recent unionising propensities of the Force. There were also some occasions when individual policemen sympathised with the strikers, or at the very least refrained from interfering with them in the absence of any serious breach of law.
Accusations of pro-striker bias were strongest in Wellington, Herdman noting that ‘ever since the Waihi Strike a determined effort had been made by the Federationists to enlist the sympathies of the police.’ The Wellington police met, vigorously denied all allegations, and demanded an enquiry. But Ellison believed that some of his men, including an NCO, had ‘shirked their work’ during the Battle of Featherston Street by refusing to arrest rioters on the spot. After many reports that ‘the Police appear to be in sympathy with the Law breakers’, Cullen asked eyewitnesses to ‘identify the delinquents’, and identification parades were held. In defence of himself and his men. Sergeant John Fitzgerald noted that his nine-man relief had not been notified that the specials were to march down Featherston Street, so had been taken unawares and forced to somehow control a hostile crowd of 2000 amidst the ‘wild disorder’ of charging specials, stone throwing, and so forth. Ellison felt that criticism in parliament of the regular police involved in the 30 October Post Office Square charge had had the ‘effects of a cold douche on a few of the Constables’: they thought they would be blamed if they got too energetic.
It does however seem that there was some support among the regulars for the strikers and their allies, and certainly there was a significant degree of detestation of the specials. After making exhaustive investigations into Featherston Street, and enduring allegations of police supineness from Chief Justice Stout, Cullen told Herdman in February 1914 that ‘there is no doubt but that a small percentage of our men had sympathy with the strikers, and another small section was rather diffident about showing too much energy, fearing that they might get pilloried in the House’. In turn, and particularly because the strikers had a naked class/ideological enemy to deal with in the form of specials, the regular police were unaccustomedly popular with the demonstrators in 1913 - in marked contrast to Waihi in 1912, when regular police had been the upfront coercive agents of the state. Holland later recalled that the uniformed police could be ‘openly hostile’ to the specials, although this was no
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doubt mostly because specials ‘lost their heads in the excitement on quite a number of occasions’. After the specials in Christchurch failed to provoke a confrontation with the strikers, ‘cheers were given for the uniformed police present’. Years later Herdman was still claiming that ‘outside influence’ had caused ‘considerable difficulty in the Force’ in 1913. The unusual configuration of forces, and the suspicions of the authorities as to the reliability of the regulars, caused many strains in the Force; chaplains were called in to assist some men.
Heard, like police and political authorities, saw something sinister in all of this. During the Featherston Street riot, he noted, the strikers and their allies openly shouted, ‘Leave the blue police alone, go for the specials’. This was ‘not a good sign and inferences might be drawn’; he noted that there had been few arrests. In fact, crowds often ‘treated with respect’ the regular police. The strikers frequently stressed that their struggle was not with the police but with capitalists and the government. They reminded the police that it was the Massey government which refused to allow police to organise, and appealed to them to realise where their class interests lay. While relatively accepting of the ‘restraining but not oppressive hand’ being played by the regular police, as compared to the often thuggish and drunken brutality of even trained specials, strikers and their allies focused on (as a headline put it) ‘Keeping The Scab Johns Busy’. 44
Just as there was considerable tension between police and military/ specials, so too was there tension between some local military personnel and their own superiors. A number of military men were unconvinced that the civil power was threatened, and felt that the clandestine involvement of the military in the suppression of the Red Feds was not only wrong in principle but also likely to be exposed. Yet in the House Herdman denied that Territorial officers were in command of specials in Wellington, and Heard (after an MP had seen him giving orders to specials) told Allen that he had ‘nothing to do with’ specials, which in turn allowed Allen to mislead the House. Many at the time, including opposition leaders, accepted such assurances at face value, and some of those who did not went along with the ‘convenient fiction’ that military personnel engaged in special policing were there not as soldiers per se but as ‘citizens assisting the police’. In short, ‘Military Forces played a significant role in the industrial conflict of 1913’, an involvement that went ‘far beyond’ what was required in ‘maintaining public order’. In the Great Strike of 1913, as at Waihi, the Reform government made ‘use of the state’s coercive apparatus to pursue political objectives; namely the destruction of the socialist trade unions grouped in the United Federation of Labour.... The cardinal rationale for the mobilisation of a veritable army of special constables throughout New Zealand was the defeat of the United Federation of Labour’ 45
The last of the specials came off the payroll at the very end of 1913, well after the definitive defeat of the strikers, although the Huntly miners
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struggled on until 6 January 1914 - to then be ‘taught a lesson’ by extensive blacklisting (in which Herdman and Cullen played a role) and the seizure of their hall by strikebreakers and mounted police. The militant unionists had resisted the might of the state in what was viewed by the authorities as an attempt to challenge the existing constitutional and sovereign order, and had come off the worse for it. In the future their tactics would have to change; accordingly, direct action and revolutionary (particularly ‘Wobbly’) influence waned inside the labour movement. The workers had leamt in 1912-13 that, in the last analysis, the state could override the rule of law if necessary in its own self-defined ‘public goodTself-defence’ interests. It was the state which had control over the police, the military, and the citizenry organised as special police. The New Zealand Freedom League’s protest that specials, or the defence force organised ‘in a surreptitious fashion .... have been used not as impartial preservers of the peace between disputants but as partial adherents of one of the two quarrelling parties’, missed the point: in the last instance, the state as impartial arbitrator was a myth. It would use its coercive forces in any capacity in which they were required. Accordingly, as after 1890, many militant workers now reverted to political activity to achieve their socialist or labourist goals. 46
The deployment of so many specials at such short notice left a legacy of great bitterness between the police and the military, which had effectively controlled the specials, because the police had to deal with the consequences of special constables’ activities and behaviour. Many specials appropriated expensive military equipment, even horses complete with saddlery, and claims for these were not finalised until mid 1915. Drunkenness had led to a great deal of vandalism by specials, including at two schools in which some had been quartered on Mount Cook. ‘Ministers are appalled at apparent extravagance at Auckland’, Cullen had wired on 3 December 1913 in a reference to the specials, and a Treasury investigator was sent north to examine the situation; the Police had to pay for the results of military ‘mismanagement’ of specials. Although the Auckland employers had begged the authorities to keep Superintendent Kiely in their city, he was perforce often in conflict with them and their allies in the specials’ leadership, being under orders from Wellington to control expenditure. ‘Remember it is you who is responsible and not Major Lusk ... it is you who will get the blame for wasteful expenditure and not the Mayor.’ In the event, the costs were enormous.
There were also many wrangles over pay. Even the basic rates for mounted men (10s per day plus rations for man and horse) were not fixed until mid November, while rates for foot specials remained up to IPs - though it was hoped that most would not claim them, as it was their ‘duty as citizens to preserve law and order’. In the event Christchurch’s lead was followed, with foot pay regularised at 8s per day for those who insisted on claiming (mostly those who had been placed in camps). But despite the vast expense, and the many recriminations, the authorities
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considered that the whole exercise had been essential; potential insurrection had been defeated during (in Cullen’s words) ‘the most critical time the Dominion has ever experienced’. As it happened, Cullen himself lost some of his authority as a result of the events of 1912-13. Herdman had taken a prominent role in policing operations, against the grain of policing/constitutional development, and he found it difficult to let go. Many observed, Truth reported in 1915, that ‘the real Commissioner’ was the Minister, even before the emergency circumstances of wartime. 47
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PART FIVE
Challenges and Continuities, 1913-1917
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CHAPTER 21
Discipline and Discomfort
While discipline in the New Zealand Police Force was in general being relaxed in response to the trend towards the benign policing of a ‘settled society’, this long-term trend was halted or even (at times) reversed during Cullen’s Commissionership. This reflected not only Cullen’s personal predilections, but also (and most significantly) the demands of the period: industrial strife and the problems of wartime required a tightening of conditions inside the Force. Cullen had no regard for niceties when ‘internal discipline’ was at stake. He inherited a Force in which, despite the ‘cleansing’ following the 1909 Commission, a minority of policemen continued to transgress, amidst loud publicity. In Truth, ‘Police v People’ headlines had continued to appear frequently. In March 1911, to take a month at random, a Taumarunui constable allegedly conspired to convict an innocent man of theft, and another constable was convicted of assault. Cullen was displeased that such accusations did not diminish after he took up office. A constable was charged with assault in August 1912, a Nelson policeman with burglary in September; a December headline, ‘The Third Degree. Police Methods Denounced From The Bench’, was quickly followed by assault allegations against Bluff and Palmerston North policemen (‘Brutal Bobbies’) and the headlines ‘A Burglarious Bobby’ and ‘A Criminal Constable’. In 1915 Constable John Howard of Dunedin was dismissed on admitting to burglary, and subsequently gaoled. 1
With assault cases in particular, part of the problem was that the informal police subculture - not least under Cullen - permitted the administering of a considerable degree of ‘bush justice’. Within limits, ‘a policeman can employ illicit violence that, while not sanctioned in law, is often legitimised by his peer group since it appears to serve the ends the police, as a body, are required to achieve.’ This comment about nineteenth century England is applicable to all police forces. Former constable Arnold Buttenvorth recalled of recalcitrant youngsters that ‘a good slap had more effect than a lot of talking’. A colleague of his confirmed that ‘we used to give a couple of good ones in the arse with a hunting crop’, and concluded, ‘Oh, you’d get hung for half the things we did then’. Physical punishment was not directed just towards youth and radicals: drunken bushmen and the like had to be ‘manhandled’ in order to get their ‘respect’. In the detective subculture, it was said, offenders too clever to get caught would be ‘set up’. Ex-constable James McClennan recalled that Detective Cassells tried to persuade him to perjure himself
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in order to convict a bookmaker. There is anecdotal evidence that police frequently received gifts of beer from publicans, but it seems that bribery seldom progressed much beyond this. 2
In breaching regulations or the law, the policeman had to judge how far he could go within the parameters of the occupational subculture - and make sure that he was not caught even when committing breaches ‘permissible’ within the subculture. Although Cullen’s definition of the ‘highest standards’ expected from his men allowed for, even encouraged, a degree of summary justice, he used exemplary harshness against offenders who had ‘gone too far’, to discourage the rest from making similar mistakes. When a commission of enquiry headed by Bishop into the dismissal of Constable Peter Maloney in 1915 acquitted him of the ‘gross misconduct’ which had led to his sacking, Cullen refused to reinstate him anyway; in the end a huge pay-out of £350 was negotiated to settle the former constable’s grievance. NCOs were not immune from Cullen’s Draconian tendencies. In 1914, when two officers found a sergeant guilty of being drunk in charge of a night relief, he was demoted to constable - on threat of dismissal for any further offence. In 1916 a Christchurch sergeant was similarly demoted and transferred to Oamaru, for ‘a series of acts of serious neglect of duty and his general lack of energy in supervising the constables under him, especially when on night duty’. In between these two events the Force had been castigated by the Commissioner for, inter alia, declining to treat poachers as seriously as ‘any other law-breaker’: gossip abounded about bribes of illicit game. 3
The ‘higher standards’ expected of police under Cullen, and harsher penalties for transgressions, were not just related to ‘civil strife’ and ‘war emergency’ conditions. In a less direct way they were also tied to the concept of police as moral exemplars. To be sure, as a smaller proportion of the population offended, police discipline of society, and concomitantly discipline inside the police, could be relaxed. But conversely, as societal standards ‘rose’, so too had police behaviour to ‘rise’. Police had to internalise changing societal mores - at a greater rate than many of the public, so that they could be at the forefront of change in (especially) working-class New Zealand. Without strict moral attitudes, moreover, a policeman was ‘more likely to be a menace to the community than a protection’. But Cullen’s high ‘moral’ requirements sat uneasily alongside his authoritarian attitude towards the citizenry. His Tough-shod’ approach, and the events of 1912-13, led to his implicit encouragement to police to continue or even escalate ‘informal’ methods for getting information from suspects or administering condign punishment outside of the formal judicial system. It was because social expectations of the police were becoming so high that, when policemen were caught out, the administration had to mete out increasingly severe punishments to them: Superintendent Mitchell’s detective son in Gisborne, for example, was reduced to the ranks after exhibiting overbearing behaviour towards suspects.
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Part of the police task of role-modelling, keeping up a suitable demeanour and presence, became more difficult as working conditions became more austere, particularly as war set in and the government retrenched. From early in the Great War, expiry of the issue period for a uniform was no longer sufficient reason for a replacement; it had to be completely worn out, which meant that it was often difficult to look smart. Equipment damaged through ‘carelessness’ now had to be repaired at the expense of the individual policeman, even if the damage had been done by an arrestee (from whom the policeman now had to try to recoup the cost, often to no avail). All over the country police quarters and stations remained in very bad repair. In late 1915, for example, police cottages occupied by the Hokitika sergeant and his constables were adjudged to be fit only for demolition, but due to a lack of funds for rebuilding they were patched up once again. In 1917 the Port Chalmers police station, situated in a ‘smellsome’ alley, was described as ill-lit, illventilated, damp and depressing. ‘The cells would disgrace a penal settlement in barbarous Mexico.’ 4
Constable William Bradley’s transfer to Waipiro Bay in 1917 remained vivid in his memory decades later. There was no path up to the police residence, and a ‘rude shock’ awaited when the door was opened. ‘My wife cried her eyes 0ut.... Think of it! Here was a house which at one time had been a Maori whare’ before being added to. The kitchen was only 6 by 8 feet, and all the ceilings in the house were ‘black with dirt’. The constable and his wife found alternative accommodation while they scrubbed out the police premises, whereupon Mrs Bradley succumbed to scarlet fever. Such experiences, far from rare, resulted from a long period of inadequate maintenance and unwillingness to custom-build stations, exacerbated by wartime economising measures. Superintendent O’Donovan spoke of the need for a major programme to build ‘wellappointed, comfortable residences’ when the war ended, noting that the ‘satisfaction of members of the Force with their lot ... is very much bound up with this matter’. 5
Some progress was made with accommodation, particularly in the larger centres, thanks to decisions made before the war. In 1913 Cullen announced that a new police station for central Wellington, combined with police headquarters (as suggested by Royal Commissions), would be built between Johnston Street (the Commissioner’s office would be on this frontage) and Waring Taylor Street (watch-house, detective offices, etc). The new Central station would replace the Lambton Quay station, built in 1880 and long acknowledged as inadequate; the 1905 Royal Commission had described the interior as ‘wretched in the extreme’ and called the building a threat to both ‘health and efficiency’. Not only was it full of ‘passages, small rooms and door-ways’. Inspector Ellison had testified at that time, it was already far too small to house all the single men. Bishop’s 1909 enquiry had also condemned the ‘small, dark, and inconvenient’ sleeping cubicles in the ‘rabbit-warren’. Cramming seven
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or eight men into each room created ‘appalling’ ventilation problems, and was objectionable ‘on the score of decency’, none of which helped a young man ‘to live up to a refined standard of life’.
No progress had been made by the outbreak of war, but the go-ahead was given that September. The fact that police headquarters was involved might have been a factor in this unusual timing (certainly the Commissioner looked after his own comfort, lambasting the Government Architect for planning to have the ‘closets and urinals’ opposite his office, which was ‘objectionable on sanitary grounds’). On the other hand, the government and the police administration did seem to appreciate the need for better working conditions for the police in the main centres, albeit progress was slow. They had also decided to build a new station in the capital’s Taranaki Street, following ongoing agitation to better supplement the Mount Cook station in the disorderly Te Aro area than could be done from the old Manners Street station. Taranaki Street was opened in March 1916, and the final move to the Wellington Central complex came on 1 March 1918, with the transfer of police headquarters from the top floor of Government Buildings to Johnston Street.
In 1915, moreover, a new station was opened at Hamilton, and later in the war the Dunedin police gained better district headquarters by moving from their ‘very cramped’ accommodation into the building next door, the front section of the city’s gaol. This had been partly modelled on Old Scotland Yard when it was built in 1895, and was now altered to provide ‘ample accommodation for the present and future’ (the Dunedin police still occupied it at the time of writing). In Auckland the barracks had been ‘taxed to its limit’, and city men often had to be accommodated in suburban stations. This, as the 1905 Commissioners noted of a similar situation at Wellington Central, prevented the proper supervision of the men. In 1917, with Auckland’s auxiliary watch-house building in Princes Street having been demolished, a three-storey building was erected to provide office and cell accommodation with ‘a far greater degree of comfort’ and space for the men. 6
One way of maintaining decorum in a period of general austerity was to grant extra remuneration through the reward system. Over recent years this had declined in importance, the concept of a salary with no perquisites (except to a degree for approved ‘outside’ work by, particularly, country police) being central to modem professional policing. Although the government included a clause relating to monetary rewards in the Police Force Bill, Herdman later withdrew it after much comment to the effect that in a properly paid professional force it would be far more appropriate to shorten the period between increments as a reward for special services. Given Cullen’s relentless quest for perfection, the ability to offer rewards as an incentive to excellence appealed to him, however, and the practice underwent something of a revival (while still often tagged to the concept of notes on personnel files for use in future promotion decisions).
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Police, for example, were rewarded for ‘courageous conduct’ during the 1913 riots. When in 1914 a ploughman went missing, Geraldine constable John O’Grady suspected foul play by the man’s workmate (‘a very cunning type of degenerate’). Search parties failed to find a body, but the constable searched on alone and eventually discovered it in a gorse thicket in the Orari riverbed. ‘After a couple of days search another Constable might have given it up as a forlorn hope and be[en] content with the issue of missing friends notices, but not so with O’Grady’, who received a record of merit and a £3 reward, as did a detective sergeant with whom he had collaborated on the case. Such incentives, however small in money terms, became of greater significance as wages fell further behind the cost of living. Some top policemen saw rewards as a supplement to poor pay which encouraged hard and creative work. Through the exigencies of the times, those who had opposed money rewards on theoretical grounds began to change their minds. In 1917, £2OO was set aside for rewards for ‘meritorious conduct’. 7
Official rewards had always been complemented by private rewards - from individuals grateful, for example, for the return of burgled property. The growth of the bureaucratised society meant that, increasingly, state institutions other than the police were able to offer rewards. The Post Office notified the Force in 1915 that it would pay each constable who secured a conviction for theft from slot machine telephones a £5 reward. However, some departments had to temporarily suspend rewards as a result of wartime economies - the Education Department stopped making payments for the arrest of absconders from Industrial Schools in 1916, for example. The biggest rewards of all were offered by the government in connection with spectacular cases - such as the £5OO on offer for a double murder committed by Frederick Eggers on the West Coast in 1917; three detectives were each given £lOO or more, with smaller amounts to uniformed men and civilians.
While the offering of rewards might in general have encouraged police to be more efficient, the old disadvantages of the reward system remained, especially when large sums of money were involved. Jealousies were fostered amongst the disappointed, and uniformed men resented the greater propensity for detectives to receive rewards. In the West Coast case, for example, a constable stationed at the Globe Mine police station claimed that he was on to the culprit at the same time as Detective Sergeant R L Ward, who had been rewarded handsomely while he received nothing. 8 Many critics felt that rewards went against the service ideal. In 1920, Detective J B Young drew attention to this after receiving a much smaller reward in a murder case than a colleague: ‘lf a man cannot do his duty without having to be encouraged by monetary rewards he is, in my opinion, of little value to the service or public.’ The Commissioner told him that the ‘obvious remedy’ would in future be applied to him! But Detective Young was, on this matter, the more attuned to the general
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direction of policing in the modem world: as a general rule, rewards were no longer desirable as incentives. 9
The prerequisite for promotion under the Police Regulations of 1913 was a pass in examinations which all men with seven years of police experience were entitled to sit. The intention was to remove long-standing criticisms that promotions were based on factors other than merit. There had been little demand within the Force for such a solution; it had not come up in the Royal Commissions, and nor had it proved successful in the past. However, it was part of a worldwide trend in professionalising forces (in American urban forces, and in South Australia, for example) as a way to avoid unsatisfactory promotions resulting from political influence, inhouse favouritism, and the like. Some critics felt that examinations might produce an unsuitably ‘intellectual’ police hierarchy. But in examinable forces, if officers in charge of districts reported unfavourably on a bid for promotion, and/or the candidate was insufficiently senior, promotion was unlikely no matter how many passes he had or how high his marks were. Despite much trepidation in New Zealand, the examination system ‘stood the test of time’, a former Superintendent later reminisced.
Some men began private tuition as soon as the regulations were released, and then at the end of March 1913 it was announced, with the first of the new examinations due that September, that ‘a teacher of high standing in the Education Department’ had been engaged to instruct candidates by correspondence at no charge to them. Dozens enrolled for subjects such as precis writing and arithmetic. These took candidates to either Standard Six level (for the Sub-Inspector examinations) or Standard Five (for sergeant and Senior Sergeant). So able were the keenest of the ‘juniors’ that in April it was announced that constables and sergeants could sit the Sub-Inspector examination and be automatically credited with the NCO examinations if they passed it. 10
The first examinations were held in nine centres, with the sitters’ identities protected by a numbering system. The Sub-Inspector examinations comprised a seven-hour general educational test on the first day, and then two days of six-hour tests on policing matters. The Senior Sergeant examinations covered the same kind of material. Constables sitting the sergeant examinations faced five and a half hours of ‘academic’ tests on one day, also followed by two days of six hours each on policing subjects. The English examination at Sub-Inspector level had an essay topic (e.g. ‘lmportance of early associations in the formation of character’), and precis and other work which emphasised military matters as well as subjects such as fingerprinting.
The general duties of Chief Detectives taxed the minds of those sitting the Senior Sergeant examination, together with questions designed to test their knowledge of their subordinates’ duties: ‘When on beat duty and parties approaching do not keep the proper side of the footpath, what should the constable on the beat do?’ Aspirant sergeants had to read
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aloud ‘fluently and intelligently’ from a Standard Five reader. Their spelling words and essay subjects included emblems of colony, policing and empire; lieutenant, pioneer, collision, requirement, ‘Benefits of the colonies to Great Britain’. Their geography and policing papers were simplified versions of the other examinations: a New Zealand mapping exercise, describing a trip to London, fingerprints, juvenile smoking. 11
The results of these pioneering 1913 examinations were. Commissioner Cullen announced, ‘highly satisfactory’, indeed ‘splendid’. Fully 79 of the 90 candidates had passed in all subjects, with the top candidate averaging 87 percent. Even those who could not average 50 percent across all papers, as required, ‘need not be disheartened’, the Commissioner stated. Many of them had done well in individual papers and should try again. 12 Eighteen of the 21 who sat the Sub-Inspector examination had passed: Senior Sergeants Hastie, Mathieson, and Dart; nine sergeants (including several such as Wohlmann who later reached high rank); Detective Sergeant Cassells; an acting detective; and four constables. Twenty-one men passed the Senior Sergeant examination (18 sergeants, three detective sergeants), and of the 47 candidates in the sergeant examination, 40 passed.
The examiner of ‘literary subjects’, Robert Darroch (a Wellington schoolteacher with previous coaching experience), noted that nine of the Sub-Inspector candidates showed ‘exceptional merit, well beyond ... a Sixth Standard proficiency’. Five of them had received 100 percent in arithmetic, while in English ‘the precis-work of three candidates was well up to the standard of the Senior Civil Service examination’. The quality of aspirant sergeants was often beyond the required Standard Five level, with many of them able to ‘arrange their ideas methodically’ in essays. Crown Solicitor H H Ostler, who had conducted the criminal law and evidence papers, endorsed the general praise. There was ‘hardly one candidate who did a really bad paper’, and only one ‘absolutely failed’. ‘ln my opinion, the results of this examination show that the country is to be congratulated on the quality of the men who serve it in the Police Force.’
All this was a far cry from the dismal publicity about quality in the recent past. The results proved, said Cullen, that there were many men qualified to fill the higher ranks. Inspectors were ordered to report on those who had passed, with an eye to ‘the future efficiency of the service’. Given the perceived success of the examinations as one way of testing the degree of individual and collective professionalism in the Force, the same general format was to be repeated in 1914, although in the literary topics essays on ‘Strikes’, on contrasting Germany with Britain, on ‘Britain’s Navy is her All in AH’, now jostled with old New Zealand favourites such as ‘The Life of Sir George Grey, or any great Imperialist’. 13
The 1914 results were not, on the surface, so impressive (39 passes out of 60), although there were eight constables among the 18 Sub-
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Inspector passes. Only three sergeants among the 10 candidates for Senior Sergeant passed, and only one had even ‘fairly good marks’. Cullen attributed this result to the permissiveness of the examinations regime; constables should be more modest in their aspirations. But there were other reasons why results were of a ‘distinctly lower quality’ than in 1913. The best had taken the first opportunity to progress, and in some cases the examination had been made tougher (that in arithmetic, especially). So generally the administration was not displeased with progress in ‘professionalising’ the Force. 14
In 1915, the literary and other academic subjects were handled satisfactorily, reflecting the administration’s happiness with the general intelligence of those joining - not to mention the men’s knowledge of the current wartime situation, given essay topics on ‘Submarine warfare’, ‘Machine-guns’, ‘A man’s (or woman’s) work in wartime’, ‘a letter to General Godley expressing your appreciation of the work of the New Zealand soldiers in the Dardenelles’. But this was not the case in the policing subjects. The accusation of aiming too high was reiterated, and in 1916 regulation 417 was altered to prevent constables and detectives sitting any but the sergeant examinations, while sergeants and detective sergeants became ineligible for the Sub-Inspector examinations.
A major cause of the decline in standards, however, was the demands made upon the men by the wartime situation. Before the war Herdman had acknowledged the truth of the recurring argument of Royal Commissioners, Police Commissioners and others that the Force had not been keeping up with the growth of settlement in new backblocks areas (e.g. around Ohakune, where the problem of order was compounded by ‘a very rough lot’ of navvies who required ‘constant and unremitting supervision’) and the increasing size of cities. This was despite a rise in police numbers from fewer than 500 at the time of Tunbridge’s arrival to 870 in 1914. Cullen had advised in 1913 that a hundred more were needed. Now many new duties were imposed by the war, at the very time when many of the ‘good men’ were leaving the Force to fight, or to take advantage of better opportunities elsewhere, factors which exacerbated the strain on the remaining men and left them no time for study of academic subjects or the theoretical side of policing.
There was another reason for some of the failures. When the system was introduced many police, especially older men, were distraught that it was now impossible to get promoted without passing the prerequisite examinations. This gave, they claimed, ‘an undue advantage’ to younger police, and ‘glib youngsters’ rather than tried and experienced men would now get the higher positions. The Maoriland Worker noted in 1914 that four Senior Sergeants, all with excellent reputations, had failed twice in succession; it argued that men who had been in the Force a certain length of time, or who had reached a certain rank, should not be subjected to examinations. The Minister reportedly stated in 1914 that no man with over 25 years’ experience should be asked to sit examinations.
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But the administration was determined to professionalise the Force, saw examinations as integral to this, and ignored such calls. 15
In mid November 1915 NCOs in various parts of New Zealand reported that they had spotted a five-page draft letter addressed to MPs which had clearly emanated from a police ‘combination’ centred in Wellington. The main grievance was the examination question, although a retirement age of 60 was also discussed. The letter pointed out that when parliament had regulated professions such as dentistry, accountancy and midwifery, provision had been made for ‘persons who had practised for years prior to the Acts coming into force’ to register without sitting examinations. If exceptions were made for some categories of ‘older’ people, why were they not made for all? ‘lt is unreasonable to expect from members of the Force who has from 15 to 25 years service and over, to study up Arithmetic, Fundamental rules, vulgar and decimal fractions, and common metric weights and measures, Geography and other various questions which are not in any way dealing with Police matters’. This argument ignored the poor results in the policing section of the examinations, but these too were no doubt due in part to the length of time since these men had sat examinations.
The would-be petitionists requested a change to regulation 417 to exempt constables with 15 years of good service in 1913 from sitting examinations for promotion, with the same provision for sergeants with 17 years of police service and Senior Sergeants with 20 years. This, they felt, ‘would create satisfaction amongst a very large majority of the Service’. Moreover, it would allow older men to be promoted out of the lower ranks, enabling their places to be filled by ‘men with more up to date methods in dealing with Police matters’. Although the combinationists remained clandestine, perhaps because of agitation within the PSA a few MPs were sympathetic to their cause. In May 1916, for example, an MP asked the Minister to make the syllabi of the examination course simpler in order to meet the problems of the police veterans. The Minister’s response was that it was crucial to have an examination system ‘to get the best educated policemen for the higher positions of the Force’, and ‘excellent facilities’ were provided for coaching. Good on-street policing alone was no longer adequate for advancement; it had to be complemented by the ability to express that knowledge coherently in writing, and supplemented by general academic development. Such men would be more suitable role models within the Force, and therefore for society as a whole; such men would have the nous to be able to introduce the new techniques and methodologies being developed overseas.
But the agitation continued. It would not have been so endemic had the police authorities been less inflexible. When Senior Sergeant Barrett Rutledge failed arithmetic alone in 1913, he noted that candidates for the Senior Civil Service or for solicitors’ examinations were credited with subjects passed; since his studies had been impeded by transfer to Auckland, why could this not be done in his case? When told by Cullen
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that the rules did not provide for this, he responded that he was asking for flexibility in the rules because, like many New Zealanders, ‘I had not the opportunity of a schooling in my young days’. Surely, he asked, 27 years of faithful service deserved some concessions. He got none, and nor did any of the other older men: if they failed three times, they were doomed forever to miss out on promotion, for they could not sit again.
This was tested in 1915 when Senior Sergeant S J Dew, who had achieved only 25 percent in arithmetic, submitted that his second failure in a row was due to the authorities’ insistence on him ‘trying to perform an impossible task at my time of life’. Older men found three days of examinations ‘an arduous test’; could he sit arithmetic by itself ‘before risking my last and only chance of further advancement’? But Cullen rejected the depiction of ‘oppressive’ regulations creating an ‘impossible barrier’. He had often gone on record as claiming that the examinations were not ‘hard’; that men ‘only of moderate abilities’ had passed even the Sub-Inspector examination at their first attempt; that the examinations were manageable by ‘any man of moderate abilities’. For him, clearly, the examinations were a bottom line below which the standards of NCOs and officers in a professionalising force could not go.
When Dew applied under section 25 of the 1913 Police Force Act for an enquiry into the consequences of the regulations for ‘elderly’ police, Cullen stood firm. Although the complainant had noted that men of his generation ‘had been led to believe that subject to general capability and good conduct there was no bar to promotion to the higher ranks’, such ideas were now an anachronism. ‘There is no use in ignoring the fact that Senior Sergeant Dew is not qualified for promotion to a higher rank’. The protesters got nowhere, not even with support from people like Ostler and W G Riddell, SM, who agreed that ‘excellent officers’ had ‘an almost insuperable barrier’ placed in their way by their ‘limited general education’. On the contrary, when arranging for the law papers in 1916 Cullen noted, without taking into account the extra burdens imposed upon police by the war, that the candidates had had several years to think about examinations. Not only was a ‘good standard’ of questions required, he declared, but also ‘the marking of the papers should be fairly hard’. Once again, that year’s results were ‘not very satisfactory’ and revealed a ‘very poor standard of knowledge’ of regulations and duties - although Senior Sergeant Dew proved Cullen wrong by passing the Sub-Inspector examination.
Given the utter inflexibility of the police administration, and the failure of informal combinations to alter the examination system, by 1917 the older men in particular were pressuring the PSA to act. Prompted especially by the Auckland and Wellington men, the Association formally requested that examinations not be a prerequisite for promotion for men who had joined before their introduction; and that those required to pass them should be able to sit them in sections. An alternative suggestion, one favoured by the Otago men, was to have the Police Force Act
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amended to give men a meaningful right of appeal against non-promotion. But PSA pressure was no more successful than informal pressure had been. Many older men remained disgruntled, and uniformed resentment of the detective branch grew - for it was the plain-clothes men, selected for the branch because of their ‘intelligence’ in the first place, who (at least proportionately) climbed the ladder of examination success (albeit one of the three policemen who failed three times was Chief Detective Frank Bishop). Both of those who passed the 1917 Senior Sergeant examinations were detective sergeants, while four of the 15 successful in the sergeant examination were detectives. ‘We deplore the regulations of 1913 in respect to examinations which brought scores of splendid New Zealand Policemen to a dead-end’, uniformed sergeants said bluntly in 1919. 15
Older men belonging to an earlier era and unable to fully adapt, then, saw their aspirations dashed by the policing requirements of a largely selfdisciplined and increasingly more sophisticated society. These requirements had produced a ‘higher’ standard of recruit by the time Cullen became Commissioner, although this was not always apparent. Tunbridge’s formula still applied. A typical applicant was strongly recommended by his local police for being ‘a strong, athletic fellow, fond of sport such as boxing and general athletics & has been chosen as a Southland Representative for competitions at different sports meetings’. This 21 year old ploughman was just what was wanted, an ‘empty head’ but one of higher intelligence and capacity than men accepted a decade or so before. All the same, it was not necessarily easy to fill such heads with the requisite knowledge and discipline. Cullen also advertised for recruits in Ireland, hoping to get rural lads who had already undergone strict training in the Royal Irish Constabulary.
There were endemic tensions in the Force between ‘the old Service men’ from British military and police units, and the colonials. The former, from their first days at the Depot, saw themselves as ‘a bit above’ the New Zealanders. Jack Garbutt wrote from the Depot in 1911 that ‘The Colonials have to take a back seat, they don’t take well to discipline and are too boastful & talkative by far to be any good either as soldiers or policemen. They fairly hate us out from Home.’ When four of his class were sought for work in the city several weeks before the formal end of training (thereby getting a pay rise over those who remained recruits per se ) they were selected by special examination. The successful men were all recent immigrants from Britain. ‘The Colonials are simply furious at the Home chaps cutting them out so clean.’ Garbutt was soon reporting ‘a colonial’ placed under him for fatigue duty for ‘insubordination & neglect of duty and he got 30 days confined to Barracks’. He and other British recruits hated the monotonous diet of meat at the Depot: ‘meat is no good but for brutes’. But fairly intelligent ‘brutes’ were still what the recruiters looked for in the New Zealand countryside. When on his
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application form in 1914 James Fleming put down as the ‘Cause of leaving’ his milling and farming jobs, ‘Thought to do better’, this was annotated ‘Good’ by the police selection authorities. A Depot report on the 6 foot 4 inch Irish farm labourer noted that the ‘big powerful young man’ was ‘slightly raw’, but the important thing was that he had the capacity to ‘develop’. 17
Requirements for entry continued to tighten up to the outbreak of war. When in 1913 an applicant who was not only a former policeman but had also been ‘camped with the Special Constables on the wharf’ applied for re-entry. Commissioner Cullen refused to waive the usual investigations into his suitability. When the following year he heard from the Western Australian police about an unsatisfactory former constable who might apply for entry to the New Zealand Police, he declared that any such bid would be unsuccessful; T have quite a number of his type in this Force already’. Enquiries about the antecedents of applicants were sent all over the world.
In 1913-14 Cullen was permitted to take on 80 extra constables, which helped numbers to catch up with the rapid population increase of the previous decade, especially in the north. Given natural attrition, this translated in practice into an increase from 683 constables in March 1913 to 707 a year later, and there were 748 by March 1915. Yet even with this large increase, the Commissioner could afford to be selective thanks to pay rates which he now felt compared ‘favourably with the earnings of the other workers’. He told an applicant in October 1914 that there were ‘so many eligible candidates already on the list’ of aspirants the man had little chance of being called to the Depot before he reached the age limit for entry of 30. That year the selectors turned down men with small deformities to their hands, or who suffered ‘slightly from varicose veins’. At the same time, Cullen waived Depot training requirements for two applicants with Royal Irish Constabulary experience. lB
Large numbers remained on the waiting list in the early period of the war, and so as men left, there were no problems replacing them - 77 new constables were recruited in 1915. As late as 1916 men were being rejected for being over age or unfit, for not being committed to policing, or for having no good reason for not having joined the New Zealand Expeditionary Force to fight overseas. Increased immigration, and Cullen’s eagerness to induct experienced overseas police, had reversed the previous trend towards New Zealand-bom police. But with private international travel now stymied, the proportion of New Zealand ‘natives’ being taken into the Dominion’s police again rose quickly; from little more than a third in 1912 to over half by 1915. The favourable recruiting situation did not last. In 1916, with manpower increasingly short in the Dominion, the waiting list of suitable recruits had been worked through. Few fit young men were now interested in joining, but the annual losses through dismissals, retirements and resignations (mostly to join the Expeditionary Force) had to be replaced. By May Herdman was experiencing
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‘considerable difficulty’ in doing this. 19
This was partly a self-induced problem, in aid of the war effort. In Herdman’s words, ‘the practice of discountenancing single men from applying for enrolment in the Force has been in operation for some time past, with the result that there are now scarcely any eligible police recruits offering. The effect of this will be that the Police Force will soon become so reduced in numbers that sufficient police to attend to regular police duties in the various centres will not be available.’ But this did not mean they would lower their recruiting standards to take in men not suitable as moral and patriotic exemplars; quite the contrary. Men who had married since May 1915, for example, would not be enrolled in case they had done so to avoid war service. Not surprisingly, the ‘scarcity of recruits’ did not lessen, and vacancies had to be left unfilled.
This put a greater burden on the men still in the Force, but they too were enjoined not to drop standards. In October 1916, for example, Cullen sent out by circular a complaint that the grounds of police stations were often ‘dilapidated and untidy’. Sole-charge constables and NCOs in charge of stations must ‘set an example of tidiness and cleanliness to the town or village’, he ordered. There would be ‘rewards’ for outstanding attention to duties, he reminded the staff. That same month Cullen made John McNamara one of three sergeants promoted to Senior Sergeant, thereby jumping him over others longer in the Force. This was in return for his ‘special services rendered in carrying out the duties of Instructor at the Training Depot’ since 1911, his training having remained rigorous despite the problems posed by wartime conditions. 20
But standards inevitably fell as a result of the fall-off in recruiting. In December 1916, the newly appointed Commissioner O’Donovan stopped recruiting any men liable for military service. That month the lack of recruits caused him to close down the Training Depot. There was now ‘a considerable diminution in the membership of the Force’, which fell from 916 to 898 men during the year to March 1917. One possible solution was the mass swearing-in of specials, as had been done in London, but O’Donovan baulked at using ‘amateur’ police, given the lessons of the recent past. An alternative was provided by section 32 of the War Legislation Amendment Act, passed on 7 August 1916. Under it the Police could now appoint as ‘Regular Constables (Temporary)’ men who did not meet the normal entrance standards. Those sworn in under the relaxed rules would serve a probation period of three months, with instruction mostly on the job but including some classes run by sergeants and Chief Detective Mcllveney. They would be taken into the regular Force if found to be suitable. Men who had previously been rejected were now allowed to apply again. Former policemen who had served in the Expeditionary Force but left it for health reasons could rejoin the Police. In December 1916 Maurice Ryan did so after being invalided home from Egypt with typhoid, although his pay was set at the level of a new constable’s.
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Cullen had not made too much use of such provisions, being wary about any relaxation of standards. But the drying up of regular recruits, exacerbated by his ‘patriotic’ gesture of December 1916, meant that O’Donovan could not afford to be so selective; he could allow a lower staff ceiling, but could not countenance the Force continuing to diminish in size. One of the main centres now had only three police on night duty. In early February 1917 he decided to take full advantage of the War Legislation Amendment Act. Over-age men, or men normally deemed unsuitable for a variety of reasons (poor health, or insufficient height), would from now on routinely be appointed as temporary police. These ‘temporary regular constables’ would receive the same pay and allowances as ordinary regulars, but would have no superannuation rights. Despite initial trepidation, O’Donovan later felt that the untrained recruits had ‘generally given satisfaction’, although even with such relaxed entrance standards there were still not always enough adequate men available. 21
Officers in charge of districts were to seek out suitable candidates. These men were to be clearly told that they could not necessarily become permanent regulars, and that their contracts could be terminated at any time. ‘ln cases of men who have had no previous police experience, it will probably be necessary to employ them on duties where they will be under the immediate supervision of regular members of the Force and will not be called upon to act on their own initiative in enforcing the law.’ The ‘section 32’ temporary constables were in effect considered auxiliaries, and once their employment situation was regularised by O’Donovan they were given a separate numbering system. No. 1 on the list was Robert Smith, appointed on 13 February 1917, a former Australian policeman. Despite a Dominion-wide advertising campaign, many of these men were well over age. One temporary was 67, two were 65, another 13 were 45 or older. Some regular police who retired - beginning with Whangaroa’s Constable Patrick Carmody in June 1917 - were immediately reswom as section 32 police. 22
During 1917, 61 temporary appointments were made, followed by a similar number the following year. This system of recruiting direct to beat life became entrenched after the war pending the renewal of Depot training in 1921, and was incorporated in the 1919 Police Force Amendment Act. By far the most common employment background for the section 32 men was labouring, and most were married men (only seven of the first 61 were single). Those who did well in the Force were transferred to the permanent staff; Smith was transferred within a year. Of the 412 temporary constables appointed between 1917 and 1921 inclusive, 264 gained permanent positions. Many of these did not meet the desired qualities of the new breed of bureaucratic constables. But the job had to be done, one way or another. Professional policemen, or men with the capacity to become professional policemen, were the most highly desired - but in their absence, an inadequate constable was, for the state, infinitely better than no constable. 23
CHAPTER 22
War ‘Excitement’, War Duties
The industrial struggles of 1912-13, and New Zealand’s participation in the Great War, heightened police consciousness of the need to impose officially-sanctioned codes of behaviour upon the recalcitrant, particularly now that these events had greatly enlarged the potential and actual numbers of people seen to require tighter controlling. During the war, for example, the need to restrain drinking loomed even larger than previously as a concern for the police. It had of course never been easy to control what was seen as excessive liquor consumption in New Zealand. So widespread was the popular tolerance of it, notwithstanding the strength of the prohibition movement, that in 1912 a Napier jury, against the judge’s advice, found a Norsewood man not guilty of murder (he had kicked his wife to death) on the grounds that he had been intoxicated.
John Cullen had always been assiduous in following up complaints from temperance campaigners and their allies, and he had been renowned for demanding rigorous explanations when there were allegations that the police were being soft on certain hotels. The major enforcement problem during Cullen’s Commissionership, then, was not so much laxity in administration but - that long-standing complaint of successive Commissioners - the complex and chaotic state of the liquor laws. Despite earlier rationalisations, these remained so Byzantine that some police made their reputations by mastering their intricacies - D J Cummings, for example, who later rose to Commissioner. All the same, the pressure had come off politicians and police to some extent following 1910 legislation providing for a regular national poll on prohibition; temperance campaigners now refocused their energies on trying to win the requisite three-fifths majority. 24
The outbreak of the First World War gave a new slant to the ‘drink problem’. Large-scale consumption of alcohol was seen as inimical to the war effort, particularly when indulged in by youthful soldiers. Cullen’s men now gave extra attention to the ‘problem’, and it was as a result of his representations about the difficulties of legal enforcement that special measures were eventually taken: 1916’s War Regulations Amendment Act included provision for the better regulation of the liquor trade, such as extended police powers to prevent slygrog selling, particularly near military camps. Soon the ‘illicit traffic’ in liquor had reportedly ‘been practically effaced’. War Regulations of August 1916 banned women
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from pubs after 6 pm (partly to stop prostitution) and outlawed the common New Zealand male drinking habit of ‘treating’ or ‘shouting’, whereby each member of a drinking circle bought a round of drinks in turn. Apart from suppressing undesirable activities in general, these measures were designed to stop young soldiers and war workers becoming addicted to drink through being ‘shouted’, or being ‘contaminated’ by prostitutes while in a state of intoxication.
Such methods of repressing excessive imbibing risked a public backlash, and so their introduction was carefully regulated and closely monitored by Commissioner Cullen and his successor, and through them by the Minister. New suppressive measures were to be fully enforced only ‘as soon as the public have had a reasonable opportunity of being acquainted with their provisions’. By December 1916 the public had acclimatised to the anti-treating regulations, which were regarded as a successful experiment. The Minister directed their vigorous enforcement: all offenders from now on were to be prosecuted, and magistrates ‘usually imposed heavy penalties’. ‘Police officers in charge of districts are almost unanimous in attributing the decrease of drunkenness chiefly to the operation of these regulations’, although the departure of many men to the war also contributed.
Eventually, regulations which imposed even more Draconian antidrinking measures were promulgated. For some time the Police had been investigating the possibility of restricting drinking hours, especially because of continuing drunkenness amongst would-be and returned soldiers. The temperance movement had also urged this, arguing on grounds that received widespread support: alcohol depressed the productivity rate, weakened the moral fibre and damaged the war effort in other ways. Police had been impressed by the wartime introduction to some Australian states of measures requiring all pubs to close at 6 pm, and had sought information from the authorities in New South Wales: had this led to a decrease in drunkenness, had the regulations been offset by widespread evasions of the law, was early closing easily enforceable? A favourable response led to the instituting on 1 December 1917 of 6 o’clock closing in New Zealand, a wartime ‘emergency’ measure that was to last half a century. Later in the war, anti-treating and other restrictive measures were tightened even further. 25
The policing of laws which curtailed one of New Zealanders’ most popular pastimes was no easy task. ‘The police experience very great difficulties in administering the laws passed by Parliament to lessen the amount of drinking in the Dominion during the war’, the Minister noted early in 1917. Indeed, police had at first been loath to administer such regulations, especially (despite the Minister’s directives) the anti-treating rules, for fear of provoking the opposition of ‘decent’ drinking people. Country police, in particular, found it difficult to enforce the rules in communities which were becoming increasingly tight-knit as transience and other factors inhibiting stability declined. This problem was the
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greater because there were now even fewer transfers of policemen. Exhortations to properly enforce the liquor laws dotted the policing landscape during this period. On the West Coast, in particular, 6 o’clock closing was ‘neither accepted nor complied with’. 26
It was particularly difficult to curb Maori drinking, given the remoteness of much of the Maori population. Although it might be thought that this problem could have little, if any, effect on the war effort, a kind of domino theory was put forward: if rural Maori continued to succumb to the debilitating effects of excessive alcohol, rural pakeha would follow, and then urban pakeha. In 1916 a sergeant was transferred from Auckland’s Queen Street wharf station to Tokomaru Bay ‘in order to cope with the excessive drinking and illicit dealing in liquor which is going on among the Maoris along the East Coast’. To his north, the ‘liquor problem’ took up most of the time and energy of the Te Araroa and Tuparoa police. In isolated areas with ‘meagre’ communications, Herdman noted, ‘Practically no assistance is given either by Natives or Europeans in the detection of offences of this nature, and the police have to depend almost wholly upon their own exertions.’ Maori were particularly resistant to liquor laws because, as Rua Kenana and others frequently pointed out, these differentiated between Maori and pakeha. It was, for example, illegal to supply liquor to any female Maori not married to a European (unless it was prescribed by a doctor); or to ‘an intoxicated male Native’; or to any Maori for other than consumption on the premises; or for anyone to take liquor into any Maori village. 27
Equally inimical to the war effort, in the eyes of the authorities, were the related problems of prostitution and venereal disease. From 1912, ‘one-woman brothels’ - now generally untouchable by the law - had been noticeably on the increase in the big cities. Even before the war brought the ‘moral laxity’ traditionally associated with the displacement of large numbers of young men from their families and usual leisure-time pursuits, Wellington’s Superintendent Ellison had written that ‘unless it is possible to amend the law so as to keep immoral, diseased, women under some restraint the nuisance will shortly be worse than Bubonic Plague and Smallpox together.’ There were 19 known one-woman brothels in Auckland, concentrated in Grey Street, where 10 or 15 men would wait outside for their turn with ‘Fanny de Nigro’, ‘Sydney Mag’ and the like. Officers were in despair over how to prevent ‘common harlots’ practising their trade from ‘the usual soft-drink and confectionery shop’, pastrycook or dressmaking businesses. When young Robin Hyde and a group of other children went into a Grey Street shop to ask for one of the few dusty boxes of chocolates in the window, the ‘shopkeeper’ snarled: ‘Yer little devils, gwan out o’ this.... Yer know bloody well them’s dummies!’ The fact that most of these brothels did not threaten ‘disorder’, that their operators were ‘as a rule sober, quiet, and as far as external appearance go might be mistaken for respectable citizens of good class’, made suppression more difficult.
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Constables generally applied time-honoured techniques of pressure only on disorderly (‘bawdy’) houses or when prostitutes strayed outside red-light areas. In 1913 Ellison noted that ‘the Mount Cook Police can without difficulty find a means of removing’ prostitutes from a locality. One such technique was to place a uniformed constable on a ‘short beat’ to and fro in front of brothels, or even at the door of such an establishment. ‘Let the Constable have a lamp and turn it on every customer who goes in the door. By taking the names of a few of the men going there would soon cause an empty house.’ Alternatively, the police could frequently persuade landlords to evict prostitutes. But attempts to stamp out brothels worked only in the short term. When Constable Edward Favell was posted between 9 and 12 pm outside Mildred Pilcher’s Wellington confectionery shop for four days, the prostitute simply moved to new premises. Pressure, then, was generally only applied in unusual circumstances, such as when a prostitute seemed to be developing a larger business - by setting up another woman in a subsidiary one-woman brothel, for example. In the latter case the police could then set up watch and swoop as soon as one of the prostitutes visited the other. 28
Cullen was not satisfied with any such policy of partial intervention. During the 1913 strike he saw life in Wellington’s demi-monde at first hand, and realised ‘that prostitutes and their bludgers are allowed to live in the Te Aro end of the City with very little interference from the Police’. He now instructed the men to ‘enter upon a systematic and continuous crusade’ against prostitutes and their clients. If this failed to bring quick results, the local sergeants would be ‘transferred to less important positions in the Service’. Cullen and other senior officers were particularly concerned at the visible presence of women plying their trade in the streets - women, moreover, who were believed to be most likely to spread disease. Despite police concerns, however, because prostitution was confined to a few specific areas of the cities and large towns ‘it has not been found necessary to legislate specially against the evil’. Anti-vagrancy laws were normally used to send such ‘lumpen’ prostitutes to gaol. 29
The 1914 murder of an Auckland prostitute, Mrs Frances Marshall, focused attention on the differing police perceptions of one-woman brothels and the more low-life ‘street-walking class’. The victim was stabbed savagely in an alley-way after a sexual transaction. The Commissioner, and others, speculated (wrongly, as it turned out) that Mrs Marshall might have been the victim of a revenge killing by a man whom she had infected with a venereal disease. In any event, the prostitute was viewed with such disfavour by the police authorities that when initial enquiries into her death came to naught Cullen refused to offer a reward. The Auckland police presumed that the murder must have been ‘the work of some fanatic or epileptic’, and quickly pigeon-holed the case. 30
During some of the moral panics produced by the war, not only were street-walkers,‘real’ brothels and disorderly houses targeted, but one-
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woman brothels were also seen to require much greater attention. In particular, VD rates amongst the soldiery were alarming the authorities. Superintendent Ellison railed at ‘avaricious money-making harlots ... at liberty to contaminate the nation from end to end.... One need not wonder at the number of young people wearing glasses, artificial teeth, and other evidences of constitutional weakness when female vultures are able to fatten and become wealthy while they disseminate disease in a wholesale manner.’ In 1915, the Commissioner assessed that it was timely to amend the 1908 legislation to enable the suppression of onewoman brothels. There were other calls for the reintroduction of contagious diseases legislation. But legislative change was not yet forthcoming, and so police helped city authorities - particularly those of the main centres of prostitution, Auckland and Wellington - to pass suitable bylaws. ‘Auckland to be Purged and Cleaned’, trumpeted Truth in February 1916 after the first successful prosecution under a new city bylaw which prohibited the running of ‘any brothel or disorderly house, or house of ill-fame’. Prostitute Catherine Hughes’ defence counsel had argued that she had breached only ‘moral law’. The City Solicitor however argued that the Council had power to pass anti-brothel bylaws on public health grounds as part of its task of ensuring the ‘good rule and government of the borough’.
F V Frazer SM interpreted the bylaw’s phrase ‘house of ill-fame’ as encompassing one-woman brothels, and amid much sensation Hughes (who was not short of means, having £329 to her name) was fined £lO and 30s costs. Sub-Inspector Mcllveney announced that now the bylaw had been validated by the courts, the police would leave no stone unturned to clear the city of such houses. Army authorities cooperated wholeheartedly, passing on any information they could glean from VD-infected soldiers or their mates. Measures might include prosecuting the owners rather than the operators. In the event, bylaws were supplemented by War Regulations, those of August 1916 giving the police more secure powers to suppress brothels, particularly one-woman brothels. This, and a wartime relaxation of morals among ‘new women’ which allowed men to rely less on prostitutes, led to a great decline in prostitution. By March 1917 ‘houses of ill fame’ (including the ‘one-woman-brothel pest’) were officially ‘reported to be non-existent in the Dominion’, although this was undoubtedly an exaggeration. 31
The role of policemen as moral exemplars had been evolving over decades, generally in line with changes in public mores. Police behavioural patterns were ideally slightly ahead of those of the rest of the community, to be emulated by the right-thinking populace. During the First World War this role became much harder to perform. The conditions of a society geared to war were seen to induce ‘moral laxity’. Young men uprooted from stable rural environments were thrown together in military barracks with city youths, who were believed to teach them ‘bad habits’;
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young women and girls were thought to be tempted by the lure of young manhood in uniforms to throw off all virtue; returning soldiers allegedly introduced degradation and disease to New Zealand womanhood. More and more people behaved as the police did not (or should not) behave.
A stable society was viewed as a wholesome society; movement and turmoil were seen to bring undesirable characteristics to the fore, to necessitate greater control by the authorities. The long-term evolution of public mores now suffered a temporary setback. The police were not supposed to step back in line with this trend; they were to remain faithful to the exemplary code of behaviour expected of them before the war, and also continue to model for and impose the same ‘acceptable’ standards of behaviour upon those tempted to transgress. They thus became, as a wartime tactic, more overtly instrumental socio-moral agents of the state.
In 1916 a 17 year old daughter of ‘respectable’ parents refused to heed Sub-Inspector Mcllveney’s advice about liaising with a married Auckland taxi-driver. The ‘ruined’ teenager was hauled before the court: ‘in her own interests the charge of vagrancy was laid against her’. Since she was penitent, the police requested an adjournment in order to place her in the care of a probation officer. Reverend F R Jeffreys. Police and relatives of doomed young women often sought his help to save ‘girls which the Queen Street Friday and Saturday nights’ parade had ruined’. The magistrate, Frazer, suggested that the culprit’s father give the taxidriver ‘a good hiding’, at which Mcllveney pointed out that had he not intervened the father would have ‘pounded him to jelly before now’. Frazer acknowledged that it was not actually illegal to have sex with young women aged 16 and over, but that ‘if somebody tarred and feathered him or gave him a good hiding I doubt if much would be done. At any rate no harm would be done by promising him a hiding that he would remember for the rest of his days’ if he did not end the romance. To supplement their role as guardians of the virtues of girls and young women, the police intensified their rooting out of all potentially undesirable influences. They patrolled bookshops, for example, in order to suppress ‘indecent’ literature, such as Eugene Brieux’s play Damaged Goods. Such material was believed to have a ‘demoralising tendency’ on the nation in a time of crisis. 32
Not only did civil unrest and wartime conditions bring the police extra ‘public morality’ work, they also gave them the chance to regulate matters which had long concerned them. Cullen, in particular, took the opportunity to extend the moral crusades on which he had embarked long before. He told the Minister in 1913, for example, that it would be ‘highly undesirable’ to allow the reintroduction of ‘professionalism’ in boxing, which was being strongly advocated in some quarters. In Sydney, where professional boxing was allowed, ‘the Police appear to have much less control over such matters than we have here’. Much better to retain the status quo (since 1908), whereby clubs or associations had to be approved by the Govemor-in-Council (on police advice), and the officer
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in charge of each police district had to approve a permit for each match. Professionalism would be a vehicle for importing overseas crime. In support of his argument, Cullen cited the applicant B Doyle, ‘a rather shady character from South Africa’; it would be ‘a gain to Auckland to be rid of his presence during Exhibition time’. Doyle’s efforts were crushed. When the Rotorua Boxing Association applied for registration in 1914, police investigations revealed that the organisers were not fit and proper persons. Throughout the war, boxing - despite much pressure for deregulation - remained strictly regulated and non-professional. 33
Many police wartime duties involved controlling dissent, or anything perceived to be ‘unpatriotic’ and thereby damaging to the war effort. This too was a continuation (albeit highly intensified) of pre-war preoccupations. As the militarist mood of the Dominion heightened in response to international events, so too did a fledgling ‘peace movement’, opposed to the compulsory military training set in place by the 1909 legislation, make itself felt ever more keenly. Pacifists were supported by leftists and civil libertarians who saw that one of the objects of the new Territorial Army was to discipline the minds and bodies of ‘Young men who stand at street comers and jeer at volunteers as they pass by’. Its first full year of operation was 1912, and when Senior Cadets paraded in various parts of the country they were taunted and berated by large numbers of anti-militarists. At first the police were ordered to use ‘civility, tact & judgement’ in order not to provoke widespread physical confrontation with the protesters. They were merely to keep them apart from the paraders and their supporters, and take names in case prosecution was later decided on.
But by 1913, reflecting the views of the political authorities, the police were becoming less accommodating to protest, particularly in Christchurch where it was at its greatest. That March the National Peace Council’s passive resistance meetings came under particular scrutiny. Every Saturday night huge crowds gathered at Christchurch’s clock tower to hear anti-militarist speakers, and there were clashes as police tried to arrest those using ‘seditious’ language. ‘As the cranks and roughs and faddists of Christchurch appear to be intent on setting the law at defiance, there appears to be great need of drastic action by the Police who should prosecute every person who creates disorder in the public streets’, Cullen instructed Kiely. The Minister of Justice had spoken to the Commissioner twice about stopping such activity, which he deemed a ‘disgrace’. 34
When the National Peace Council complained of disorderly conduct by uniformed Territorial soldiers at resisters’ meetings, the police considered that their singing and other disruptive activities were doing no harm. Meanwhile the Defence authorities had demanded that opposition from military-aged men should be vigorously suppressed. Police had to round up non-registrants, and defaulters who had failed to turn up for compulsory parades. In 1912-13 there were thousands of convictions for
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breaches of this law, and 259 men were gaoled for matters such as refusing to pay their fines. Cooperation between Police and Defence grew increasingly close, and a division of labour on the monitoring of protests and on military regulatory matters arose as a result. In February 1914, for example, the Police agreed to provide the military with the names and addresses of all males eligible for military training who had been convicted of crimes or were of ‘notoriously bad character’. In June, rolls of untraced persons liable for military service were distributed to all police stations, with a 10s reward for procuring the conviction of any ‘genuine defaulter’ (i.e. not just a person who could not be found for reasons such as transience). 35
When war was declared on 4 August 1914, the police moved quickly to control potential and actual disaffection and pro-enemy activity. All police leave was cancelled in case ‘disturbances’ broke out. Commissioner Cullen telegraphed around the Dominion that known Austrian and German reservists were to be prevented from leaving, ‘by using force if necessary’, and suspect ones were to be detained. All Germans and Austrians were to report at once to police, and their movement was restricted to a 20 mile radius unless they were permitted otherwise. Such requirements were soon extended to other nationalities. ‘Please suppress without delay any attempted demonstrations by foreigners of any nationality as such demonstrations, if held, may lead to serious disturbances of the peace.’ The partnership with the Defence authorities was consolidated. Soon police were registering and supervising all non-naturalised enemy subjects, carrying out various enquiries on behalf of the military authorities, reporting on persons applying for passports, helping identify ‘undesirables’ who had enrolled in the Expeditionary Force, and so on. The amount of time spent on such activities stretched the Police Force, particularly when public order problems also loomed large. When in October ‘enormous crowds’ converged on Wellington to see off the first Expeditionary Force to travel to the battlefields, police from ‘up country stations’ were drafted in to keep control. 36
When two Maori soldiers from Narrow Neck camp in Auckland were arrested for a minor misdemeanour, some 40 of their comrades converged on the police station. They were warded off with fists and batons, ‘fell like ninepins, and soon retreated’. Police had also to control ‘patriotic’ crowds attacking the business premises of people with Germanic names, or the homes of foreigners. There was drunken and riotous behaviour by returned servicemen, and men on leave from their camps, to contend with. Attempted arrests of drunken servicemen would spark off largescale brawls. Wellington’s Sergeant Lott O’Halloran needed ‘a few days in bed to recover’ from some of ‘these little encounters’. Such behaviour was so bad in Christchurch in December 1915 that the local police were supplemented on Colonel Chaffey’s orders by the designation of six artillerymen, headed by a Bombardier, as military police (there being no
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nearby camp, and hence no regular military police). By April 1917 there were 15 permanent military police in the city to control soldiers. Auckland and Dunedin also had military police details, whose numbers increased as the regular police became more stretched and more soldiers returned from overseas, and they were required to supplement the police in such matters as looking for deserters. 37
From 25 August 1915 all men had to register information about themselves and their willingness to serve in the armed forces. The police had to enforce enrolment on this ‘National Register’, in the face of a great deal of civil libertarian and other resistance. Under the War Regulations of 15 November 1915 no male aged over 18 could leave New Zealand without a permit. Prior to the departure of all steamers for overseas, a sergeant, detective and two constables would go aboard, line up all adult male passengers, and inspect their permits. Anyone suspected of being an ‘alien enemy’, whether naturalised or not, could be detained at the pleasure of the authorities.
Constables hunted out ‘foreigners’ who might be working in ‘sensitive’ positions, particularly German subjects alleged to have definite pro‘Fatherland’ views. These ‘must naturally have strong feelings against the British’, and so it was expected that those working on - for example - the wharves would be sacked. This was seen as fair, since ‘Britishers under German control will not be shown much consideration by German authorities’. Suspicious-looking persons - such as a man with a ‘fierce and dark’ moustache who was about to board a train carrying troops - were interrogated. Surveillance files on Germans and alleged spy activities (e.g. a supposed 1913 plan to destroy HMS New Zealand, which had led to a police guard at each port) going back many years were resuscitated. Police investigated reports from the public of espionage activities, including an allegation that Wellington university professor George von Zedlitz was signalling messages from his Lower Hutt home to waterborne compatriots. On arrival they found not a signal lamp but the remains of a fire in which garden refuse had been burnt. (Von Zedlitz was later forced from his teaching post by the Alien Enemy Teachers Act 1915, which was passed specifically for this purpose.) 38
There were many such false alarms, and with a dearth of spies to catch, a number of critical ‘patriotic’ voices complained about police inefficacy. From time to time the politicians reminded the police of the importance of in-depth surveillance in wartime. This was particularly the case in the critical years of 1916 and 1917, when the allied cause was at its ebb and popular pressure on the government was all the more insistent. In February 1916 the Police were told by Herdman that it was ‘of greatest importance’ that they ‘watch closely the movements and business transactions’ of enemy nationals or ‘their agents’. The best information that Cullen could find that month was about the naturalised New Zealander Dr T Erdletsberger, who was said to be not only associated with ‘the most pronounced pro-Germans about Auckland’ but also to be ‘continually
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boasting about the number of British women he has seduced in New Zealand. He is evidently a man who should be at home among his brother Huns in Belgium’, and needed to be closely monitored. 39
Reminders to police from Ministers and the Commissioner about their surveillance responsibilities often came at the prompting of the Defence authorities, who tended to see the police as rather soft on potential fifth-columnists. In 1916 they complained that ‘in many instances the police have reported favourably upon the loyalty of men of alien enemy parentage who have joined reinforcements, and that many of these men have subsequently been found to harbour strong enemy sentiments and therefore have had to be turned out of camp’. The Commissioner rebuked his men for the ‘very grave neglect of duty’ of failing to make ‘the most exhaustive enquiries respecting the loyalty of the parents, relatives and associates of men of alien enemy parentage or descent who join the reinforcements, as well as the loyalty of the men themselves’. Indeed, if any such man was ‘enabled to get away with any reinforcement on account of a favourable police report and it is subsequently found that he harbours sentiments favourable to the enemy, the policeman who reported favourably will be dismissed.’ There should be no favourable report where there was ‘the least doubt’ about the man or those he associated with.
Police were often distressed at having to intern or restrict the rights of people they knew to be perfectly ‘patriotic’. One reminisced that it was ‘repulsive’ for him to arrest men he had worked with and knew to be ‘decent’. Charleston’s Constable Allan was instructed to arrest a ‘most loyal fellow’, a German shipwrecked years before who had become a ‘good citizen’ and family man. He refused, the community backed him up, and the authorities relented. In the event, however, hundreds of ‘enemy aliens’ were interned on Somes and Motuihe Islands and at Devonport, in an atmosphere in which even Herdman, believed to be of ‘German extraction’, came under suspicion. In 1917 the Auckland police were forced to sack their cook because his Swiss parents had been naturalised as Austrians. The ‘German’ community in the Motueka area, which had been there since the 1840s, was investigated. 40
The police were also particularly enjoined to ensure that leftists and pacifists did not hinder the war effort. War Regulations of 19 July 1915 made it an offence to make statements likely to interfere with recruiting, training or discipline in the forces. The initial enthusiasm for volunteering for war was receding, and conscription into the Expeditionary Force was increasingly on the agenda, especially after a ‘recruiting crisis’ that September. A decision to introduce conscription was however delayed because the authorities feared massive opposition from the powerful libertarian strand in the prevailing ideology, from religious objectors, and particularly from the labour movement. Elements of labour opposed any form of conscription to capitalist interests, while the broad labour
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movement opposed conscription of labour unless it was accompanied by the (highly unlikely) conscription of wealth.
Police Superintendents were from September 1915 instructed to monitor the activities of the trade union leadership, it now being illegal to ‘express any seditious intention’, and from October public meetings could be banned. Meanwhile the government put strong moral pressure on eligible young men to join up, and although enough came forward for Cabinet and the police to generally tolerate ‘moderate’ labour movement rhetoric, it was alarmed at the results of the National Register of manpower: of the 187,593 male respondents aged 19—45, only 58.5 percent were prepared to volunteer for a combat role (with another 23.2 percent being prepared to serve in a civil capacity). There were public order implications. Pro-conscriptionists increased the pressure, particularly after a Conscription Bill was introduced in the British parliament in early 1916. Anti-conscriptionist forces also organised, and the police feared industrial sabotage if conscription was introduced. In March 1916, Massey announced what was perceived as a compromise: he would introduce in May a bill that would enable conscription to be implemented if necessary. The resulting draft legislation permitted conscription by ballot for men in areas where there were shortages of volunteers. Its permissive nature did not alter the fact that it was designed by the authorities as ‘a guarantee that our Force would be maintained at full strength if at any time the voluntary system proved insufficient’.
So hostile was its reception that the military feared a general strike in opposition. Adela Pankhurst attracted big audiences on a Dominionwide anti-conscription speaking tour sponsored by the labour movement. Customs officers worked with police to confiscate material supportive of resistance - even down to peace badges. But the fact that the Military Service Act (operative from 1 August) was permissive, that conscription would be introduced gradually and partially, did defuse widespread disobedience, as did the fact that the members of the most militantly antimilitarist unions (miners, seamen, wharfies) were exempted from being called up because of their essential contribution to the war economy. So although the imposition of martial law had been contemplated, it was not necessary. Police now spent a lot of time checking off lists of men apparently coming within the scope of the Act, distributing posters to hotels, clubs and the like regarding the obligations of reservists, and tracking down ‘defaulters’ who failed to register under its provisions.
Inciting disaffection, disorder or class hostility, interfering in recruiting or the production and transport of essential goods, and discouraging the prosecution of the war to ‘a victorious conclusion’ all became defined as ‘seditious’. Once balloting began on 16 November 1916, various regulations were used vigorously to suppress the anti-conscription forces, especially labour movement leaders. The situation grew tense with a West Coast miners’ strike which embraced anti-militarist causes, and
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with the arrest and gaoling of labour leaders. But while the police continued to crack down on dissenters for the rest of the war, the expected major crisis never occurred. From mid 1917, a resigned acceptance of the inevitability of conscription set in. Protest increasingly centred instead on the rising cost of living at a time when capitalists were profiting from the war.
By the time of O’Donovan’s accession to the Commissionership, large numbers of defaulters under the Military Service Act who had already been traced were about to be arrested, and the police were actively hunting down unregistered men. They were seen as so repressive a controlling authority in some circles that the Minister was moved to comment that ‘it is probable that young men would resent being approached by a policeman with a view to inducing them to enlist in the Expeditionary Forces’. By 1917 ‘police raids’ in search of the thousands of ‘shirkers’ were occurring at picture shows, billiard rooms, racecourses and so forth in (especially) the four cities as well as in the haven for the ‘lawless’, the West Coast. Solicitor-General J Salmond talked of the police as being ‘closely analogous to a military force’. To help remove such fears, police were now obliged to telegraph to Wellington to obtain arrest warrants for suspected defaulters. This created delays which led to escapes. 41
The lengths to which the authorities were prepared to go can be seen in the state’s attitude to the National Freedom League, which had been formed to oppose the introduction of compulsory military service. The League had moved very cautiously. One of its forms enabled registrants under the National Registration Act 1915 to notify the authorities that on conscientious grounds they could not take a military oath or help produce materials designed to take life. The form was ‘to satisfy the scruples of some of the members of the more extreme school who were contemplating refusing to sign the National Register’, an illegal act. But the NFL’s actions were themselves seen as too extreme by the authorities. A conviction over the distributed form was sought, secured, and upheld on appeal, on the grounds that it would have ‘a marked tendency to interfere with recruiting’, especially among men who were ‘chronically in a vacillating mood’.
With the anti-conscriptionists generally defeated, the police were able to concentrate more on the search for military ‘defaulters’ and those who had deserted from the forces once called up. Men failing to provide satisfactory information about themselves were subject to arrest. By the end of August 1917, when only 10 percent of eligible men had been balloted, 5505 men had not responded to call-up and 3054 of these had yet to be located. By that November, 102 objectors were doing hard labour in prisons or prison camps, and men had even been forcibly sent overseas to the front. By the end of the war there had been 208 convictions for seditious or disloyal activities under the War Regulations, and 71 of these offenders had been sentenced to gaol terms.
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Many defaulters and deserters hid in the countryside, or were smuggled into the West Coast (where miners left food for them in the hills) or out of New Zealand altogether. Those resisters who had never registered were the hardest to find. Only a small proportion of the 3500 to 5000 such men were located, despite a concerted police effort from mid 1917, when all the registration cards had finally been issued to known eligible men. Perhaps a third of all those who had evaded military service were ever found. The burden had fallen mostly on the police, rather than on the Defence Department, and given the wartime shortage of experienced policemen, it is perhaps surprising that so many were located. 42
Maori had not been included in the ballots because of principled opposition to conscription by the ‘pakeha state’ from key tribal groupings, especially those which had suffered land confiscation and the Urewera tribes. Once opposition to conscription from the labour movement had largely dissipated, the government could take a stand against this. In March 1917 Maori land districts were readied for participation, and in June James Allen (Acting Prime Minister during the lengthy absence in the United Kingdom of Massey and Ward) announced that some or all North Island Maori would be subject to conscription. The police geared themselves to enforcing registration and call-up in the Waikato, King County, Taranaki and Urewera, with the aim of ‘breaking down the anticonscription movement’.
Meanwhile, scrutiny of all matters pertaining to the war effort had continued on every level, more than compensating for the lessening of criminal and ‘public order’ work resulting from the departure overseas of huge numbers of men. The police sought out publications and circulars allegedly damaging to the war effort, acting as censoring agents when necessary. Such was the case with Direct Action, the journal of the Sydney Wobblies, suppressed in New Zealand in September 1915. At the end of that year, police in the main centres were asked - with a view to suppression - to check if bookshops were selling a pamphlet by Harry Urquhart called Christianity and War, printed by the New Zealand Worker Newspaper Company. Since none of the alleged pro-Germans in the country (most of whom existed only in imaginations anyway) circulated publications, the brunt fell upon the political left, although books which might help the enemy ( Fleets of the World, Jane's Fighting Ships) were also suppressed.
The police were ordered to spy on unions, partly because of the close links between militant unionism and anti-conscription activities, and also because the ‘socialist virus’ was considered to be a danger to the body politic. In 1916 the Wellington police investigated a man of ‘a foreign appearance’ who was ‘claiming’ to be from Louisiania. ‘From his conversation it is apparent that he is an extreme Socialist’. His antecedents in Melbourne, where he had been a grocer, were enquired into. Much information on such alleged subversives was exchanged across the Tasman. In 1917 the Police Gazette had a photograph of an
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Italian who was a ‘dangerous Anarchist’ believed to be in Australasia. In September 1917 an officer was detailed to ‘assist the Naval Adviser’s staff in the supervision of wharves and shipping’, particularly to superintend searches for ‘subversive’ men and literature. 43
After a time, some degree of police discretion in the control of people who were suspect by dint of their ethnic origins was allowed. The German-Polish residents of Ratapiko in Taranaki, for example, were relieved of having to report weekly to the Inglewood police since they had been in New Zealand since childhood, had intermarried with New Zealanders, and were not thought likely to leave the district. But even these people still needed permission to travel more than 20 miles from home, and an innocent application to go to a race meeting could be refused. Police were ‘still looking sharply’ at all ‘alien enemies’, naturalised or not. 44
Discretion was increasingly used over ‘peace movement’ activities as well. When a Manawatu man complained that local flax mills displayed anti-conscription posters, the police pointed out that these were just normal left-wing publicity material of the type freely available in the Maoriland Worker. When ‘seditious’ or ‘disloyal’ statements in contravention of the regulations of 1915-16 were made in arguments in pubs, workshops and so forth, the local police officers in charge were allowed to use their discretion as to whether to prosecute. However, police remained tough on anti-conscriptionists who urged active resistance; the leaflet Conscription: The Workers’ Hell - Who Shall Escape? was branded ‘seditious’ and assiduously hunted down early in 1917. That year West Coast police were told that because anti-conscriptionist miners had allegedly been securing arms and ammunition ‘in considerable quantities’ since the convictions of their comrades after a late 1916 round-up, they should conduct in-depth surveillance in the region, e.g. by scrutinising firearms permits, ensuring that purchasers of arms and ammunition did not pass them on to dissidents, examining stocks of arms, and watching firemen and other ships’ crew who allegedly acted as ‘carriers’ of arms to the Coast 45
All citizens lost rights during the wartime emergency. Under the 1914 War Regulations Act, the ‘burden of proving that the accused is not an alien shall be upon the accused’. Regulations of 10 November 1914 allowed arrests without warrant if the arrestees were ‘reasonably suspected of having committed or of being about to commit any breach of these regulations’; or if they had acted or seemed about to act in ‘a manner injurious to the public safety or the interests of His Majesty in respect of the present war’. There could be no spreading of ‘false reports likely to create disaffection or alarm’, no publication of information even ‘indirectly useful to the enemy’. Police worked closely with Post Office officials to intercept suspicious mail. In such matters the police had a huge degree of discretion.
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The military stepped up their usual internal policing operations, establishing, for example, a temporary military police station in Wellington’s Buckle Street. All Expeditionary Force members caught by police for offences which could be dealt with by military authorities were to be handed over to the military police there. The police were ordered to give all enemy subjects of military age found on neutral ships, and any captured prisoners of war, to the military authorities. The military had, per se, broad policing powers in the community under the emergency regulations; they could, for example, post armed guards, or fire on anyone disregarding their warnings. From July 1915 people were prohibited from publishing anything ‘likely to interfere with the recruiting, training, discipline, or administration of His Majesty’s Forces’ or ‘likely to be injurious to the public safety’, nor could they publish ‘any statement or matter which in any manner indicates disloyalty or disaffection’. Although there could be tension between the two services, especially over workloads, degree of zealousness and demarcations, the war effort ensured generally harmonious cooperation. The Commissioner considered in March 1917 that the ‘firm and consistent application of the War Regulations’ had avoided ‘a state of turmoil and upheaval such as this country has not yet experienced’ , 46
In the jingoistic atmosphere prevalent at the outbreak of the war, young men from all over the Dominion flocked to sign up for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Policemen were no exception - if anything, because of the commitment to ‘service’ which had been drummed into them, they were even keener. Police applicants for the NZEF who were imperial reservists were given leave without pay almost at once. Their seniority was preserved, including the increments which would have been paid had they remained on the police roll; their ranks included two of the small clerical component in the Force, W Crawford and W Evans. But the police authorities faced an immediate problem. Between 100 and 150 policemen had signalled their intention of resigning from the Force in order to join the troops, and the administration had a fair idea that most of the unmarried men wished to do so. Political and police authorities needed to ensure ‘the protection of life and property in the Dominion’, and assessed that a mass exodus of police to the fighting front - however desirable from a military perspective - would mean that the preservation of order at home would suffer. It was the younger and beat duty men in particular who wished to go, which would ‘leave the Force considerably weakened’; ‘the streets of the cities would be practically denuded of police’ who could not easily be replaced.
Selectivity in accepting resignations was rejected because ‘invidious distinctions’ would have to be made, and morale would suffer. The defence authorities were ordered to stop accepting applications from constables, and the police were told by Herdman that none of them
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would be allowed to resign from the Force to join the military. The Police Force was quite different from ‘other branches of the Public Service’, which were allowed to contribute members to the Expeditionary Force, ‘as it has to maintain a physical standard among its employees’ and could not get ‘boys and women’ to fill gaps so created - particularly in view of all the extra work created by the war, for which experienced police were needed. As Cullen said in 1915, ‘the police in their present capacity were serving their country to much more advantage than if they were at the front’. Given the problems created in other countries by police flocking to join up, the decision was a wise one. When Thomas Smith managed to enlist in early 1915, permission to resign was refused and he was disciplined for not having sought this. 47
Policemen frustrated at not being able to volunteer, and others, assuaged their consciences by subscribing to the financing of the Expeditionary Force. By early 1915, their contributions had reached the very healthy sum of £1745 11s. Soon police competed district by district in monthly contributions to War Relief Funds. When public service and police interest in pay deductions for such funds flagged, keen policemen found novel alternative ways of fundraising, such as running athletic carnivals. A show put on by the Auckland police in December 1915 included boxing, wrestling and tug-of-war contests, and raised £6OO for the Wounded Soldiers’ Fund - plus £lOOO from the sale of tickets to other Fund entertainments, £l3B collected from within the Police, and the donation of the £2O prize won by the police champion tug-of-war team. The Minister commended their ‘excellent spirit’. A similar athletic carnival in 1917, featuring a McHugh v Pooley boxing match, raised £2OOO for the British Red Cross. 48
Some policemen, not content merely to contribute money, had continued to fight hard for the ‘privilege’ of being allowed to go to war. Few won permission. One exception resulted from pressure from Apirana Ngata, who had sought a leave of absence for Rotorua’s mixed-race Constable William Neil so he could join the Maori Contingent of the Expeditionary Force. Neil was not given this, but was allowed to resign with an understanding that he would be reappointed in due course. By September 1915 determined policemen were getting around the ban on joining the military by resigning without stating their intentions and then later applying to join the Expeditionary Force. In view of this, it was futile for the Police to continue to stop policemen resigning with the stated reason of joining up, and the rules were changed accordingly. But these men were given no privileges of re-entry, a matter which caused public protest. Herdman said in April 1916 that though police might choose to resign in order to join the reinforcements, ‘the Government can hardly be expected to encourage them to do so by taking steps to conserve their rights as regards seniority and superannuation’ (although this was done for other public servants), because they were needed on the home front. 49
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The police authorities continued to attempt to dissuade young constables from enlisting. It was hard to replace them with fit young men able to ‘stand the strain of regular day and night beat duty in the cities’, as well as all the extra duties such as reporting on applicants for passports or for permits to leave the country. By June 1916,160 policemen reportedly wanted to enlist at some point, and in these circumstances the conscription of serving men could not be allowed. When the names of several police were drawn in conscription ballots, appeals were automatically lodged with the Military Service Board by the police administration, and the constables were exempted so long as they stayed in the Force. When men who had resigned to go on active service applied to rejoin, the Police took them on again if they were capable, but did not accredit their previous service.
Some of the returning resignees had been wounded. Thomas Smith, for example, having got away, had lost the lower part of a leg but was allowed to rejoin as an office worker in 1920, the same year that David Sterritt (who had won a DCM for bravery, and spent two years in hospital recovering from war wounds) re-entered the Force. After a long struggle with the authorities to get previous police service counted for seniority and superannuation purposes, reappointees with war service were declared - under section 6 of the 1919 Police Force Amendment Act - to have been on leave without pay for the duration. Their original dates of appointment were restored and their superannuation rights were preserved. ‘The Government, with characteristic generosity,’ said O’Donovan, perhaps with tongue in cheek, ‘contributed the amount of their superannuation premiums which were payable during their absence’. 50
Throughout the war the ordinary routine of policing continued as ever. In the words of a Reefton sergeant, the urban policeman’s duty ‘was to patrol the streets and attend to anything that would crop up’. In no-liquor Balclutha and elsewhere, the police continued to focus on preventing slygrogging. Before the war there had been moves to increase surveillance over the populace, following the increase in public disorder resulting in part from the industrial situation; the establishment number of NCOs at both Manners Street and Lambton Quay stations in Wellington was increased to four, for example. To be sure, nearly 10 percent of New Zealand’s population - over 100,000 men - went to war, and the fact that these were aged between 19 and 45 meant that more than two-fifths of the male age-group which created the most ‘trouble’ for police was absent from the Dominion for long periods. On the other hand, mobilisation for war created its own problems of public (and private) order. In particular, there were always plenty of young men in the military training camps, and that meant disorder in their vicinity. As the conflict progressed, turbulence on the streets led to more stringent surveillance requirements, which in turn heaped more duties on top of existing police workloads.
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Night patrols by mounted men were a significant means of preserving order, and by early 1916 these were being extended into the suburbs of the four main centres. One of their specified tasks was to control soldiers, who were ‘inclined to become rowdy when they get liquor’. In a not untypical incident on Lambton Quay on 3 May 1916, police arrested a soldier and were then attacked by a mob of troops who were aided by civilians doing their ‘patriotic’ duty and protecting the soldiery. Areas near military camps had to be particularly targeted to prevent disorder. The escalation in the carrying of weaponry also caused problems for the police, both major - the discharge of firearms by soldiers - and minor - Territorials omitting to hand in their weapons on time. 51
In the countryside and small towns, informal social sanctions had long been developing, making life much easier for rural police despite the often huge distances they covered. There was ‘no crime in the countryside’, a retired senior policeman reminisced, with (at least for many areas) only slight exaggeration. The policeman ‘knew everyone’ who was local, and kept a watch mostly on ‘strangers’ rather than the generally law-abiding residents. He did not necessarily ‘enforce the strict letter of the law’, for in a stable community ‘duty had to be tempered with discretion. Sometimes he had to consider how far a breach could be met by a reproof rather than a summons’; sometimes he would turn a blind eye to endemic but benign offences such as the violation of hotel closing hours, especially after 6 o’clock closing was imposed. For the few local recalcitrants, or the rather more numerous transient offenders, extra-legal methods were often used and endorsed by the majority of the community, and many such incidents became part of police folklore. As a later Minister of Police put it, ‘many felt the bite of the black-bearded Sergeant’s switch which he used to good effect to administer on the spot, summary justice, when and where he found it necessary!’ In the words of a man reminiscing about his provincial service during the First World War, when pacifists tried to speak ‘we used to boot their arses’. Frequently, ‘undesirable’ visitors to a locality were told by the local constable to get out of town - ‘or else!’ 52
But despite their social support networks, during the war many rural and small-town police were still ‘too fully occupied’ to be used as recruiting and publicity agents for the military. This was so not only because their numbers had been run down as a result of general retrenchment and lower rural crime rates. They also had many war duties, such as reporting on agitation amongst the dairy and other farming industries. All over the Dominion, with resources so stretched, there was an increasing emphasis on keeping the lid on less serious matters, rather than necessarily bringing the full might of the law down upon culprits. When in 1915 ‘the Phenomenal Fairchild’, a touring ‘quack healer’, fled to South Africa to avoid judicial proceedings, the Napier police were relieved rather than angry. The Commissioner agreed that New Zealand was ‘well rid of him.
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and the charges pending against him will serve to keep him away from this country’. There would be no attempt at extradition. 53
The requirement that they keep closer control over public morality also added to the burden on the police. Since 1906, public pressure over the need to suppress ‘indecency’ had grown, and both legislators and the police had responded. The Indecent Publications Act ofl9lo, in particular, strengthened police powers to combat indecency, and cemented an antiobscenity policy that was to last for decades. The popularity of the cinema and the coming of the war intensified the trend towards active suppression. In late 1915 police were instructed to keep a watch out for any ‘objectionable pictures’ being shown in the ‘motion picture palaces’ which had sprung up before the war, following public pressure for the official censorship of films. They were to report if, in their opinion, any were indecent. Police were inclined, taking a lead from the Commissioner, to include drunkenness and bloodshed in this definition as well as scenes ‘suggestive’ of ‘immorality’. This job was, fortunately for them in view of the controversial nature of such assessments, and after a great deal more pressure group organisation, superseded by the introduction of a professional film censorship mechanism.
First, in March 1916 the Minister of Defence was given permission to censor any films relating to the war effort which might, for example, affect recruiting. Then, in September 1916, film censor W Jolliffe was appointed under a new law allowing films to be banned if they were contrary to ‘public order or decency’ or ‘the public interest’. But this new system also generated work for the police. While films such as Infidelity and The Devil’s Bondman were banned, and others had scenes depicting subjects such as class hatred or criminal methods removed, some were given certificates restricting viewing to certain age groups. The Kreutzer Sonata, for example, could be seen only by those aged 21 and over. The police enforced such restrictions. More pressure still went on the Force when from February 1917 the Baptist minister/Orange Lodge leader Reverend Howard Elliott began to gain huge followings for his claims that the Vatican had caused the war. Catholics mobilised in opposition, but although matters became very ugly Herdman declined to prosecute Elliott so as not to incite his followers to even greater disorder. The Protestant Political Association, founded by Elliott in mid 1917, continued to threaten to disturb the peace. 54
When they were really overstretched, the police could always call upon auxiliary force to help them out. When the resident constable, Henry Scott, was absent from the Chatham Islands, the officer in charge of the wireless station, Ralph Wheeler, carried out his duties (for which he received an annual gratuity of £5). As secretary of the Chatham Islands Defence Club, Wheeler also played a key role in this quasipolicing organisation established to fend off any invading foe. When industrial struggle in various parts of New Zealand was met by the
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bringing in of strikebreakers, the atmosphere was all the more confrontational because of the perception that strikers were hampering the war effort. The hard-pressed police had sometimes in such situations to call for assistance in handling the resulting bitterness. This happened, for example, in early 1917 over an Admiralty cargo in Auckland and Wellington. After coal had been unloaded by scab labour it had to be guarded during the hours of darkness. ‘Temporary police’, supplied with uniforms, were given this job. Regulations in 1917 banning strikes led to an increased workload, with a number of pre-emptive raids on union and other offices, but reduced the amount of civilian help needed. 55
With auxiliary help available for many matters, the police managed to solve most of the major wartime crimes. Particularly well received was the hanging of 26 year old Arthur Rottman, a German who had lost his job on the government steamer Hinemoa on the outbreak of war. He had axed to death his employer (a dairy farmer) and his family in December 1914. There was such universal revulsion at the alleged depths to which ‘the German element’ could sink that it would have taken a miracle to successfully defend Rottman. There was evidence to support his defence of temporary insanity brought on by drunkenness, and had the climate of the times been different he ‘might well have escaped the gallows’. 56
Such violent cases were rare early in the war, but there was an increase in the murder and violence rate during its latter stages. Contemporary analysis which blamed this on the brutalising ambience of wartime was, no doubt, at least partially correct. As early as 1915, Superintendent Kiely of Auckland was urging legislation to prevent the ‘indiscriminate carrying of loaded firearms by irresponsible persons in the streets of our cities’. The numbers of murders and attempted murders had fallen dramatically since 1900, with 11 murders annually on average at the turn of the century and six for the years 1912-16. But in 1917 there were 14 murders, as well as 13 attempted murders (up from seven in 1900 and three or four per annum in 1912-16).
Curiously, the perceived brutalisation of the male was epitomised in a sensational case which featured not a returned soldier, but the kind of man detested as a member of the demi-monde, a deserter from the military, a ‘flash’ man. On the South Island’s West Coast, on 9 November 1917, John Coulthard was driving William Hall and Isaac James to Runanga with mineworkers’ pay-packets totalling £3659 16s Bd. Their way was blocked, and out of the bush stepped a masked ‘desperado’ brandishing two revolvers. When they did not at once obey his command of ‘Hands up!’ all three men were shot at in cold blood, Coulthard dying on the spot. Hall managed to get in two shots, but the highwayman paralysed him and he died from a stomach wound that December; James was wounded in the leg.
There was a Dominion-wide obsession with what was described as ‘one of the most deliberate, cold blooded and calculated murders that has ever stained the criminal records of the country’. A team of detectives
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and uniformed police worked enormously hard without any obvious clues to go on. Detective Sergeant R L Ward’s initial ‘faint suspicions’, combined with what Greymouth’s Inspector Cruickshank called his ‘untiring energy, skill, intelligence, keen perception, close observation & deduction, perseverance and zeal’, led the police within a week to arrest a3l year old American ‘commercial traveller’, Frederick W Eggers. The money was found in his room. The Christchurch Star felt that Ward’s detective work ‘would have done credit to a Sherlock Holmes’, and Cruickshank averred that it equalled any he had seen in his 39 years in the police. The NCO received so much praise and financial reward that there was a backlash against him, particularly from police who had worked on the enquiry and to a lesser degree from miners and other civilians who had volunteered their services to search for clues.
After Eggers’ arrest at his Christchurch boarding-house, he and his ‘fancy woman’ (divorcee and barmaid Mrs Elizabeth McMahon, whose surname he had been using) were taken to the Detective Office. After an escape attempt by force of arms, he in effect admitted his guilt, which ‘made his defence to the charge of murder impossible’. There were so many ‘sensational statements’ in the press as journalists pumped police for information that the Minister had to remind the men that ‘it is very impolitic that the Police should make such elaborate public disclosures’ on a sub judice matter. Eggers was found guilty and executed amidst rejoicing on 5 March 1918. 57
Between that crime and its punishment, another dramatic incident had seized the headlines. On the evening of 13 December 1917, nine German prisoners of war, led by ‘The Sea Devil’, Count Felix von Luckner, commander of the German raider Seeadler, escaped from their guard on Motuihe Island near Auckland in a motor launch. There had been escapes from internment islands before, but this one caused exceptional excitement. All available police were detailed to search by land and sea, under overarching military control. The Power Boat Association assisted them by providing launches, which were each manned by three armed soldiers and six constables, but to no immediate avail. It was over a week before the escapees were recaptured at the Kermadec Islands, and the episode had reminded New Zealanders of the meagreness of the military and policing forces which defended their long and convoluted coastline. 58
But the high drama of the situation also emphasised the fact that, in a very long war, this was the first military incident of any great moment on the soil of the Dominion. Because New Zealand society remained only vicariously affected by the ramifications of a distant war, the reversion to overtly coercive regulation need be only temporary. After the war, the stabilising trajectory of the self-disciplining society would resume, and the authorities could then gradually lessen the degree of regulation.
CHAPTER 23
Reordering and Rationalisation in Both Branches
Superintendent Mitchell, the officer transferred to Dunedin ‘in disgrace’ for being ‘too soft’ on Auckland workers during the 1913 general strike, had become a thorn in Commissioner Cullen’s side. The opportunity to get rid of Mitchell presented itself in 1914 in the wake of allegations about Dunedin Police Surgeon Dr Gordon Mac Donald. To examine these, Cullen used section 25 of the 1913 Police Force Act to convene Superintendent Ellison and Napier’s Inspector O’Donovan as a Committee of Enquiry. A ‘somewhat voluminous’ body of evidence was presented. The enquiry found that Mac Donald had incited men to leave the Force to go into farming, had been brusque with the men and claimed there was nothing wrong with them when there was, and had been generally incompetent. The surgeon was sacked, losing both his £lOO salary and his superannuation. He alleged that ‘religion and politics’ had caused his ‘victimisation’, but the men were happy.
Herdman and Cullen supplemented this inquiry with their own investigations of the situation in Dunedin, particularly the role of Mitchell and Chief Detective Herbert. They in effect made police testify against their superior officers. Mitchell was induced to resign early on six months’ retirement leave from 1 October. He believed the inquiry to have been rigged, and with the support of the local labour movement campaigned unavailingly for an independent investigation. Christchurch’s Superintendent Dwyer, taking temporary charge of Dunedin as well as his own district, was told to leave the routine work to Sub-Inspectors McKinnon and Fouhy but to ‘pay quiet attention to the conditions you find existing’. O’Donovan was promoted to Superintendent in Dunedin in the New Year. 59
Districts had by now stabilised, after a long-expected alteration had been made. For years it had been said that the Thames District was too small and had been created to pander to leading Liberal politician James McGowan, then Minister in charge of Police. Now, from 1 February 1913, Thames District was reconstituted as Hamilton District and its headquarters moved to Hamilton. Areas of the Waikato and the King Country (including 15 police stations) were hived off from the sprawling Auckland District and added to the new district. Inspector Wright now controlled stations stretching from Huntly in the north to Raurimu in the south and across the Bay of Plenty in the east.
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At the beginning of 1915, under strict instructions from the Minister of Finance to implement wartime economy measures, the Commissioner sought to start an efficiency drive by promoting those he saw as the best men into the top echelons of the Force. Two Chief Detectives, W B Mcllveney (who had been moved to the Finger Print Branch, later reconstituted as the Criminal Registration section, by Waldegrave) and C R Broberg, were transferred to the uniformed branch and made SubInspectors despite their relatively short length of service. This gave hope to detectives but caused resentment among the uniformed men. The Auckland men gave Mcllveney some initial trouble, the sin of his being an ex-detective compounded by the fact that he was widely seen as the Commissioner’s ‘pet’. Fie quickly alienated most Auckland police, not to mention the magistracy, through his ‘lack of tact’. He was also universally disliked by the men for his ‘hypocrisy’. A martinet disciplinarian, he violated the informal code by his flirtatiousness and boozing. He also suffered much public ridicule for his alleged stupidity and bungling. But his efficiencies were perceived to outweigh his deficiencies, and he would one day be Commissioner.
Rationalisation and the efficiency drive required both transfers and further promotions, of Senior Sergeant George Hastie to Sub-Inspector for example. O’Donovan moved from Dunedin to Wellington in November 1915 to replace Ellison, who had gone on retirement leave. He stood in for Cullen when necessary. Sub-Inspector A Cruickshank was promoted to Inspector and would soon go to Greymouth, Detective Sergeant J J Cassells joined two uniformed sergeants in being promoted to Senior Sergeant, while Detective Sergeant T Boddam was made a Chief Detective. Nine new sergeants were appointed. A H Wright was promoted to Superintendent to replace O’Donovan in Dunedin, with the Hamilton vacancy thus created being filled by Phair; the vacant Inspectorship went to B Sheehan. Cullen was satisfied that he had an efficient set of officers and NCOs to control the Force in difficult times. 60
By the time of Cullen’s retirement, however, further changes to the police hierarchy were required. At the end of 1916 Invercargill’s Inspector Norwood was promoted to Superintendent and transferred to Wellington, where the newly promoted Inspector Marsack became his deputy. He in turn was replaced by Sheehan, who as an NCO had been so strict in a previous posting that a public meeting had protested against ‘police tyranny and oppression’. The new Inspector William Fouhy from New Plymouth was sent to Auckland to succeed Sheehan. Veteran Inspector E Wilson had that January been given permission to retire in August, with six months’ leave of absence on pay from 15 February. From the latter date he was given the honorary rank of Superintendent in recognition of his long and meritorious service. This promotion on retirement leave became a precedent for the other Inspectors when they reached retiring age.
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The flamboyant Sub-Inspector Mcllveney replaced Fouhy in New Plymouth in 1917, to the relief of many of the Auckland men. He was not to stay long, for later that year he was seconded to liaise with the Defence Department over the administration of the War Regulations. He was replaced in Auckland by Sub-Inspector Broberg. Meanwhile, Cullen’s successor as Commissioner was ensuring that the most competent of his officers were promoted to the Inspectorate: Sub-Inspectors Marsack and James Johnston attained the rank in 1917. Apart from this strengthening and consolidation of the commissioned officer ranks, however, there was little room for upward movement in the Force after 1915, which led to discontent. There was, for example, only one promotion to commissioned rank in 1916 (that of Senior Sergeant Luke Mullany), and there were only three in 1917 (of Samuel Dew, William Mathieson and David Hutton). There would be more opportunities for promotion when from 1918 O’Donovan began to create new districts to reduce the distance which separated officers from their staff and the public. 61
The 1899 Royal Commission into the policing of Queensland had recommended that a Deputy Commissioner position be established, and both there and in Victoria high-level assistants to the Commissioner were created. But the New Zealand headquarters structure had remained tiny, administered by a five-person secretariat headed by R F Madden, all of whom were now public servants attached to the Police Force rather than members of the Force per se. Cullen preferred sole control through these underlings. (That being said, however, Wellington District’s Superintendents Ellison and O’Donovan were effectively Cullen’s second in command, to the extent of often signing letters on his behalf.) The 1913 regulations had contained no reference to any retiring age, and nor had that year’s Police Force Bill, Some said that the intention was to allow Cullen to stay on in office; under pressure from the opposition the previous retiring age of 65 had been included in the Act, with provision for a six-month extension. Cullen’s extended time was up on 23 November 1916, and he retired with honour (being awarded both the Imperial Service Order and the King’s Police Medal). Soon, as Commissioner of Aliens in the Defence Department under wartime legislation, he was finding compulsory employment for, superintending, and generally giving a hard time to, Dalmatians and other enemy ‘aliens’.
O’Donovan was the obvious choice as the next Commissioner, despite some opposition to another Roman Catholic becoming head of police. He was a ‘quiet’ educated man of ‘gentle manner and fine sensibilities’, a trained lawyer, widely read and an eloquent orator. Moreover, as politicians were aware, his policing orientation was towards the selfdisciplining future rather than the tighter controls of the past (though he was not averse to using overt coercion when necessary). New Zealand’s forward-looking decision-makers were thinking about post-war reconstruction, about reconstituting the stabilising trend of New Zealand society. O’Donovan, in the Commissioner’s chair from 1 December
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1916, felt that social conditions in New Zealand were so quiet as to be ‘unlike those of any country in the World’. His analysis as to why this was so was simplistic, but he could see that - inherently conflict-ridden as was any society based upon competitive private ownership - life in the Dominion tended to be less confrontational than elsewhere. It was a reflection of this that since the formation of the modem New Zealand police in 1886, only two policemen had been shot dead in the course of duty, and almost certainly neither death had been intended. Given such stability and order, O’Donovan’s policing style would be - particularly once the war had finished - one of relative benignity. Even the supercritical Truth would say after his retirement: ‘John always gave a square deal to all and sundry, good and bad’ , 62
On taking over the Force, Commissioner Cullen had acquired a growing and now very vigorous detective branch, which comprised in October 1911 five Chief Detectives, seven detective sergeants and 27 detectives. In order to strengthen the branch, he actively looked out for intelligent detectives to promote - Fane Strange Cox to detective sergeant, for example, and Peter McMahon to Chief Detective (the latter’s career was to end early, in 1922, after his son was suspected of committing a murder). From August 1912 he began to select from among the ‘acting detectives’, those uniformed constables on plain-clothes detail, men whom he promoted to the pay (though not actually the rank) of detectives. But Cullen had risen through the uniformed ranks, and showed less sensitivity towards the detectives than had his immediate predecessors.
The fact that Chief Detectives had numbers assigned them was a humiliating reminder that they were not formally equal in rank to commissioned officers, although they were informally seen as nearly equal in status. Detectives clung to a belief in their superiority to equivalent uniformed ranks even after the creation of detective sergeants in 1911 made this view obsolescent. From 1 March 1913, however, ranks in the two police branches were equated under the new regulations, which was very much to the liking of uniformed men, who had long complained that detective service was a short-cut to promotion. Chief Detectives were designated the equivalent of Senior Sergeants, detective sergeants were equated to sergeants, and ordinary detectives and acting detectives were considered, despite their superior pay, to rank merely as constables. All detectives were upset by an exercise which clearly and formally detracted from what they had persisted in seeing as their superior status in both the Force and society.
The new regulations provided for a probationary period of six months for the constables of four or more years’ experience who were selected for plain-clothes duty. After three years service as plain-clothes constables they could be appointed full detectives, provided they had been eight years in the Force. Promotion to Chief Detective was made available only to detective sergeants who had passed the qualifying examination
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for Senior Sergeant, and promotion to detective sergeant only to detectives who had passed that for promotion to NCO level. These rules, together with a preference for giving promotion in the uniformed branch to branch members, had the effect of lessening movement between the two branches and thereby separating them more completely. 63
Detective branch seniority was now measured from the date of appointment as a detective, irrespective of length of service in the uniformed branch. The increasing de facto separatism (the precluding of transfer between detective and sergeant positions, for example) widened the pre-existing rivalries between the two branches, as did another element in the pre-war reforms. There was resentment in senior uniformed NCO ranks that Chief Detectives seemed to have ‘got away’ with seniority: the rank of Chief Detective had been created in 1904, that of Senior Sergeant in 1911, and as a result several Chief Detectives with less service in the Force than Senior Sergeants were deemed to have been promoted sooner. Conversely, after being equated with uniformed sergeants, detective sergeants complained that their prospects of promotion to Chief Detective were slim (and slimmer after 1915, when the number of Chief Detectives was reduced to four), whereas numerous Senior Sergeant positions were available to the uniformed branch. Moreover, detectives continued to argue that the Chief Detective’s equation with Senior Sergeant was unfair, since his responsibilities were greater: ‘to keep his fingers on the pulse of crime, to watch vigilently the coming and going of thousands of people and so bring to justice all those whose actions are a menace to society.’
Once the regulations were released in February 1913, Wellington detectives headed a month-long agitation. On 1 April Detective Sergeant James Mcllveney submitted a report on relativities which referred particularly to the promotion blockage. Cullen responded with a memo to Ellison, headed ‘Alleged discontent, feeling, and unrest among the Wellington detectives’. Each detective was to furnish ‘a full report setting forth how the new regulations affect his status in the service, and any complaints or grievances which he wishes to make’. Those with no grievances were to say so in writing. The replies were to go to the Minister of Justice. Forced into speaking up, or denying problems altogether, some were forthright. Detective Arthur Andrews characterised the recent evolution of the position of detective as ‘From bad to worse’, a comment which led to his carpeting by the Commissioner for making ‘such insolent remarks’.
On 27 May, all detectives based at the Lambton Quay and Mount Cook stations accompanied Cullen to the Minister’s office, where Herdman (who was more sympathetic than his Commissioner to the detectives’ cause) opined that the creation of the rank of detective sergeant was ‘responsible for the trouble’, but that ‘rightly or wrongly’ it existed and would have to be lived with. When a detective was appointed, he agreed, it was clear ‘he advanced in status’, yet when he was appointed
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detective sergeant he only equalled a uniformed sergeant in rank. The Minister acknowledged that this meant he had been advanced twice in status but only once in rank. The effect of the new regulations was to formalise what had been known since 1911, to ‘set back the detective to the rank of constable’. But what was to be done? 64
The Minister opposed the creation of a formally separate detective branch or of Detective Sub-Inspectors: the large uniformed branch would be jealous of the accelerated promotions which would be shared amongst the small numbers of detectives. The Force should be ‘regarded as one homogeneous body’. Detectives were sceptical about his ‘solutions’: Senior Sergeants and Chief Detectives would have equal claims, as regards seniority, when competing for commissioned officer vacancies; detectives as well as detective sergeants could compete for Senior Sergeant positions; uniformed sergeants were eligible for promotion to Chief Detective. Moreover, to bolster the status of detectives, Herdman agreed to abolish use of the ‘rank’ of ‘detective constable’, and restore that of ‘detective’. Yet as the 1919 Committee of Enquiry was to point out, there was no provision for a rank of detective in either the 1913 regulations - which referred to ‘Constables (including Detectives and Acting Detectives)’ - or the Police Force Act. What the Minister had in actuality confirmed, the 1919 enquiry noted, was that becoming a detective meant not a promotion but a ‘higher status’ within the rank of constable, an attempt by circular to give it a formal ‘status’ equal to that of sergeant having been dropped after uniformed protest. While detectives might somewhere near approximate the status of sergeant, so far as Herdman was concerned, they could not formally equate to the rank. 65
Accordingly, in 1914’s amended regulations the status of detective was higher than that of constable, but lower than that of sergeant; ‘any detective stationed at a place where a sergeant of the uniform branch is in full charge should be under the direction of the sergeant in charge’. Yet like the 1913 regulations, the new rules still did not show clearly the exact relationship between detective and constable. They remained lumped together in one rank, with no reference to their informal relative status. Detectives thus remained in what they felt to be ‘an ambiguous position’. A 1915 ‘General List’ which attempted to show seniority within the whole Force and which provided for a superior status for detectives (e.g. by placing detective sergeants above sergeants promoted on the same day) was withdrawn after protests in favour of separate lists. It was not until after the 1919 enquiry that the perceived anomalies were finally cleared up in line with what the uniformed branch had always argued: detectives were equal in rank to constables, detective sergeants with sergeants, and Chief Detectives with Senior Sergeants. Meanwhile, ambiguities meant discontent, and this had increased after June 1915 when the exigencies of wartime led Cullen to introduce a new system of plainclothes constables, responsible to Senior Sergeants or Sub-Inspectors
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rather than to higher ranks in the detective branch. This system was modelled on those of Victoria and New South Wales.
The new plain-clothes constables got Is per day extra allowance if reported on favourably at the end of their probation period. ‘They acquired no status above that of constable’, and did ‘general inquiry work’, thereby freeing detectives ‘to attend their legitimate work of detecting serious crimes’. Yet to a degree they investigated criminal cases, and therefore came into competition with the detective branch. The Auckland plainclothes constables noted that they were in effect the detectives for the entire uniformed branch of the city, working 11 hours per day quite independently of the detective branch even though they saw themselves as ‘probationary Detectives’. Sometimes they and the Detective Office men duplicated each other’s work. Detectives worried that Cullen would make use of the plain-clothes men to cut down their numbers and privileges. No one objected to the old practice of superior uniformed police being detailed to special plain-clothes duty from time to time, but Cullen’s move institutionalised the system in a clear attempt to test and train detectives under uniformed control. As a rule, constables served three years on plain-clothes duty before becoming eligible for appointment as detectives. Friction was inevitable and this, it was acknowledged in 1919, ‘lessened efficiency’.
Very few police welcomed the attempt to blur a distinction between the two wings of policing, and the 1919 enquiry recommended the obvious solution; to place all regular plain-clothes men under the control of the Chief Detectives. Other eligibility periods contributed to detectives’ ongoing grievances: it was now even harder to reach detective sergeant rank than the equivalent uniformed rank. When detectives visited Herdman in 1913 they had not found him entirely inflexible. Since they were often on duty until very late in the evenings, for example, he agreed that Superintendents and Inspectors should try to arrange for them to be relieved from 1 pm onwards on one day per week. But largely as a result of the training and propensities of Cullen and most senior police, the relationship between the detection and uniformed wings remained a problem-ridden facet of the policing operation. Individuals suffered and jealousies between the two branches festered. 66
The situation was exacerbated by the extra burdens imposed on the detectives by the War Regulations - hunting down deserters, checking out suspected spies and so forth - which were not fully relieved by the additional plain-clothes constables. There was frustration, too, at NCO level. Detective sergeants were well off financially compared with uniformed sergeants, and whereas the latter had charge of constables on sectional duty, detective sergeants had no staff responsibilities since detectives reported to Chief Detectives. (This was one of the uniformed NCOs’ grievances: the elevation of a man to NCO rank in the detective branch did not ‘impose greater responsibilities upon him than carried during his olfice as a detective’, whereas his uniformed equivalent acquired
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responsibility for ‘controlling the social barometer’.) But for years detective sergeants continued to complain that their promotion was blocked (since three of the four Chief Detectives had not qualified through examinations to become Sub-Inspectors) unless they first reverted to Senior Sergeant. On this, as with other such matters, after his initial forays Herdman wanted to wait until the end of the war before finding structural ways to set up ‘a truly united Force’ with fairness to both branches. 67
Detective methods did not change very much over time, except to accommodate new technological and scientific developments. The essence of the job remained the same as that of the uniformed police, surveillance, albeit surveillance which was more intense and practised in a more covert fashion. A typical day involved various duties from 9 am to 1 pm and 2to 5 pm, Bto9pm in the office, and 9to 11 pm on ‘Detective Patrol’, with extra and irregular hours whenever there was anything special to target. Their new wartime duties could be carried out using existing methodologies and practices, including when acting as ‘thought police’. All Adela Pankhurst’s lectures were attended by undercover police who monitored whether her remarks were ‘disloyal’ or seditious. When the president of Christchurch’s Conscription Repeal League, Peter Ramsay, explained at a meeting at the Socialist Hall in 1917 that the anticonscriptionist labour movement was not stopping people going to war but just arguing that the state should not force them to. Detective Sergeant J Mcllveney interpreted this as seditious. As a result, Ramsay was jailed for nearly a year. There were many such cases. 68
At times during industrial and wartime turmoil, traditional surveillance and investigative duties - even in sensational cases - were somewhat neglected or mishandled. The most spectacular manifestation of this was the failure to make an arrest for the murder of a young ‘gigolo’, Horatio Ramsden, a case in which clues abounded but the investigation was fairly perfunctory. Failures could sometimes have important social consequences. In 1914 a quiet, inoffensive fruiterer, Wong Way Chung, was robbed and murdered in his Adelaide Road shop in Wellington. The wound inflicted by an iron bar looked to police to be Tike the work of a lunatic or a savage’. When detectives failed to locate the murderer, a ‘grave feeling of unrest and insecurity’ pervaded the capital’s Chinese community, for the crime had not been ‘an isolated instance of violent assault on Chinese’ but rather part of a pattern. The Chinese Consul was eventually successful in demanding that a reward be advertised, but when this failed to produce results the Chinese community remained in fear. The detective branch aim of total surveillance was once again exposed as aspiration rather than reality, and a generally law-abiding section of the population suffered as a consequence. 69
That total surveillance of at least targeted groups remained the aim was restated by Cullen. In 1914 Dunedin’s Chief Detective Herbert reported favourably on an application by James Muir for a publican’s
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licence for the Railway Hotel in Middlemarch. The Licensed Victuallers Association later discovered that Muir had been extradited from England to Adelaide in 1900 and sentenced to hard labour for a major fraud. He was a member of a notorious criminal family, and his photograph had appeared in a cheap paperback. Lives of Romance, which was ‘widely circulated throughout the Dominion’. Herbert had relied on having known Muir for some five to seven years, although other police believed he should have been suspicious because Muir ‘knocked about the billiard rooms of Dunedin a great deal and attended race meetings’. Commissioner Cullen was furious with Herbert: ‘A scandal would be created if it became public property that a man of Muir’s character obtained a publican’s licence on the recommendation of the Chief Detective’.
In advising the Minister that Herbert be punished, Cullen stated that he could not believe that the true character of a man formerly ‘well known to every member of the Force of standing and experience as one of the most dangerous confidence men in Australasia’ could have been unknown to the Chief Detective. Herdman asked Cullen for proof of this contention. The Commissioner replied that ‘as all notorious confidence men who carry on their criminal operations in New Zealand become well known to the members of the Detective Branch both by name and personal appearance, it is only reasonable to assume that Herbert knew of Muir’s antecedents .... With my experience of the manner in which the police keep themselves posted up about men of Muir’s type, I feel confident that Herbert knew all about him.’ This was a level of ‘proof’ not acceptable to the Minister. But Cullen’s certainty clearly reflected his genuine belief that reality in the world of detection could come close to the ideal. He seemed loath to concede that there was little chance of this in the unusual circumstances of the immediate pre-war and war period. 70
A positive longer-term trend during this period of difficulties with efficient surveillance and detection was that towards scientific and technical improvement. Detectives kept abreast of such developments through, in particular, reading the latest literature - such as J Adam and J Collyer’s two-volume Criminal Investigation. At the time that Cullen became Commissioner, the Australian Chief Justice made a breakthrough pronouncement on fingerprinting which overrode the Victorian Chief Justice’s scepticism: ‘that there was nothing so satisfactory as the signature of the hand was recognized in all parts of the world’. Soon fingerprint evidence would be regarded as definitive in both Australia and New Zealand.
Cullen had soon seen the need to consolidate the control of the Force’s scientific and intelligence-gathering activities. The Finger Print Branch had been renamed the Criminal Registration Branch (CRB) to more accurately reflect its functions, and on 3 September 1912 the Minister and Cullen ‘personally instructed Chief Det Mcllveney that he is appointed to the complete charge’ of the CRB as part of a major
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reorganisation to meet its broadening responsibilities. Mcllveney’s position included ‘control of the Police Gazette, Finger-print, Photographic, Correspondence and general work of that portion of the Dept’. Each CRB member was ‘directly responsible’ to Mcllveney, while ‘he in turn is directly responsible for everything connected with the branch to the Commissioner alone’. This powerful position set Mcllveney on the path to the Commissionership. 71
There were problems of adjustment to the new regime, in particular resistance by the ousted branch head E W Dinnie and other specialists to control by the ‘very peculiar’ Mcllveney. In January 1913, for example, the Chief Detective told Dinnie: ‘ln future your minutes are not to be in the form of an instruction to me. They should, if at all necessary, be couched in the terms of a suggestion only.’ Such demarcation disputes did not dampen the enthusiasm and dedication of the fingerprint specialists. They were assiduous at keeping in touch with new developments in their field around the world, tireless in quoting figures about the enormity of the odds against identical fingerprints. There was great competition for positions in the ‘Finger Print Office’ and other parts of the CRB. The Branch strove for perfection, and sought out promising men before advertising vacancies - men like Christchurch’s Acting Detective Charles Snow, who became for a time Dinnie’s assistant in classifying and searching out fingerprints. Hard-worked though they were, when they were not travelling to scenes of crime or lecture venues they had attractive conditions of employment; normally, regular office hours, no holiday duty, no work on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. At this time, as well as Mcllveney and Dinnie there were two other expert staff, Detectives Robert Issell (who tested and examined fingerprints, wrote up criminal records, and was official photographer) and Charles Halke (editor of the Police Gazette). 12
The press remained especially fascinated with the fingerprint aspect of the CRB, the Branch fascinated with its own publicity. A 1913 article in the Evening Post, typically, was reproduced all around New Zealand by other papers. It told of the Branch recently obtaining from New Scotland Yard the fingerprints of a man taken there 15 years ago; his photograph from that time was unrecognisable as being of the same person, but the fingerprints had identified him as nothing else could. The article poured out the usual statistics on the work of the Branch: six unknown dead identified, 1500 sets of fingerprints added to the central files in the last year, 1100 photographs taken at headquarters and 2000 elsewhere in New Zealand by the police. There had been a 60 percent increase in the volume of work in the last year, an increase no doubt partly due to the Prisons Amendment Act 1912, which allowed the photographing and fingerprinting of all accused or convicted prisoners incarcerated for the first time, including by the use of ‘reasonable force’ (the records of those not subsequently convicted were to be destroyed). By 1917 the nearly 20,000 sets of fingerprints held took too long to
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search, and work had begun on the ‘long and tedious task’ of further subdividing the collection. 73
The police continued to seek favourable publicity for their scientific techniques partly because there was still some public scepticism, which was fuelled by the efforts of defence counsel in high-profile cases. As late as 1920, when Dennis Gunn was about to be hanged for the murder of the Ponsonby postmaster, mainly on fingerprint evidence, people campaigned for his release on the grounds that his guilt had not been proven. E W Dinnie, some claimed, was motivated by a desire to ensure the continuation of his Branch and promotion for himself. There was talk of the forging of fingerprints. All this despite the calling in of the foremost Australian expert. Inspector J Fowler, to corroborate the Crown case. ‘You are in the hands of an accurate science’ was the prosecution’s assurance during the trial, in response to the defence claim of unreliability or worse, and Mr Justice Chapman himself defended Dinnie’s knowledge of ‘scientific facts’. After the verdict the judge stated that the evidence had been ‘absolutely convincing’: ‘this case has once and for all vindicated the system of finger-print investigation and identification, if vindication were needed.’ The same year an American university textbook on fingerprinting noted that the system was ‘almost universally recognized as infallible’. Gunn was the first New Zealander to be hanged mostly on fingerprint evidence. 74
The CRB worked in close conjunction with the other headquarters staff in Wellington’s imposing Government Buildings on Lambton Quay. Until May 1914 the chief administrator at headquarters was helped by only three clerks, the same number as in 1882; the small team was then joined by a ‘shorthand-writer & typist’. Amos Muggeridge continued to control the store, although his wings had been clipped when Cullen discovered an ‘unauthorised system’ established a few years before of stocking underwear, boots, shirts and so forth for sale to policemen. This, to the Commissioner’s mind, was ‘likely to lead to irregularities’ and was banned, with the storekeeper being ‘demoted’ by being designated as a civil servant. But Muggeridge’s services in running efficiently the whole supply operation of the Force were so appreciated, particularly in the war period, that from 1 December 1915 he was transferred back to the Police Force proper, with the rank and pay of Senior Sergeant. 75
Meanwhile, on 1 April 1915, E W Dinnie, ‘Finger-print Expert and Photographer’, had had his status upgraded in the same way. Since these were permanent fixed posts, Dinnie and Muggeridge were not in competition with other police of the same rank for promotion, and the ripples their appointments inevitably caused soon died away. At the beginning of that year the CRB had been seen as so firmly established that Chief Detective Mcllveney could be promoted to Sub-Inspector and transferred to Auckland (despite many reports that suggested he was an unusual choice to be a senior uniformed policeman, allegedly remaining, among other things, a ‘hard shot’ and ‘a mental case’). 76
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Another high-profile area of policing before and during the First World War was traffic regulation. As more motorised vehicles appeared on the roads, local authority control was proving inadequate; the police were forced to supplement this by carrying out more traffic control work themselves, as had also been found necessary in Australia. Traffic congestion became so great at the intersection of Hereford, High and Colombo Streets in Christchurch (the horse-drawn police van was hit by a motor car, for example) that from early 1907 there were full-time policemen (the first was Constable Duncan Matthew) on point-duty at the bottleneck. In 1911 the Police sought details from Australian forces on their methods of traffic control. By early 1913 Cullen was instructing police to vigorously complement local body control. Cars and motorcycles were said to be travelling too fast, and policemen were to suppress this by prosecuting ‘with the utmost rigour of the law’.
Urban local authorities began to feel that their traffic control sections were a wasteful duplication of functions carried out by the Police, who had final theoretical control of ‘public order and regularity’ in any case; it would make more sense for them to dismantle their own traffic regulatory bodies and pay the Police to even more actively supervise traffic. This suited the police, as joint control was proving unsatisfactory in view of inadequate local body provision of traffic control measures. A pioneering agreement was reached on 29 March 1913 between the Minister of Justice and the mayor and councillors of Wellington. From 1 April, the police took over ‘control of the regulation of all vehicular and pedestrian traffic, and of the conduct of drivers of licensed vehicles within the City of Wellington’. There would be constables on point-duty directing traffic at three strategic locations: the junctions of Lambton Quay and Willis Streets, Manners and Willis Streets, and Manners and Cuba Streets. This experiment would begin with 9 am - 6 pm coverage. All police were charged with traffic duties, and there would be a period of grace - ‘except in bad cases’ - before traffic regulations were strictly enforced. Other urban areas followed this lead. By 1919 Palmerston North’s Inspector McKinnon was highlighting traffic control as a key aspect of beat duty. If constables left the beat, ‘the traffic of the city would be in chaos’.
Traffic regulation brought a new problem to policing. ‘lt is desired ’, Commissioner Cullen told Ellison, ‘that the Police try and educate the public up to Police requirements before taking ordinary offenders to Court’. But as in all other countries where motor transport was rapidly increasing, police came into adversarial contact for the first time with many ‘respectable’ people hitherto untouched by the law. When in 1889, in a not untypical case involving powerful citizens, the son of a wealthy and respected man was arrested for larceny, the matter had been kept out of the courts. In 1895 a Masterton constable had been prevailed upon by a JP to issue a summons against a cattle-stealer, on the grounds that there would be a ‘general local outcry’ if he were openly arrested, given his
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‘standing and general character’ as a ‘settler and a man of fair repute’. Such practices, once very common, were now disappearing, thanks in part to the Liberal government’s ‘democratic’ ideology. The advent of motor vehicle offences hastened their virtual demise, but not without a lot of resistance from (wealthy) motorists who traditionally expected deference and even obedience from the police. Old police regulations and practices concerning deference to social superiors were also gradually abandoned. 77
It was agreed that constables would not be required to do more than four hours on point-duty on any one day, usually for two hours at a time. The rest of their duty would be on the beat, ‘so as not to run the risk of the constant strain of point duty getting on the mens’ nerves.’ In addition, all sectional sergeants and beat constables in the city ‘must pay particular attention to the suppression of reckless driving by drivers of motor cars and motor cyclists who appear to be very persistent in exceeding the speed limit and cutting round comers in a most reckless manner.’ The public should be made to keep to the right on footpaths in the cities, and should not be allowed to loiter in groups. Democratic enforcement was not universal. Free passage for the vice-regal party was to be ensured - something quickly slipped up on, for local police were soon being censured by the Commissioner for stopping the Governor’s car as if he were ‘an ordinary citizen’. Wellington paid the Police £125 per quarter for the traffic regulation service; Auckland followed (at £lB7 10s per quarter) from 1 September 1913. One of the first point-duty men, Thomas Smith, had vivid memories 65 years later of standing in water up to the top of his boots while directing traffic at the foot of Queen Street. 78
The Force itself was gradually changing to keep up with motorisation and other technological and communications developments. Telephones in stations were increasingly complementing the telegraph system. By 1913 two dozen stations in the Taranaki District alone were connected by telephone, though it would be many years until all stations in the country were linked, and many more until toll calls were used for anything but emergencies. At the outbreak of war, even country stations were acquiring modem conveniences such as electric lighting and hot-water supply. By 1910, the number of troop horses held by the Force had fallen by twothirds over the previous two decades, to 38, a reflection of improvements in reading and public transport. Most rural men who used horses rode their own or hired them when necessary. Though the government as yet shied away from expenditure on motor vehicles for police, the authorities increasingly hired or borrowed them. One of the policemen investigating a 1916 murder at Kaiapoi travelled there rapidly from Christchurch on a ‘motor bicycle’ .In 1915 Commissioner Cullen advocated the acquisition of a motor car at each of the four centres for the use of the senior officer and for ‘urgent cases in the country’, and also of motor vans to convey prisoners in Christchurch and Auckland, where the horse-drawn vehicles were old and worn out. Motor vehicles (vans in three cities and a
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‘touring-car’ for headquarters) were not to materialise for another three years.
By the First World War, many of the men sought to better themselves by studying matters of relevance to their job. The administration made such information available. From the beginning of 1917, law reports ‘of criminal and evidence cases ... compiled for use of members of the Police Force only’ were printed separately from the pages of the Police Gazette for separate filing and ease of access, as were the voluminous War Regulations. The concentration on the war effort and wartime austerity impeded some technological change, and prevented a number of policemen from expanding their academic horizons, but it did not prevent effort and innovation; indeed, the very lack of resources encouraged ingenuity, and the quest for new methods and more knowledge. Meanwhile, O’Donovan’s gaze was fixed firmly on the post-war future. In March 1917 he was anticipating ‘a longer period of training according to modern requirements’. There should be ‘technical’ instruction in ‘shorthand and typewriting; photography, sketching, and draughtsmanship as applied to police work; chemistry relating to the identification and operation of poisons; professional lectures in law, physiology, and medical jurisprudence, &c. The value to the community of a well-trained and equipped Police Force is now better realized’, and he planned to bring in courses of specialist instruction for constables, NCOs, and detectives. 79
The Minister had stated that the men could join the Public Service Association provided that ‘reasonable conditions’ were met. In February 1914, the PSA president wrote on behalf of Auckland police to the Minister seeking his ‘official approval’ for their joining the Association. The request was sufficiently sycophantic in tone for Herdman to reiterate his previous permission, and more of the men began to join. With police unionism in effect defeated, Cullen’s 1914 annual report defiantly declared that New Zealand’s conditions of police service were better than those anywhere else in the Empire. However, the abortive police union - which struggled on clandestinely well into 1914 - had made the police’s political and bureaucratic leadership aware that even disciplined paramilitary organisations were not immune from demands for better pay and working conditions, and from collective action if these demands proved fruitless. From now on, the government paid more attention to the men’s grievances.
Demands which were antithetical to the government’s ideology were of course turned down. When the men requested that the Police Store once again stock cheap non-uniform clothing (even, as one suggestion went, that it be turned into a cooperative for this purpose!), this was rejected because it would interfere with private enterprise. But other things, even expensive things, could be done. There were a few concessions at once; selected police in country areas, for example, could now receive a generous £2O per annum allowance for maintaining their own horses for police duty; country and small-town police were permitted to
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be employed by Registrars of Electors to help enrol voters (at 2s 6d per day, plus meals if they were absent from their stations), provided that their ordinary duties were not neglected. There was a response on Forcewide issues as well.
When Herdman told the Auckland police at the time of the Police Association that their pay was quite sufficient, he had underestimated the difficulty of getting ‘good men’, he later acknowledged. Now, taking account of this, wanting to pre-empt any chances of the police union remnants undergoing a resurgence, and (relatedly) rewarding the police for their ‘excellent work’ during the Great Strike, another major pay concession (from 1 April 1914) was announced. This time even single probationer constables received an increase, to 7s per day. Ordinary constables now began at 9s, rather than Bs, and would reach 1 Is 6d after 20 years’ service; detectives’ pay rose a full Is 6d per day. The Superintendents at Auckland and Wellington now received up to £520 per annum. The Minister soon proclaimed that ‘contentment prevails’ in the Force as a result of the rises. ‘The State is prepared to give good pay for good service’, Herdman stated in March 1914; ‘the lot of a policeman in New Zealand is a comfortable one’, and more ‘first-class’ men would now be attracted to the profession.
Cullen had already claimed that more had been done to improve conditions in the short time since Reform came to office than in any decade during his many years in the police. He had cited not just the big improvements, but cumulative small ones too; more Sundays off, time off in lieu of court appearances in off-duty hours (which could be accumulated to a whole day off), refreshment time for night-duty men, abolition of the rule requiring constables to have a clean defaulters’ sheet for the last three years before increments were granted at 14 and 20 years’ service, night-duty overcoats for country men, £5 per annum to cover the cost of making up uniforms and providing footwear. All of these measures were part of the government’s defusing strategies, rather than the result of any meaningful pressure from the Public Service Association, which few had as yet joined. Police knew not only that the Minister’s concession did not mean that they could organise properly, but that senior police remained hostile even to membership of the Association, and that the regulation prohibiting ‘combinations’ as ‘subversive to discipline’ remained in place ready to be used against any future direct action. 80
Men began to join the PSA following meetings in the big centres, there being safety in numbers, and they soon gained representation on the Association’s Executive Committee. But they remained cautious, even after Herdman made it crystal-clear in a very public fashion in 1915 that they remained welcome to enter the PSA, for Cullen was still hostile to any form of outside pressure, however anodyne. An anonymous policeman complained in 1915 that men dare not speak out, as they would be considered ‘malcontents’ and become ‘marked men’. The PSA
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could, in such circumstances, do little for its membership - even when the Liberals entered government to form the wartime coalition ministry in August 1915, thereby reducing the influence of the extreme right of the Reform Party. The PSA’s Journal later put another reason for lagging membership gently: ‘Naturally enough’, a number of policemen were ‘somewhat tardy’ in accepting as an alternative to their own Association one which had been ‘thrust upon them’. 81
Membership of the PSA nevertheless grew, in response to accumulating and in some cases long-term grievances. One of these was that 40 years had been made the qualifying length of service for the maximum pension, compared with the original 36 years under the old Police Provident Fund scheme. By 1915 some of the men were combining on this issue. That year an anonymous letter to politicians sought a 35 year period, with compulsory retirement at 60, But as in the past superannuation created divisions even among activists on the issue. A Sydenham sergeant, for example, noted that since he had joined at the age of 30 he would not welcome retirement at 60: he would get a lower pension were such a scheme introduced, and would therefore have to ‘take my chance in the labour market with younger men’. But with fine-tuning to meet such cases, by 1917 police were generally in agreement. In several districts they were asking, via the Public Service Association, that the 1908 Public Service Classification and Superannuation Amendment Act (as modified in 1909) be altered to take in compulsory retirement at 60 (or, optionally, 55), with favourable arrangements for those who had served for a lesser period than that which produced the maximum pension. Although this campaign was not successful, it was an important testing ground for the Public Service Association as a substitute for a police union; inadequate as the PSA was, it did give the men a chance to organise and discuss openly. 82
There were no viable alternatives in any case. There was a widespread feeling that individual complaint to the police hierarchy would lead to persecution by Cullen and perhaps Herdman, The Police Commissioner was known to be hostile even on the question of PSA representation. When in 1916 the PSA General Secretary asked Cullen to reinsert the 1913 Police Gazette notice allowing membership, he declined. He simply distrusted ‘combinations’. When the Queensland Police Union contacted him for information on New Zealand policing, he refused to provide any. But the PSA would not go away. 83
By 1916, gains in pay and conditions had slowed because of wartime retrenchment. There were adjustments in pay for some staff who had fallen well behind in relativities: the two lower-paid Superintendents in 1915, for example, and the Matrons in 1917. Additionally, all police shared with civil servants a one-off war bonus in August 1916 -£ 15 for married men, half that for single. But the economic boom during the war saw real wages decrease as inflation took hold; the police were among those who lost the most from this. The arduousness of fulfilling wartime
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duties with too few men, particularly too few experienced men, coupled with the sharply rising cost of living (prices rose by a third during the war) created profound discontent. There were no further pay rises, and when large numbers left the Force in 1916-17, many were not replaced because of the ban on recruiting men liable for military service. The advent of temporary constables was only a partial help. 84
The police presence in the PSA grew considerably after a recruiting drive which began towards the end of 1916. A meeting of Otago police, for example, opted to join the PSA, and they were given two delegates on the local Association committee. The police administration, alarmed at this increased propensity to combine, frequently impeded ‘union’ activities. When the PSA attempted to hold a meeting of its Auckland police members on police property, the Superintendent declared it to be ‘prejudicial to discipline’ without his prior permission, and forbade it because of the organisers’ ‘discourtesy’. Since the Association was an extraordinarily moderate body which eschewed all claims to be a union, however, it was seen by the police administration as a lesser evil if evil indeed were insisted upon by the men. Moreover, Cullen and his officers could not go too far in disrupting PSA activities, given that the government continued to tolerate them. The Minister, for example, made a point of stating that, had he been asked in advance, the Auckland Superintendent would have allowed a PSA meeting on police premises. 85
So to all intents and purposes, the police now had a functioning advocacy organisation, albeit a weak one. By the end of 1916 the Public Service Journal carried in its Auckland notes items of police news, especially transfers, and its Canterbury notes mentioned that the Association was helping a policeman in a personal grievance case. By early 1917 the majority of the New Plymouth police had joined; at that time there was only one Wanganui policeman in the PSA, but when a sergeant actively recruited members for the Association, all but one of the staff soon joined. In February Chief Detective McMahon chaired a meeting in Auckland at which police were assured that there was no opposition to PSA membership from officers or the government.
It was stressed at the Auckland meeting that the PSA was not a radical organisation, that heads of government departments occupied seats on its Executive Council. It was noted that the Association was not wont to take up trivial issues, only those concerning harsh or unjust treatment, and that it would do so in a ‘responsible’ fashion. The meeting, however, felt that since police needs did not necessarily coincide with those of the rest of the PSA membership, proactive measures should be taken on their behalf. The Aucklanders decided to form an informal subcommittee (including men from country areas) to help the police representatives present their concerns to the Association. Nine members were elected that April, including McMahon and three NCOs; the Chief Detective chaired the subcommittee. Each Auckland police member was asked to
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donate a shilling to put the subcommittee’s work on a sound basis, and it was soon soliciting the support of police in other regions. B6
At the beginning of 1917 the Public Service Journal had expressed the hope that before long all New Zealand police would become members of the Association. This did not occur, partly at first because of the continuing cool attitude of the bulk of the police administration, whatever the reassurances of sympathetic police in relatively senior positions and despite the accession of a more liberal Commissioner, O’ Donovan. Police were all too aware that technically regulation 174 still banned combinations, and felt that membership of the PSA could be used against them, particularly by individual officers who were overtly hostile to police ‘unionism’ of any sort. When the police had a high profile at the 1917 annual conference of the PSA Executive Council, such officers felt vindicated by what they saw as unreasonable pressure for reforms, and made their views known.
Police demands on the government included paid leave to attend the PSA conference, the publishing of all police transfers and vacancies for reasons of transparency, more generous leave provisions, more adequate rest and sleep provisions for constables on escort duty, and greater consideration of seniority when vacancies at the sought-after out-stations were filled. PSA representations on such matters after the conference did not get far, but there was progress in that membership of the PSA was legitimised beyond any shadow of a doubt when, on the initiative of the Wellington section, the PSA president visited Commissioner O’Donovan and was assured that regulation 174 was now considered obsolete by the hierarchy.
After publicity about this significant concession, which no doubt reflected political will, police numbers in the Association were again boosted. By September 1917, most of the Nelson District police had joined. The stance of the men in this area, however, exemplified the distance between police unionism and conventional trade unionism. They stressed that they were content enough with their lot, and not inclined to growl; they respectfully submitted however that the authorities might consider giving them some free time to compensate for work on Sundays and public holidays, while acknowledging that there should always be sufficient police on duty to cope with any emergencies.
Even such moderate tactics did not work, and so by the closing stages of the First World War, the PSA noted that even the least combative among its police members were increasingly agitated about their working conditions. ‘Good men’ were leaving the Force, one of them telling a reporter that were it not for the concept of service in a time of war there would be few left. An ex-sergeant was even more forthright; only the ‘crawler’ prepared to put up with appalling conditions was prepared to stay on indefinitely in the hope of future reward. By 1914, little could be done any more by police to gain promotion through political influence. The exigencies of wartime, some said, were producing a new, non-
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political but otherwise undesirable mode of advancing through transfers and promotions. Police struggling for better conditions were undermined by those who were prepared to put up with a worsening lot in the short term, in the hope of personal medium- or long-term gain. 87 The majority, however, suffered. By the end of 1917 police pay rates lagged even further behind rises in the cost of living. A sergeant with 18 years’ experience, no demerits and high examination marks, resigned because he could not make ends meet on his salary. He and other NCOs had tried in vain to explain their plight to the Commissioner, a plight exacerbated for those who had been recently promoted and transferred back to the city. 88
Another keenly-felt grievance was the administration’s continued adherence to the ‘four hours’ system of beat duty for the day shifts, which relied on young urban men being available at the barracks during the middle four hours to provide a reserve for use in riots or other emergencies. This meant (including travelling time) up to a 13-hour day with very irregular mealtimes. Following a trend in reforming forces elsewhere, particularly in Britain and Australia, agitation for a single eight-hour day shift had been building up. This would, it was argued, enable married members of the Force to live in the outer suburbs and single men to devote more time to studying law and otherwise generally improving themselves; it would also give more leisure time and a better quality of life. When the Wellington Superintendent asked a full parade of men from the Lambton Quay and Mount Cook stations for their views on the matter, all but one favoured a change from the current system. But it was not until 1922 that, with PSA backing and following trials, eighthour shifts were finally introduced throughout New Zealand. 89
There had been other gains, too. In 1917, for example, it was finally agreed that men who had joined the Force before the introduction of examinations could sit them in sections. In both 1918 and 1919, pay rises were at last secured to keep up with cost of living increases. But the PSA remained uncertain as to how far it could go in representing the men, and its executive made representations in 1918 to the Minister in charge of Police, now (from 4 February 1918) Thomas Wilford, who was also made aware of the continuing desire of some of the men to form their own association. Wilford directed that a ballot be taken of the whole Force, and that October they were asked to choose between no association, the PSA, and a police union per se. The great majority of police (697) voted to keep the status quo. Only 87 opted for a Police Association, while 34 did not feel it necessary to have any union representation, and 38 cast informal votes. 90
This caution probably reflected the fact that policemen could scarcely fail to see that unionism, even of a sort, was still at most merely tolerated by the police administration, whatever the government might say or think. Police PSA activists alleged that superiors still harassed them, and when O’Donovan had pressure put upon him by the PSA he was not
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averse to making dark reference to the disciplinary rules still formally in place. Even when after the ballot the Minister announced that regulation 174 would be amended to specifically allow membership of the Association, this was accompanied by caveats: he would ‘limit’ and ‘define’ which policing matters could be dealt with by the PSA, different sections of the police should be represented on its executive, discipline had to remain a paramount concern within the Force. Three-quarters of the Force eventually joined the Association, enabled to do so - in the final analysis - by the overarching evolution of the Police towards a relatively benign regime policing a relatively tranquil society. But because of the history and nature of the New Zealand police, they still could not receive the same level of advocacy service as that enjoyed by ordinary members of the PSA, itself little enough by the standards of normal unions.
The PSA, then, proved largely ineffectual, and despite its balloted support, police membership soon declined. They could sometimes get better results by themselves. During the tour of the Prince of Wales in 1920, the men escorting him refused to sleep in Dunedin cells when hotel beds were available. They successfully defied a ‘good lecture’ by the Commissioner, although not without ‘a bit of spite on the bosses part’ the next day. The administration’s relative hostility to the PSA was misplaced. In various countries around the world there were major police strikes in the period 1918-23, with one as close as Melbourne. Membership of the PSA, frustrating as it was for the rank and file and annoying as it was for officers, had achieved sufficient concessions for the men to keep them engaged in ‘constitutionally proper’ actions. But before long the interests of policemen differed so much from those of public servants that the relationship broke up; as early as 1922, police advocacy action by the Association ended. 91
CHAPTER 24
Controlling Indigenous Peoples
Commissioner O’Donovan’s belief in the relative tranquillity of New Zealand reflected, among other things, an official assessment that Maori were finally at least in acquiescence with this generally stable pakeha society. He took over the Commissionership, indeed, in the same year that the last armed resistance movement was crushed by police force. The prophet Rua Kenana in the Urewera, inheritor of the mantle of Te Kooti Rikirangi, had for years been defying the pakeha authorities. ‘The English are no good. They have two laws, one for the Pakeha and one for the Maori’, he said. On his flag were the words: ‘One Law For Two People’. He particularly objected in principle to prohibitive liquor laws against Maori, but his teachings could be tolerated so long as he remained isolated and did not in practice significantly defy pakeha laws.
Rua’s continuing demands for one law, and by extension for actual as well as formal equality, were largely rhetorical in the face of what he observed about the structure of power in New Zealand. His teachings soon amounted to a call for a nation within a nation. Moreover, this call was for a rival sovereignty which in many ways did not model itself upon the pakeha state and its societal norms. ‘Most of the men allowed their hair to grow long, down on their shoulders, and they looked a wild lot’, the constable at Patutahi later recalled of Rua’s followers who sought shearing and scrub-cutting work in his area; worse, Rua challenged pakeha norms of decency by having several wives. When he began deliberately selling liquor to Maori in no-licence areas, he ran foul of the authorities. His motivation was to regulate the supply of alcohol in order to prevent the excesses caused by his people patronising unsavoury pakeha slygrog sellers, so in a sense he was promoting order. But the government preferred the ultimate state of ‘order’ which would be secured by acquiring substantive sovereignty, rather than order within a would-be rival sovereign state. In 1911, therefore, he was fined for breaches of the licensing laws. 92
This was a warning that he could not escape the Tong arm of the law’. But given his isolation at Maungapohatu, deep in the Urewera, Rua’s defiance was deemed to merit nothing more than the occasional show of state disapproval. With the onset of the war, however, matters altered. Dissent was no longer to be tolerated. The main weapon which could be used against him remained the liquor laws, now applied with greater vigour and punitiveness. In 1915 the prophet was gaoled for three months on a charge held over since 1911. He was to appear again on five other
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charges if called upon, a ploy which the magistrate openly admitted was designed to keep a hold over him. On his release in August 1915, police surveillance over his activities recommenced. 93
Rua was now careful to keep within the letter of the law, but his antistate preachings, and particularly his opposition to recruitment amongst the Tuhoe, caused the authorities to move against him once more. That his settlement’s economy was thriving made the experiment all the more dangerous in its symbolic and actual challenge to the imposition of substantive sovereignty. The government decided to act in January 1916, when Rua was given notice to attend court for sentencing on the holdover charges, an effort to gaol him to break his influence over his followers. He asked for a delay of a month because he was busy with harvesting, but was fined and sentenced to gaol in absentia. Sergeant (and future Commissioner) D J Cummings of Rotorua and District Constable Grant of Te Whaiti tracked Rua down at Te Wai-iti on 12 February in order to fetch him on warrants of commitment. He refused to come with them, on the grounds that he had already been gaoled in 1915. He did not - or in Grant’s view, did not want to - understand that the 1915 jailing had been for the 1911 charge, and that he was now being held accountable for the 1915 incidents. 94
Rua’s alleged responses to the police approach (the two policemen’s versions differed greatly) were made the basis of a new charge of sedition: because the state would not give him a liquor licence on the same basis as pakeha, he would not only continue to discourage enlistment but also (because New Zealand ‘belongs to us the Maoris’) support the Germans against the British colonisers. His refusal to accompany the policemen was interpreted as the act of a leader with pretensions to heading a rival sovereignty: T big man in the Maori. I see no one but big fellow’ (i.e. the Governor or the Minister). The Supreme Court was later to acquit him on the sedition charge, thus indicating problems with the police versions of the events at Te Wai-iti. With Rua Kenana openly defying the authority of the Crown, Commissioner Cullen on 22 February sought and gained permission to personally oversee his arrest. By March he was making extensive, secret preparations for an invasion of the Urewera by a large force of armed constables. Excitement was mounting in ‘patriotic’ circles at the prospect of crushing a Maori ‘rebellion’. Opotiki’s Legion of Frontiersmen, a private body organised on paramilitary lines, offered ‘to chase the misguided prophet Rua out of the Urewera’, and Cullen felt that they could be used as auxiliaries sworn in as specials, but this was seen as too provocative by Herdman. Such men - and other volunteers, such as Major Lusk’s Auckland Provincial Farmers’ Union Rifle Clubs, veterans of the suppression of the 1913 strikers - would be used only if the police expedition was repulsed. 95
The government had hoped to avert a confrontation by getting Apirana Ngata to ask Rua ‘to submit to arrest without resistance’. When Ngata’s and a follow-up mission by Herdman and Cullen failed, under orders
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from the Minister the Commissioner set about securing a formidable array of arms, in the expectation of violent resistance. Twenty of the police would carry long-barrelled weapons, the other four dozen automatic Colt .32 pistols ordered from Sydney. The main march would be of 20 to 25 miles over steep, rough bush tracks from the road-head at Ruatahuna. Two smaller columns would go in from Gisborne and Whakatane, acting under ‘sealed orders’. On 21 March the Commissioner instructed several Inspectors to select ‘strong athletic constables’ for the job, including ‘some suitable men to use the carbines who have served in the Army or the Royal Irish Constabulary’. The expedition was organised as a military operation, and the services of an officer of the Army Medical Corps were requested. The commissariat was treated very seriously, with Senior Sergeant Muggeridge planning the supplies and accompanying the expedition. In order to press home to all citizens the lesson that seditious dissent would not be tolerated, Cullen arranged for two ‘reliable’ journalists (one a photographer) to accompany the main column. 96
With all preparations made, Cullen aimed for the columns to converge on Maungapohatu on Sunday 2 April. In the 1913 police examinations, the sergeants’ paper on ‘Police and Detective Duties’ had included an elementary question; ‘What warrants may you execute on a Sunday, and what ones may not be executed on that day?’ Every recruit learned that warrants of committal based on sale of liquor offences were not enforceable on Sunday. The stakes were so high that Cullen, in his haste to suppress Rua, was prepared to go beyond even his acquiescence in illegal activities by police and scabs at Waihi in 1912, and himself illegally serve a warrant.
The first police to enter Maungapohatu that Sunday were in the small party from Whakatane which had reached the settlement the previous day and camped nearby. They were followed by the six-constable Gisborne detachment led by Sub-Inspector ‘Jimmy’ Johnston. Both groups were treated hospitably. The main expedition of 57 constables comprised a big Auckland contingent under Inspector Sheehan, sizeable groups from Hamilton and Wellington, smaller groups from Wanganui and Napier, and the übiquitous Arthur Skinner from Tauranga, who was acting as Cullen’s bodyguard. They had assembled secretly at Rotorua, gone by road to Ruatahuna under cover of being on an outing, and there donned their uniforms for a laboured journey (with most on foot) guided by District Constable Grant. Mixed-race Constable Bill Neil cleared the path with an axe as they went. They loaded their weapons not far from Rua’s marae. 97
They looked so much like soldiers that both Maori and pakeha at Maungapohatu automatically referred to them as such. Accounts differ as to what actually happened next. Rua expected Cullen to korero, and when the column drew near asked that his force hold back pending discussions. Cullen refused, and rode up to the marae, determined to handcuff Rua. Constable Arnold Butterworth recalled that Johnston
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pointed out Rua to Cullen, and the Commissioner then beckoned to him and tried to say, ‘Come here’. Cullen thought that the appropriate expression was ‘Haere mai’ (a greeting), but so mangled the pronunciation that Rua and his followers thought him to be making a proclamation of strength (‘Here ami!’). This, coupled with Cullen’s obvious determination to reject the traditional hospitality (including a feast) which marae offered to all visitors, and arrest Rua at once, set the scene for a greater degree of Maori hostility. There is no doubt that Rua was already determined to resist arrest, which he could within limits legally do on a Sunday.
Constable Gerald Maloney felt - as did the Gisborne police party - that Rua still expected Cullen to approach him and his two sons for a korero, and hoped to preserve his mana by portraying surrender as an agreement. But when the heavily armed mounted constables Skinner and Thomas Wolfendale rode up to the marae to join Cullen, Rua panicked and attempted to make for the bush, apparently prompting Cullen to order Johnston to stop him. Rua motioned with his hands that his people should flee after him, and a melee ensued. Johnston (in Grant’s words) ‘caught Rua by the arm asking him to go over to the Crown’, and in the ensuing ‘tussle’ Rua’s son Whatu Rua got hold of Neil’s axe and tried to use it. The two were subdued and arrested, as was another Maori who had got hold of a police rifle but immediately discarded it. Cullen later testified that T sang out don’t fire’ during the confusion, but he acknowledged that at least one of his men had raised his carbine as if to fire. Butterworth and others at the scene believed that Cullen was ‘determined to have a shoot-out’. Firing by Maori began as soon as an attempt was made to carry Rua off, allegedly as a result of a previous instruction from the prophet - which was in all the circumstances, and given the words used, highly unlikely, but the only circumstance that would justify subsequent police actions. While the police contended that a Maori fired first, some Maori later testified that they saw Skinner (‘the man who snuffles’) fire the first shot - or that at the very least they saw his black charger start at the same moment as the first shot rang out, which implied the same thing. This version was also unlikely, although many police testified that Rua’s people were to all intents and purposes not armed at this point.
Whoever started the firing, chaos soon prevailed. Constables chasing Rua’s other son. Toko Rua, were fired upon by him when he reached a defensive position, and this was later interpreted by the Crown as proof of a prearranged ambush. Senior Sergeant John Cassells, who was leading the main column of police up to the marae at the time, ordered them to break ranks, which turned an exchange of shots into a battle. A number of police present would eventually claim that had Cullen and Cassells been more tactful, this battle could have been prevented, or at least minimised, given that only a handful of Maori had so far taken up weapons. Butterworth felt that in the circumstances the Maori were ‘quite within their rights to use rifles to defend themselves’. In Bill Neil’s
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eyes, the bringing of ‘the Police army’ to Rua Kenana s ‘stronghold was intended to culminate in a spectacular showdown. Neil knew Maoridom, the Maori language, and Rua and his people; the least likely way to get Rua to peacefully submit to authority was by an ‘invasion ’ which intruded upon the mana of Maungapohatu. 98
During the battle Toko Rua and Te Maipi Te Whiu were killed when the police concentrated their fire on them, Te Maipi shot in the back of the head while trying to escape. Cullen acknowledged that Toko Rua’s right forearm had been smashed during the fighting, but claimed that he had kept shooting by swapping his automatic shotgun for Te Maipi’s pistol, and had been killed in the course of the battle while shooting with his left hand. Maori claimed that he was captured when he was wounded and could fire no more, and then murdered with a shot in the back. Cassells acknowledged that ‘Tokorua did not have a gun when I found his body’, and nor was there one nearby. There was no proper inquest because Cullen decided that this was ‘unnecessary’ and had the bodies interred at Maungapohatu ‘in great haste’. A recent study concluded that Toko Rua was killed ‘quite unnecessarily’.
After a battle which Cullen claimed lasted up to half an hour, but which apparently was over within a few minutes, and appeals to the detained prophet, a ceasefire occurred and more Maori were arrested: 31 men (out of the four dozen there that day), not one of them armed. Four policemen had been wounded, most seriously Huntly constable William (‘Darkie’) Wright, a veteran of Waihi, who had injuries to the back and the lung. For the rest of his policing career, which ended in 1946, Wright was put on ‘light’ duties - including, for his last 23 years of service, as orderly at the Auckland Supreme Court. Auckland constable John Neil, the first to be wounded, had four dozen shotgun pellets in his abdomen and legs. His genitals ‘looked like a plum pudding’, and he proved to be emasculated. Constables Frank Ebbett of Hamilton and Alexander McGowan of Stratford were slightly wounded. Several Maori were wounded, two of them seriously. British sovereignty had been reimposed at what was seen as a small cost in blood. Well over £lOOO was spent on the expedition, in a time of austerity. 99
The main occupying force stayed on at Maungapohatu until 5 April, not only overawing the population and stealing some of their possessions but also re-enacting the battle for the benefit of the photographer. In the next few weeks police scoured the Urewera and adjacent regions looking for followers of Rua who had escaped during or immediately after the battle. They were concerned that armed Maori might regroup, but concluded by the end of May that they had not done so. Only six of those arrested were taken out of Maungapohatu to face charges, Rua being held on the basis of his 1915 sentence of nine months (now increased through default on fines). Rua’s trial began on 9 June, and at 47 days it was to be the longest in the country’s history until 1977. Apart from charges of sedition and resisting arrest on 12 February, he was charged
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on several counts regarding the events at Maungapohatu, including incitement to murder.
Butterworth believed that many of his comrades lied during the trial in order to protect Cullen. Cassells, vilified by many policemen for his alleged willingness to use illegal tactics in police work, but highly regarded by the police hierarchy, orchestrated the police approach. He prevented Tom Collins from testifying, because of Collins’ disquiet at some of the events of 2 April. Cassells typed up a statement that Butterworth was supposed to make, but the constable tore this up because it was ‘all lies’, and refused to testify as this would have meant obeying an instruction to commit perjury. This led - he later recounted - to ‘unbearable’ pressure on him when Cassells became his superior, and to his resignation from the Force. Even a pro-Cullen constable on the expedition would recall that Cassells had tried to frame innocent Maori, and another constable later claimed that Inspector Sheehan’s career had suffered as a result of his questioning the number of arrests at Maungapohatu. Since Rua’s arrest had been unlawful, the charges of resisting arrest and obstructing the police at Maungapohatu were not allowed to stand. Justice Frederick Chapman noted that ‘the right that the subject has to resist an unlawful arrest allows him to go to great lengths even to the extent of inflicting serious wounds in so doing’.
This left the prosecution to argue that Rua had gone beyond what was reasonable by inciting others to resist the police with an alleged reference to arms. Were the words ‘Patua! Patua!’ (and were they the words uttered?) a signal forming part of a prearranged scheme? The jury reported that they could not agree (although they were in favour by 10 to two of Rua’s acquittal on all charges), and the judge proceeded only with the February charges. It was up to the government, he said, whether Rua should be retried on the charges relating to the events of 2 April. Some of the jury later said that they could have reached a decision (presumably to acquit) given time, and had wanted to add a rider recommending exhumation, for proper examination, of the bodies of Te Maipi and Toko Rua. Rua was also acquitted on the February sedition charge.
However, when the jury found Rua guilty only of what they termed ‘Moral Resistance’ to Grant and Cummings in February, also with a clear view to acquittal, Justice Chapman - a friend of Cullen’s - sentenced him to a year’s gaol, to be followed by 18 months in reformative detention. He spoke at length of Rua’s ‘long history of defiance of the law’. Cullen was relieved to have got any guilty verdict at all: the jury were ‘the poorest looking lot I have ever seen in Auckland’. Eight of the jury, for their part, published a letter stating they were ‘astounded’ at the ‘severity of the sentence’. They were upset at the judge’s statement that their verdict of ‘moral’ guilt should be interpreted as meaning something they had not meant, that the Maori version of the encounter should be disbelieved. Their verdict really meant that Rua had declined to ‘voluntarily’ accompany the police, but would have gone had he had the
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situation ‘satisfactorily explained to him’. They considered that he wanted to be ‘formally arrested as a matter of protest’, feeling that he was ‘being persecuted, and in that respect we shared his opinion’. He would not have physically resisted arrest.
Their verdict was in fact supposed to mean that Rua was not guilty (although the jury foreman, and two others, disagreed) and that the police evidence was unreliable. ‘Our sympathies were and are entirely with Rua’, whose version of both the Te Wai-iti and Maungapohatu incidents they believed. They petitioned the House for a pardon or prompt release, in order to rectify ‘a grave miscarriage of Justice’. All that happened was that eventually the Crown decided not to retry Rua on the Maungapohatu charges. No charges against those arrested with Rua were sustained. But with the prophet in gaol, his power as leader of a rival sovereignty was broken. In sentencing him, Chapman summed up the ‘lesson that your people should leam from this trial’: ‘ln every comer of the great Empire to which we belong the King’s law can reach anyone who offends against him’. 100
As in 1912 and 1913, the government was none too squeamish about how it suppressed a threat to the established order of things. As Prime Minister Massey affirmed, the Police ‘were the representatives of the Government when they went to Maungapohatu’. But the authorities had egg on their faces over the bunglings and the acquittals, and so the Ministers conferred with Cullen over what further public steps could be taken against Rua’s millennial movement. Police pressure orchestrated by Cassells was put on some of Rua’s witnesses. As a result, Herdman instructed the Crown Law Office to prosecute six Maori who had allegedly perjured themselves at the trial of Rua, focusing on those who had testified that Skinner had fired first. Cullen did not want the authority of the Crown to be compromised by any public memory of wrongdoing. He was determined to expose the Maori as the evil-doers by this new means; ‘As your present Jury list appears to be packed with Red Feds, and other undesirables, I beg to suggest that you get Mr. Thomas the Sheriff, to summon more than double the number of men usually summoned, so that you may have an opportunity of standing aside such a number of jurymen as will enable you to secure twelve decent men of standing in the district.’ Auckland’s Crown Solicitor was replaced as the prosecutor by a man adjudged to be better able to secure convictions. 101
Cullen had planned his strategy carefully. He had first secured the arrest of Tori Biddle, Rua’s son-in-law, who was seen as the weak link who might implicate the others and ‘expose’ defence lawyers Jerry Lundon and W A Carter and their interpreter Wi Hapi. The other suspects were arrested one by one, their statements taken before they could communicate with any lawyer. Cullen hoped that the police might also be able to get a statement from the ‘big Maori woman, who is one of Rua’s wives ... if she was made to believe that she also would be prosecuted.’ Rotorua-based Carter complained to the Minister of Justice that when he
Part of a procession of mounted specials pass Post Office Square, Wellington, heading into Queen’s Wharf during the Great Strike of 1913. Museum of New Zealand.
The police expedition to invade the Urewera ‘capital’ of Maungapohatu begins, 1916. Mihaia collection, Judith Binney.
Police reconstruct the battle against Rua Kenana’s people at Maungapohatu, soon after the event, 1916. Auckland Public Library.
After the battle at Maungapohatu, police parade triumphant before Rua’s citadel, Hiona, 1916. Mihaia collection, Judith Binney.
Wounded Constable W G (‘Darkle’) Wright being helped out of Maungapohatu 1916. A N Breckon photograph, New Zealand Police.
Commissioner Cullen on horseback leads the prophet Rua (tom shirt, alongside horse) and other prisoners away from Maungapohatu, 1916. New Zealand Herald.
Police escorting Maori troops along Quay Street, Auckland, 10 February 1915. New Zealand Herald.
Policemen (including Constable R Ryan, left) supervising the arrival of wounded soldiers in Christchurch, September 1915. Canterbury Public Library.
Auckland police wagonette (‘Black Maria’) used primarily for conveying prisoners Auckland Institute and Museum.
Frederick W Eggers, hanged for the 1917 West Coast ‘payroll’ murders. National Archives.
Constable S Green on duty in Karangahape Road, Auckland, 1913-14. He was to die on active service during the First World War. New Zealand Herald.
A typical early twentieth-century memorial from leading citizens upon a police transfer. New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
Wellington Police Superintendent John O’Donovan (sixth from left, two along from Police Matron Sarah Beck) flanked by officers C W Hendrey and W H McKinnon, First World War. New Zealand Police.
John O’Donovan, the ‘new look’ Commissioner of Police appointed in 1916. New Zealand Police Centennial Museum.
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discovered some of his clients had been arrested for perjury he had twice attended the police station but had been prevented from seeing them. The police counter-claimed that the Maori had not wanted to see Carter, although in court four opted for him as their defence counsel and later said they had wanted him all along.
The judge accepted that they had not actually requested to see Carter, but ordered the Crown Prosecutor to withdraw any implications against the two lawyers. The Police Gaoler at Rotorua later admitted that if any lawyer other than Lundon and Carter had said he was under instructions from friends of arrestees to appear for them he would have been allowed to see them. These cases demanded, in the interests of justice, special precautions, and where unscrupulous men like Mr. Carter and Mr. Lundon were making an impudent attempt to force themselves into a case of some notoriety, without a colour of right and for corrupt reasons, I deemed it my duty to refuse Mr. Carter an interview with them, unless any one of them asked for him, and this they did not do.’ After the refusal Carter had got (in the policeman’s words) the ‘notorious’ Wi Hapi, ‘his corrupt interpreter, to lurk about the police station and try and get into communication with them’. When Wi Hapi tried to shout to them. Constable Bill Neil ran out and seized him.
Some of the accused testified in court that the police (including Native Constable Te Kepa Tawhiao) had told them that if they implicated others they would receive light sentences. One claimed there had been threats to have ‘our throats cut and our heads split’ if they did not change their evidence. Biddle testified that Lundon, with Carter’s acquiescence, had travelled to Maungapohatu to induce the witnesses to state that Skinner had fired the first shot. This was allegedly in retaliation for Skinner’s prominent role in the suppression of the Waihi strike, Lundon having been a Red Fed lawyer. Biddle proved so unreliable a witness, however, that the Crown quickly dropped him. He was replaced as star Crown witness by Wi Hapi, who now asserted that there had been untoward behaviour by Lundon. In return, the defence counsel claimed that the police had extracted such statements by ‘pressure and bribery and other corrupt means’, regarding convictions on this issue as ‘of considerable importance’ for their public image. At the preliminary hearings Biddle and Mahia Huakeke had pleaded guilty to perjury, and although both later changed their pleas the two received nine months’ gaol. Of the other defendants, however, one was acquitted, despite Wi Hapi’s efforts, and the Crown abandoned the cases against the others. The police, however, did not give up.
Senior police had considered, as the perjury trials of the accused loomed, that Carter had tried ‘to get them to fake their evidence ... and commit further perjury’, and Crown Counsel J A Tole KC felt that they had been ‘got at’ by Lundon, ‘probably to throw discredit on Police methods’. He had arranged for the police to investigate Lundon for ‘devious and organised corrupt method’ and ‘subordination and organised
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conspiracy of corruption and villainous perjury’. Cassells now set out to prove that the entire defence had been ‘a deliberate concoction’, alleging inter alia that a drunken Carter had confessed as much to him. The Minister handed the information to the Auckland Law Society in March 1917, and suggested that Lundon be struck off for professional misconduct. The Society replied that this was a matter, if true, for criminal prosecution - as did the Hamilton District and New Zealand Law Societies when Herdman persisted. ‘Every penny spent on the Rua business will be well spent if we can tie Lundon up’, Crown Prosecutor Selwyn Mays had told Herdman that January. After strenuous efforts, the police finally dropped what Carter called a ‘most dastardly scheme ... to place the police in a favourable light, no matter what was done to others.’ On 1 May 1917 Lundon drafted a petition to parliament on behalf of the Maungapohatu people calling for a public enquiry into the events of 2 April 1916 and police pressure to get changed testimony. On the following day he was suspended - he was later disbarred - on a technicality relating to another case of alleged professional misconduct. Auckland’s ‘leading and most outspoken criminal lawyer’ had been silenced.
When the Supreme Court had in August 1916 declared the police expedition to Maungapohatu to have been illegal, Rua’s people had sought compensation, especially for the relatives of the dead, and for the expense of the trial (which had ‘entirely ruined us’). Not only were they denied compensation, they were not even given back their confiscated weapons, because (in Tole’s words) they were ‘not too civilized, and are subject to peculiar influences’. They had to sell stock and land to pay for their defence and meet Crown levies, which included (on Cullen’s insistence) the cost of the police expedition. The final serious attempt to in effect set up a state within the state had ended in politico-economic collapse, vindicating in the eyes of the state and its coercive agents their Draconian measures of suppression - however embarrassing these were in a legal sense. A conspiracy of silence on the measures used quickly descended. When in 1937 the general manager of the state tourist organisation requested permission to examine files on this ‘last vestige of Maori rebellion’ to get material for articles, the police turned him down. An anthropologist has concluded that although ‘some sort of confrontation is almost inevitable between a messianic movement and the forces of social control ... it is still a reasonable criticism to suggest that the Government could have used other tactics to deal with Rua [and] arrested him in circumstances with less potential for violence’. This is true enough, but at the time the state wished to make a major statement about the fate of any residual resistance to its authority. This - as in 1912-13 - overrode all other considerations. 102
The war brought New Zealand into the policing of another territory, Samoa. Former New Zealand police had already of course been involved in policing in the Pacific, particularly in the New Zealand colony of the
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Cook Islands. Such help sometimes involved the supplying of policing equipment or the recruitment or seconding of New Zealand police, which had not always been very successful. In 1913 it was decided that the Cooks required a more professional Sergeant/Chief of Police, and that a man of New Zealand policing experience should be selected. On 5 August former Auckland constable Francis Blake was appointed sergeant-in-charge. He possessed a string of disciplinary convictions in the New Zealand Force, which he had left under a cloud. His appointment was therefore the subject of a minor scandal in the New Zealand parliament. When the Minister responsible for the Cooks, Maui Pomare, demanded an explanation. Resident Commissioner Captain H W Northcroft defended the selection on the grounds that Blake’s eight disciplinary offences had been minor and dated mostly to 1901-3, when he had been young and inexperienced. A ninth charge, ‘absent from duty at barracks’ in Auckland, related to his behaviour on the day after he had submitted his resignation. As a result, his resignation had been accepted but the pay due to him had been forfeited. Although Northcroft stuck to his decision to appoint Blake, the new chief of police had come under such pressure that later in the year he resigned from the Cooks force - ostensibly because his rheumatism needed hot baths treatment at Rotorua.
At this stage it was decided to appoint an experienced and reliable serving New Zealand policeman to avoid a repetition of the unfortunate history of chiefs of police in the Cooks. Commissioner Cullen selected Constable John Nash, a clerk in the Auckland district headquarters, for the job, and he took up the position in January 1914. After tough negotiations, Cullen had allowed Nash to take up to two years leave without pay from the New Zealand Force without loss of seniority. In the Cooks, however, he fell foul of the administration’s rigorous code of conduct by cohabiting with a ‘native girl’ who bore his child. The Resident Commissioner complained to the authorities in New Zealand in 1915 that Nash ‘had been conducting himself immorally’. Since a white sergeant, ‘to have any influence for good with the native constables who are under him and the native population generally, must live a moral life’, the New Zealand Police were asked to recall him and replace him with a married man. 103
Commissioner Cullen agreed to another two-year secondment, this time with superannuation rights as well as seniority preserved in order to attract a more suitable applicant. Though he would have to be married, he should have no (or ‘very young’) children. The new man was Constable Christopher Atkinson, who had policing experience not just in New Zealand but also in the London Metropolitan Police. Atkinson arrived in September 1915 with his wife and child, and during his period in charge the gaol system was reorganised and revolvers were purchased for the police. Soon after the end of his stint he was replaced in early 1918 by William Blake, who had gained a further concession in the authorities’ search for a suitable candidate: that his two years in charge of the Cook
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Islands police be counted as three years’ New Zealand service. The Islands force was small, but continued to be well-equipped with periodic supplies of uniforms, arms and accoutrements from New Zealand. In emergencies, such as a riot by returned soldiers in 1919, specials could supplement the police - in this case, ‘practically every white man on the island’ of Rarotonga, as well as many ‘native special constables’. 104
It was in the first territory to be seized from the Germans in the First World War, Western Samoa, that New Zealand’s policing influence was greatest. The British suggested the capture, to knock out the German radio station, on 6 August. A week later the ‘Samoan Force’ was ready for embarkation. The German authorities surrendered without resistance to the 1413-strong New Zealand expeditionary force (mostly comprising part-time soldiers, i.e. Territorials). Its leader, Colonel Robert Logan, who had been commander of the Auckland Military District, became the territory’s Administrator. The pre-war German administration had retained a number of indigenous politico-social control mechanisms, while attempting to reorientate them in a Eurocentric direction. This was a common enough expedient for imperial powers trying to control indigenous populations with the least possible use of coercive force - it had been the rationale for New Zealand’s juridico-policing runanga organisations in the 1860s. The New Zealand military occupation authorities felt comfortable enough with the German system to substantively continue it, ‘employing where convenient the same officials and the same police’. One of the occupying soldiers observed that the Germantrained native police were ‘a very fine body of men, and the natives gave them respectful obedience in all matters’. The new administration increased the surveillance level, in particular to keep the German population on a tight rein. Differential legal and policing systems for whites and non-whites remained, as did most of the previous police - including the various types of formal and informal/chiefly ‘native police’ in the remoter areas.
The inherited policing establishment included many dozen leoleo (constables) in the villages who reported to village authorities, 39 Samoan policemen in Apia, the capital, and nine Chinese policemen who reported to the Chinese Commissioner and helped control the more than 2000 indentured Chinese labourers in the islands. From among these and others a new police body which superimposed an occupation-police perspective upon the colony’s policing agencies was created. This was called the Native Samoan Armed Constabulary, a full-time indigenous force with Europeans occupying the senior positions. Its members worked alongside the pre-existing police services on the usual matters, examining street lighting and cleaning, controlling immigration, fighting fires, patrolling. But with it the authorities had imported into Samoa those overtly coercive modes of control which had once been prevalent in New Zealand. The tone was set at the very beginning of the occupation when the starving and maltreated Chinese ‘rioted’: the ‘native police used their
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batons freely and blood flowed’. German planters were allowed to keep their arms in order to suppress the ‘coolies’. Logan became ‘almost obsessive’ about the Chinese, encouraging the Samoan village authorities and police to ‘keep their race a pure one’. The force was run, in succession, by two civilian Commissioners of Police, W Sims and F Nash. 105
The Chinese were particularly heavily policed, including by troops at the beginning of the occupation, when the authorities feared an uprising. Many were repatriated during the course of the war to avoid any possibility of insurrection, and those who remained were placed under increasingly repressive and racist laws. The general trend towards coercion intensified, there being no arrangement to transfer New Zealand police on secondment to work alongside the indigenous constables and their white NCOs from the military. This in turn led to laxity of discipline in the Police. In March 1916 Logan asked for the services of a New Zealand policeman willing to resign to become Assistant Commissioner of Police for Samoa, with a particular brief to tighten internal discipline.
Since the duties also included conducting prosecutions, Cullen asked Dart, but he did not want to take his family into such a climate for a poor financial return (he was to retire medically unfit later in the year, in any case). The Commissioner could find no one else, so passed the matter back to the military. Minister of Defence Allen tried to enlist former Commissioner Dinnie, but he would not serve under a Commissioner of Police ‘entirely ignorant of police control or administration’; ‘the prestige of Scotland Yard must be retained’. That December Logan, despairing of laxity within his police establishment, decided to amalgamate it with the Native Department, headed by Lieutenant J W Crampton - the Judge of the Native Court, who had ‘native police experience in Fiji’ and had been invalided back to New Zealand from the front and sent to Samoa as Provost Marshal. Crampton seemed to want to compensate for the ‘shame’ of having been returned from the war. He took over direct control of Samoan policing as Commissioner of Police, and the relatively benign New Zealand policing influence became increasingly subsumed beneath that of the military occupation authorities.
Meanwhile, the Europeans’ excessive drinking needed to be repressed under wartime measures similar to those in the Dominion. The enforcement of such measures on the occupying troops (a 360-man Samoa Relief Force comprising men unsuitable for fighting service in the war had replaced the Advance Force in May 1915) was usually carried out by or in conjunction with the military police, who met with considerable resistance. Appointed to remove ‘slackness’ in this and other matters, Crampton proved just as unable as the non-military men before him to resist the temptation of ‘native women’. Following unseemly publicity for assaulting one, he was reprimanded and humiliated by again being returned to New Zealand - where, according to a magisterial enquiry, he used ‘force and brutality’ on defaulters at the Wanganui detention barracks. Military control of the police continued, for much of the time in the
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hands of a new Provost Marshal, Captain J M Gillespie. His Commissionership extended beyond the end of the war, and continued even after Tudor Boddam was assigned to organise a European police patrol in Apia in 1919. When a civil administration took over in 1920 the methods and ethos of Samoan policing were already increasingly akin to those of New Zealand (despite the history of problematic police leadership and the arrival of a Dominion-raised Samoan Constabulary Force which had replaced the soldiers a few months before). The Commissioner of Police appointed to reorganise the force was Auckland’s Sub-Inspector W G Wohlmann, who was eventually to head the New Zealand Police. 106
CHAPTER 25
‘The Coming Terror’: The Demand for Women Police
In the early twentieth century women were gradually being taken on in police forces around the world. The debate among Crown authorities on the possibility of taking this step in New Zealand illustrates features of the country’s slow, uneven policing evolution, and explicates the fundamentals of the police role. Until the First World War, few had questioned that the only role for women in New Zealand’s police system was that of paid or unpaid auxiliary workers carrying out specified duties. On pay there were the full-time Police Matrons in the four main cities, and a number of women who held the position of matron and/or female searcher on a part-time basis at smaller stations. Forty-two such appointments were made between 1891 and 1913, with most appointees paid £5 per annum. A few were on higher sums, or received an amount for each woman prisoner handled. Most of the matrons and female searchers were constables’ wives. Many other constables’ wives carried out similar duties without pay from time to time. 107
The female searchers performed escort duty, looked after women prisoners in lockups, kept charge of lockup keys when females were incarcerated, and so forth. That they were needed was indicated by the fact that constables were still occasionally disciplined for ‘disgraceful conduct’ with female prisoners. Sometimes the police authorities would also hire women for specialist duties on a casual basis; there were to be more Ursula Smiths from time to time after the turn of the century, particularly those employed as spies or informants to winkle out slygrog sellers in no-licence areas. By the time of the war, however, the early feminist movement was - in parallel with developments elsewhere in the western world - campaigning for women to take up more than marginalised positions in the police. It was part of the grand plan by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and other such organisations to extend the influence of women throughout the Dominion’s public life. In such ways, inter alia , womanly ‘virtues’ could better pervade society, and the specific interests of women and children could be attended to more adequately. Policing was just one of many state operations seen as needing the participation of women. In the course of this struggle, the largely middle-class moral campaigners, prohibitionists and other women reformers became well versed in the use of ‘moral panic’ arguments. 108
They also collected a great deal of information about overseas experience with women police. By 1914, women constables had been
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appointed in most big American cities (the innovation had started in Los Angeles) and elsewhere - including in Canada, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Austria, and Russia. There were reports that women and children confided more freely in women police, and that women police constables effectively undertook specific ‘female’ enforcement and surveillance activities. No one expected women police to do the same work as male police, and this was reflected in the New Zealand campaign. The fight was for separate spheres, for the expansion of the concept of the matron/female searcher/Police Matron from a largely reactive role to a proactive, ‘preventive’ one. The campaigners wanted women police out on the streets, actively protecting the ‘virtues’ and safety of women and children. Policemen were to remain the exemplars of rightful behaviour in general terms, but they were to be supplemented by the surveillance activities of women, the ‘natural guardians’ of society’s mores. 109
A resolution from a meeting addressed by Anna Stout and other temperance leaders in July 1914 requested that policewomen be appointed ‘to safeguard girls and children in parks and wharves, places of amusement and railway stations.’ They stressed that they were not intruding into the world of mainstream policing, for the ‘policewoman can never take the place of the policeman’. The campaign often talked of employing women ‘to assist the police’ rather than referring to policewomen per se. It focused moreover upon the received wisdom that urban areas were centres of vice and immorality, and so it was here that women police should be deployed. In the same month as Lady Stout’s meeting, the WCTU notified Herdman that the member for Wellington East, Dr A K Newman, would speak up for them in parliament on the question. ‘As our cities grow in population it becomes more & more imperative that special methods should be adopted for the protection of young people of both sexes’, they argued.
Pressured by such organisations, Herdman had already authorised the New Zealand Police to investigate the use of ‘women constables’ overseas. The outbreak of war overtook such investigations, with the police diverted to various kinds of extra duties. But conversely, the war caused the campaign to step up in intensity, given the perceived escalation in ‘moral danger’ to girls and young women from displaced and mobile young men, particularly those in uniform. Protecting the vulnerable from shame and VD required not matrons mostly closeted in police stations, but a preventive patrol system which would make young women and girls more amenable to the warnings of authority than they would have been in the unlikely event of their being approached by young male constables. 110
As the war progressed, the campaigners were able to gamer more overseas evidence to support their cause. Previously, one impediment to the campaign had been the reluctance of the United Kingdom police, particularly the London Metropolitan Police, to contemplate the use of women police. But precedents were soon established in Britain. Just
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before the beginning of the war. Miss Darner Dawson and colleagues had established the Women Police Volunteer Corps (WPVC; from 1915, the Women Police Service or WPS), a semi-official uniformed body which patrolled the streets of London and towns where troops were stationed. It cooperated with the police and military authorities, especially the military police, engaged in drilling and other types of police training, assisted prosecuting authorities, spoke to ‘at risk’ women in the streets, put drunken soldiers onto trains or into barracks, and so forth. The WPVC/ WPS volunteers were not sworn in as constables, but some were given paid positions by various British police forces, while other forces with military bases within their jurisdictions (e.g. Folkestone) also appointed their own women police (often former members of the WPVC/WPS). Chief Officer Dawson encapsulated the overarching character of their job as ‘dealing with women and children’. In New Zealand some protagonists characterised women police as ‘police missionaries’ proselytising for the virtues of bourgeois morality.
Under increasing pressure from the campaigners in 1915, Herdman had little choice but to reopen investigation into the idea. He did so by commissioning the editor of Dunedin’s Evening Star newspaper to study women police during a forthcoming trip to the United States. Mark Cohen was a seasoned campaigner against ‘loose morality’, and took the job seriously. In San Francisco, where he operated out of the New Zealand pavilion at the ‘Panama-Pacific International Exposition’, he visited the Chief of Police, other senior policemen, the magistracy, and women police (including some of those who had been assigned to the Exposition). He reported that women police participated in the investigation of all incidents concerning girls and young women, including paternity cases, watched places they frequented (‘trying to stem their downward course’), and were visibly in evidence in public parks even though they wore only a star to signify authority. They inhabited a working world halfway between those of ordinary constables and matrons: they did not do beat duty, and intervened only if they observed an actual or potential breach of peace. They were attached to the aptly named Bureau of Wayward Girls and Women.
In Los Angeles, the police chief was even about to appoint a ‘negro policewoman’ for specialist work with women and children of her own race. The chief ‘invariably’ acted on the reports of his women police, who comprised - in Cohen’s approving phrase - ‘a committee of censors’. All of Cohen’s reports on various cities were supportive of the idea of women police, although he cautioned against over-zealousness; candidates put up by religious and social organisations might well be ‘disinclined to submit to wholesome discipline’ within a force. Cohen passed on the advice of the Los Angeles chief: ‘You may tell your people that the policewoman is a most valuable ally; she has come to stay; and I would not give them up for anything.’ The reporter added his own advice: New Zealand should experiment with women police in the four centres.
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assigning to the policewoman ‘those aspects of police work for which she is pre-eminently fitted’. Even before the last report arrived Herdman, now facing a campaign for women JPs as well as police, had agreed that women police were ‘working very well’ overseas, pledged to place before Cabinet a proposition for ‘some women to act in certain cases’ in a police capacity, and promised to find out more about the English system. 111
In sending through the draft constitution of the International Association of Policewomen, Cohen noted that on his trip it had been ‘universally recognised that New Zealand was in the van among the nations that are working for the betterment of the human race’ because of its incipient welfare statist regulatory reforms. In America, women police had been part of a move to ‘modernise’ policing. Policing rationalisation/bureaucratisation was seen as a ‘progressive’ step, akin to the advances in New Zealand under the Liberals. But in the Dominion the liberalising mood had, despite some ‘progressive’ Ministers, dissipated in the last years of the Liberal government, and more especially with the combination of the coming to power of Reform and the impact of the war. On the issue of women police, nothing happened other than the seeking of further information. News that female police patrols had begun in a small way in Sydney and Adelaide in 1915 led to increased agitation. The two Adelaide policewomen were actually sworn in as constables, although their duties were specialist ones, including to ‘patrol slum neighbourhoods’, look after drunk women and children, keep an eye on brothels, watch hotels in order to stop young women being decoyed there for prostitution, prevent truancy, and keep children off the streets. 112
By now the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) had grown powerful as young women flocked into cities to fill positions vacated by men who were off to the front, and YWCA campaigners had joined Dr Newman and others (including elements of the labour movement) in pressing for women police. Herdman had reportedly - if vacillatingly - made up his mind against this reform by 1916, and sought refuge in commissioning a report from his Commissioner of Police. Cullen’s world-view had no place for the New Zealand women’s movement, which he tended to see as embodying the militant practices which dominated reporting from overseas about the suffragists. Moreover, he noted. New Zealand was generally speaking a tranquil society, quite unlike the major metropolitan cities overseas which had women police. There ‘would be no work for women police under existing crime conditions in the Dominion. Women have never been criminals in New Zealand, and are not likely to be for many years to come.’ Even New Zealand’s ‘lower class women’ lived in far better conditions than those ‘who live in slum land and Chinese dens in such cities as Sydney, Frisco, etc, where the worst dregs of society, both male and female, band together to carry on crime on a highly organised basis’." 3
But Cullen knew that forceful arguments were being mounted in
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favour of women police hastening the development of desired modes of behaviour among young women and children. He therefore threw in other arguments, although these generally centred on fairly easily resolvable problems: the lack of provisions in the Dominion’s legislation or police regulations for women police, for example, the lack of accommodation for women police at stations, the need for further overseas enquiries. While awaiting Cullen’s report, Herdman had already responded to vigorous and direct pressures from campaigners by deciding to enquire even further about the United Kingdom situation. He had been encouraged by a change of tactics by the campaigners. The WCTU had sensed that if it ameliorated its demands to simply making women police a temporary response to wartime conditions, it might get a foot in the door via the underwhelming slogan, ‘Women Police or Women Patrols in conjunction with our Police Force in New Zealand during the period of the war’. They and other organisations stressed that ‘Male police must be the real custodians of the law’, and took on board the contention of Cohen’s newspaper that women police’s duties should be ‘rigorously restricted’." 4
Herdman was unimpressed with his Commissioner’s totally unyielding report, and insisted that Cullen take the debate on women police seriously. What of Lady Stout’s point that all over the Empire women do ‘more difficult work’ than that which policewomen would be asked to do? Why wait for ‘more reports from remote countries’? Cullen’s response was to personally write to police chiefs overseas: in Australian cities, Glasgow, Liverpool, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, the Royal Irish Constabulary. He no doubt felt that the positive replies would confirm his contention that overseas conditions in which women police were appropriate were quite different from New Zealand conditions, while there would be a bonus of negative replies too. The RIC replied bluntly that no positions ‘could be satisfactorily filled by the appointment of women police’; New York had no need for any women members except matrons. In the United Kingdom there were now several new women police movements, including the Women Police Committee of the National Union of Women Workers of Great Britain and Ireland (NUWW), an organisation which raised Cullen’s suspicions because of the mention of workers in its title. Yet this was now the main women police body cooperating with the London Metropolitan Police to regulate the activities of ‘foolish Girls’, and it felt that women constables ‘would be too controversial to be considered just now’. The Metropolitan Police considered that the NUWW rendered valuable service in protecting girls from those risks ‘to which their sex and the excitement of the times render them liable’." 5
The Metropolitan Police attempted to hide from New Zealand police the radical suffragist credentials of another organisation, the Women Volunteer Police, presumably so as not to alarm them unduly. But Cullen had read enough to confirm his deep-seated dislike of the idea of women police. When the campaign was joined by elements of the New Zealand
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labour movement, his suspicions were heightened. Herdman was more receptive, but some of the arguments went too far for him: for example, that because ‘undesirable’ women gave diseases to young soldiers and thereby hindered the war effort, a ‘woman patrol’ should be able to run them off the streets, prevent them boarding trains headed for the camps, and so on. The existing police, the Minister said, already performed protective functions ‘splendidly’. 116
By August 1916 - under unremitting pressure - even Cullen was acknowledging that, while Police Matrons could handle any necessary specialist duties to protect women and children, their numbers might need to grow and their sphere of activities expand. He had decided, moreover, to canvass all his commissioned officers as to whether they would like women police in their area. If so, what type of work should they do? In reality he was gathering ammunition to confirm to the Minister yet again that women police would not be needed in New Zealand in the foreseeable future. He was not disappointed. Responses from the officers in the provincial areas were as one, that there was ‘no scope’ for such a development in their region. Westland’s Inspector Cruickshank noted that Greymouth, the main centre for the district, had only 5663 people; there were no women in factories or slums, no cases of indecent exposure, no ‘professional prostitutes’, no need even for a detective. Wanganui’s Inspector Wilson observed that he had ‘a very good young woman here as Matron’ who also acted for the Education Department as a visitor of Infant Homes under the Infant Life Protection Act. Inspector Phair of Hamilton in effect summed up the views of most of those in charge of non-metropolitan districts: there could be a role for women police only in big cities, where ‘a large number of the unfortunate class of females assemble, and where a number of neglected and criminal children are to be found’.
Wilson even felt that appointing women police in big centres might be ‘a wise step’, especially in meeting ‘a popular demand’ by enquiring into neglected children, the families of drunken women, and ‘young girls inclined to be fast’. But, he warned, ‘Women of pronounced views, or faddists’, would ‘only be a hindrance to the Department’. Napier’s Inspector McGrath was alone among the provincial officers in feeling that women police were not even necessary in the cities. They would be useful only in a city with the population of the whole Dominion. Dunedin’s Superintendent Wright agreed with him that there was no ‘female criminal population in New Zealand to warrant their services being sought’. He was in any case sceptical that they could check the ‘immorality that is found in every community. It would require an army of women to watch young couples going to secluded places for immoral purposes’. 117
Inspector Hendrey noted that while women might make useful big-city detectives, it took five years to train a detective: ‘The greatest difficulty we have in training these men is to teach them to control their tongue, how long it would take to train women I do not know.’ In passing on this
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view, O’Donovan, the most forward-looking of senior police, endorsed it. Superintendent Dwyer of Christchurch had given much thought to the subject of women police and had similar doubts: ‘From what I have seen of women in other capacities where tact and discretion is required, I am not sure that women police would be a success under any conditions.’ Auckland’s Superintendent Kiely rejected the idea too, but suggested something along the lines already contemplated by Cullen, since wartime conditions had produced more female arrestees and given police more regulatory functions with regard to the vulnerable in society: an additional matron should be appointed in each of the main cities. Among other things, this would cut the cost of hiring women on an ad hoc basis for escort duty and the like when the matrons were otherwise engaged.
At this very time the public campaign for women police reached a peak, and Herdman was deluged with submissions. He was not totally unsympathetic to the campaigners, but could not ignore the views of his policing experts, nor of his political colleagues who assessed that the public would not tolerate women police. He could scarcely avoid doing something, however, and came to the tentative conclusion that the appointment of extra matrons was both an acceptable compromise and an expedient which might produce a good return for a small outlay. If the stated (and now limited) aims of the campaigners could be seen to be met by an expansion of the matron institution, they would be hoist with their own petard. 118
That October Herdman - again under pressure from various organisations - came to a decision on the subject of women in the Force. Over the last five years, he noted, there had been only a small number of offences against women and children, and these had had an arrest rate of 92 to 95 percent. He concluded that generally men respected the weak and defenceless, and where necessary women and children were already being adequately protected in a reactive sense. As for proactivity, in addition to the four full-time matrons in the cities there were five parttime ones, in Newton (Auckland), Napier, Wanganui, New Plymouth and Timaru; there were also the female searchers. Moreover, the SolicitorGeneral had drawn to his attention an English procedural decision that had precluded women from appointment to the office of constable, and although this could be changed by legislation that would not be appropriate since the police were ‘closely analogous to a military force’. The best solution was to increase the number of matrons, and perhaps also expand their functions to provide ‘useful work as helps’ to the constables.
Herdman put the idea to a 21-person delegation led by Lady Stout, which pressed for something better. There was no need in New Zealand for the overt control of young women by women patrols, he replied, so what exactly did they want? ‘Did they wish him to appoint women who should have the right to catechise any girl walking alone, or to follow any young man and young woman who might be walking together in a public park, probably on no evil purpose?’ Women police would not be able to
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carry out such an interventionist policy with discretion; he could not let ‘undisciplined elements’ loose on the streets, and in any case moral policing was the ‘height of folly.’ He would be offended if his daughter was approached by female police, for police should only interfere with the ‘criminal classes’. These remarks not only revealed his libertarian ideology but also reflected a popular view of policing. In actuality, from the general perspective of the state the delegates were correct: as Herdman knew and acknowledged in other contexts, the policing role was, overarchingly, one of social control. But there were contradictions within the modern, consensualist police mode: social controllers could not go too far beyond current social mores in their methods of control, or they would alienate large sectors of the generally law-abiding community. Herdman would not, therefore, listen to the delegates, and twice virtually told Lady Stout (she later said) to ‘shut up’.
Lady Stout’s Society for the Protection of Women and Children (SPWC) and other organisations, such as the National Council of Women, now publicly excoriated Herdman. She could tell from his ‘evident discomfiture’ that the Cohen reports (which he was ‘suppressing’) had given ‘unquestionable testimony to the efficiency of policewomen wherever they have been enrolled’. There was (partially true) speculation that the police had persuaded an apparently sympathetic Herdman to change his mind. Cohen himself demanded to know why his reports on the efficacy of women police had been ‘pigeonholed’. 119
Some campaigners accepted that more matrons would be a viable compromise, so long as the scope of their duties was widened to looking after ‘wayward’ girls and women. Most of the reformers ridiculed this as being ineffective, however. Lady Stout noted that women would usually still have to tell male police the ‘horrible details’ of assaults, and would rather not report them than do this. Canon W Curzon-Siggers emphasised that what was needed was ‘women to save women from falling, and not women to take them in hand after they had fallen’; the role of women police was to impress on girls ‘the higher ideal of the duties of woman’, which was to be worthy of being worshipped by men.
The president of the Dunedin Men’s Mission claimed that proactive women police, not matrons, would be ideal for the ‘special work’ of mothering those who needed help, thereby preventing them turning into criminals. Why would New Zealand not do what the rest of the western world did? Acting Prime Minister Allen agreed that the experiment had been useful elsewhere, but said that military chiefs did not believe the problem with soldiers was of sufficient magnitude to require women police near camps. Social reformers of varied hues flooded the newspaper columns well into 1917 on the subject. At ‘all women’s meetings’, it was said, resolutions urging women police were carried, often in conjunction with other demands such the raising of the age of consent from 16 to 18.
Moral panic was in the air. There had to be women police to stop girls ‘from becoming immoral’. The president of the WCTU had observed
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two female children ‘giggling and larking with a soldier’ in the Octagon in Dunedin at 11 pm, something a woman patrol would have prevented by taking them home. Women were owed such a service as a result of their war effort. Women police, said the SPWC leader after 15 years’ experience ‘among the masses’, should be akin to probation officers. The number of women in prison had risen considerably during the war, albeit there were still only 82 (compared to 808 males) in 1916. Most were in gaol for convictions relating to ‘immoral’ lifestyles. Much of the increase, according to Justice Minister Hanan, ‘was thought to be due to war conditions bringing about an increase in the number of disreputable women’ in the populated areas. How could matrons act as ‘deterrents against the actual commission of offences?’
Social reformers in Dunedin led the opposition to the anodyne solution of extra matrons. It was ‘preposterous’, said the Reverend Rutherford Waddell, that in most circumstances male police possessing none of ‘the finer feelings’ exercised ‘tyranny’ over women. Herdman was portrayed as being as backward-looking as Cullen, reluctant to disturb ‘the established order of things’. His ‘Conservative’ politics, Cohen noted, were not in sympathy with the ‘forward feminist movement’. At a mass meeting in the Dunedin Town Hall of people from 20 ‘philanthropic’ societies, a unanimous vote in favour of women police (and for equal pay and other ‘feminist’ causes) was taken. The chair, Curzon-Siggers, followed this up with a delegation to Acting Prime Minister Allen, claiming that Herdman had treated them ‘flippantly’.
But the government’s conservative constituency had also been rallying on the issue of women police. Dyed-in-the-wool Tories mingled with civil libertarians in this counter-campaign. The former railed against ‘female faddists’ who wanted ‘petticoated Johns’ roaming cities with powers to play ‘Paul Pry’ and act ‘like a lot of Zulu witch doctors.’ The latter felt that while the few ‘sinners’ around would easily dodge the ‘female detectives’, the innocent would suffer: what was wrong with couples ‘indulging in a little discreet osculation’? Wellington’s Evening Post felt that crusading women police would be ‘a menace to society’, while the Sun considered that there was no support for ‘the mobilisation of an army of moral Amazons’. It was reported that in the United Kingdom women police often exceeded their powers, entering homes illegally to evict men visiting women with husbands at the front, and engaging in other excesses of moral fervour. Some of those calling for women police were indeed also demanding such things as the incarceration of women with two or more illegitimate children in ‘farm colonies’, and castration for sex offenders. The strident call for a ‘moral police’, one observer noted, had thrust the idea of ‘regular women police further and further into the millennial reaches of the future’. 120
This proved to be an exaggeration, but a mistake of degree rather than of kind. The government and the police did not need female moral police on
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the streets; male police could carry out this function as needed, backed up by female civilian employees called in to deal with specific situations. By March 1917 the compromise solution had been implemented. There would be four Assistant Matrons, one at each of the main centres, to assist the Matrons. Their duties would be similar to those of the Matrons, ‘but applicants should be sufficiently intelligent to be available if required to assist with enquiries respecting offences in which women and children are concerned’. They might be needed, for example, to hear and type statements. They would be quartered in the police stations, in order to be easily accessible, and would be paid a salary of £lO5 (rising by £5 annual increments to £130). Four were appointed in April and May 1917.
They were (in Chief Clerk Madden’s words) ‘younger women who have had previous training as nurses in mental hospitals etc’, often with a knowledge of the police world: Wellington’s Mrs Catherine Ledger had two brothers who were prominent members of the Force, while the Auckland appointee was the daughter of retired Detective Sergeant William Campbell. Like the Matrons, they focused on indoor work at the central police stations, being largely custodial rather than preventive in orientation. Their outside duties were largely confined to providing escorts and visiting premises to check on such matters as reports of neglected children. When Prime Minister Massey told Christchurch’s Social Hygiene Society that they did ‘patrol work’ and so could protect women and children against ‘criminal interference’, he had quickly to recant. All the same, some of them did manage to visit places which ‘girls frequent, with the view of their protection’. Both the Dunedin Matron and her Assistant were able to ‘devote considerable time to outside matters, such as visiting railway-station, picture-theatres, parks’ and so forth. Their Christchurch counterparts patrolled the banks of the Avon to watch out for immoral behaviour. Their lack of a uniform made it difficult, however, for them to play a preventive role, except on a one-to-one basis. 121
Occasional patrols by the women police employees had not been completely ruled out, but in mid 1917 Chief Detective Tudor Boddam reported that in Wellington they were not needed. If girls or women began ‘an immoral or criminal career’ they soon came to police notice and were dealt with accordingly. More frequently, the Assistant Matrons were used in detection work. Assistant Matron Ivy Campbell of Auckland excelled at exposing quack fortune-tellers. Under the wing of Chief Detective McMahon, she would visit under cover the ‘clairvoyants’, ‘astrologists’ and ‘palmists’ who (in McMahon’s words) ‘had been preying on the servant girls of this city’, including by pretending to give information as to soldiers at the front’. On the basis of her evidence, a number of fortune-tellers were gaoled for short periods. So expert did she become that she was used for the same entrapment work in other centres.
The reform campaigners usually welcomed the expanded number of
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Matrons as ‘a praiseworthy endeavour to solve the problem’, but depicted it as woefully inadequate. They did not give in (although their stridency lessened a little after the politeness of new Minister in charge of policing, Thomas Wilford, to their deputations gave them false hopes that women police were being reconsidered for New Zealand). Once again they stressed the Rowan/Mayne teachings on the preventive purpose and function of policing, and within these general terms of reference they were right. As a newspaper correspondent put it, the old adage was best: ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. But the country remained unready for such a radical new preventive method, and the reformers eventually came to terms with this - for the present. As Waddell put it, they now hoped that after the war, ‘when nations have seen what woman can do, there will be a new order of things’. 122
In any case, by 1917 the government had a new idea for introducing preventive ‘moral policing’ by less controversial means. Around the time of Waddell’s statement, three Christchurch women waited on the Minister in charge of Public Health, G W Russell. Typically, they pleaded for women police ‘to engage in patrolling the New Brighton beach, giving attention to the conduct of week-end shacks, and advising young people found in the streets at night not under adequate protection’. This seemed to them to be the only way to fill the gaps in parental control which had emerged during the war. The government remained concerned about the need to combat ‘immorality’, but now had other ideas about implementation.
It was drafting, Russell told the delegation, a Social Hygiene Bill aimed at the suppression of venereal disease. People would welcome regulation against this evil, so long as that regulation was not carried out by actual police; the regulatory process would help prevent all kinds of ‘immorality’, not just venereal disease. ‘Women inspectors’ would advise young people on the dangers of immoral behaviour, and he could see no reason why they should not also visit military camps, seaside resorts and the like. The legislation was passed in October 1917, and section 12 gave power to appoint ‘Health Patrols ... to protect the health and morality of young persons’. These could be of either sex, ‘may exercise the powers of police constables, and shall be entitled to the same protection and privileges in the performance of their duties as police constables’ - except that they could not deal with persons of the opposite sex.
The campaigners for women police now directed much of their attention to trying to force the government to actually implement such patrols, but the civil liberties ramifications seem to have frightened it off what had initially seemed a good idea. The government finally advertised for applicants in August 1918, in a move greeted by the moral reformers as ‘an instalment of their aims’. Operating under Health Department auspices, the health patrols were definitely a policing instrument. They would ‘advise and warn’ young persons out after dark ‘without adequate supervision and protection’, and notify their parents of the danger they
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were in. They were seen as a welcome indication of willingness to depart from ‘the virtual monopoly by men of official positions connected with the detection, prevention and punishment of crime’. But although police had to cooperate with them, they came to be seen as an inadequate substitute for women police, and eventually budgetary cuts led to their disappearance. 123
The campaign for women police had shown that progressive social reform was inexorably bound up with the extension of the state’s regulatory function within society; and that the government and police authorities felt that an extension of such a radical nature was not, except to a very small degree, actually necessary in what was generally (despite industrial troubles, wartime ‘emergency’ and so forth) a stabilising society. The Liberal experiments were essentially at an end. Reinstatement of new frontiers of state interventionist regulation awaited the advent of a Labour government in the mid 19305. Only following this were women police, and other ‘progressive’ reforms such as police unionism, implemented. The stable New Zealand society which had in general cemented itself in place by the beginning of the twentieth century, and which despite hiccups was to last until the 19605, did not yet need a Police Force that gave any prominence to women, unions or Maori. However benign, it was still a male, pakeha, paramilitary formation; this was a sobering reminder that, in the last instance, the function of the constable was to legally wield coercive power on behalf of the state on a day-to-day basis. Prevention, role-modelling, regulatory inspection, all were subsets of the essential police functions: to surveil and to discipline.
Conclusion
This volume and its predecessors have stressed the role of the state in first the taming, and then the regulating, of social life in nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand. 1 The state comprised a collectivity of institutions but, after a process of intrastate discourse, it spoke and acted as a unitary entity on any given issue. It possessed legitimised coercive monopoly over all people, and had the capacity to determine the parameters of all systems of activity, within the country’s borders. The state, with the role of the government therein looming large, defined ‘what society ought to be like’, and implemented ‘procedures for how it might become like this’. It aimed to impose and maintain its own conception of ‘order and regularity’, and among its organisational methods policing played a prominent role as its ‘first line of formal social control’.
In New Zealand as elsewhere, the state’s definition of ‘peace and good order’ reflected in the final analysis and of structural necessity the interests of the dominant social and economic forces. But it was far from being a direct instrument of such interests. It could even, with their longterm gain in mind, operate against their individual or collective shortterm aspirations. The state, then, was ‘relatively autonomous’. It regulated civil society through a number of mechanisms; from overtly repressive apparatuses, especially the police and the army, through less obviously coercive entities such as other bureaucratic institutions, to legal-ideological dominion mediated through state, quasi-state and even non-state institutions.
The police, characterised in the final analysis by their licence to coerce on a daily basis on behalf of the state, held a unique, pivotal and flexible position on that continuum of control. There were many methodologies of policing available to the state, both strategic and tactical. These ranged on the control continuum from an overtly violent (‘condign’) pole, in response to the harshly coerced having withheld their consent to the wishes of the state, through ‘benignly’ coercive and bureaucratic modes of control, to the pole where policing participated in a control strategy that was mostly hegemonic in nature - where control by the state and the interests it represented was overarchingly intellectual, ideological and cultural. The primary and secondary modes of policing, and the interrelationships between these and other modes of social control, were determined by the exigencies facing the state authorities.
Policing, therefore, did not primarily (or even necessarily) involve preventing ‘crime’ or catching ‘criminals’. Most police time was (and is) spent on matters unrelated to what is traditionally viewed as crime (the more serious offences, especially expropriation of property and violation
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of the person). Policing was essentially about ‘social control’, with prevention and detection of ‘crime’ a subset of this imperative. Its terms of reference constituted the broad mandate of ‘keeping the peace’, within which ‘law enforcement’ played no more than a part. The evidence is overwhelming that in nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand police constituted the key ‘socio-political tool of the state’ in monitoring and ensuring standards of belief and behaviour deemed appropriate by the authorities. This is not to claim that they were primarily responsible for the ‘stabilising’ of society, for the progressive overall decline in theft, violence and social turbulence which occurred in New Zealand as elsewhere in this period. More fundamental factors, economic, social, political and cultural/hegemonic, were at work in the process of ‘civilising’ the frontier and its successor polity. But these stabilising developments were encouraged by the state, frequently through the mediation of the police. 2
The police franchise on the ‘legitimate’ use of non-negotiably coercive force on behalf of the state on a daily basis was (and is) the primary characteristic which provided ‘thematic unity’ for all police work. As a British observer put it during the period covered by this book, policemen ‘represent the physical force of the State in its dealings with intestine enemies - with crime, ruffianism, and disorder - as the army represents its physical force in the first resort against foreign foes, and in the last resort against domestic disloyalty’. For 24 hours every day the policeman was the ‘soldier acting alone’ to impose or maintain the civic characteristics perceived as constituting correct values and appropriate activity, while retaining the capacity to combine with his colleagues to present coercive might against collective challenges to the state authorities and their decreed modes of appropriate behaviour. 3
For the state fell far short of achieving its aspirations in the arena of social and racial stability. As has been pointed out with regard to Britain, the ‘juristic’ perspective held by the propertied classes of what appropriately constitutes order is deeply antagonistic to the ‘customary’ view of order held by working people, and - one might add in the New Zealand context - by Maori. Moreover, as New Zealand scholars of policing have noted, ‘consent’ to policing/state-desired norms of behaviour has historically been ‘hard won and easily lost’; ‘police/public relations have always been both uneven and fragile’.
In the present volume not a few instances of significant collective resistance to state domination have been illustrated. On these occasions, most significantly in 1890 and 1912-13 for pakeha resistance and in 1898 and 1916 for Maori resistance, the seething mass of subsumed conflictual elements burst to the surface. In such circumstances, if the now benignly configured police power could not cope, auxiliary coercive power was acquired. In some circumstances, extra-legal tactics might be used. For, in the final analysis, in the eyes of the authorities ‘the law’ was - as Lord Scarman recently noted - but ‘a valuable but subordinate
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mechanism serving to maintain a social order’. In any state/police contradiction between enforcing the law and maintaining ‘order’, the latter took precedence in the interests of reimposing what was deemed to be the correct and/or ‘natural’ state of social being. That being said, all the evidence points to the post-frontier period in New Zealand being one in which the degree of ‘peace and good order’ attained was generally satisfactory to the state authorities and in which, therefore, auxiliary police and extra-legal tactics rarely intruded upon the overarching strategy of restrained coercion and hegemonic control. 4
That the policeman operated as a state agent and ultimately, therefore, as a tool of the political executive and the forces it represented, was obscured then (and later) by an ideological device. When the ‘new police’ were first fully constituted with the founding of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, Commissioners Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne faced barriers to their acceptability precisely because they were agents of the government. To counteract these barriers, a myth was created to the effect that police were agents only of ‘the law’. Operatives who were in actuality responsive to ‘the governing classes’ concern to maintain an unequal social order with a minimum of violence and oppression’, the most cost-effective option for imposing and maintaining ‘peace and tranquillity’, were therefore portrayed as impartial bureaucrats administering an impartial law.
The strategic locus of ‘the law’ can be easily grasped by merely citing Anatole France’s much-quoted sarcasm: ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor.’ But the formal general impartiality embodied in the legal system, and the fact that (whatever its finalanalysis function) most people benefited to some degree from the presence of the ‘new police’, meant that the imagery of policemen as agents of ‘the law’ eventually received support from much of the populace. This phenomenon recurred when the Metropolitan Police ‘model’ was imported into ‘settler’ colonies, including New Zealand - indeed, particularly in New Zealand as time went by.
Official and academic circles developed this increasing public acceptance of policing into a theory of police accountability, viz that public consent to both ‘the law’ and the police provided the police mandate to coerce. The ancient origins of the office of constable were utilised to depict the police as mere ‘citizens in uniform’, working under the supposedly impartial aegis of ‘the law’. Because of ‘the confidence which the public repose in it’, ‘British’ policing was seen as ‘the soundest police system in the world’. Ironically, police employment as state bureaucrats, in fact, helped increase their acceptability. In the past, social control had manifested itself through direct and personal control by the dominant groups - including by their power over constables - whereas now policemen were only an ‘indirect embodiment of class rule’. Responsible to the ‘relatively autonomous’ state, ‘a major prop of the
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newly developing state bureaucracy’ which removed the dominant classes from directly controlling the mass of people, policemen could be viewed as less partisan than in the past. The ‘consent thesis’, brought to New Zealand with the ‘Metropolitan model’, strengthened as a result of both autochthonous events and those in the ‘Mother Country’. 5
For a considerable period, however, development of ‘public consent’ in New Zealand was slow, among pakeha as well as, more obviously, among Maori. The newly annexed colony posed a dual problem: the need to ‘pacify’ both a huge and resistant Maori frontier, and a series of turbulent pakeha frontier settlements comprising people alienated from many of the communal bonding mechanisms which had been influential in social control in the United Kingdom. The most significant proactive state activity involved in this early pacification process, that of policing, is explored in Policing the Colonial Frontier.
There was one characteristic common to all the perceived policing ‘models’ that the state could adopt and adapt which was central to the methodology of dual repressions. The (Royal) Irish Constabulary, the London Metropolitan Police, specialist colonial forces - all emphasised the primacy of surveillance. Knowledge was the basis of power. When a writer enthused of the Canadian ‘mounties’ that they ‘know all the ins and outs of the district, and are in constant touch with the people’; when the Irish constable’s duty was described as ‘to know everything about everyone’, operating as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the state as the prerequisite for being its ‘strong right hand’; such could have been written about the New Zealand police. All ‘western’ police forces, moreover, stressed patrolling as the principal modus operandi for gaining the requisite knowledge for successful social control. As a British study put it, the constable’s task was ‘maintaining Civil Order (mainly by patrolling)’. The London police were instructed in 1893 that ‘it is almost impossible that a vigilant officer sees nothing worthy of further notice’. Once information was collected it was collated, assessed, and if necessary acted upon, these later processes often involving or being taken over by the patrolman’s superiors. Patrolling, moreover, provided a high visibility for the state: people were believed to be deterred from offending by means of constant reminders of its coercive power, and those undeterred would be apprehended either by the patrols or as a result of information received from patrolling.
Patrolling featured in both the reactive/suppressive policing required to pacify the frontier and other turbulent areas and the preventive/deterrent emphasis of the post-frontier and other relatively ‘civilised’ communities. Regular patrolling surveilled large urban areas, semi-regular patrolling monitored smaller urban and semi-rural areas, and irregular patrolling of the rural spaces completed the network of nation-wide surveillance. At first the patrols targeted large collectivities of the populace, while later small groups and individuals constituted the major threat to the desired social order.
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From the beginning, then, the controllers of the New Zealand state required policemen able to impose ‘peace and good order’ upon the social collectivities comprising two frontiers, Maori and pakeha. This form of policing, primarily as an instrumental agency of the state, intensified in periods of extreme turbulence - as with the irruption of pakeha goldminers and the eruption of Maori armed ‘rebellion’ in the 1860s, when targeted collectivities were coercively disciplined by forces operating at the ‘condign’ end of the control continuum. In this period up to 1867 when, generally, policing was required to help hasten the ‘taming’ of frontier New Zealand, the overarching control paradigm was that of overt coercion. Through the police the state manifestly revealed its capacity to potentially or (perhaps in conjunction with the military) actually visit punishment upon groups (as well as individuals) who did not submit to its will. Police forces were at the ‘cutting edge’ of social and racial change, their goal being to sufficiently suppress generalised or massed untoward behaviour to a degree satisfactory - in the eyes of the authorities - for the orderly transaction of commerce, industry, and socio-political discourse. 6
The proactive and repressive policing methodology of the New Zealand frontier stage was paralleled in the other imperial frontiers. The ‘taming of the prairies’ said to have been effected by the Canadian mounted police was lauded, for example, as ‘a solid piece of nationbuilding’. While the claims made for condign policing are frequently exaggerated, and it must be re-emphasised that the frontier is tamed primarily by fundamental (particularly socio-economic) factors, it is clear that state-controlled taming activities (particularly policing) accelerated the process to a marked degree. The state, always confident of its ability to engage in proactive control of both class and race, was able from the late 1860s to preside over a colonial society in transition from turbulence to stability. 7
By 1840 the British governing classes were taking up Benthamite utilitarian solutions to the problems of social disorder unleashed - inter alia - by the ‘industrial revolution’, and such ideas were transferred to New Zealand. Police were but one of the new-styled, paid bureaucracies created to surveil and control. Developments in the physical and conceptual ‘technology of subjection’, for example, enabled the state to adopt more rational modes of deterring ‘wrong-doers’. Inexorably, punishment/ deterrence regimes were moving from severity of punishment towards certainty of apprehension and potentiality of reform; from relocation of pain in the prisoner’s body to his/her mind as a prerequisite for remodelled behaviour. Not just prisoners however but all the citizenry, including Maori, were perceived to be ‘reprogrammable’. Preventive policing, certainty of incarceration for serious offenders, reformative penal discipline for the recalcitrant, all were part of an interrelated state strategy to ‘rationalise’ and better control social, racial and economic relations in nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand.
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Overarching the progressive repression of ‘unauthorised behaviour’, and the efforts to ‘reprogramme’ Maori and pakeha beliefs and behaviour, was a ‘civilising’ development independent of (though interrelated with) these. The percentage of the population prepared to adhere (most of the time, at least) to officially sanctioned modes of social activity gradually increased. As settlement and urbanisation progressed, pakeha began to rebuild an intricate network of formal and informal associations roughly along the lines of those they had left behind in Britain. These, coupled with ‘stabilising’ developments such as the ‘denomadisation’ of New Zealand labour and the mass immigration of marriageable women, were conducive to an aggregate rise in the level of ‘public order’. Likewise, most Maori tribal and sub-tribal institutions gradually came to at least a modus vivendi with the new political economy. Where Maori resistance continued, it was increasingly in subtle ways that could be accommodated (at least in the interim) within the state’s definition of an appropriate degree of order. Over time, Maori generally adapted sufficiently for the authorities to be satisfied that their aim of assimilation of the tangata whenua was achievable. 8
It was as a result of the self-‘taming’ of the frontier through the internal dynamics of the New Zealand situation, and the ancillary processes of coerced and programmed ‘taming’, that the state’s requirements for order imposition began to recede from the late 1860s. The Colonial Frontier Tamed, the immediate predecessor volume to this work, covers the transition from a relatively ‘unstable’ to the relatively ‘settled’ society of the mid 1880s. Whereas a ‘harsh’ police strategy had once been perceived as essential, by 1886 ‘stabilisation’ of Maori and pakeha society was seen to be so progressed that a state - and therefore police - strategy to merely maintain the established order of things was all that was necessary. In the course of the transition an overtly coercive police strategy had given way to a more benign, repressive-only-when-needed strategy. By 1886 the colony was said to have attained a ‘profound and settled repose’. Most people of both races obeyed the laws and officiallysanctioned codes and customs most of the time. While policing remained tactically able to be as coercive as ever, overarchingly it became less instrumental, less military in its orientation to the citizenry, more directed to containing rather than harshly repressing the pressures from below - which were now usually less dangerous to the state and its desired socioracial fabric.
Statistics from the period covered in this volume and its predecessors are crude, but in general terms reliable enough. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the trends. In 1864 there were only 615 pakeha females to every 1000 pakeha males; by 1886 the female ratio had moved up to 853, and by 1916 the figure was 993. Family life and therefore social stability were on the increase. Despite a population increase from 625,859 to 1,150,002 (plus around 44,000 military
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personnel overseas in 1916) during the three decades from 1886, reported offences had increased from 18,135 per annum to only 21,724. Such figures are notoriously difficult to analyse, given that they measure variables such as differing legal/political standards and (interrelatedly) societal expectations of the state of desired order, and that between these two dates there had been a low of 12,674 in 1891 and a high of 28,402 amidst the ‘moral laxity’ of the early wartime period in 1915. But taken together with a wealth of non-statistical evidence, and official assessments at the time, they reflect clearly a process of post-colonial ‘settling down’ - a process symbolically endorsed two-thirds of the way through the period by New Zealand’s change in constitutional status in the Empire. When ‘crime’ and drunkenness convictions went up, as they did from time to time, this might well have resulted from the police doing their job as agents of the state by - for example - making a greater effort ‘to clear drunken people from view’ when so required by the authorities. People as well as state had high expectations of police ability to suppress remaining recalcitrants, police status having improved as elsewhere in the ‘civilised’ world.
The state had not left to chance the social and racial metamorphosis from fragmented frontier to the stable society of the Dominion. Various new civil bureaucracies had increasingly supplemented and complemented the police as the agents of physical control. But of escalating significance was the exercise of social control through hegemonic (socio-cultural and intellectual-ideological) controls. What was sought was a predominantly self-policing society in which at very least most people, including Maori, had internalised most of the state-desired values. This mode of control was the most attractive of all the options on the social control continuum for both the New Zealand and other ‘western’ states. To procure a situation in which the great majority of inhabitants believed the ‘present structure of the social system is legitimate to a greater or lesser extent’, to secure the acquiescence of the populace (including a subjugated tribal society) in the politico-economic leadership vested in the state, was by far the cheapest form of control. It was also less disruptive to those already acting in accord with the general wishes of the state and the dominant interests in society. Given the appropriate combination of socio-economic and other developments, it was, in short, ‘a more effective social control than repression’. 9
In the stabilised society, then, the hegemonic power wielded by the state involved the successful instilling of values and beliefs (‘conditioning’) that led people to ‘voluntary compliance’ with state authority and to behave of their own accord in officially approved fashion. Many desired societal characteristics had pre-existed or evolved of their own right, particularly in pakeha society, although some of these needed channelling into forms compatible with the social relations prescribed by the state as necessary for the peculiar conjunctural needs of New Zealand. That ‘persuasion, education, or the social commitment to what seems
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natural, proper, or right causes the individual to submit to the will 0f... others’, particularly controllers of the state or their agents, is how J K Galbraith has summed up the concept of ‘conditioned control’. In this process of mobilisation and reproduction of a collective world-view adequate for the needs of the construction and preservation of the desired social order, policing agents played a not insignificant role.
In the phase of the condign policing strategy police had been emissaries and ‘missionaries’ of the state, imposing and cajoling correct behaviour upon large numbers of people; in the transitional phase, they engaged in similar activities but were able increasingly to orientate them towards the easier task of controlling individual deviators from the desired norms. Even during these phases, between 1840 and 1886, large numbers of the dominated or subjected had in a sense (or at least to a degree) given permission for their domination or subjection by the state. Many pakeha had openly deferred to the exercise of intellectual, moral and political leadership by the state and the interests it represented; the state had, inter alia, provided the infrastructural support they needed to tame the bush, develop farms, trade, crush Maori resistance. Many of those indigenous people not repressed by force of arms had accommodated to the state’s will in their own ways, for their own reasons. The exercise of condign power was, in short, objectively visible, the state’s actions being redolent of instrumental intent. Conditioned control, however, was more subjective in its visibility; in the period of hegemonic control after 1886 only the recalcitrant offenders against the state-required standards were generally aware of their subjection, and few of these appreciated that their lives were governed within paradigmatic parameters of domination.
Hegemonic control methods ranged from ‘explicit conditioning’ deliberately cultivated by political persuasion, education, bureaucracies and the like, through to ‘implicit conditioning’ in which officially sanctioned thought and behaviour became considered normal, proper and ‘natural’. In a conditioned society there was - in the words of a tum-of-the-century scholar - ‘a general recognition of the unwritten code of manners which makes for social progress and good citizenship’ (that is, as defined by the state and the forces it represented). Eventually, state-required behavioural characteristics became the received wisdom of all but a small minority. A recent American official task force report put the matter prescriptively; ‘Public order ... does not and cannot rest solely on applications or threats of force by the authorities. It must also rest on the people’s sense of the legitimacy of the rule-making institutions of the political and social order and of the rules these institutions make’.
Although the state in ‘modem’ New Zealand of necessity allowed this ‘sense of legitimacy’ to be reshaped from time to time to meet changing socio-political situations, it could not allow the fundamentals of appropriate attitudes and deeds to be undermined. In the continued mobilisation, reproduction and recreation of these attributes, police played
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a significant role. They were increasingly to embody , as well as merely practise, the desired virtues. As well as imposing these upon refractory citizens, therefore, constables also role-modelled them. In 1905 Edward Carpenter could note of similar developments in Britain that police ‘have the morals of society, so to speak, in their charge’. They had become, in the ‘consensual’ society, symbolic agents of both the state and its mores, as well as its coercive agents.
When a young man joined the Force he lost, in the words of an NCO, ‘in an ideal sense the disadvantage of individualism and becomes a vital factor in the efficiency of the service’ by acting instinctively along ‘certain ordered lines’. The new policeman in a stabilised society quickly became an exemplar of ‘Order, Accuracy, Civility, System and Loyalty’, attributes which made him a symbolic representative of state-desired virtues as well as a man able to do the appropriate thing in his discretionary interaction with citizens. He could not afford to allow his necessary separation from society to slip into a modus operandi that alienated sizeable parts of the citizenry from him, as might happen in an overtly coercive force of ‘occupation-police’ mode. The goal was hegemonic public acceptance of all state interventionary activity and state-prescribed mores; a generalised perception of the required ‘condition of being’ as not just desirable but self-obviously ‘natural’. Restraint towards citizens (through internalisation of appropriate actions by patrolmen) contributed greatly to this goal, as did the emergence of police ‘service functions’ which had much to do with state interventionary social control (partly through enhanced surveillance opportunities) but little ostentatious connection with coercion.
The ‘consent thesis’ had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘The policeman obtains public cooperation, and enjoys public esteem, because he enforces standards accepted by the community.’ There were hiccups in this development in New Zealand, particularly when the state attempted to move too fast for large sectors of the public to accept (as with some liquor laws), but the evolution of the stabilised society was most certainly accompanied by the development of the policeman as ‘friend, helper and adviser’ to the ‘law-abiding community’, as a touchstone of all that was desirable in a citizen. Concomitantly, the old overtly coercive orientation towards the populace had given way to a more benevolent surveilling gaze: as Commissioner Arthur Hume noted in the 1890s, the trend was towards bringing his men into ‘closer touch with the people’. 10
A benignly configured coercive surveillance mechanism normally involved fewer police personnel per citizen. In 1886 there were 494 regular police in New Zealand; in 1917 there were 898. Given the large amount of immigration during this three-decade period, as well as increasing numbers of ‘native-born’ pakeha as family life increased, these policing numbers do not contradict this expectation. Yet they represented only a small decrease in the ratio of police to population,
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down from 1:1266 to 1:1280 (albeit this had reached an all-time New Zealand low of 1:1530 in 1896); in view of the general ‘settling down’ which was frequently commented on at the time, one might have expected a much greater decrease. But the 1886 figure, it should be recalled, reflected an already stabilised society following a two-decade or so transition. Only eight years before, the ratio of regular police to population was a high 1:944, and that at a time when soldiers too carried out policing duties. Moreover, in a stabilised society, given the ever-increasing expectations by the state authorities and ‘respectable’ society of ‘good behaviour’, there needed to be a relatively sizeable representation of state-provided moral exemplars, the police being in the front line of this endeavour. Belatedly, as social mores and legal rules ever tightened, an adequate number of police-as-coercers needed to be retained to knock refractory elements back into line - including resistant Maori, and new immigrants thinking they were entering a ‘loose’ frontier society. A police specialist bureaucracy was developing to meet the new circumstances, supplementing the other specialist bureaucracies of the New Zealand interventionist state.
By 1886 New Zealand’s policing requirements had, then, become those for an essentially benign force. While at root the police role remained that of ‘an extension of the violence potential of the state’, in the consensual society established by the late nineteenth century overt police coercion was required far less pervasively, and on far fewer discrete occasions, than before. In the post-frontier society the primary social control emphasis lay firmly in the colonisation of the beliefs and behaviour of both races. Although this was effected by many means, the police were one of the significant players, and played several roles at that. It was the ‘rule of law’, to which the police were supposedly alone responsible through their ‘original authority’ (derived from the judicial branch of state rather than from the legislative and executive), which provided their legitimatory ideological resonance.
The utilitarian theoretical genesis of the ‘new police’ had mandated their proactive intervention into social life through its stress on prevention of disruption to ‘order and stability’. Once appropriate values had permeated society, the police role as a significant ‘ancillary aid to the value maintaining processes’ became an easier one in that these interventions were now generally more readily accepted than in the period of the condign policing strategy. Other factors helped this development, such as the passing of laws reflecting the trend towards social integration, and Maori acquiescence in state authority. With the imagery of police as an impartial bureaucracy firmly in place, there was much less overt resistance to their presence."
Working people gave increasing adherence to hegemonic mores, partly because of the state’s heightening expectations of appropriate behaviour from all citizens and its increasing regulation of all areas of social life: in areas such as sexual morality and traffic control, middle-
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class people who in past periods might well have been unencroached upon by policing might now come manifestly to police attention. New police ‘service functions’, moreover, might well benefit lower socioeconomic groups disproportionately, even if only incidentally - as did other aspects of the stabilised society. The benign police was seen as supportive of such a society, indeed as reflective of desirable elements of it, and therefore as generally worthy of support. The strategy devised by Rowan and Mayne of gaining public consent had both paralleled and to a degree influenced socio-ideological development in New Zealand, whose post-1886 police has been characterised as coming ‘closest of all the antipodal forces to the Metropolitan Police model’.
Other circumstances eased the police lot. The laws embodying social control had always been permissive in nature rather than prescriptive, allowing policemen wide latitude in imposing and maintaining the concepts of what constituted minimal requirements of ‘order and tranquillity’. New Zealand police recruits in training at the turn of the century were taught for their ‘Definition of Law’: ‘Law as it is understood by a Constable, means a rule of civil conduct, prescribed by the supreme power of the State, commanding what is right, and preventing what is wrong’. Laws were -in the words of later scholars - ‘all-purpose control devices’, and police could ‘arrest almost anyone on formally defensible grounds, with relatively little effort’. In short, constables had ‘an enormous degree of freedom in setting peace-keeping and law-enforcement policies’, because their activity at the lowest level of state interaction with the citizenry determined the ‘outer perimeter’ of public coercion.
The controlling groups, therefore, needed to pay particular attention to the policing function and its ‘omnibus mandate’ in relation to the creation and maintenance of social stability. In general, the state and the interests it represented were satisfied that modem constables would use the large degree of discretion given to them in a wise fashion. This was to be exercised in a restrained way, in a manner which was not too oppressive and which did not therefore provoke reaction against the authorities. Whatever the formal legal requirements, police - with state backing - were usually satisfied if the citizenry ‘conform their general behaviour to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood and good manners; to be decent, industrious and inoffensive’. All these characteristics were, of course, loaded with subjective meaning and in any case altered through time. In the ‘conditioned society’, however, most people generally conformed to a degree that was considered ‘good enough’ by the constables and therefore by the state. W'here stricter standards were required to meet the increasing ‘bourgeoisification’ of ‘the law’ and/or official expectations, the policing of these often involved offences of minor ilk. Moreover, such offences tended to be committed by individuals qua individuals rather than through the medium of collectivities, and any resistance to apprehension or other discipline imposed by the police now manifested itself in physical assault less frequently. 12
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Integral to police benignity was public perception of a level of corruption so low as to be truly remarkable by international standards. When in 1922 former Justice Minister Thomas Wilford reviewed 30 years of court work, he claimed to have discovered just a single policeman who had wilfully distorted the truth. Three years later a judge noted that during two decades at the Bar he had been ‘looking for the wicked policeman, but have never found him. The wicked policeman exists only on the films; anyway, he does not exist in New Zealand.’ Even more positively, by the end of the First World War it had become a truism that there was a ‘tradition of police fairness in this country - in contrast with what is reported to occur at times in other countries’; ‘police honour’ was on a ‘high pedestal’. The depiction of police as impartial appliers of ‘the law’ seemed to have become the reality. Only in minority circles, such as those of socialists and Maori ‘rebels’, was the partiality inherent in ‘the law’ addressed.
In short, police were seen as being ‘good citizens in uniform’, paid to uphold what were seen as self-evident societal virtues enshrined in ‘the law’. In farewelling Inspector Dwyer on his transfer to Dunedin in 1912, a prominent Hawke’s Bay citizen spoke of contemporary policing by ‘a class of men who joined hand in hand with the Community’ - in contrast to the situation in the past. A scholar’s conclusions regarding a British force could equally be applied to the New Zealand Police Force: the modem constable ‘sees his role as being responsible for the maintenance of public order by projecting an image of public respect. In effect, he believes his major impact is in stabilising the community.’ When Dwyer retired in 1921, the Christchurch mayor depicted him as having been (while no ‘kid gloves man’, as another speaker emphasised) always ‘fair to the fallen, and a help to the helpless ... a sentinel of peace and goodwill’.
When the police were perceived by the public and/or the authorities to have relaxed their standards too far, the state would take remedial action, often after harrowing public or internal police investigations. The continuance of a paramilitary organisational culture inside the Force was seen as the key safeguard against laxity, as well as enabling the police to respond to situations of collective physical opposition to state control. For although paramilitary discipline tended to militate against expansive use of discretion, on the other hand it instilled in the minds and actions of the men a rigid conception of what social behaviour was definitely inappropriate and could not therefore be excluded from the application of state sanctions. Removed from their working-class origins, constables were obliged to act and think in ways that transcended their socioeconomic backgrounds. State agents engaged in the overarching task of helping discipline and reprogramme those as yet unenamoured of the ‘disciplinary society’ had themselves first to be reprogrammed. It was the constable on the urban beat or in the rural police station who decided when to mobilise the state bureaucracy, and this important task required
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firm terms of reference. The use of discretion was too important to be entirely discretionary. 13
Those police ‘service functions’ which resulted from the increasing state penetration of civil society by the late nineteenth century - acting as labour market regulators or pensions assessors, for example - illustrate that the approach of the ‘disciplinary society’ did not preclude a high level of police surveillance of the populace. On the contrary, the increasingly higher threshold of acceptable public (and indeed private) behaviour required a continuingly high degree of surveillance. The post--1886 society was far from static, with concepts of appropriate behaviour forever evolving. In particular, tolerance for certain types of behaviour was decreasing rapidly during the first 30 years of the New Zealand Police Force. The New Zealand of 1886 had been a far cry from the turbulent frontier, but the nature and degree of order and tranquillity which then prevailed was - by any standard definitions - less orderly than that of three decades later. As a newspaper correspondent put it in 1905, one of the duties of the police was to ‘check and restrict the vice that increases and becomes more apparent as our civilisation becomes of a higher order’.
The authorities wanted to lower the per capita policing level to reflect the great decrease in turbulence which had occurred since the late 1860s, but could go only so far in this, for they had to take into account the need to suppress types of crime and behaviour which were increasingly considered untoward or illegal but had been accepted, or at least tolerated, in the past. Even when the number of sworn staff rose before the First World War to take account of both new expectations of order and population increases, many considered that the police-to-population ratio remained too low despite the entrenchment of a tranquil post-colonial frontier society. The strains of industrial trouble and of the wartime emergency exacerbated this perceived problem. The transition from generally condign to generally benign policing had not been easy, then, and nor was the ongoing relationship between police and society. The various commissions of enquiry, and demands for public enquiries, were manifestations of the dysfunctions between theory and practice which had flowed from the problems of adjusting to the post-frontier world.
Particularly problematic was the fact that at the very time that - and because - the parameters of safety allowed in the conditioned exercise of power were quickly altering, there were confused signals from the controllers of standards as to what was indeed appropriate social belief and behaviour. In their role as symbols of state-desired attributes, then, the police had a very difficult task in interpreting and mediating official expectations to the public. A prerequisite for police success was an extremely close monitoring of both state expectations and public behaviour and values. Police always needed to be ready to intervene in the public arena if people were seen to be lagging behind in their adoption of new standards, but it was far from easy to know where to draw the line
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between intervention and non-intervention in many situations. Thus while life was physically easier for the policemen, insofar as it involved less rigour and danger, it was in a sense conceptually more problematic. Although such difficulties were much talked about in policing and official circles, they were seldom appreciated at the time by the public. ‘One is apt to take the policeman ... very much for granted’, wrote a commentator in United Empire in 1911: ‘He is there. It would be strange if he were not there’. In the hegemonised society the constable’s role and function was seen as unproblematic - he had ‘public consent’ for his operations, which were supposedly impersonally conducted on behalf of an ‘impartial law’ - although how well he did the job remained a subject of both major public fascination and major state concern. 14
The function of the ancient office of constable was in essence the same in 1840 as in 1886 and thereafter. In the final analysis, policemen were differentiated from other state bureaucrats in that they alone, 24 hours a day, legally wielded state coercive powers against the citizenry. While their strategic milieu after 1886 lay towards the benign pole of the control continuum, they would also on a daily basis use extreme tactical coercion against individuals they identified as refractory; and at moments of actual or potential crisis for the state they could quickly move en masse towards the overtly coercive pole. They were the most visible, the most mobile, the most versatile of ‘ordinary’ social control agents, able to engage in anything from collective violence to individual acts of charity in pursuit of their goal of social ‘order and tranquillity’.
By 1886, however, harsh coercion was generally only used in extreme circumstances, and its use continued to fade. In 1902 a ‘citizen’ wrote to an Auckland newspaper contrasting the difference in contemporary police behaviour from that of the past. He had seen a constable gently and patiently steer a man rendered ‘incapable’ by drink through a crowd, with not a harsh word or action to provoke obstreperous behaviour from either the drunk or the onlookers. Pat Hickey, Red Fed activist, was told by Blackballs ‘local constable’ that though he was ‘supposed to lock you up to-night ... if you will meet me at the comer at nine to-morrow morning, it will be all right’. Despite eruptions of extreme state coercion - in 1912-1913, wartime measures - the benign strategy was firmly cemented into place by the end of the First World War. Accordingly, patterns of police organisation, administration and behaviour had been established by 1917 which were to last for decades. These reflected a relatively tranquil society in which the constable, particularly the rural and suburban constable, had become that ‘touchstone of decency for a whole community’ which Oliver Duff wrote about in his centennial survey New Zealand Now some quarter of a century later. When the children of Charleston were asked about the most important person in the world, the answer was ‘almost invariably’ their local constable, Richard Allan.
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Whereas in the past order had to a meaningful degree been imposed on the streets and in the frontier interior, now people largely policed themselves. An existing state of order could be maintained with minimal police intervention in the lives of most of the citizenry, both Maori and pakeha. An 1888 assessment of the condition of New Zealand had declared that ‘the long dispute between the two races, which had lasted from the very beginning of colonisation, at last came to an end’ with a declaration by the King Movement that ‘the Maoris and pakehas shall be as one people’. The King had told his people to ‘obey the laws of the Queen, and respect them in every way as loyal subjects’. The assessment was as yet too optimistic, but it was a reflection of the relative contentment of ‘men of standing’ from the mid 1880s that the racial turbulence of the frontier period was definitively behind them.
Sergeant Alexander Cruickshank, a man of humble upbringing, articulated well the preoccupations of the new-style policeman attuned to the post-frontier world. When he left Dannevirke in 1910 after a seven-year stint he noted that ‘even in the worst of us there was some good’. The mayor agreed that Cruickshank had not been as strict as some would have liked, because he had always acted ‘with discretion, and had not attempted to enforce the strict letter of the law’. Sometimes, the NCO confirmed, ‘he had to consider how far a breach could be met by a reproof rather than a summons’, because ‘duty had to be tempered with discretion’. He was in tune with the times. In the town the bulk of those appearing before the court were ‘strangers’. Such transient and marginalised elements constituted a decreasing proportion of the population, giving way to an increasing number of ‘legitimate Dannevirke residents’, who were perceived to be generally law-abiding and peaceful.
On public occasions later in his career, such as celebrations of promotions, Cruickshank received similar plaudits. He was said to have a ‘generous knowledge of humanity’, and it was believed that even criminals agreed that he gave them a fair deal. ‘He looked forward to the time when the peoples of the world would no longer be divided by distinctions of class or colour, when swords would be turned into ploughshares and when the hand of fellowship would be held out among all men’. In 1891 the Commissioner had stated that a ‘peaceful order of things’ had descended upon New Zealand; men like Cruickshank were the appropriate types of policemen to represent the coercive powers of the state within such a society. Between them, with very small resources per capita compared with other Australasian forces, and extraordinarily low ratios of police to population in terms of European forces, the New Zealand police were able at most times to control society - with, of necessity, the active or passive support of most people to enforce most laws when coercion was needed.
The professionalising drive of policing had clashed with Liberal pretensions of ‘democratic’ access to state power and with the Liberal
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propensity for hands-on ministerial intervention. By 1917, with the classical phase of Liberal influence long since gone, there was no longer much debate about political interference of any nature. That is not to say that there was no capacity for political intervention in policing. On the contrary, as has been noted, in theoreticising the police mandate one must set aside the mythology that the police constituted an independent agency responsible only to the legal system and/or ‘the people’. They were, rather, a hierarchical institution ultimately answerable to the political wing of the state. All their activities, therefore, even discretionary ones, were in the last instance circumscribed by the requirements of the (relatively autonomous) state. As a New Zealand commentator put it in 1913, together with the military the police formed ‘the agencies or instrumentalities through which the essential power of the Government is exercised, and are by the very nature of the service in which they are engaged necessarily subject to the absolute commands of the Government’.
That being said, by the early twentieth century in New Zealand (as in Britain and elsewhere) there was - despite all the hiccups - widespread politico-state satisfaction with ‘the general functioning of the police’, partly because of police professionalisation but mostly because of the sense of social stability that usually prevailed. The political regimes and the interests they represented had no ideological or practical necessity to intervene in policing on a day-to-day level, and the fact that the general views and actions of police decision-makers accorded with those of the political executive meant that the reserved right of the political executive to step in would seldom need to be exercised. New Zealand Truth, the critical watchdog of policing, was itself acknowledging near the end of the war that it ‘need hardly be said that today the Minister is not apt to over-rule or unduly interfere with the work of the Police Commissioner’. Politicians would generally leave well alone. Commissioner O’Donovan was pleased to record in his last annual report in 1921 that Ministers had ‘maintained in practice the fine ideal’ that the Commissioner should be able to get on with his job of ‘efficient administration ... without interference’ (albeit ‘every act, every proposal was carefully scrutinized by the Minister, and his counsel was readily given in every difficulty’). ‘lt is unnecessary to stress the effect this attitude had in maintaining the authority of the Commissioner and promoting the discipline of the Force’, he continued. Many observers at the time noted that Ministers no longer routinely intervened in policing matters, and that - relatedly - the Commissioner and his men were now virtually immune from the interference (usually via Ministers) of back-bench politicians and other ‘important people’. The police had moved rapidly from a position of maximal reliance on ministerial control to a status involving possession of a greater degree of operational autonomy from the political executive than that held by the other departments of state.
That it had not become shackled to the Public Service Commissioner established by the 1912 Public Service Act was a reflection of the
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Reform government’s appreciation that the Force best knew its business in the day-to-day operations of maintaining order. Just as the state had acquired relative autonomy from the dominant socio-economic forces which in the last instance it represented, so too had the Police acquired relative autonomy from the political masters who, in the formal sense, it served. The Rowan/Mayne rubric of the political independence of the police had seemingly come to pass in a day-to-day sense in normal times. But this was nothing to do with the ‘original powers’ thesis. The freedom of action of police chiefs from everyday political control has been likened by Mike Brogden to that of the freedom of managerial negotiators - a constrained and accountable freedom. Their autonomy of action depended entirely upon their skill at procuring results acceptable to those who appointed, paid for and depended on them.
These masters were, in a chain of command sense, the political executive; but in the final analysis, the exercise of policing control ‘cannot be other than a reflection of those interests that define the nature of the legitimacy on which they draw’. In pursuit of their goals of social ‘order and tranquillity’, the police were provided by the executive, legislature and judiciary with a constellation of laws and operating procedures from which to select - from which to ‘label’ as offenders or deviants those who were perceived to be a threat to the civic peace and who should therefore be made (hopefully, with the cooperation of the courts) an example of, if they were not made to ‘rehabilitate’. All offences and ‘crimes’ were definable as ‘political’ insofar as the state had declared that they threatened the King’s/Queen’s Peace, the legal name for the ‘normal’ (i.e. desired by the authorities) state of society. And so some scholars, by extension, would argue that all police decisions were inherently political.
As New Zealand became increasingly stable in the late nineteenth century, its police had what some - ignoring the conceptual difficulties, elaborated earlier, posed to the police - saw as the ‘luxury’ of being able to focus on activities that in the past were either not illegal or were ignored as petty misdemeanours, but which were now designated as offences or ‘crimes’ worthy of police attention. Moreover, the laws remained so permissive that police continued to have virtually a blank cheque in carrying out their mandate - making their job easier in theory, but sometimes presenting difficulty in practice in interpreting the appropriate parameters of discretionary action. This was even more of a dilemma for police having to face a subcultural liberalising countertrend on (say) matters sexual, a dilemma only partially helped by rafts of repressive new legislation from 1890. Their use of discretionary suppression, always awesome in theory, posed very real problems for patrol policemen. A breach of the peace, for example (as Christchurch police were taught during in-house training early in the new century), was defined as ‘any violation of that quiet, peace, and security, which is guaranteed by the laws, for the personal comfort of the subjects of the
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Kingdom’ - that ‘comfort’ being defined by the state and mediated through the police, but often ‘determined’ rather indeterminately in a period of change. The politicisation inherent in the definition of crime meant that a decreasingly physically coercive job did not necessarily make for an easier job; problems tended to become displaced from the physical to the mental planes.
The move to professionalisation both reflected and encouraged such displacement. Although not meeting some of the scholastic requirements of a ‘profession’, the New Zealand Police had by the First World War observably become far more ‘professional’. They can comfortably be called at least a quasi-profession. They possessed expert knowledge (including in new forensic and other techniques), and their attempt to turn the job into a ‘dignified vocation’ was aided by the relative lack of disorder in the society and (relatedly) by the lack of overt political interference. Despite the exigencies of the years from 1912, which produced tactical reversions to older, more coercive modes of policing, since in the longer term society was becoming more ordered, police were continually ‘modernising’ and adapting (including by a relaxation of internal discipline, to the chagrin of some of the older men) to the more ‘mannered’ socio-cultural spaces they patrolled and surveilled.
Cullen had embodied this in Police Force symbolism with his 1912 change of uniform from the military-style shako and patrol jacket to helmet and tweed frock. As the new style was phased in with the old uniforms wearing out, a more benign image was thereby progressively presented to the public. Not too benign, however: the collar ‘must be a proper military one’, and somewhat of a reversion to a military look for mounted police and senior NCOs came about in 1916 with the issue of forage caps. There was in other words an unmistakable trend towards a ‘softer’ approach, but always within parameters appropriate for an organisation that was, quintessentially, coercive. In 1919 John Dwyer recalled that when he had joined the police four decades before the constable ‘was obliged to keep up a much stricter military appearance and discipline’, but contemporaneous comments by Senior Sergeant A T Emerson and Inspector W H McKinnon balanced this by noting that the police remained ‘a kind of military body’ despite their altering general orientation towards the public. The following year Commissioner O’Donovan reminded police that although country men were inclined not to wear uniforms on duty, any guilty of this ‘objectionable’ behaviour would be transferred.
A relatively benign regime, then, did not mean resiling from the imagery of, and - if necessary - the capacity for, order-imposition. The uniform embodied two key things about policing. First, it was a shorthand code for the coercive power of the state. As instructions to London Metropolitan police had noted, the uniform provided ‘great moral power and weight against any lawless character’ needing to be dealt with. In the words of a later scholar, it helped ‘render explicit the state’s interest in
Conclusion
482
the maintenance of order’. Secondly, it was an ostentatious means of displaying to the public, via ‘the demeanour’, mores and deeds of the wearer, desired behavioural and value attributes. No matter all the many lapses of individuals, the policeman was the ‘most visible symbol and agent of government and conventional morality to most people’. In short, the uniform conveyed a ‘sense of sacredness or awesome power that lies at the root of political order, and authority, the claims a state makes upon its people for deference to rules, laws and norms’. When the imagery embodied in the uniform was under serious threat, drastic remedies were taken: hence the series of official enquiries from 1898 to 1909, their outcomes designed to restore public confidence in ‘the uniform’ as much as to identify internal police wrongs and inefficiencies for righting. With wartime coercive regulations not only firmly in place but becoming increasingly Draconian, yet coexisting in a long-term sense with a ‘stable order of affairs’ in the Dominion as a whole, the police uniform in 1917 epitomised both the new benign norms of control and the abnormal coercive situations that police had always to be ready to cope with in their capacity as the legitimised wielders of coercive state force. 15
When Wellington policeman Vivian Dudding was killed in 1919 after intervening in a domestic dispute, Commissioner O’Donovan pondered publicly on what was, in the final analysis, the police role: when the soldier beat the external foe his job was soon done, but it fell upon the police to continuously preserve the ‘internal national peace’. The constable was ‘at all times in the line of battle, ready always to risk his life’. Others took up the theme, which was also elaborated during the Commissioner’s eloquent address at Dudding’s funeral. The ‘internal war’, it was said, was ‘even more necessary than is external war to the safety of the State’, a statement calculated to make people take notice, given that the ‘Great War’ had only recently ended. As ‘society’s first line of defence all the time’, a ‘good policeman’ took longer to create than a ‘good soldier’. He was ‘much more liable to error of judgment, and is much more criticised’. He was, in the last instance, a ‘soldier acting alone’ in civil society. 16
O’Donovan’s address, though sombre and emphasising the essential role of police as wielders of state coercion, expressed an optimistic sentiment based upon the recent evolution of New Zealand society. ‘Security in town and countryside, the safety of women and children, and all the elements of peaceful social life are commonly taken as a matter of course’. The significance of the modem police’s proactive role lay in controlling on a 24-hour, seven-day basis those who violated that ‘peaceful social life’, usually individuals or people in small groups. Inspector Mitchell had put it thus: for most ‘resident New Zealanders ... there is not much need for police’ any more, those needing disciplining being usually a ‘floating population’ of individual recalcitrants. A veteran policeman summed up his job as ‘suppressing brothels, bludgers, and others of the criminal class’.
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
483
After the war the old daytime four-hours system, which relied especially on the young urban men being available at their barracks in the middle four hours of 12 in order to provide a reserve for use in riots or other such emergencies, was eventually dispensed with in favour of straight eighthour beats. This reflected a state of improved order not only in a narrow sense, but also a broad one: families were increasingly wanting ‘more congenial surroundings to live in’ and so were moving to the suburbs, and people were also engaging more in sport and recreation activities as communities became more stable. Police aspirations reflected social aspirations, hence their desire to come under direct departmental control for eight rather than 12 hours per day, and if possible to develop a life away from the centres of cities. Moreover, the police’s exemplary role remained of continuing importance despite the cementing in of societal stability; ‘such conditions could not be relied upon to endure in the absence of strong and able guardianship’. Optimism based on New Zealand’s ‘settled’ polity was tempered by the need for continual police vigilance and proactivity lest that stability be undermined. Prime Minster Massey circulated the Dudding funeral address to all police, and similar ideas were expressed on later occasions: at the funeral in 1921 of Constable James Dorgan in Timaru, for example, O’Donovan waxed eloquent both over ‘the tranquillity of order’ which prevailed in the Dominion and that the duty to preserve it was the first duty of government and police.
That a large degree of social ‘discipline and order’ had been attained could, indeed, be measured by the relative smallness of the degree of coercive force that needed to be employed. As in the ‘Mother Country’ and elsewhere, the decreasing overall level of ‘crime’ and disorder was frequently attributed in whole or in part to what was seen as a generally efficient, impartial and uncorrupt police. The imagery that was employed suggested that the London Metropolitan Police ideal of prevention of crime by surveillance-patrolling had been wildly successful. In New Zealand, the full or substantive attainment of social peace was seen to be considerably closer than in the United Kingdom, suggesting a hugely successful adoption of the Rowan/Mayne policing methodology. But how instrumental were the police in forging the modem New Zealand? As has been emphasised, the evolution of New Zealand society reflected both fundamental socio-economic, socio-political and socio-cultural developments, as with similar trends in other western societies, and race relations developments indigenous to New Zealand. Policing could therefore have little effect on the overall state of order and/or ‘crime’.
But it was highly significant in reinforcing existing societal tendencies. Policemen were key state agents in forcing the pace of the evolution towards ‘tranquillity’ and then in monitoring this for the state. The sergeant in the town (and, one might add, the sole-charge country constable) was said to be ‘the strongest factor in controlling the social barometer in the community’. The colonial frontier had largely ‘tamed’ itself, but the police had helped to a more significant degree than had any
Conclusion
484
other state agency. They had both suppressed actual and potential disorder, and deterred would-be violators of the desired state of order, during New Zealand’s frontier and (to a lesser extent) post-frontier development phase. In the process of professionalising their control over the populace, as in other forces in the western world the New Zealand police had improved their own lot: their jobs became secure, they obtained pensions and more holidays and sick leave than before, and they attained a much higher status in the community than in the frontier days. It was a development that complemented society’s.
While it is clear that policing played only a lesser, if reinforcing, support role to fundamental socio-economic trends, the emergence of ‘order’ had occurred in such a relatively short period that it was often commented on at the time. Observers trumpeted that order-imposition had generally been achieved in the Dominion, with order-maintenance now the prevalent task: ‘the forces of disorder’ having been contained to an acceptable level, police vigilance was now needed to ensure that they did not ‘increase and prevail’. In short, the ‘duty of keeping the State in an orderly manner’, as the Inspector-General of Schools put it in 1909, had quickly and noticeably altered in methodology as ‘the functions of the State are modified’; and policing in turn was modified (but did not change in essentials) as a result of both the degree or otherwise of ‘turbulence’ and the expectations of the controllers of the social order. After 1886, supposedly in large part thanks to efficient policing in the past, the state could rest relatively easily and get on with the job of further improving an already generally satisfactory state of affairs - again, with police activity featured prominently. 17
While the population tended to take policing for granted, then, the prominent position in the preserving of social tranquillity assigned to police by the authorities was elevated to a near-supreme role by contemporary analysts. Not only senior police, officials and politicians, but many commentators too, ascribed a goodly proportion of New Zealand’s relative ‘peace and good order’ to its policing regime. Rolemodelling featured highly in the panoply of virtues ascribed to the police, who were believed to have largely brought about this happy condition. There was no man more respected in the country than the ‘straight-going, clean-living’ country constable, who was ‘the general adviser for the whole district’, Cullen believed. The town men had to be more coercively orientated, but were still seen as manly and righteousliving, disciplined and non-oppressive, and above all as men of integrity and incorruptibility. It cannot be stressed enough that it was seen as a truism that New Zealand’s police were the ‘best conducted’ in the world, a theme of self-congratulation which has extended to the present day. ‘By international standards’, said the Police Commissioner in 1992, T believe we carry more trust and credibility than any other police service in the world’. In the same year the Police Complaints Authority characterised New Zealand policing as being ‘astonishingly corruption free’. In 1993 a
485
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
former Minister of Police said bluntly that New Zealand had ‘the best police force in the world’, echoing words frequently used by commentators towards the end of the period covered in this study.
The most valuable men in the public service of the Dominion were. Sir Francis Bell had said in the Legislative Council, policemen. While the general public tended more to take them for granted, there was general respect accorded the police. They were even increasingly characterised in the newspapers (particularly after the traumatic period of the Royal Commissions) as men of intelligence and wisdom. It was all a far cry from the endemic criticism expressed in a former era, from past semi-military and paramilitary modus operandi and personnel generally seen as unnecessarily harsh and oppressive. In a sense, however, by the twentieth century the paramilitary past of the policing operation throughout New Zealand was being reinterpreted. It was being, according to the context, mythologised into eulogy as well as demonology. Increasingly, the pre-1886 policeman, whatever the acknowledged shortcomings of some of his methods, came to be attributed with all the perceived virtues of the modem policeman. He was transformed into a noble instrumental agent for imposing desired changes upon society, Maori and pakeha. Even when New Zealand Police Force constables were depicted as falling short of the expected mark in comparison with the pre-1886 forces, however, their reputation in terms of such analyses could be at least partially rescued by comparison with forces elsewhere in the Empire where pre-paramilitary modes of policing (‘old police’) still prevailed; ‘it has never been the case in the Dominion that the policeman has been regarded as a kind of amiable, necessary, but witless ass’. 18
In the period covered by the present volume, indeed, few attempted to portray the Police Force as full of Dogberries. The police remained influential, on both overt and non-overt planes, in helping maintain the degree of order achieved by 1886, and were - whatever the problems - generally perceived to be so. They also helped enforce the ever stricter societal requirements of the state during those decades, in both quiet times and social emergencies. They symbolised for the state the desired characteristics of the ‘good citizen’ in (using Clive Emsley’s terminology with regard to England) ‘what contemporaries perceived as the civilization or moralization of the population’. 19 Just as the new rehabilitative penal ideas were posited on prisoners becoming party to their own punishment, just as the new state bureaucracies coerced and cajoled the citizenry into new modes of thought and therefore behaviour, so too did policing help ‘invite’ the populace to become parties to their own (state-approved) modes of internal discipline. This was the other side of the coin to policing as providing a means of visiting the condign might of the state upon members of the populace who deviated too far from the officially approved norms. The social internalisation of policing by most people was a cheaper and less disruptive way of achieving the required norms of
Conclusion
486
thought and deed than pure coercion. In the final analysis the norms reflected the socio-economic (including socio-racial) power relations in society, and it was the duty of state agents to actively promote them. But since they also benefited many of the people in many ways, it was expedient for the great majority eventually to ‘sign up’ to them. The new institutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the police, were highly important in reinforcing social and economic tendencies and their accompanying ideological tenets, and in promoting assimilation of the Maori; in giving a hefty helping hand to fundamental developments of social belief and behaviour which existed elsewhere in the ‘western’-dominated world, but which had - partly thanks to policing - a distinctively New Zealand slant.
An ‘establishment’ historian of policing put the police role this way: ‘military force and moral force alone or together always fail to secure sustained observance of laws in a community unless they are provided with police force, as a medium through which they can function’. Underpinning this is the message to the public from every police interaction with citizens: that the state claims the right to intervene in their lives, for better or for worse, and that force may legitimately be used to achieve a desired state object. It is better for them, cheaper and less disruptive for the state and its agents, if they cooperate willingly; they will be surveilled to see if they are adhering to appropriate norms, and if they are not, condign might will descend upon them. ‘The police are, in symbolic terms, the most visible representation of the presence of the state in everyday life and the potential of the state to enforce its will upon citizens’. 20
Despite the advent of the ‘disciplinary society’ in late nineteenth century New Zealand, from time to time, and on some issues endemically (e.g. measures which sought to suppress traditional working-class pastimes), there was significant public opposition to the state and the interests represented by it, or to the state-sanctioned norms of public or private behaviour. Mass approval for the socio-political order ‘could be withdrawn instantly in the context of industrial conflict’, for example. Police surveillance was aimed, inter alia, at providing sufficient warning for the authorities to take pre-emptive action to prevent individual or mass offending. Failing success in this field, it was the police role to suppress dissentient or ‘deviant’ activity; failing this, to detect offenders after the committing of the offence. While post-frontier policing strategy focused on prevention-surveillance, suppression and detection activities were also required on a daily basis, and sometimes the need to activate suppression would temporarily subsume the requisites and customs of the preventive patrol operation. Although the state policing strategy was overarchingly benign, therefore, it could accommodate overtly coercive and repressive - even military - tactics whenever necessary in the perceived interests of the polity. One can truly call the post-frontier policing strategy ‘moral suasion with force behind it’, or more evocatively
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487
the ‘iron hand in the velvet glove’. Most people witnessed and accepted the glove, but whenever use of the hand was needed by the state authorities it packed a severe and if necessary disabling punch - and this too, was generally approved of or acquiesced in by the majority in most of the period under review. The ‘hearts and minds’ of the population had in general terms been won. 21
In 1917, the decade-old attaining of Dominion status was capped symbolically by the removal of the now archaic term Governor, resonant as it was of colonial times, and its replacement with the more modem concept of Governor-General. This fitted better with the nascent ‘nationalism’ which had previously been taken up - albeit in quiet fashion - and fostered by the long-lived Liberal government and not entirely abandoned by its Reform and coalition successors. If any state agents were forgers of the emergent ‘New Zealand nation’, the police could lay claim to this status. At any rate, they had played a prominent role in providing the overt surveillance/coercion which had underpinned the emergence of the ‘disciplinary society’ from frontier New Zealand. They had followed this up by playing a key role as both moral exemplars and (relatively) benign surveillers/coercers of remaining refractory elements in the ‘self-disciplined society’. Despite all the internal police vicissitudes of the tum-of-the-century era, the police were just as much at home and in ultimate control of order in the post-frontier socialengineering ‘nation’ of pre-Liberal, Liberal and post-Liberal New Zealand as they had been in the earlier days of military, quasi-military, semimilitary and militarised policing. Although the Dunedin Crown Prosecutor may actually have been exaggerating when he declared in 1905 that ‘it was no exaggeration to say that the whole superstructure of the administration of the colony finally rested on the Police Force’, a proper comprehension of the emergence and nature of modem New Zealand requires an in-depth knowledge and understanding of its policing history. 22
References
First Appearance of Later-abbreviated Sources in Notes
Alpers
Cheerful Yesterdays, part I, note 25
Ascoli
Queen's Peace , III, 2
Baker
King & Country, V, 34
Ban ton
Policeman , Concl, 3
Barber
‘Waihi Strike’, IV, 10
Barrowman
‘Massey’s Cossacks’, IV, 42
Bassett
Atkinson, I, 8
Bassett
Ward, I, 33
Becker
Police Systems , Concl, 15
Binney et al
Mihaia, V, 92
Binney et al
People & Land, II, 87
Bittner
Functions, IV, 5
Bloomfield
New Zealand, II, 17
Bollinger
Against the Wind, I, 84
Bollinger
Grog , I, 33
Brogden
The Police , Concl, 2
Cain
Policeman's Role , Concl, 2
Cameron & Young (eds)
Policing at the Crossroads, Concl, 15
Campbell
‘Role of Police’, IV, 10
Carr
Mountain Shadow, I, 63
Carson
Kaiwarra Mystery , I, 59
Carson & Davison
Longest Beat, I, 3
Carter
‘Call of Duty', I, 1
Catran
Hanlon, I, 23
Cherrett
Fear or Favour, I, 3
Chch Police
GO Book, I, 3
Christoffel
Censored , I, 24
Clarke & Hough
Effectiveness of Policing, Concl, 2
Clyne
Colonial Blue, V, 10
Cohen & Scull (eds)
Social Control , Concl, 6
Crawford
‘Military Involvement’, I, 84
Crawford
‘Overt & Covert’, IV, 24
Cyclopedia Co
Cyclopedia , vol 1,1, 12
Dilnot
Scotland Yard, I, 18
Dinnie
Observations, III, 10
Dreaver
Horowhenua, IV, 33
Duncan
‘Address’, V, 92
Dunstall
‘NZ Police’, II, 17
Dunstall
‘O’Donovan’, II, 48
488
489
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Dwyer
Dyne
Eldred-Grigg
Emsley
Fairbum
Field
Fleras
Fosdick
Frame
Franklin
‘Fragments’, I, 18
Murders, I, 23
Pleasures, I, 21
Crime & Society, I, 18
Ideal Society, 11, 17
Mau, V, 105
‘Runanga’, II, 74
European Police, I, 31
‘Wellington Waterfront’, IV, 35
‘Long Service Medal’, I, 2
Fry (ed)
Tom Barker , IV 29
Galbraith
Anatomy of Power, Concl, 2
Gee
Devil’s Own Brigade, I, 66
Gee
Poison , I, 23
Giddens
Contemporary Critique, Concl, 2
Gilkison
Dunedin , I, 66
Glynn
NZ Policeman, Concl, 8
Griffiths
To Guard My People, III, 2
Gurr et al (eds)
Crime & Conflict, II, 17
Hall-Jones
Historical Southland, I, 23
Hamer
‘Centralization & Nationalism’, I, 14
Hamer
Liberals , I, 14
Hanlon
Random Recollections, I, 23
Hermans
‘Wellington Police’, I, 59
Hill
‘Cullen’, IV, 2
Hill
‘First Association’, I, 49
Hill
Frontier Tamed, I, 5
Hill
‘Incorporating Maoris’, II, 74
Hill
‘Part-time Policing’, I, 67
Hill
‘Police Super’, I, 5
Holcroft
Invercargill , I, 23
Holdaway (ed)
British Police , Concl, 5
Holford
‘Evolution NZ Police’, I, 5
Holland
Armageddon, V, 41
Holland et al
Tragic Story, IV, 10
Holland
Police Unionism, IV, 19
Hollander
‘Dunedin Police Stations’, I, 44
Holt
Arbitration, I, 84
Howe
Scotland Yard, I, 18
Hucker
‘ “No Germans” V, 38
Hughes
‘Massey’s Cossacks’, IV, 22
Irvine
‘Militant Unions’, IV, 10
Lange
Tohunga’, II, 88
Lawlor
Wellington, IV, 29
Lawrence
Police Review, III, 3
MacDonald
Napier , I, 9
490
References
Macdonald
‘Women & Crime’, I, 24
Macdonald et al (eds)
BNZW, I, 76
Mclvor
‘NZ Army’, III, 115
McLean
Southern Octopus , I, 85
Macleod
Fighting Man, I, 55
Macnaghten
Days, I, 55
Malony & Annabell
‘Rua Expedition’, V, 92
Manning
Police Work, Concl, 2
Martin & Wilson
Police , II, 33
Melrose
‘Chiefs of Police’, III, 105
Merrett
‘Reappraisal’, I, 84
Miller
Cops <4 Bobbies, Concl, 8
Miller
‘London’s Police Tradition’, Concl, 5
Miller
‘Police Authority’, Concl, 5
Monkonnen
‘Cop History’, Concl, 10
Monkonnen
Urban America, I, 18
Morris & Heal
Crime Control, Concl, 2
Neale
Nelson Police , II, 119
NZ Govt
Police Act, I, 2
NZ Police
Circulars Book, III, 74
NZ Police
‘1919 Commission’, II, 60
Northage
‘Police’, IV, 10
O’Connor
‘Awkward Ones’, V, 41
O’Halloran
‘Policeman’s Lot’, IV, 27
O’Hara
Northland, I, 76
01s sen
Red Feds, IV, 12
O’Malley
Law, Capitalism & Democracy , Concl, 8
Orange (ed)
DNZB, vol 2,1, 13; vol3.II, 48
[Organ]
Jack Sheppard, III, 44
O’Sullivan
Mounted Police , I, 90
Peirce et al
‘London’, II, 17
Plimmer
‘Military Occupation’, V, 105
Pratt
Punishment, III, 44
Rainer
‘Company Town’, IV, 10
Read
‘Policing the Empire’, I, 18
Richards (ed)
Chudleigh , I, 75
Richardson
Urban Police , I, 33
Roche
Red & Gold , IV, 10
Rorke
Two Peoples, I, 17
Roth
‘Blazing’, I, 49
Roth
‘General Strike’, IV, 22
Roth
Trade Unions , I, 50
Scott
Ask That Mountain, I, 72
Scott
‘Looking Back’, II, 90
Scotter
Port Lyttelton, I, 85
Shane
Police & People , Concl, 6
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
491
Sheehan
Lora Gorge, I, 23
Simpson
Shame, I, 33
Sinclair (ed)
Oxford Illustrated History, 11, 87
Singe & Thomson
Authority, I, 23
Spicer
River District, I, 67
Stead
Police of Britain, 111, 2
‘Locusts’, Concl, 4
Storch
Pawelka, 111, 38
Swain
Shadow, I, 13
Taylor
Thomson & Kagei
Century of Service, I, 2
Challenge, I, 65
Thomson & Neilson
Thomson
Scotland Yard, 111, 2
Thorwald
Cain, 111, 2
NZ Trials, I, 24
Treadwell
‘Public Order, IV, 16
Vick
Police Department, I, 30
Wake
Walker
Critical History, I, 55
Ward
Show, I, 72
Webster
Rua, 111, 113
Weiner
Role of Police, Concl, 13
‘Theoretical Orientation’, Concl, 6
Wenniger & Clark
Whitaker
Police in Society, I, 56
Wicksteed
‘Chronology’, 11, 80
Williams
Politics, I, 75
‘Police Training’, 11, 45
Young & Hill
Other Abbreviations
AJHR
Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, New Zealand
ATL
The Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library, Wellington
Finger Print Branch, New Zealand Police
FPB
NARC
National Archives Records Centre, Lower Hutt
NZG
New Zealand Gazette
NZJH
New Zealand Journal of History
New Zealand Parliamentary Debates
NZPD
PDB
Police Description Book, vol I, New Zealand Police
PG
New Zealand Police Gazette
Police Museum
New Zealand Police Centennial Museum, Porirua
PRO
Public Record Office, London
PSA
New Zealand Public Service Association
Note:
All cited archival files are from National Archives, unless otherwise stated. Archives police subject files in a separate sequence from the main P 1 series are annotated ‘sep seq’.
Notes
Part One
1. P 1/143, 2363/86; P 4/15, p 322; AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 170; Ray Carter, ‘Beyond the Call of Duty': A History of the Palmerston North Police District, Palmerston North 1988, p 191; Police Force Act 1886 (espec section 17).
2. P 4/15, pp 442-58, 464, 492; P 1/147, 213/87, 294/87; Joe Franklin. ‘The Long Service Medal Awarded to the N.Z. Police 1886-1976’, Journal of the Orders and Medals Research Society, vol 16, 1977; F Mallard, in Evening Star, 14.7.05; Raewyn Dalziel, Julius Vogel, Auckland 1986, p 296; David Thomson and Hendrik Kagei, A Century of Service: A History of the South Canterbury and North Otago Police, Timaru 1987, p 19; NZG, 1887, pp 14-25; New Zealand Government, The Police Act, and Regulations For the Guidance of the Police Force of New Zealand, Wellington 1887, regulations 33, 34, 51, 122; AJHR, 1887, H-5; 1898, H-2, p 3; P 4/14. p 296; P 1/145, 19/87; Mark H S Stevens, ‘New Zealand Defence Forces and Defence Administration 1870-1900’, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington 1977, p 121.
3. P 4/16, p 31; P 3/2/18, NARC; P 2/13, 376/87; PG, 1887, p 33; P 1/155, 2122/87; P 1/168, 751/89; P 5/9, p 715; Kit Carson and Yvonne Davison. The Longest Beat, Greymouth 1990, pp 26-8; Le 1/1890/160; AJHR, 1887, H-5; 1891, H-28; Christchurch Police Station, General Order Book, 1862-1900, circular 3/88, 27.3.1888, NZ Police; Owen Cherrett, Without Fear or Favour, [Auckland] 1989, p 83; Franklin, ‘Long Service Medal’.
4. P 4/15, pp 251, 724; P 1/157, 217/88; P 1/150, 1034/87; PG, 1890, p 12; P 1 sep seq, 1893/492; Chch Police. GO Book, circular 14/97, 10.3.1897; AJHR. 1888, H-6.
5. P 1/176. 1217/90; Le 1/1890/12, No. 18; S R Holford, ‘The Evolution of the New Zealand Police Force. 1840-1920’, typescript 1974, pp 856-7; P 1/145, 2935/86; Richard S Hill, ‘The Rise and Fall of the First New Zealand Police Superannuation Scheme’, International Police Association Journal [NZ], Sep and Dec 1985; Richard S Hill. The Colonial Frontier Tamed, Wellington 1989, pp 357-8.
6. P 5/8, p 494; P 1/160, 980/88; P 4/15, p 730; P 1/167, 320/89; NZG, 1888, p 231; PG, 1887, p 235; 1893, p 170; P 4/15, p 668 A; Hill, ‘Police Super’; NZPD, 13.8.1907, pp 204-5; Carson & Davison, Longest Beat, p 29; AJHR, 1887, H-9; 1888, H-6.
7. NZPD, 4.8.1899, p 472; AJHR. 1887, H-9; 1890, H-3.
/. -*.0.1077, 11*., /WIIA, .00/, 11-7, IO7U, 11-J. 8. P 4/16, pp 53. 57. 93; P 1/185, 442/88; P 4/15, p 492; AJHR. 1888, H-26; P 1/167, 320/ 89; P 1/155, 2122/87; Judith Bassett. Sir Harry Atkinson, Auckland 1975, pp 139f; P 4/15. p 627; PG, 1888, p 72; P 4/16, pp 284-5; P 1/161, 1053/88; P 1/160, 732/88.
9. P 1/151, 1288/87; P 1/159, 491/88, 575/88, 669/88; P 5/8, p 494; PG, 1888, p 92; P 1/161, 1102/88; Le 1/1892/139; NZ Times . 31.3, 28.4, 12.5.1888; 31.7, 1.8, 10.10.1889; Colin H Mac Donald, The Story of the Napier Police District, Napier 1986, pp 19-20; AJHR. 1888, H-6, H-30; PG, 1889, p 215; Shearman family papers; Dictionary of Canterbury Biographies, Canterbury Museum, AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 477, 814; P 4/16, p 329; PDB, no 4A; P 1/199, 93/1155; P4/15, pp 464. 626.
10. P 4/16, pp 410-11, 439; P 4/17, pp 412-15, 432-3; P 5/9, p 313; AJHR. 1889, H-9; 1898. H-2, p 1187.
11. PG. 1890, pp 38, 46-7, 57, 125; 1899, p 88; P 1/173, 2124/89; P 1/174, 258/90; P 4/17, pp 691-3; P 1/176, 1174 A/90; Cruickshank scrapbook, ATL; AJHR, 1887, H-5, H-9; 1889, H-9; 1890, H-3; 1909, H-168, p 470; W Gudgeon scrapbook (M Gudgeon).
12. Cyclopedia Company Ltd, Cyclopedia of New Zealand, vol I, Wellington 1897, pp 144, 179; NZ Biographies, ATL; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 21/90, 31.12.1890; A 6/2, Audit Salary Register, 1888-91; J B Thomson Papers; clippings, MS 1524, ATL.
492
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
493
13. P 1/176, 1217/90; PG. 1890, pp 134, 153, 242; P 1/179, 1808/90 (sample); T Y Wilson. ‘New Zealand Prisons 1880-1909; The Administration of Colonel Arthur Hume’, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington 1970, pp 56-7; T E Taylor, The Shadow/ of Tammany ... , Christchurch [lB9B], p 116; NZPD, 1.10.1897, p 200; 26.7.1901, p 684; AJHR. 1891, H-28.1-1; 1898, H-2, pp 24-30, 111 . 965; JAB Crawford, ‘Hume, Arthur’, in Claudia Orange (ed). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993.
14. P 1/183, 91/622; P 1/182, 91/580; P 4/18, pp 471, 549, 589; P 5/10, pp 43, 49, 73; P 1/199, 93/1155; P 1/183, 91/703; David Hamer, ‘Centralization and Nationalism (18911912)’, in Keith Sinclair (ed), The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, Auckland 1990, p 128; David Hamer, The New Zealand Liberals, Auckland 1988, pp 32, 40, 43, 52-3, 77, 103, 221; NZ Times. 7.6.1888, 16.8.1895; Le 1/1890/161; Waikato Times, 4.10.1890; AJHR, 1891, H-28, H-28A, H-288, H-40; 1898, H-2, pp 22-3, 44-5, 203. 669, 1152-3; Thomson & Kagei, Century of Service, p 20; P 4/19, pp 33, 199, 314; R M Burden, King Dick, Christchurch 1955, pp 139, 140; NZPD, 15.9.1898, p 151; P I sep IOQO/lAOQ D 1/1 *7*7 1-301/ on
seq, 1889/1099; P 1/177, 1391/90. 15. AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 199; P 1/250, 98/1813,
16. P 1/147, 284/87; P 1/149, 651/87; PSA Journal, Nov 1895, p5; NZPD. 10.9.1891, pp 482-3; AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 25; NZ Herald, 1.3.1909; R C J Stone, Makers of Fortune, Auckland 1973, pp 113, 121, 194-5.
17. P 4/19, pp 597, 729-32; PSA Journal. Jan 1893, May 1895; P 4/23, p 222; P 1/220, 96/593; PG, 1896, p 94; P 1/193, 92/1647; Cruickshank scrapbook, press clipping, 8.7.1890, ATL; Jinty Rorke, Policing Two Peoples, Tauranga [1993], p 131; NZPD. 13.9.1893, p 253; AJHR, 1893, H-26; 1894, H-14; 1896, H-16; 1898, H-2, p 1106; P 4/19, p 390; P 4/20, p 105; P 4/22, pp 190, 248, 282, 675.
18. PG, 1888, p 23; 1895, p 81; P 4/20, pp 608, 719; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 19/89, 2.11.1889; P 5/12, p 279; P 4/21, p 537; P 1/213, 95/979; for a provocative account of ‘class management’ in the United States, see Eric H Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920, Cambridge 1981; Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900, London 1987, p 194; NZ Times, 13.10.1887; NZPD. 24.6.1890, p 590; P 4/26, p 139; John Dwyer, Fragments from the Official Career of John Dwyer ... 1878 to 1921’, typescript 1934, p 19; George Dilnot, The Story of Scotland Yard, London nd, p 170; Cherretl, Fear or Favour, p 44; Stephen White, ‘Howard Vincent and the Development of Probation in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom’, Historical Studies, Oct 1979; A Butterworth interview; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, p 600; M Tennant, ‘lndigence and Charitable Aid in New Zealand 1885-1920’, PhD thesis, Massey University 1981, pp 168-9; AJHR. 1887, H-9; 1888, H-6; 1889, H-9; 1890, H-3; 1892. H-21; D H M Read, ‘Policing the Empire’, United Empire, Dec 1911; Ronald Howe, The Story of Scotland Yard, London 1965, p 76; info from M Doyle.
19. P 1/229, 97/483, 97/524, 97/533; P 1/232, 97/1082; P 1/234, 97/1353.
20. PG. 1892, p 41. circular 3/92; p 71, circular 10/92; P 1/189, 92/436, 92/563, 92/651; Chch Police, GO Book, p 403; NZ Times, 4.1.1888, 1.10. 3.10, 6.10.1890; J Ng, ‘Physical Violence’, typescript nd; AJHR, 1892, H-21; 1896, H-16, p 7.
21. P 1/191, 92/1094; P 1/183,91/679; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 13/91, 28.9.1891; P 1/213, 95/1036; Slevan Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures of the Flesh, Wellington 1984, p 39. ch 9; PI, 92/1511.
22. P 4/18, p 73; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 9/91, 8 6.1891; PG. 30.12.1891, p 220; 18.12.1896, p 215.
23. P 1 sep seq, 1896/40, Hume to Pender; Chch Police, GO Book, p 372; P 1/169, 1055/89; P 4/20, p 511; P 1/212, 95/845; Robyn Anderson, 'Criminal Violence in London. 18561875’, PhD thesis, Toronto University 1990, pp 308f; MEPO 2/399, PRO; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, p 148; P A Lorimer ‘Minnie Dean: A Case and Public Response’, BA Hons thesis, Otago University 1978; Jack R Sheehan, The Lora Gorge Mystery and Other Famous Trials. Wellington 1935, pp 22f; M H Holcroft, Old Invercargill, Dunedin 1976, pp 95f; A C Hanlon. Random Recollections, Dunedin 1939. ch 16; F G Hall-Jones,
Notes
494
Historical Southland, Invercargill 1945, pp 196f; David Gee, Poison: The Coward's Weapon, Christchurch 1985, pp 40f; NZ Times, 6.8, 16.8.1895; AJHR. 1893, H-26; 1895, H-28; Miles Singe and David A Thomson, Authority to Protect, Dunedin 1992, pp 231-2; J 40 PD box 58, 93/598; Dudley G Dyne, Famous New Zealand Murders, Auckland 1969, ch 8; Ken Catran, Hanlon: A Casebook, Wellington 1985, pp 26f; Lynley Hood. ‘Dean, Williamina’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
24. P-Chch 1/10, letters 73 &74 of 10.1.1891; P 4/17, pp 59, 162; PG, 1893, p 96; P 4/22. pp 190, 408; P 4/24, p 298; CAL Treadwell, Notable New Zealand Trials, New Plymouth 1936, pp 298f; NZ Times. 8.1, 12.1, 17.1,21.1,24.2, 26.2, 28.2.1891; Charlotte J Macdonald, ‘Women and Crime in New Zealand Society 1888-1910’, research essay, Massey University 1977; AJHR, 1899, H-16; Paul Chrisloffel, Censored: A Short History of Censorship in New Zealand, Wellington 1989, p 5.
25. P 1 sep seq, 1896/40; P 1/233, 97/1217; Richard S Hill, ‘Worthington, Arthur Bently’, in Orange (ed), DNZB II; O T J Alpers, Cheerful Yesterdays, Hamilton 1928 (1951 edition), pp 86f; [H Roth,] articles in Joy, 23.3, 31.3,6.4, 21.9.1959; John Hosking.A Christchurch Quack Unmasked, Christchurch 1893; Rex Monigatti, New Zealand Sensations. Wellington 1962; John Hosking (ed). From the National Detective Review of the United States: Criminal Details of Worthington, Christchurch c.1893; NZPD, 28.6.1893, p 70; 18.7.1893, p 547; W A Taylor, in The Plainsman, Sep 1948; Canterbury Times, 8.6.1893; NZ Truth, 3.6.1893; Roth Papers, Acc 82-213, ATL; H Roth, personal communication to author, 14.2.1991; Madeleine Seager, Edward William Seager: Pioneer of Mental Health, Waikanae 1987, p 284; for lowering tolerance, see Ingrid Clausen. ‘Crime and Criminals in Dunedin, 1880-1893’, research essay, Otago University 1983.
26. P 1/166, 40/89; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 2/89, 8.1.1889; P 2/14, 109/89, 1190/89; Canterbury Times clipping, nd, with AC 1352/88, which incls also Press 29.5.1888, Pender to Gudgeon 31.5.1888, Gudgeon to Pender 1.6.1888, Police Museum; Mac Donald, Napier, pp 89-90; interviews with R Allan, A Butterworth and W O’Donnell.
27. P 5/9, p 549; P 1/234, 97/1390; P 4/20, p 657; P 4/21, p 28; NZ Times, 4.9.1890; AJHR, 1887, H-5; 1894, H-14; 1898. H-2, p 998.
* 1 •• ■ > •• * ■ > * * *•> r 28. P 1/217, 96/33; P 1/234, 97/1390; AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 998.
29. P 1/147, 206/87; P 1/204, 94/374; NZG, 17.1.1889; P 1/236, 97/1590, Broham, 30.10.1897; NZ Times, 29.4.1891; AJHR, 1887, H-5; 1888, H-6; 1890, H-3; 1891, H-28; 1892, H-21; 1898, H-2, pp 5, 17; NZPD, 15.9.1898, pp 151-2.
* ' * —•* ‘"'“i * ■ rf “ ’ • '■•v'v, ci' * - • -■ 30. P 1/234, 97/1390; PG, 1888, p 72; PG, 13.5.1896; P 1/179, 1808/90; P 1/183, 91/696; NZPD. 17.6.1896, p 71; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 807-8; Theo Wake, The Police Department: Its Demoralisation Demonstrated, Christchurch 1895, pp 18-20; Taylor, Shadow, pp 14, 115.
iu. 31. P 1/217, 96/33; Meltzer Papers, folder 1 (Te Whaiti’), NZ Police Association; P 4/24, p 483; P 1/273, 05/2193; Raymond B Fosdick, European Police Systems, New York 1915, pp 199-200; AJHR. 1896, H-16; 1897, H-16, H-38; 1898, H-2, pp 21. 997; NZPD, 17.6.1896, p 71; 1.10.1897, p 200; 14.9.1898, p 61.
32. PG, 13.5.1896, p 86; P 1/234, 97/1390; AJHR, 1898 H-2, p 997; 1909, H-168, pp xl.
459; B Thomson, ‘Police Uniform’, The Bulletin (NZ Police), Oct 1983. 33. P 1/209, 95/19, Hume to Seddon, 11.9.1895, etc; P 1/218, 96/239; P 4/23, p 425; PC, 10.6.1896, p 102, circular 16/96; Franklin, ‘Long Service Medal’; Hamer, Liberals, pp 126,209,211 ,NZPD, 1.10.1897, p 205; Conrad Bollinger, Grog’s Own Country, Auckland 1959 (1967 edition), pp 32f; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, pp 180, 188; Tony Simpson, Shame and Disgrace, Auckland 1992, pp 113, 117; Michael Bassett, Sir Joseph Ward, Auckland 1993, p 97; James F Richardson, Urban Police in the United States, New York 1974, pp 86-7.
34. P 1/161, 1111/88; P 1/183, 91/679; P 1/208,94/1823; P 1/209, 95/263; P 1/204,94/268; P 4/23, p 425; Simpson, Shame, p 104; Fosdick, European Police, pp 379-84; William Bonger, Criminality and Economic Conditions, Boston 1916 (1969 edn, Bloomington, ed A T Turk), p 8.
35. P 1/204, 94/268; P 4/20, p 407; P 1/161, 1103/88; Le 1/1896/104; NZ Times. 28.1.1887,
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
495
27.1.1891; Hill, Frontier Tamed, pp 305, 323, 367; Wake, Police Department, AJHR, 1894, H-14; 1898, H-2, pp 527-8; NZPD. 10.10.1894, pp 606-7; 18.10,1894, pp 896-7; 15.9.1898, pp 133-4.
36. Chch Police, GO Book, p 393, circular 14 of 1888; P 4/23, letter to Pender, 13.7.1896; P 4/23, p 425, Hume to Premier, 3.7.1896; P 1/169, 870/89; P 1/181, 91/42; AJHR. 1892, H-21; 1895, H-28; 1898, H-2, pp 22, 24, 67, 527-9; NZPD. 15.9.1898, p 147.
37. P 1/209; P 4/23, p 425; P 1/186, 91/1592; AJHR. 1894, H-14; 1898, H-2, pp 1129-30; 1909, H-168, p 193.
38. Chch Police, GO Book, 27.2.1893, circular 8/93; PG. 1895, p 131; Lyttelton Times, 16,7.1900; NZ Herald. 25.6.1908.
39. P 4/17, p 164; P 4/24, p 483; P 1/166, 37/89; P 1/169, 1132/89; PG. 1889, p 88; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 22-3; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 657f, 710; for antiCatholic feeling, see eg passages in scrapbook of Const W McAnerin (D Terry); P J L Skerman, ‘The Dry Era: A History of Prohibition in the King Country, 1884-1954’, MA thesis. Auckland University 1972.
40. P 4/23, p 425; for similarities with ‘skeleton army’ situation in the UK, see A P Donajgrodzki (ed). Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain, London 1977, ch 9; Grant Middlemiss, A History of 125 Years of Police in a New Zealand Town’, typescript nd, ch 6.
41. P 4/23, p 425; P 1/220, 96/581; P 4/20, p 411; P 4/24, p 159; P 1/211, 95/661
42. P 1/232, 97/1082; G Anderson, interview with J Cummings.
43. P 5/10, pp 647, 651; P I sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 90-1, 288-9, 460, 594-5; Evening Star, 22.9.1905; notes of Snr Seigt McLean re Taranaki District orders for 1880s, Police Museum.
44. PG, 29.7.1891, p 135; 18.4.1894, p 632; P 1/211, 95/661; P 4/15, p 718; P 4/18, pp 336, 443; P 1/187, 91/1872; Henry Hollander, ‘Dunedin Police Stations’, typescript 1986; Grahame Anderson, ‘The Mount Cook Police Barracks, Buckle St, Wellington’, typescript 1977, pp 3, 6: NZ Times, 2.9.1894; NZ Herald, 3.3.1898; Bulletin (NZ Police), Apr 1985; Singe & Thomson, Authority, p 256; info from G Anderson, ind clippings from Evening Post, 19.1, 11.4.1894.
45. P 1/168, 736/89; P 1/216, 95/1638; P 1/189, 92/563; Chch Police, GO Book, p 346, circular 27, 24.11.1888; P 1/229, 97/529; P 1/213, 95/1020; NZ Times, 23.5.1889.
46. P 1/204, 94/609; PG, 2.1.1895, p5, circular 1/95; AJHR. 1895, H-28.
47. Chch Police, GO Book, p 351 (circular 3), p 361 (circular 15), p 379 (circular 18); P 1/166, 37/89; PG, 13.12.1893, p 194, circular 20/9.
48. P 1/177, 1450/90; PG, 13.8.1890, p 153; 28.4.1897, p 84; P 4/19, p 659; P 1/209, 95/40; Rorke, Two Peoples, pp 44, 186; Cherrett, Fear or Favour, pp 50. 52, 244; NZ Times, 31.7.1890, 6.12, 28.12, 29.12.1894; P 1/268, Mollerto Commissioner, 13.2.1899; AJHR. 1895, H-28; 1898, H-16; info from J R Fitzgerald and R O’Reilly.
49. Chch Police, GO Book, 1.9.1890, p 390; H Roth, ‘Blazing the Trail’, PSA Journal, Aug 1953, p 17; P 1/178, 1645/90; P 5/9, pp 527-8; P 4/20, p 1; Richard S Hill, ‘The First Police Association’, NZ Police Association Newsletter, Dec 1984,
50. Roth, ‘Blazing’; PSA Journal. Dec 1892, Jan 1893, Apr 1893, May 1893, Jan 1894, Feb 1894, Aug 1894, 20.9.1918; P 4/20, p 166; Chch Police, GO Book, 22.3.1893, circular 9/93; P 2/15, 93/361; P 1/207, 94/1506; P 4/21, pp 153-6, 460-1; NZ Times. 26.3.1892; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 25, 226; H Roth. Trade Unions in New Zealand Past and Present, Wellington 1973,p !2;Wgtn District Committee Minute Book 1891-1897,22.3,25.5.1893 minutes, PSA; Hill, ‘First Association’.
51. PG. 23.5.1888, p 100; P 1/209, Hume to Seddon etc, 11.9.1895.
52. P 1/143, 2363/86. 2437/86; P 1/184, 91/1029; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 91-2, 124; NZPD, 18.7.1893, p 547; 29.9.1893, p 861; 3.10.1893, p 934; 10.10.1894, pp 613-14; 30.7.1895, p 286.
r 53. Holford, ‘Evolution NZ Police’, pp 853-6; AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 1179; P 1/193, 92/1647.
54. P 1/199, 93/992; P 4/21, pp 153-6; P 1/226, 97/134; AJHR. 1894. H-14; 1895, H-28.
55. P 1/229, 97/536 (ind Lyttelton Times, 23.4.1897); P 1/232, 97/1082; P 4/24; J J Green and A J Young, “The Finest" - A Brief History of the New York City Police Department*,
Notes
496
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Dec 1976; Eric J Hewitt, A History of Policing in Manchester, Didsbury 1979, pp 104-7; Hamer, Liberals, pp 208-9; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, p 190; M L Macnaghten, Days of My Years, London 1915 (2nd impression), p 274; NZPD, 10.4.1897, p 162; 30.9.1897, pp 149f; 1.10.1897, p 204; 8.10.1897, pp 395, 421; 19.10.1897, pp 654-6; 14.9.1898, pp61.70, 96; 15.9.1898, pp 141, 152; 26.7.1901, pp 684, 689; Taylor, Shadow, p 5; Nellie F H Macleod, Fighting Man: A Study of the Life and Times of TE. Taylor, Christchurch 1964, p 48; AJHR. 1891, H-28; 1894, H-14; 1896, H-16; 1897, H-16; 1898, H-2, p 830; P 4/25, p 184, Tunbridge to Hume, 5.11.97; PG, 27.10.1897, p 89; Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, Lexington 1977, pp ix-x, xiv, 44, 55-6, 81; James F Richardson, The New York Police, New York 1970; Donald McLeod diary, 18.10.1897 (Della McLeod); for a summary of Tunbridge’s career, see Richard S Hill, ‘Tunbridge, John Bennett’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
56. NZ Govt. Police Act, regulations 6, 14, 220, 236; PG, 8.5.1889, p 88; 1919, p 419; Holford, ‘Evolution NZ Police’, p 819 ,AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 211; A K Boltomley and C A Coleman, ‘Police Effectiveness and the Public; The Limitations of Official Crime Rates’, in R V G Clarke and J M Hough (eds). The Effectiveness of Policing, Famborough 1980; Ben Whitaker, The Police in Society, London 1979, p 41; Emsley, Crime & Society, p 190.
57. P 4/16, pp 307, 309, 317; P 1/185, 91/1295; P 1/147, 284/87; HO 45/11000/223532, PRO; Taylor, Shadow, pp 90-2.
58. P 4/16, p Chch Police, GO Book, 13.3.1888, circular 2; P 1/158, 442/88; P 5/8, pp 652, 663; P 1/163, 1758/88; P 1/183, 91/696; P 1/167, 365/89; P 4/17, p 26; AC 1352/88, Police Museum.
59. R T Hermans, ‘Wellington City Police History’, typescript nd; P 1/179, 1808/90; P 1/177, 1391/90; P 1 sep seq. 1889/1099, 1902/1692; P 4/19, pp 157-60; Des Swain, ‘Miscarried Justice’, Evening Post, 22.6.1991; NZ Times, 5.6, 12.7-24.8, 3.9, 8.10, 9.10.1889; Dyne, Murders, ch 1; W H Carson, The Kaiwarra Mystery and More Famous Trials, Wellington 1935; Treadwell, NZ Trials, pp 17If; AJHR, 1889, H-9.
60. P 1/172, 1761/89; AJHR. 1889, H-9.
61. P 1/173, 2071/89; P 4/18, p 531; P 1/185, 91/1295; PG, 29.1.1890, p 23.
62. Holford, ‘Evolution NZ Police’, pp 844-5; P 1/178, 1659/90; P-Auckland 9/2, Detective Occurrence Book 1886-7; P 1/189, 92/563; NZPD. 1.10.1897, p 202; AJHR. 1891, H-28; 1892, H-21; 1898, H-2, pp 29-30, 33. 65.
63. J S Tullett, The Industrious Heart, New Plymouth 1981, pp 196f; Margaret Carr, Policing in the Mountain Shadow, New Plymouth 1989, pp 29f; J B Thomson Papers. MS Papers 1524, ATL; Evening Post, 2.3.1896; Florinda Lambert, ‘Wallath, Robert Herman’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
64. P 1 sep seq, 1892/1139; Le 1/1892/146; NZPD, 24.7.1901, pp 604-6; Hall-Jones, Historical Southland, pp 199f; Stuart Perry, The New Zealand Whisky Book, Auckland 1980, ch 4; W D Stuart, The Satyrs of Southland. Gore 1982; Sheehan, Lora Gorge, pp 97f; B Swanton. ‘Women Police in New South Wales’, Australian Police Journal. OctDec 1983; NZ Herald, 24, 28.10.1930; info from Arthur Manning, and Manning’s typescript, ‘Recollections of Inquiries into Lora Gorge Murder’.
65. P 5/10, p 537 A; P 4/20, pp 14-15; P 4/22, p 134; P 1/215, 93/1443; NZ Times, 20.5-4.7. 12-15.8.1896; Barry Thomson and Robert Neilson, Sharing the Challenge: A Social and Pictorial History of the Christchurch Police District, Christchurch 1989, p 219; Sheehan, Lora Gorge, pp 32f; AJHR, 1897, H-16; 1898, H-2, pp 906-7, 919, 936, 948, 953-4; P 4/23, various letters; PG, 10.6.1896, p 102; P 1/221, 96/854.
66. P 1/229, 97/524, 97/533; Dyne, Murders, pp 62f; Sheehan, Lora Gorge, pp 80f; Robert Gilkison, Early Days in Dunedin , Auckland 1938, pp 84f; David Gee, The Devil’s Own Brigade: A History of the Lyttelton Gaol 1860-1920, Wellington 1975, pp 72-3; [Jonathan Roberts,] The Diary of Jonathan Roberts. Christchurch [1895].
■wuvi u,j i lie iu I t "J Ji/iiuiiiuii nui/u u, viuMikiiuiv.ii [IU7JJ. 67. PDB; P 4/16, p 306; P 1/162, 1327/88; P 4/19, p 386; P 4/24. p 159; P 4/18; interview with D Holmes; E C Richards, The Chatham Islands, Christchurch 1952, p 159; Le 1/1888/109; Carter, 'Call of Duty', p 169; Richard S Hill, ‘Part-time Policing: An Historical Perspective’, NZ Law Journal, Dec 1987; Charles E Spicer, Policing the River
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
497
District: The First 100 Years of the Wanganui Police, Wanganui 1988, p 200; AJHR, 1887, H-5; 1888, H-6; 1898, H-2, pp 191, 1041-2, 1134-5; 1909, H-168, pp2l7, 226-7; ‘Richard William Rayner’, typescript provided by Linda Stopforth; info from David Woodcock; P 1/180, 2267/90; P 1/183, 91/684; Cherrett, Fear or Favour, p 243; Sherwood Young, ‘Wong Gye, Charles’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
JIICIWUUU IUUIIg, TTUllg VJJt, GIIOIILJ , 111 C/iangL 11. 68. P 1/149, 729/87; P 1/213, 95/986; P 4/23. p 540; P 1/209, 95/398; P 1/188, 92/235.
69. P 4/20, p2; P 4/17, pp 246, 267, 671; P 4/19, pp 229, 425; P 2/14, 91/729; P 1/201, 93/1589; P 1/205, 94/767; P 2/15, 94/378; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, pp 67, 2212, 235; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 657-8.
70. P 1/185, 91/1368; PG, 1888, p 100; P 4/21, p 702; AJHR, 1895, H-28; 1909, H-168, p 470.
71, P 1/235, 97/1475; P 1 sep seq, 1893/492; P 1/182, 91/591
72. P 4/15, pp 314, 327; P 1/159, 687/88; P 1/179, 1832/90; Dick Scott, Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka, Auckland 1975 (1981 edition), pp 57-8, 152-4; P 5/8, pp 190, 194; A L Smith, Ko Tohu Te Matua. The Story of Tohu Kakahi of Parihaka', MA thesis, Canterbury University 1990, pp 122f; Carr, Mountain Shadow, pp 71-3, 119; Thomas Hickman, ‘Autobiography’, P 18/1; AJHR, 1887, H-9; interview with Mrs L Dalgety; Opunake Times, 14.1.1930, and other material in possession of Mrs R Gilshnan; NZ.PD. 15,9.1898, p 149; Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial 'Amalgamation' in Nineteenth Century New Zealand, Auckland 1973, p 295.
73. P 1/149, 755/87; P 1 sep seq, 1888/590.
74. P 1/147, 213/87; P 4/15, p 579; PG, 1887, p 162; P 1/183, 91/679, 91/745; P 5/9, pp 600-1; Bronwyn Elsmore, Like Them That Dream, Tauranga 1985, pp 125-7; NZ Times, 22, 23.10.1890; AJHR. 1898, H-2, p 944; Chris Koroheke, ‘Te Mahuki’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
75. P 1/174, 95/90; P 1/172, 1827/89; E C Richards (ed). Diary of E. R. Chudleigh, Christchurch 1950, pp 321-5, 333, 340, 367, 369-70, 373, 378-9, 406-7, 460, 464; NZ Times, 7.11.1890; J A Williams, Politics of the New Zealand Maori, Auckland 1969, p 46; Scott, Ask That Mountain, p 157; Michael King, Moriori. Auckland 1989, p 146.
76. P 1/123, 659/85; P 5/7, pp 145, 152; P 1/171, 1545/89: P 1/160, 730/88; P 5/8, pp 273. 302. 312, 314; P 1/168, 739/89; C R O'Hara, Northland Made to Order. Whangarei 1986, pp 48-9; NZ Times, 23-29.7.1887; Bronwyn F-lsmore, Mona from Heaven. Tauranga 1989, ch 37; Scott, Ask That Mountain, pp 154-7; Judith Binney, ‘Ani Kaaro, Maria Pangari, Remana Hane', in Charlotte Macdonald, Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Williams (eds). The Book of New Zealand Women. Wellington 1991; NZ Herald. 22.7.1932; Ward, Show, p 295; AJHR. 1887, H-9; 1888, H-6; ‘Part of AlexrMcGilp's Life Story’, manuscript, nd, and other material in possession of Mrs I Fidler; P 4/15, pp 626, 647; Judith Binney, ‘Kaaro, Ani’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
77. P 1/144, 2786/86; P 1/178, 1791/90.
78. P 1/149, 738/87; P 1/160, 815/88.
79. P 1/221, 96/776; P 1/168, 727/89; PG, 1897, p62, circular 15/97; AJHR. 1889, H-9; Alan Ward, ‘Law and Law-enforcement on the New Zealand Frontier, 1840-1893’, NZJH, Oct 1971, p 146; P 1/183, 91/695; P 5/8, p 547; P 1/171, 1563/89; I H P Murray, ‘The Armed Constabulary of Papua’, Police Journal, Oct 1931.
80. P 5/9, pp 27f; Goodall papers (Mr & Mrs F Bell); P 1/167, 559/89; P 1/168, 727/89, 767/89; NZ Times, 20.2-7.3.1889; Alan Ward, ‘Documenting Maori History; The Arrest of Te Kooli Rikirangi Te Turuki’, NZJH, Apr 1980.
81. P 1/184, 1015/91; P 5/10, pp 95f; P 5/11, pp 90f; NZ Times, 10.3.1894; Williams, Politics, pp 92-3; AJHR. 1894, H-14; 1895, H-28; 1898, H-2. p 944.
82. Meltzer Papers, 'Miscellaneous' folder, NZ Police Association; PG, 1895, p 178; P 5/11, pp 436, 442, 659; P 4/22, p 547; P 1/232, 97/1041; AJHR, 1895. H-28; 1896, H-16.
83. P 1/147, 198/87; P 1/168, 719/89; NZ Times. 16.3, 20.3, 30.4.1889.
84. P 1/186, 91/1510; P 5/9, p 531; P 4/18, p 115; H Roth, 'The Maritime Strike of 1890 - , Historical News. Aug 1970, p 2; John Crawford, ‘Military Involvement in the 1890 Maritime Strike and 1913 Waterfront Strike in New Zealand', typescript nd, pp 3-4; for 1890 strike, see also Conrad Bollinger, Against the Wind. Wellington 1968, ch 4; Roth,
498
Notes
Trade Unions: James Holt, Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand: The First Forty Years. Auckland 1986: AJHR. 1891. H-28; NZ Herald. 22.8, 2.9. 9.9, 10.9.1890; NZ Times, 30.8.1890; Press, 11.9.1890; lan Merrett, ‘A Reappraisal of the 1890 Maritime Strike in New Zealand', MA thesis, Canterbury University 1969.
85. P 5/9, pp 530-1, 535, 539; P 4/18, p 114; AJHR. 1891, H-28; Gavin McLean, The Southern Octopus, Wellington 1990, p 112; W H Scoller, A History of Port Lyttelton, Christchurch 1968, p 152; Guy H Scholefield (ed), The Richmond-Atkinson Papers, vol 11, Wellington 1960, pp 559-62; NZ Herald. 2.9.1890; Otago Daily Times. 2.9.1890; Press, 5.9.1890; NZ Times, 1.9.1890; Merrett, ‘Reappraisal’, p 117.
86. P 5/9, pp 533, 536, 537, 543. 576; Crawford. ‘Military Involvement’, pp 4-7; P 1/183, 91/765; P J O’Farrell, ‘The Workers in Grey District Politics 1865-1913; A Study in New Zealand Liberalism and Socialism’, MA thesis. Canterbury 1955, p 71; NZ Government, Compilation of the Law Respecting Unlawful Combinations, and as to Riots and Breaches of the Peace; With Observations on the Defence of Person and Property by Private Persons; and the Powers and Duties of Special Constables, Wellington 1890; NZ Herald, 1.9, 22.9.1890; Press, 3.9.1890.
87. P 5/9, p 549; ‘Lyttelton Police Station Centenary 1880-1980’, NZ Police; P 4/18, p 122; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, pp 59-60, 128; Scotter, Port Lyttelton, p 153; NZ Herald, 12.9.1890; Press. 9.9, 12.9.1890; NZ Times, 13.9, 15.9, 16.9.1890; Merrett, ‘Reappraisal’, pp 176f.
88. Roth. Trade Unions; P 5/9, p 662; P 1/183, 91/765; P 1/186, 91/1510; Bassett. Atkinson; NZ Times, 23.9.1890; Waikato Times. 21.10.1890; AJHR. 1891, H-28.
89. Roth, Trade Unions; Guy H Scholefield, Notable New Zealand Statesmen: Twelve Prime Ministers, Christchurch [1946], p 170; Tribune, 18.10.1890, quoted in Dick Scott, Inheritors of a Dream, Wellington 1962 (1969 edition), p 100; McLean, Southern Octopus, p 119.
90. J E Martin, Tatau Tatau - One Big Union Altogether, Christchurch 1987; P 1/206, 94/1235; P 4/21, pp 473, 505-9; John O’Sullivan, Mounted Police in N.S.W., Adelaide 1979, pp 123-4; Hamer. Liberals; Peter McKinlay, ‘The Role of the State’, in Royal Commission on Social Policy, The Role of the State: Five Perspectives, Wellington 1988.
Part Two
1. Westport News, 9.5.1898, in H S Wardell scrapbook (J Wardell); AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 388, 632, 795.
2. AJHR. 1898, H-2, p 830, H-16.
3. P 4/24, pp 533-63; AJHR, 1897, H-34; 1898, H-2, passim, espec pp xi, xxviii-xxix, 836f, 906, 919-20, 936; P 1/239, 98/136; P I sep seq, 1898/1645; P 4/26, p 166; P 1/248, 98/1585; P 1/252, 98/2219; P 5/13, pp 224, 273, 339; NZPD. 30.9.1897, p 153; 20.12.1897, p 914; 14.9.1898, pp 70-1; 21.7.1899, p 87; Taylor, Shadow, pp 8-9, ch 36.
■ ‘ ' r ' * '* * rr • ~ r v., ■ ” » rr " 'i v “ ■ /u . 4 P 1/236, 97/1590; AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 853; Westport News. 9.5.1898, in H S Wardell scrapbook (J Wardell); PG. 25.7.1898, p 132, circular 15/98; P 1/268, Tunbridge to Pender, 28.9.1899.
5. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 14, 798, 831-3; 1922, H-16, p 6; P 1/236, 97/1590; NZPD. 14,9.1898, p 67.
6. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp i-ii, 355, H-16; PG. 16.2.1898, p 25; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; Simpson, Shame, ch 4; Taylor, Shadow, pp 39, 120; Macleod, Fighting Man, p 49; Lyttelton Times 30.7,7.9.1898; Bollinger, Grog, p 49; NZPD, 16.11.1897, p 9; 21.12.1897, p 974; 14.9.1898, p 75; 15.9.1898, pp 124, 134-5; PSA Journal. 1.12.1927.
7. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp x, liii-lxiii, 535; NZ Times, 15.2.1898, in H S Wardell scrapbook (J Wardell).
8. P 1/244, 98/998.
9. Lyttelton Times, 30.4.1898; Press, 30.4.1898, in H S Wardell scrapbook (J Wardell); 'Fair Play', Evening Post. 4.5.1898.
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
499
10. AJHR, 1898, H-2, passim, espec pp xxvii, Ixxiv-vii, 193, 200, 212-13, 217, 660, 663, 667-8, 814.
11. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp ix-x, 1143-4; NZ Times. 7.9.1898; Hamer. Liberals, pp 204, 222, 355-6; NZPD, 14.9.1898, p 107.
12. NZPD, 26.7.1901, pp 688-9; Taylor, Shadow, passim, espec pp 5, 117-22, ch 28; Simpson, Shame, pp 126-7.
13. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xx-i, 834; Macleod, Fighting Man, p 49; NZPD. 21.7.1899, p 87.
14. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp v-vi, ix. xxx, 14. 201-2.
15. AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 801; P 7/1; Hamer, ‘Centralization & Nationalism’, p 131.
16. PI sep seq. 1905/547, McDonald’s letters of 5.8, 5.9.1902; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xv, 28, 64. 572. 667.
17. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp v-vi, 7. 25. 62. 66. 197, 201-2, 755-6, 832; P 1/252, 98/2099; P 1 sep seq, 1903/1916; Chch Police, GO Book. 11.12.1899, circular 347/99; for a discussion of crime rales, see Miles Fairbum and Stephen Haslett, ‘Violent Crime in Old and New Societies - A Case Study Based on New Zealand 1853-1940’, Journal of Social History, Fall 1986; and more generally, Fairbum’s The Ideal Society and its Enemies, Auckland 1989; for London, see David Peirce, Peter N Grabosky and Ted Robert Gurr, ‘London: The Politics of Crime and Conflict, 1800 to the 19705’, in Ted Robert Gurr, Peter N Grabosky and Richard C Hula (eds), The Politics of Crime and Conflict, Beverly Hills, 1977; Otago Daily Times, 8.9, 16.9.1913; NZ Herald, 9.11.1920; ‘Crime Rale Per 100 Population 1878-1984’, graph. NZ Police; G T Bloomfield, New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics, Boston (Mass) 1984, pp 364-8; Graeme Dunstall, ‘A History of the New Zealand Police, vol IV’, draft, ch 2, p 32; Barrack Regulations: Auckland Police Station, Police Museum.
18. AJHR, 1898, H-2, p 315; P 2/16, register 98/42; Auckland telephone directory, late 1890s (Mrs E Crompton Smith); P 1/258, 99/684; P 4/31, p 301.
19. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 25. 115, 657-8, 665, H-16; 1909, H-168, pp 165, 177; P 1 sep seq. 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 52-3, 55, 228, 233, 611, 615, 644, 654-5; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, pp 67, 236; papers of Snr Sergt McLean, memo 28/98 of 12.12.1898, Police Museum. Barry Thomson, ‘Police Transport in New Zealand’, typescript nd.
20. P 1 sep seq, 1902/1469, 1905/1267; Alpers, Cheerful Yesterdays, ch 22; Gee, Poison, pp 23f, 49f, 55f; Johannes C Andersen, Jubilee History of South Canterbury, Auckland 1916, pp 472-3; Dyne, Murders, ch 6; Report and Narrative of the Trial of Thomas Hall and Margaret Graham Houston, Charged with Attempting to Murder Kate Emily Hall, Christchurch 1886; Sheehan. Lora Gorge, pp 43f; Treadwell, NZ Trials, pp 151 f; Helen Wilson, My First Eighty Years. Hamilton 1950, ch 3; Catran, Hanlon, pp 70-7; info from Jim Young; for Mumford’s career, see Jim Young, The Makira. Last Years of an Island Trader’, in The Great Circle, Oct 1984; NZ Herald, 16.7.1927; Brian O’Brien, ‘Hall, Thomas’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
21. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 4, 8, 61, 68, 121, 215, 529; info from Ms J Moriarty and Mrs B Pook.
22. AJHR. 1892, H-21; 1895, H-28; 1898, H-2, pp xxi, 200, 1120. H-16; 1899, H-16; 1900, H-16.
23. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 458, 562-6, 1023.
24. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 576-7, 1093, 1130-1; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, pp 36. 64; interview with J Skinner.
25. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xxii-iii, 107-9, 381; P 5/12, p 697; P 1/256, 99/415 (incl Lyttelton Times, 14.2.1899); Simpson, Shame, pp 120-1.
26. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xxii-v, 299-303, 333-9, 575, 730. 1025, 1033, 1037, 1048. 1073; 1899, H-16.
27. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xxiv-v; Evening Star, 8.6.98, in H S Wardell scrapbook (J Wardell).
28. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xvi, xviii-xx, 161-2, 194-5, 405, 429-30, 1116.
29. AJHR. 1891, H-28; 1895, H-28; 1898, H-2, pp xii-xiii, xvi-xvii, 20. 24, 63-4, 67-8, 671, 796, 803, 833, 959, 970, 1081, H-16; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; P 3/2/18; NZPD, 14.9.1898, pp 61. 94; 15.9.1898, p 155.
Notes
500
30. P 3/2/18, NARC; PG, 7.12.1898, circular 27/98; P 1/270, 00/929; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xiii, xvii-xviii. 4, 10; P 1 sep seq. 1898/1645; Donald McLeod, diary. 27.4.1898 (Della McLeod).
31. PG. 17.7.1901, circular 14/01; P 2/16, 98/580; Lyttelton Times, 16.7.1900; AJHR. 1898, H-16; 1899, H-16; 1900. H-16; 1909, H-168.
32. P 1/273, 05/2193; P 1/256, 99/444 A; PG, 1901, p 215, circular 17/01; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1545; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xiii-xiv; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 124, 137; Cherrett, Fear or Favour, p 43; Haddock papers (S Haddock).
i i-x, l-y / , v^iiviiwti, j cui lei i uny 14 1 , p tj, nuuuuva papvia nuuuuv.is;. 33. AJHR. 1887, H-9; 1892, H-27; 1893, H-26; 1898, H-2, pp vi, xviii, 18, 21, 29-30, 58, 119-20, 161, 194-6, 388, 424, 730; P I sep seq, 1898/1645; NZPD. 23.6.1891, p 171; 10.9.1891, pp 482-3; 1.9.1893, p 563; 24.7.1894, p 14; Hill, ’Police Super’; P 1/258, 99/733; Fosdick, European Police, p 252; J P Martin and Gail Wilson, The Police: A Study in Manpower, London 1969, p 28.
in i»i ifc ' , Loiiuuu jyu y , p 34. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xviii-xx, 797, 852, H-16; P 5/12, p 680.
35. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xviii, 797, 970, H-16; 1899. H-16.
36. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xviii-xix, 194-5, 404-5, 797, 801-2, H-16. n d i lono/ic tc n 4/n n i ; - n n i:
37. P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; P 4/27, pp 222, 736; P 1/268, various correspondence; Police Provident Fund Act 1899; Hill, ‘Police Super’; NZPD. 6.10.1899, pp 359ff, AJHR, 1898, H-2, p xix; 1899, H-16. H-16A; 1900, H-16, H-16A; 1901, H-16. p 4, H-16A.
38. P 1/268; P 2/17,99/2209; Chch Police, GO Book, 26.10.1899, circular 32/99,18.12.1899, circular 38/99; Police Provident Fund Act 1899; PG, 1900, p 46.
■ ........ . ........ ...... . .... . K .... 39. P 1/273, 05/2193, correspondence for 1900; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 20/01; PG, 1.1.1902, p 6; NZ Herald, 20.12.1901; Hill, 'Police Super’; Manawatu Standard, 24.4.1902, 10.2.1903 (M Craig).
40. AJHR. 1898, H-2, passim, eg. pp 670-1, 799.
41. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp viii, 16-17, 381-2, 804, H-16; P I sep seq, 1898/1645.
... ■■ —. rr ■—» - - ”, ' " ■ - • —r —t 42. AJHR. 1891, H-28; 1898, H-2, pp vii-x, 15, 26-7, 668.
43. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 27-8, 32, 65-6, 795.
44. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 6. 24-5, 222, 283, 386, 416, 734, 795. 802, 834, H-16; Fosdick, European Police, pp 199-204; Tom Tullett, Strictly Murder, London 1979, p 29; ‘Application for a Situation in the Prison and Police Services’, form filled in by F Simmons (G Anderson); Martin & Wilson, Police, p 12.
45. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 32, 212, 304, 386. 456, 958, 965-6; Taylor. Shadow, pp 17-18; Wake, Police Department, p 6; Weekly Graphic and NZ Mail, 30.9.1908; S I Young and Richard Hill, ‘Police Training in New Zealand’, in L B Mason and M F Gordon (eds), Trentham in Retrospect, Porirua 1982.
46. AJHR, 1897, H-16; 1898, H-2, pp xi, 2, 22, 32-3, 92. 97, 198, 222, 528, 729, 795-7, 851, 959, H-16; Carson & Davison, Longest Beat, p 170.
47. P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; Hermans, ‘Wellington Police’, p 9.
48. P 1/273, 05/2193; P 4/27. p 15, Tunbridge to Pender. 19.12.1898; PG, 1898, pp 209-10; P 1/259, 99/835, Symes, 27.4.1899; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, p 633; AJHR. 1898, H-16; 1899, H-16; Graeme Dunstall, ‘O’Donovan, John’, in Claudia Orange (ed). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 111, forthcoming.
V'-VJ/, i IK. lyicm/nui J i/j lICIF uuiuiiu »U1 111, lUI 11 IV, II llg. 49. P 4/25. p 398 (Dec 1897); P 4/26, p57 (Jun 1898); P 1/273; P 1 sep seq. 1898/1645; P 1/258, 99/733; P 1/253, 99/99; P 1/261, 99/1229; PG, 1898, pp 209-10; NZ Times, 7.2.1899; AJHR. 1898, H-16; 1899, H-16.
50. PG, 1898, pp 209-10; P 1/257,99/628; P 1/255, 99/376; P 4/28, p 542; P 2/17, 99/1111.
51. P 1/253, 99/99; P 2/17, 99/890; PG. 30.3.1898, p 54, circular 8/98; 29.9.1899, p 222, circular 26/99; the maxims can be seen as the endpieces of Richard S Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier, Wellington 1986; P 4/28, pp 149, 193, 211, 214, 366, 386; NZ Times. 7.2.1899; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 254, 622, 641-2; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 163, 166, 200; 1909, H-168, p 365. pn lom „ IAQ - D A/'ll ni Tin. D 4 m _ Ic. 1 n Imi n£.i£.£.c. n ano _ 1 • t .
52. PG, 1902, p 168; P 4/31, pp 173, 310; P 4/33, p 161; P 1/273, 06/666; P 4/30, p 114; interview with R Allan; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 286, 652, 701; AJHR. 1902, H-16; 1903, H-16; 1909, H-168, pp 50-1.
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
501
53. P 1/253, 99/99.
54. P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xv-xvi, 122, 171, 198, 406; 1901, H-16.
55. NZPD. 23.7.1895, p 113; AJHR. 1896, H-16; 1898. H-2, pp 215, 803.
56. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xiii, xxiii, 30, 34, 64, 355, 412-13, 788-9.
57. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 217-21, 764-70, 787, 792, 818. cci a twin i ono n ;;; a c i ioz n -ill -5C f\ TO 701 CTO I c\f\c\
58. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xiii, 24, 61, 206, 269-71, 331, 350, 352, 383, 386, 529, 664; 1909, H-168, pp 182, 358, 365; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; interview with R Allan; P 4/36, p 147; Canterbury Times. 27.9.1905; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 309, 313, 714; Lyttelton Times, 5.11.1909.
59. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 722, 788.
60. PG, 1897, pp 149 (18.8.1897 list). 200 (10.11.1897), 215 (8.12.1897); 1898, pp 36, 209; 1899, pp 62, 200; P 4/25, pp 158, 506; AJHR. 1897, H-33, Beetham to Under-Secretary for Justice, 10.12.1897; 1898, H-2, p 90; ’Evidence Taken at the Police Commission’, 1919, NZ Police, pp 381, 392-3, 420, 490; NZPD, 20,12.1897, p 914; 14.9.1898, p 70; 15.9.1898, pp 154, 161-2; Holford, ’Evolution NZ Police’, p 820.
61 P 1/236, 97/1590; AJHR. 1898, H-2, eg. p 730; P 4/26, pp 685, 722; S Rawle scrapbook (B Thomson).
62. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 73, 175-6, 179, 199, 201, 212, 241, 243, 245, 512-13, H-16; S H Jeyes and F D How, Life of Sir Howard Vincent, London 1912, p 71.
63. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 69, 211. 669, 907, 921; P 1/263, 99/1433.
64. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 429, 733, H-16; P 1/252, 98/2099; P I sep seq, 1898/1645.
65. P 5/13, p 165 (memo to Inspectors, 14.11.1898); P 1/267, 99/2113; PG, 19.12.1899, p 266; 14.3.1900, p 61.
66. P I sep seq, 1898/1645; AJHR, 1898, H-2. pp xii. 965; P 1/273, 05/2193; PG. 1899, p 79, NZG, 1.12.1898.
67. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp x, xii, 10-12, 199, 212, 528, 530, 798-9, 1098-9, H-16; P 3/2/18, NARC; PG, 1899, pp 79 (12.4.1899), 93 (circular 8/99); P 5/13, pp 345-6; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, p 239.
68. P 1/263,99/1433,99/1434; P 1/267, 99/2148; PG, 16.8.1899, circular 24/99, 30.8.1899, p 186; AJHR. 1909, H-168, p 336.
69. P 1/263, 99/1434; NZPD. 17.7.1900; 17.8.1900, pp 78-9, 609-10; 26.7.1901, pp 676-7. 680-1, 686-7; P 2/17, 00/1287, 00/1969 A.
70. P 1 sep seq, 1908/2084; P 4/31, p 261
71. P I sep seq, 1900/1532.
72. P4/30, pp 134, 139, 142, 164, 252, 346, 378, 386,411,468, 562; P 5/14, pp 389, 392; P 2/17, 00/1481.
73. P 5/13, pp 184, 202, 203, 205, 219, 220; P 1/251, 98/2037; P 5/14, p 223, Tunbridge to O’Brien, 10.3.1902; P 1/273, 01/811.
74. P 4/31, p 180; G V Butterworth and H R Young, Maori Affairs/Nga Take Maori, Wellington 1990, p 58; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp v, 851; for reactive work, see eg. P 4/25, p 254; Williams, Politics, chs 6-8; Augie Fleras, ‘From Village Runanga to the New Zealand Maori Wardens’ Association; A Historical Development of Maori Wardens’, typescript 1980; Richard S Hill, ‘lncorporating Maoris into the New Zealand Police’, Journal of the Police History Society (UK), no 4, 1989.
ji/ui/uu uj me i t/tiic 75. P 4/31, pp 303, 472, 473; Fleras, ’Runanga’, pp 16f.
76. P 1/264, 99/1598; Hill, ‘lncorporating Maoris’; P 1/249, 98/1736; Williams, Politics. MA 1, Acc 1369, Maori Council, Rorke, Two Peoples, pp 224-5.
77. P 1/250, 98/1891; P 1/264, 99/1598; P 1/249, 98/1736; Hill, ’lncorporating Maoris’
78. P 4/27, p 630; P 4/33, pp 57-8; P 4/28, p 562; P 4/30, p 378; P 1/265, 99/1821.
79. P 1/252, 98/2216; P 1/269, 00/422; P 1/234, 97/1390; P 5/13, pp 722-4; Pl, 97/1494, incl Lyttelton Times. 6.11.1897, Police Museum; Otago Daily Times. 9-16.2.1901.
80. P 5/13, pp 196, 199, 722-4; Crawford, ‘Military Involvement’, pp 8-9; M Wicksteed, A Chronology of the New Zealand Army 1827-1984’, typescript nd
81. P 1/273, 08/1981; P 1/273, 07/2581; G 25/18, Seddon to Governor. 20.5.1898.
u i , I Mi. I I . NJ i-~'t I O. JtUUUII IVJ VJUVtI MUI, L.XJ.J. 1070 82. P 1/235, 97/1472; P 1/273, 07/2581.
Notes
502
83. P 1/273, 07/2581; P 1 sep seq, 1898/766; AJHR. 1898, H-16; Thomas Hickman papers (Mrs R Gilshnan).
84. P 1 sep seq. 1898/766; P 1/273, 07/2581 (incl Taranaki Herald. 11.3.1904; Hawera Star. 23.11.1907).
85. P 1 sep seq. 1907/397; Pl. 98/1269; Richard S Hill. ‘Elsdon Best and Tuhoe; A Cautionary Tale’, Historical Review. Nov 1988.
86. P 1 sep seq. 1907/397; Donald McLeod, scrapbook, newspaper clippings incl Poverty Bay Herald, 19.12.1907 (Della McLeod).
87. P 1/249. 98/1669; P 1/164, 1804/88; P 4/24, p 372; P 5/12, pp 196, 362, 666, 683; PG, 22.4.1891. p 78; 1897, pl 4 (circular 3/97); Chch Police. GO Book, circular 7. 13.4.1891; P 4/19. p 514, Hume. 26.8.1892; P 1/232, 97/1041; P 1/243, 98/819; P 1/247, 98/1277; Judith Binney, ‘Amalgamation and Separation’, in Judith Binney, Judith Bassett and Erik Olssen, The People and the Land, Wellington 1990, pp 206-7; Judith Binney, ‘Ancestral Voices: Maori Prophet Leaders’, in Keith Sinclair (ed). The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, Auckland 1990, pp 175-7; Scott, Ask That Mountain, pp 161, 177-8; Le 1/1892/115, ‘Dog Tax; Non-payment ofby natives at Parihaka’; Tony Simpson, Te Riri Pakeha, Martinborough 1979, p 216; O’Hara, Northland, pp 50-5; Evening Post, 3.10.1981; Chairman, Hokianga County Council, to Premier, 10.6.1898, Hokianga County Council; info from C R O’Hara; James Cowan. The New Zealand Wars, vol 11, Wellington 1922 (1955 edition), pp 499-502; G 15/1, Capt Browne to Governor, 5.5.1898, and other documents; J 1, 98/644; G 25/18, Seddon to Governor, 20.5.1898; material from J Taylor, incl Alexander McGilp, ‘Waima Rebellion: 1898’, and Newall’s report of 12.5.1898; J Treanor letters, 4.5, 11.5.1898, in W Jones collection. Police Museum; Cecil Manson and Celia Manson, Tides of Hokianga, Wellington 1956, pp 62f; Jack Lee, Hokianga, Auckland 1987, pp 241 f; ‘Part of Alexr McGilp’s Life Story’, manuscript nd, and other material in possession of Mrs I Fidler; info from Mrs M Wellington; Angela Ballara, ‘Toia, Hone Riiwi’, and JAB Crawford, ‘Newall, Stuart’, both in Orange (ed), DNZB II.
88. P 1/254, 99/131; P 4/27, p 112 (memo to North Island Inspectors, 18.1.1899); P 2/1/29, NARC; Chairman, Hokianga County Council, to Minister of Justice, 10.9.1898, and Waldegrave to Chairman, Hokianga County Council, 20.2.1899, Hokianga County Council; info from C R O’Hara; R T Lange, ‘The Tohunga and the Government in the Twentieth Century’, University of Auckland Historical Society Annual, 1968.
a nviiiiviii '-cmui j , umtw ji ly K'J ntacMutiu iiijiui 89. P 1/237, 97/1683; NZPD, 18.8.1893, pp 143, 146.
90. PDB, pp 373f; P 1/238, 98/41; P 1/249, 98/1690; P 4/26. pp 28, 603; P 4/27, p 122; Hermans, ‘Wellington Police’, p 8; Henry Scott, ‘Looking Back’, typescript nd, p 206 (Mr & Mrs E Robertson); AJHR. 1893, H-26; 1894, H-14; 1898, H-2, pp 20. 225, 410; Walker, Critical History, p 87.
91. PG, 1897, p5; 1899, pp 5. 14; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp x, 730, 960, 1100, H-16; P 1/249, 98/1669; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; P 4/27, pp 25. 38-40: P 1/252, 98/2219. m a tun ions u i . n I iooo/ick. \t'rnr\ i a n I ono _
92. AJHR, 1898, H-2, p xi; P I sep seq, 1898/1645; NZPD. 14.9.1898, p 66,
93. P 1/249, 98/1669; P 5/13, telegrams; P 4/27, p 37; P 1/252, 98/2219; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645.
94. P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; P 1/248, 98/1646; P 5/13, eg. pp 124, 663; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xi, 29; 1900, H-16A; 1901, H-I6A; 1909, H-168, pp 410. 427; P 1/265, 99/1718; P 1/229, 97/483, 97/536; NZPD. 14.9.1898, pp 106, 110-11.
U, 1t.7.1Q71, Fl 7 7V7V7, 1177-17. 95. AJHR, 1898, B-7, H-2, pp xxxi-ii, 736-42, 758-61, 1144; P 4/26, p 294; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; P 1/243, 98/768, Tunbridge to Minister, 19.4.1898; P 1/245, 98/1005.
96. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xxxii-iv, 215; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645.
97. Evening Star, 8.6.1898, in H S Wardell scrapbook (J Wardell); NZPD, 14.9.1898, pp 62, 64-72, 88; 15.9.1898, p 172.
w-r-.-fc, UM, p i li. 98. P 2/17, 00/303; P 4/28, p 570; P 5/13, p 653; PG. 1900, p5B (list of 7.3.1900).
99. PG. 1900, pp 176, 243; 1901, p 215 (11,9.1901); 1902, pp 219 (10.9.1902), 240; P 4/27, p 679; P 4/30, p 619; P 4/31, p 745; NZ Times. 3 11.1900; NZPD, 14.9.1898, pp 66, 71.
100. P 1/263, 99/1433; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 837-9, 841, 904, 960-4; P 1/236, 97/1590; P
503
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
4/30, p 547; Chch Police, GO Book, circulars 18/01, 19/01 (23.9.1901); PDB, Muggendge entry; P 1/253, 99/99; P 5/14, pp 186, 188.
101. PI sep seq, 1900/1532; P 2/17, eg. 00/353, 1287, 1969 A.
102. NZPD. 26.7.1901, pp 673f. • rto r, 1 /-I-I-I ncnim. n ,ni nc -no nft -100. on A X 100-1 „ IXQ- D O/n 00/901 A
103. P 1/273, 05/2193; P 4/31, pp 275,278, 279, 280; PG. 2.6.1902, p 168; P 2/17, 00/894 A.
104. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp viii, 23, 27-8. 280-1, 285, 306, 357, 373.
105. P 4/30, pp 33, 406. iox II i 1 onoji £.AC. I run i orto LI -I p, „ „ LXX one x- on. I9QO „ n
106. P I sep seq, 1898/1645; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xiv, &eg 366, 805-6; PG, 1898, p 12. circular 2/98 of 5.1.1898; P 4/26, pp 228, 573; P 5/13, p 48; P 4/31, p 733; P I sep seq, 1905/547.
107. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp vii, xi-xii, 21-2, 26-7, 57,63, 65-6, 72, 193, 209, 529-30, 566, 578, 659-60, 668, 732, 964.
108. AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp xi-xii, 21-2, 70-1, 553, 556, 733, 997-8
109. Bassett, Ward, pp 100, 129.
110. Mellzer Papers, folder 2, ‘Miscellaneous’, NZ Police Association; Kumara Times, 20.9.1898; Chch Police, GO Book, confidential circular 12/99 of 21.4.1899, circular 4/01 of 11.3.1901; P 1/273, 05/2193; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp xiv, 69. 798; P 1 sep seq, 1898/1645; PG, 1899, pp 24-5; P mi. p 167.
111. PG, 1899, p 157, circular 18/99 of 14.7.1899; P 1/257. 99/559, incl Southland Times. 25.2.1899; P 1/262, 99/1298, Taylor's correspondence; P 1/258, 99/662; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, pp 120-1, 250; info from Mrs G Moore and Ms J Moriarty; Christoffel, Censored, p 6.
112. P 1/263, 99/1436; P 1/271, 00/1182; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 3/00, 14.2.1900; P 4/31, p 138; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, p 121, Conclusion.
113. P 4/31, p 433, to Ellison, 4.4.1902; p 713, to Ellison. 4.7.1902; Chch Police, GO Book, circulars 9/02 (21,3.1902), 12/02 (10.4.1902), 13/02 (17.4.1902); P 1/268; PG. 1898, p 132, circular 14/98; P 1/240, 98/305; J Garbutt papers, diary (R Garbutt); G Anderson, interview with J Cummings.
114. P 1/268, Cullen, return of 19.3.1899; P 1/264, 99/1593; Chch Police. GO Book, circular 5/02, 18.2.1902; memo, 24.4.1900; circular 15/03, 26.5.1903; P 1/243, 98/829; P 4/33, pp 115, 117; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 425, 456-8; P 1/240, 98/397.
Ft- i■ J, ii / , nj nil. ipup, iriuu, yy 11.-1, -iju-u, 1 ..i-n,, 115. PI sep seq, 1905/547; C Powell. Brief History of Mokau Sub-District’, typescript nd; Charleston Lock-Up Register, 1877-1939, NZ Police; interview with R Allan; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 21/00, 7.9.1900; P 1 sep seq, 1901/1016.
116. Cherrett, Fear or Favour, pp 94-6; NZ Police Journal. Dec 1967; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, p 723; AJHR. 1898, H-16; 1900, H-16; 1901, H-16; 1905, H-168.
117. PG, 1899, p 126, circular 15/99; 9.5.1900, p 109; 1902, p 57, circular HOI. AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 161-71,404-7, 535.
118. NZ Herald. 8.2, 21.2.1898, 22.3.1901, 21.1.1967; Bulletin (NZ Police), Aug 1968, ‘lnvercargill Police Headquarters Opened'; AJHR. 1900, H-16.
119. PI sep seq, 1903/1916, for Nelson scandal; case scrapbook, FPB; June E Neale, The Nelson Police, Nelson 1986, pp 40-3; NZ Herald. 20.12.1900,23.4.1902,30.1,31.1.1903; Otago Daily Times. 25.4, 2.5.1902, 21.6.1909; Colonist. 15.12.1900, 23.4- 9.5.1902; AJHR. 1899, H-16; 1902, H-168, ‘Charges Against Nelson Police Officers'; 1903, H-16; 1909, H-168,pp 132,477; Seddon Papers, 1/8, no 28, Seddon toWard, 15.5.1902; NZPD, 26.7.1901, pp 673f; 15.10.1901, p 438; 3.11.1909, pp 775-7; Evening Star. 30.1.1903; Lyttelton Times, 2.2.1903; Tunbridge to Kiely, 22.1.1903 (NZ Police, Auckland).
Part Three
1. AJHR. 1903, B-7, p 104; 1904, B-7; 1905, B-I; 1909, H-168, pp 84, 90, 162, 288. 451, 454, 470, 485, 489. 499; Otago Daily Times. 3.2.1903; NZ Truth. 26.10.1907, 20.6.1908; Evening Post. 16, 22.11.1915, in E W Dinnie’s papers (Mrs A Jemmett); info from P Tasker, Mrs A Schenk, and B Wright; interview with W O'Donnell: G Dunstall, interview
Notes
447
with W R Murray; case scrapbook. FPB; NZ Free Lance, 7.9.1907; NZ Herald. 18.4, 9.6.1903, 9.11.1921, 2.12.1925; Dinnie Papers (Mr & Mrs D Dinnie). 2. Newspaper scrapbook, espec Weekly Despatch (nd). Weekly Press. 20.1.1904, Sydney Morning Herald, 5.2.1903, FPB; Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police, London 1971, pp 333f; Dilnot, Scotland Yard, pp 117-18, 280-2; Macnaghten, Days, pp 144f; Fosdick, European Police, pp 320f; Adam Hargrave, Police Work from Within, London [c. 1913], p 78; David Ascoli, The Queen's Peace, London 1979, pp 182-3; Jurgen Thorwald. The Marks of Cain, London 1965, p 83; P J Stead, The Police of Britain, New York 1985, pp 57-8; Basil Thomson, The Story of Scotland Yard, London 1935, ch 18; British Guiana Government, Report of the InspectorGeneral of Police, for the Year 1903-1904, Georgetown 1904; MEPO 1/54, pp 301 f, Commissioner to Under-Secretary, 8.8.1901, PRO; Dwyer, ‘Fragments’, pp 10-12; Press, 30.10.1938; Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood. A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, vol V, London 1986, pp 263-4; Emsley, Crime & Society, p 172.
3. Newspaper scrapbook, Sydney Morning Herald, 10.10.1903, FPB; Ward draft, 7.3.1903, FPB; Cherrelt, Fear or Favour, p 178; Thomson & Kagei. Century of Service, pp 25, 55; Thorwald, Cain, p 34; Timaru Herald, 22.7.1909 (with papers of Ms P FitzGerald); R M Lawrence, Police Review 1829-1979, Perth 1979, p 21; Fosdick, European Police, pp 321-3; New South Wales Police Force, A Centenary History of the New South Wales Police Force 1862-1962, Sydney nd, p 50.
4. Draft circular to officers in charge of gaols, nd, and circulars book, 1903-38, p 1, Hume’s instructions of 14.3.1903, FPB; FPB 04/-, Receipts for Finger Print Applicances, Police Museum.
5. Circulars book, 1903-38, p 6, Tunbridge circular 13/03 of 28.4.1903; FPB 1903/49; draft memo by Ward, Mar 1903; FPB 85/03, Ward to Commissioner, 29.4.1903; circular memo 03/2/B, by Ward, 1.5.1903, FPB; AJHR. 1903, H-16.
6. Circulars book, 1903-38, circular 13/03; correspondence with Wairoa’s Constable Kennedy, FPB.
7. FPB 134/03, Ward to Gaoler, Lyttelton, 4.7.1903; case scrapbook, p 92, FPB; AJHR, 1909, H-168, p 173.
8. Circulars book, 1903-38, circular 13/03, p 7, circular 22/03 (11.7.1903), p 11, circular 32/03 (7.10.1903); draft circular of early Aug 1903; photograph file, incl FPB 207/03, Ward to Comptroller-General of Prisons, Sydney. 30.9.1903, FPB; AJHR, 1909, pp xliii, 499,501.
9. NZ Times, 8.4.1904; Dinnie to Inspector of Prisons, 30.10.1903; Ward to Dinnie, draft, early 1904; Dinnie to Ward, 8.11.1903; file ‘Miscellaneous 1903’, FPB; AJHR, 1909, H-168, p 288.
10. CR 20/90; Guardbook, clipping of Evening Post. 28.6.1913; newspaper scrapbook, incl Sunday Daily Telegraph, 9.8.1904, FPB; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp xliii, 66-7; Waller Dinnie, Observations by the Commissioner of Police on the Report of the Royal Commission dated 18th October 1909, Wellington 1909, p 21; Thomson & Kagei, Century of Service, p 55; P 1 sep seq, 1920/444, A Bodkin to E Lee, 17.10.1922; Carter, 4 Call of Duty', p 25; Timaru Herald, 22.7.1909.
11. NZ Times. 27.3.1904; P 5/15, pp 534f (1904); CR 11/324, incls clipping from NZ Truth. 11.11.1911; FPB 159/11, FPB.
12. Newspaper scrapbook, FPB; NZ Times, 27.2.1904; P 5/15, various entries for travel; Hawke's Bay Herald, 2.3.1904; Walker. Critical History, p 73. i-i i i l. iftAi i o 1 1 i n / • I i c ir\ i r»rv a \ m / • i__ me
13. Circulars book. 1903-38, pp 13, 17 (circular 20/04, 15.10.1904), 19 (circular 2/05, 24.1.1905), FPB; PG, 20.4.1904, p 103.
14. PG, 1906, p 156, circular 6/06; 1908, 7.10.1908 and onwards, and pp 350 (circular 12/08), 414 (circular 16/08); circulars book, 1903-38, p 27, circular 12/08, 5.8.1908, FPB; AJHR, 1909, H-16.
15. Circulars book, 1903-38, p 23, circular 15/05 (15.6.1905) and p 25, FPB; folder 2, ‘Miscellaneous’, Dominion, 19.7.1955 clipping, Meltzer Papers. NZ Police Association;
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
505
AJHR. 1904, H-16; 1905, H-16; 1906, H-16; 1909, H-16. 16. Dinnie entries, NZ Biographies, ATL, incl NZ Free Lance, 7.9.1907; P 1/273, 06/666; PG, 21.2.1908, p 100, circular 4/08; Weekly Graphic and NZ Mail, 30.9.1908; info from Mrs A Jemmett.
17. AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp xxxiv, xliii. Hi, 60-1. 66-7.
18. Guardbook, pp 56f, FPB; Evening Post, 10.8.1911; NZ Times, 2.11.1911.
19. FPB 144/07, incl Poverty Bay Herald, clippings 31.5, 1.6.1907; newspaper scrapbook. Dominion. 13.12.1909 clipping; guardbook, p 87. FPB; Hanlon, Random Recollections, pp 140-1.
20. P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 690f, 702-3; Evening Star. 14.7.1905; Otago Daily Times. 3.3, 16.3.1905; NZ Herald. 30.3, 6.5.1905.
21. John O’Donoghue, personal file. Police Museum; P 4/36, p 147, Dinnie to D Williamson, JP, 13.10.1905; P 4/36, p 139, McGowan to Mayor of Gisborne, 10.10.1905.
22. P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, incl Dinnie to McGowan, 18.4.1905, clippings from Evening Star, 13.6.1905, Otago Daily Times, 16.3, 17.3, 18.3, 20.3, 21.3, 27.3. 31.3, 27.5, 13.6, 19.6.1905, NZ Herald, 13.6.1905, NZ Times, 13.6.1905; PG, 1905, p 205; Singe & Thomson, Authority, pp 138-9.
23. P 1 sep seq. 1905/547, incl clippings from Otago Daily Times, 13.6, 27.10.1905, 29.9.1906, Evening Star, 13.6.1905, Southern Standard, 13.6.1905, NZ Times, 13.6.1905, and 1905 Commission minutes, pp 97f, 159f; AJHR, 1905, H-16.
24. Otago Daily Times, 4.7, 21.10.1905; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, incl Dinnie memo. 4.7.1905; NZ Times, 16.8.1905; Evening Star, 14.7, 26.9.1905; AJHR. 1905, H-168.
25. P 1 sep seq. 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 26, 32, 323f, 599f, 665f, 675f; AJHR, 1905, H-168.
26. P 1 sep seq. 1905/547, incl Secretary of Commission to E Vaile, 17.8.1905, and 1905 Commission minutes, pp 691-3, 705f; Evening Star. 22.9, 26.9.1905; P 3/2/18, Dinnie to Minister. 9.10.1905, NARC; NZ Herald, 25.9, 30.12.1905, 19.1. 13.2.1906; Canterbury Times, 27.9.1905; Otago Daily Times, 31.3.1905; AJHR, 1905, H-16B; 1906, H-16; 1909, H-16. H-168, pp 35, 113, 255-6.
27. P 1 sep seq, 1907/1876; W B Mcllveney’s personal file, has Mcllveney to Minister of Justice, 23.5.1920, Police Museum; Daily Telegraph, 6.5.1899; interview with J McClennan; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 171-3, 301, 304-5; P 1 sep seq. 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 91. 140f, 184, 193, 195, 222, 246. 641.
28. Meltzer Papers, Const W Drummond to Sergl Iremonger, 11.7.1906, NZ Police Association; PG, 1906,p 83, circular 3/06; NZ Free Lance, 27.6, 18.7.1908, 10.7.1909; P 1 sep seq, 1910/610, incl ‘Somnus’, letter to Dominion, 16.4.1910; John Wilson, Lost Christchurch, Christchurch 1984, p 16 .AJHR, 1903, H-16; 1909, H-168, pp 3. 47. 195. 338, 341, 344, 360; Otago Daily Times. 30.12.1907, 30.1.1908; Thomson & Neilson. Challenge, pp 70, 77, 118; Dwyer ‘Fragments’, pp 45-8; NZ Hera\6, 20.6, 22.7.1905, 2.5.1906, 31.12.1907; NZ Truth, 5.12.1908; info from Mrs J Goring Johnston; ‘The New Zealand Grace Family’, in possession of Mrs M Grace; scrapbook in possession of Miss E McGrath; Dorothy Wiseman, ‘Pioneer Days in Detective Force; Colourful Incidents in Career of Late J.A. McGrath’, typescript; info from Mrs B Pook; Dunstall, ‘O’Donovan’.
29. P 1/273, 06/666; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, pp 76-7; AJHR. 1907, H-16; Dwyer. ‘Fragments’, pp 34-6.
30. P 1/273, 06/666; Richard S Hill, ‘Policing in New Zealand - A Short History’, in Sherwood Young (ed). With Confidence and Pride: Policing the Wellington Region 1840-1992, Wellington forthcoming; P 5/15, p 307, to O’Brien, Dunedin. 16.10.1903, pp 328-35; PG. 18.8.1904, p 243. circular 12/04; 18.7.1906. p 254, circular 11/06; NZ Herald, 31.12.1907; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, p 168.
31. P 1/1/74 pt 1, NARC; AJHR, 1906. H-16, A McHugh, scrapbook (M McHugh); Cherrett, Fear or Favour, p 44; Wallie Ingram. Legends in Their Lifetime, Wellington 1962, ch 23; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 369-70, 395.
32. P 1 sep seq. 1906/2134, 1907/462; NZ Truth . 27.10.1906, 4.5.1907; Thomson & Kagei, Century of Service, pp 56-7 .AJHR, 1907, H-16; material in possession of Ms P FitzGerald
Notes
506
33. P 1 sep seq. 1905/1999; Carson, Kaiwarra Mystery, pp 70f; Gilkison, Dunedin, pp 135f; Frank Tod, The Making of a Madman, Dunedin 1977; Treadwell, NZ Trials, pp 204f; Hermans, ‘Wellington Police’, pp 21-2; Dwyer, ‘Fragments’ pp 49-51.
34. P 1 sep seq, 1905/1486; Police Journal, Apr 1939; Neale, Nelson Police, p 116; material in possession of Mrs N Francis.
35. P 1 sep seq, 1908/2035; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, pp 73-4; Spicer, River District, p 239; Dwyer, ‘Fragments’, pp 42-5; Sergt Miller, notebook, mostly 1913 entries (J Taylor).
36. P 1 sep seq. 1909/1031; Carr. Mountain Shadow, p 59; AJHR, 1909, H-16.
37. P 1 sep seq, 1909/1009; Gilkison, Dunedin, ch 15; Thomson & Kagei. Century of Service, pp 108f; Fiona Farrell Poole, ‘Amy Bock’, in Macdonald et al (eds), BNZW\ Singe & Thomson, Authority, pp 134-7; Fiona Farrell, ‘Bock, Amy Maud’, in Orange (ed). DNZB 11.
38. P 1 sep seq, 1910/610, espec Manawatu Daily Times, 14.3.1910, also O’Donovan to Wilson, 16.3.1910; CR 10/136, Police Museum. Des Swain, Pawelka, Tauranga 1989.
39. P 1 sep seq, 1910/610, ‘The Chase after Pawelka’; newspaper clipping, 15.4.1910; NZ Times, 6.4, 8.4.1910; Carter. ‘ Call of Duty', pp 29f; PDB, McGuire.
40. P 1 sep seq. 1910/610, incl NZ Times. 11.4, 12.4.1910.
41. PI sep seq, 1910/610, Dominion, 16.4.1910, other clippings, and ‘The Chase after Pawelka’; Swain, Pawelka, p 57; Otago Daily Times, 25.4.1910.
42. P 1 sep seq, 1910/610, NZ Times, 16.4.1910, and other clippings; CR 10/136, incl Evening Post, 18.4.1910, Police Museum; interviews with A Butterworth, C Chesnutt, Mrs J McGuire, W O’Donnell; see too Carson, Kaiwarra Mystery, pp 23-5.
43. Const J Thompson, report of 17.4.1910; NZ Times, 16.4.1910; Dominion. 18.4.1910; ‘The Chase after Pawelka’; all in P 1 sep seq, 1910/610.
44. P 1 sep seq. 1910/610, Dean Eyre to Commissioner. 8.10.1963, and ‘The Chase after Pawelka’; [A W Organ.] A New Zealand Jack Sheppard. Wellington 1912, pp 69-71; John Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society, Wellington 1992, pp 165-6.
45. [Organ,] Jack Sheppard, pp 88-9; P 1 sep seq, 1910/610, incl ‘The Chase after Pawelka’; Swain, Pawelka, pp 107f; Carter, l Call of Duty', p 34; info from R Carter; Manawatu Standard, 13.1.1965.
46. CR 10/136, Police Museum; P 4/42, p 518, Waldegrave to Ellison, 4.2.1911.
47. P 1 sep seq, 1910/312; PG, 1911, p 135.
48. P 1 sep seq, 1915/1032; P 5/15, p 457, Dinnie to Minister of Justice, 19.5.1904; PG. 1905, p 246. for Marsack; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, pp 160, 162; Eugene J Watts. ‘The Police in Atlanta, 1890-1905’, The Journal of Southern History. May 1973; William Nott-Bower, Fifty-Two Years a Policeman, London 1926, pp 133f.
49. PG, 1905, pp 37, 47; interview with R Allan; P 1/273, 08/1981, Cullen to Dinnie, 28.9.1903; NZ Free Lance, 17.10.1903, 29.12.04; AJHR, 1909, H-168, p 142; Dwyer, ‘Fragments’, pp 29-31.
50. P 1/273, 06/666.
51. P 4/33, p 135, to Macdonell (Napier), 4.6.1903; PG. 1902, p 202; P 1 sep seq, 1904/405; NZ Free Lance, 29.12.1906; Dyne, Murders, ch 11; Carson, Kaiwarra Mystery, pp 58f; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, p 58.
52. PG. 1904, p 243, circular 13/04; 1919, p 419; P 3/2/18, NARC. c-5 d c. mm _ co. i (\r\c\ a i mm _ xm. r> - -ion n»_u.
53. PG, 6.2.1907, p 58; 1909, pp 241-2; 1919, p 419; P 4/43, p 280, Waldegrave to Inspectors. 28.3.1911; NZ Herald, 24.2.1909, 4.3, 3.4.1911; AJHR, 1909, H-168. pp xxxviii-ix, xlv, 23-4, 11-9, 56-79, 85, 164, 236, 255, 151, 261-2, 270, 285, 322, 384-5, 462-4, 477, 496; interview with J McClennan; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, p 2.
54. P 4/43, pp 463. 482, 498; PG, 3.5.1911, p 205; 4.10.1911. p 468; 31.7.1912, p 420; 1919, p 421; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 32, 41.
1717, til, r 1717 Ji.ti. 55. Pratt, Punishment, pp 201 f; Otago Daily Times. 19.4, 16.6.1909; Lyttelton Times, 18.6.1909; Macdonald, ‘Women & Crime’, pp 23, 31, 34; F Lingard, Prison Labour in New Zealand, Wellington 1936, pp 16-19; NZ Herald, 8.5.1912; Hamer. Liberals, pp 254-63; Bassett. Ward, pp 141-6, 171.
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
507
56. P 4/33, pp 376f (1903); PG, 26.9.1906, p 335; 6.9.1907, circular 13/07; 11.9.1907, p 358; P J Whelan, ‘The Care of Destitute, Neglected and Criminal Children in New Zealand 1840-1900’, MA thesis, Wellington 1956, pp 164f; Alastair Isdale, ‘Notes on Policing in the Thames-Hauraki Area’, typescript 1985, p 80, quotes Thames Star, 25.9.1906; NZ Herald. 10.3.1904; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, p 222.
57. P 1/272, 04/513; PG, 26.9.1906, p 335; 1907, p 499; Scott, 'Looking Back’, incl clipping from Evening Post, 30.5.1950.
58 Case scrapbook, misc cuttings, incl NZ Times. 20.8.1903, FPB; Chch Police, GO Book, circulars 3/05 of 31.1.1905, 4/05 of 10.2.1905, 13/05 of 9.5.1905; PG, 29.8.1905, p 307, circular 26/05; Thomson & Kagei, Century of Service, p 110; Holcroft, Invercargill, p 109; Spicer, River District, pp 181, 239; W H Almond, scrapbook (A & K Almond); AJHR, 1907, H-16; 1908, H-16; A R Grigg, ‘Taylor, Thomas Edward’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
59. Chch Police, GO Book, circulars 21/04 of 18.10.1904, 6/180 of 26.1.1906; PG, 1905, p 307, circular 23/05 of 24.8.1905; NZ Truth. 27.1.1912; Otago Daily Times. 1.9.1909.
60. P Mill. 04/53%. NZ Herald. 30.3.1905; Otago Daily Times, 14, 17, 19,21.23,24.2.1903, for Griffith case; for charges against police, see eg. NZ Truth. 8.12, 22.12,1906, 29.2, 14.3, 12.12.1908, 8.5.1909; Otago Daily Times, 24.9, 28.9, 17.12.1907, 24.2.1908, 3.6.1909.
61. PG. 1905, p 307, circular 24/05 of 25.8.1905; 1907, p 304, circular 10/07 of 29.7.1907.
62. NZ Herald. 31.7.1905; P 3/2/18, incl Dinnie to Minister, 9.10.1905, NARC; PG. 1906, p 39; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 172, 287; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 5, 42, 96, 125-6, 483-4, 586-8, 617-18, 633f, 693-5; Evening Star, 14.7.1905.
63, PG, 7.3.1906, p 83; 1919, p 422; P 2/1/2 pt 2, NARC; AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp 67-8, 71, 221-2; NZ Herald, 30.12.1905, 13.2.1906; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 22, 118-19, 236, 246, 253, 302, 313, 694; NZPD, 13.8.1907, p 203.
, . . ~ — > 64. P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, incl Southern Standard, 13.6.1905; PG. 14.3.1906, p9l
65. P 4/43, p 99, Findlay to E H Taylor, MP, 3.3.1911; PG, 1906, pp 4, 404, 441; 1907, pp 201, 486; 1908, pp 284, 298, 404; 1910, p 384; PDB, entries for District Constables; O’Hara, Northland, p 39; AJHR. 1898, H-16; 1909, H-168, pp xlvi, 291, 293, 348, 353, 386; NZ Herald, 4.3, 10.3.1911; Carter, ‘ Call of Duty’, p 28; R E Marriott, ‘Police History and Stewart Island', NZ Police Journal, Feb 1951; info from Linda Stopforth
66. P 1/272, 04/580; P 4/42, p 253, to General Manager, NZR, 23.12.1910; PDB, p 372; P 2/1/2 pt 2, Wright’s memo of 18.6.1912, NARC; Hovell family scrapbook (Hovell family/Mrs V McConnell); AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 640-2.
67. P 4/33, p 685, Force at 31.12.1903; P 4/36, p 653; P 1 sep seq, 1910/312; P 4/43, p 663, to Cullen, 16.5.1911; Richards (ed), Chudleigh, p 455; NZ Herald. 15.4, 30.12.1908; P J Gibbons, Astride the River: A History of Hamilton, Hamilton 1977, pp 123-4; Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville (eds). The Outcasts of Melbourne. Sydney 1985, pp 2-3.
. syju, pp 68. PDB analyses by author; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, Dinnie to McGowan, 18.4 and 13.6.1905, and 1905 Commission, pp 193, 215-16; P 1 sep seq, 1910/610; AJHR. 1889, H-9; 1891, H-28.
69. Press, 13.6.1905; NZ Herald, 14.6.1905; John McMillan, personal file. Police Museum; P I sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 469, 719, 724; AJHR. 1906, H-16. nr\ D Imi r\A IC~I A ; I r' I > . .f hi I I nni __ J e> A n <nn A nrvn ■
70. P 1/272, 04/574, incl Gordon’s report of 23.3.1904, and 24.8.1904; PDB, Gordon entry.
71. P 4/36, p 135, letter to Hon T Duncan, 9.10,1905; p 312, Dinnie to Ellison, 15.2.1906; p 617, Dinnie to M Lynch, 20.12.1906; P 1/273, 05/2193; PG. 13.11.1905, 6.6.1906; NZ Herald. 8.6.1935; Otago Daily Times. 16.6.1909; AJHR. 1907, H-16; 1909 H-168, pp 189, 442-4, 472; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp v, 645, 551-4, 689f; James Cleary papers, diary 1905-7, Dinnie to Cleary, 17.10,1905 (B Thomson/Cleary family); Scott. ‘Looking Back'; interview with A Bulterworth; Young & Hill, ‘Police Training’; Dinnie, Observations, pp 9-10; Weekly Graphic and NZ Mail. 30.9.1908; Dunstall, 'NZ Police', ch V, pp 12, 13; PDB, Dart entry; NZ Free Lance. 14.3,1908
•. pp »*•» • • l-'l*, waii wuiijr. r icc laiiu e, ih.j.i y\jo. 72. PG. 1906, p 293, circular 14/06 of 16.8.1906; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, p 695; NZ Truth, 15.2.1908; AJHR. 1904, H 16; 1907, H-16; 1909, H-168, p 173.
Notes
508
73. PG. 1906, p 345, circular 16/06; 1907, pp 90, 175; 1908, p 76; 1909, pp 74, 488, circular 6/09 of 22.11.1909; P 1/273, 06/666; Weekly Graphic and NZ Mail. 30.9.1908; AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp xxxiii-iv, 139, 147-8, 151. 397, 478.
74. P 3/2/18, incl Dinnie to Inspectors, 13.2, 16.2.1906, NARC; PG. 1904, p 243, circular 13/04; Chch Police, GO Book, memo of 31.10.1905; P 4/36, p 660, McGowan, 13.2.1907; P I sep seq, 1905/547, incl Otago Daily Times. 13.7.1905; NZ Truth, 22.2.1913,29.7.1916; interviews with R Allan, A Butterworth, C Chesnutt, W O’Donnell, J Skinner, and (by F McMorran) J Brown; NZ Police, Circulars Book, 1914-50, circular 5/17 of 28.3.1917; AJHR. 1905, B-7; 1909, H-168, pp 71, 79, 134, 355-6; info from Mrs W H Day (re Skinner); J Garbutt papers (R Garbutt); NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 14, 360.
75. P 3/2/18, NARC; Chch Police, GO Book, circular 05/12 of 16.6.1905, memo of 31.10.1905;PG, 1906,p55, circular 2/06; AJHR. 1909, H-168, p AII.NZPD. 13.8.1907, pp 203-4; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 243, 256, 292-3, 350, 602, 617, 652, 656, 659; Otago Daily Times, 30.11.1905; NZ Herald. 25.9.1905.
76. P 3/2/18, incl Dinnie to McGowan, 17.10.1906 and 4.6.1907, NARC; P I sep seq, 1908/594; AJHR, 1909, H-168, p 355; Otago Daily Times. 15.6.1907. 30.5.1913; NZ Truth. 19.6.1909; NZPD. 13.8.1907, p 202; AJHR. 1907, B-7, H-5; PG. 1904, p 243. circular 13/04; 1906, p 384, circular 17/06 of 31.10.1906; 1907, p 358, circular 14/07 of 9.9.1907; 1908, p 329, circular 11/08 of 23.7.1908.
77. O’Donovan entries. NZ Biographies, incl NZ Free Lance, 14.3.1908, ATL; PG, 1908, p 130, circular 7/08 of 12.3.1908; P 3/2/18, Dinnie, 18.1.1909, NARC; Otago Daily Times, 16.6.1909; NZ Truth, 14.3, 31.10. 12.12, 26.12.1908; AJHR. 1909, H-168, pxlii.
78. NZ Truth, 29.6.mi. 192. 14.3, 15.8,29.8, 10.10,5.12.1908,29.5,5.6.1909,20.2.1915; Lyttelton Times, 3.6, 4.6, 21.6.1909; Otago Daily Times, 24.2.1908, 16.6, 17.6.1909; Catran, Hanlon, pp 144-60; AJHR, 1909, H-16; Dwyer, ‘Fragments’, p 39; Hanlon, Random Recollections, ch 23; Carson & Davison, Longest Beat, pp 68-9; David Yallop, Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, Auckland 1978, pp 310-12; NZ Herald, 1.6, 10.7, 20.7, 23.7, 30.9, 2.10, 12.12, 23.12.1908, 15.1, 21.5.1909.
79. Lyttelton Times, 16.6, 21.6.1909; Otago Daily Times, 17. 21, 23.6.1909; NZ Truth, 19.6.1909; AJHR. 1909, H-168, p Ivi,
80. Otago Daily Times, 21.6, 22.6, 17.11.1909; Lyttelton Times. 22.6.1909; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 8-9, 78, 90, 352-5, 366, 467; G Anderson, interview with J Cummings; Dinnie Papers: typescript note by E W Dinnie in Mrs A Jemmett’s copy of the 1909 Commission.
81. Otago Daily Times. 4.3.08, 6,7, 17.11.1909; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp Ivi, 20, 27, 175, 182, 390.
82. AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp li-iv, 75-7, 80, 83, 288, 492; NZPD, 3.11.1909, pp 760f.
83. AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp 389-90; Otago Daily Times. 20.7.1909.
84. AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp 1, 6, 9, 33, 47, 177, 182, 221, 244, 261, 289, 314, 378-9, 498.
85. Ibid., pp 47-8, 64-5, 78, 96, 127, 199, 245, 247, 273, 278, 291, 310-13, 367-8, 395.
86. Ibid., pp vi, 35, 62, 195, 242, 402-4, 407-8, 427, 430, 434-5, 442.
87. Ibid,, pp 13-14, 23. 36, 38, 42, 48, 50, 78, 131, 175, 202, 214-15, 225, 235, 237, 350, 471-2, 496; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 501-3.
88. AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 6, 24, 32, 202, 221, 241, 243, 273, 290, 292, 340, 356, 398, 423-4. 443, 446, 472, 482.
89. Ibid., pp 489-95.
90. Ibid., pp 468, 497, 502.
91. Ibid., pp 45, 139, 153-4, 202, 221, 229-30, 242, 244, 259, 265. 280-4, 302, 321, 351, 369, 446, 474, 489-95, 497-8; NZPD. 26 7.1901, p 685; P I sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, p 720; AJHR, 1905, H-I6C.
' V ■ ’ ■’ 92. AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp 499-500.
93. Ibid., pp 7, 16-17, 77, 81-2, 87-9, 155, 162-3, 204, 290, 302, 344, 396, 448. 450, 472, 477.
94. Ibid., pp vi-viii.
95. Ibid., pp xvi-xviii.
96. Ibid., pp vii-xiv.
509
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
97. Ibid., pp vii, xiv-xv, xxii.
98. Ibid., pp xv, xxxix, xli, xliii-iv
99. Ibid., pp xviii-xix, xxxi-v, xli, lii-iv.
100. Ibid., pp xix-xx, xxvii-ix, liv.
101. Ibid ,pp xxiv-vi.
102. Ibid., pp xxv-vi, liii, 276, 496.
103. Ibid., pp xxxvi-viii.
ff 104. Ibid., pp xxvi-vii, xxx, liv; AJHR. 1903, H-16; 1909, H-16; Lyttelton Times. 4.11.1909.
105. P 4/31, pp 534, 549; W B Mcllveney entries, NZ Biographies, ATL; PG, 12.8.1907, p 323; Dick Scott, Years of the Pooh-Bah, Auckland 1991, pp 43f; Otago Daily Times. 11.7.1911; Richard Gilson. The Cook Islands 1820-1950, Wellington 1980, pp 1-2, 29. 70-1; Poverty Bay Herald, 19.12.1907, in Donald McLeod scrapbook (Della McLeod); info from Reg Hale; Ron Melrose, ‘Chiefs of Police in the Cook Islands’, typescript nd; Cook Islands Police, ‘History of the Cook Islands Police’, typescript nd (courtesy G Goldie); PDB, nos 1123, 1161; birth certificate of Edith Mcßimey, Reminiscences’ of Elsie Mcßimey, both supplied by Norm Allan and Elmah Mcßimey; Barrie Macdonald. ‘Moss, Frederick Joseph’ and David Green. ‘Gudgeon, Waller Edward’, both in Orange (ed), DNZB 11.
106. ‘Background Notes on Dannevirke Police Station’, NZ Police; Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism, Oxford 1983, p 105.
107. P 1/273, 08/1981; P 5/15, pp 284, 287, 290; Otago Daily Times, 14.10.1916.
108. AM Grant, typescript (T Olsen); Poverty Bay Herald, 12.7.1923.
109. PG, 16.1.1907, p 26, 10.4.1907, p 147; P 4/42, p 172, Waldegrave to Dwyer. 14.12.1910 P 4/43, p 19, Waldegrave to Dwyer. 24.2.1911; p 307, Waldegrave to Wright, 31.3.1911 p 506, 28.4.1911; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp xlvi, 243; Hill, ‘lncorporating Maoris’ Gisborne Herald, 21.8.1945.
110. MA 23/9, Rua - Special File 198’; P 1, 14/956, Police Museum; Hill, ‘Part-time Policing’; ‘Levin (1897 to 1980)’, NZ Police; P 4/43. pp 283, 349; Poverty Bay Herald, 21.9.1922.
11l R J Walker, ‘A Review of the Position of the Maori Warden’, Maori Warden, Nov 1982.
112. P 4/36. p 454; P 1/273, 08/1981.
113. PI sep seq. 1910/1406; P 2/1/29, NARC; Lange, ‘Tohunga’; AJHR. 1901, H-16, p5; Bassett, Ward, pp 162-4; Peter Webster, Rua and the Maori Millennium, Wellington 1979, pp 221-4; Fleras, ‘Runanga’, p 16.
114. Chch Police, GO Book, circular 18/05, 30.6.1905.
115. P 1/273, 08/1981; Chch Police, GO Book, memos to all Inspectors, 05/2061,4.10.1905; J D Mclvor, ‘The New Zealand Army’, typescript nd; John Osborne, Handguns and Police in New Zealand 1840-1990, Te Awanga 1990; John Osborne, Carbines and Police in New Zealand 1840-1990, Te Awanga 1990.
116. P 1944/1294, D J Cummings, personal file, incl Dominion, 13.5.1936, Evening Post, 1.7.1936, Police Museum; P 1 sep seq, 1910/610, newspaper clippings; PG, 1905, p 307, circular 25/05 of 26.8.1905.
117. PI sep seq, 1907/397, incl Poverty Bay Herald, 19.12.1907; P 4/33, pp 8, 104, 533; P 4/36, p 320; P 4/42, p 569, 7.2.1911; P 4/43, p 123; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547. 1905 Commission, pp 50, 237; NZPD, 23.10.1911, pp 921-2.
118. Otago Daily Times, 10.7, 19.7, 4.11, 5.11, 9.11.1909; NZ Truth, 31.7, 4.9, 20.11.1909; Lyttelton Times, 18.8, 4.11. 5.11.1909; NZ Herald, 4.11.1909; NZPD, 3.11.1909, pp 767-8; Bassett. Ward, pp 176-8.
119. Dinnie. Observations, pp 3-9, 12, 16-19; Otago Daily Times, 20.11.1909
120. Dinnie. Observations, pp 10-16, 19-21.
121. Ibid., pp 17-18.
122. Ibid., pp 21-2, 25.
• * ft' —• * — 123. Ibid., pp 19, 21-4.
124. Dinnie. Observations , pp 25-7; Otago Daily Times, 17.11, 20.11.1909; NZ Truth, 27.11, 24.12.1909, 16.7.1910; Dinnie papers; ‘Family book’. W Dinnie’s notebook, obituary of
Notes
510
7.5.1923, and other info (Mr & Mrs D Dinnie); Richard S Hill, ‘Dinnie, Walter’, in Orange (ed). DNZB III; re Feast, info from M and B Pearson; Dictionary of Canterbury Biographies, Canterbury Museum.
125. Otago Daily Times. 23.12.1909, 3.1.1910, 23.11 1915; NZ Truth. 29.6.1907, 6.2, 11.12, 24.12.1909, 11.7.1914; NZPD, 22.12.1909, pp 1427f; 29.9.1911, p 280; NZ Herald. 3.2, 23.12.1909; Lyttelton Times, 24.12.1909; PSA Journal, L 1.1925; NZ Free Lance, 8.1.1910.
126. Otago Daily Times, 2.2.1910; Lyttelton Times, 3.2.1910; NZ Herald, 2.2.1910, 25.4, 29.9.1911; NZPD. 22.12.1909, p 1428; B L Dallard, Fettered Freedom, Wellington 1980, pp 46-7.
127. PG, 1910, p 126, circular 3/10 of 16.3.1910; p 194, circular 8/10 of 2.5.1910; P 4/43, pp 320, 480, 526; AJHR. 1909, H-168, pp 57, 408, 432; 1911, H-16; Fosdick, European Police, p 224.
128. P 4/42, pp 542, 552; Theodore Campagnolo and C Lumber, personal files. Police Museum; PG, 1911, p 529, circular 5/11 of 8.11.1911; P 1 sep seq, 1908/594; Otago Daily Times, 10.8.1911; AJHR. 1911, H-16. 1T n O.vlni* r? „ lliin WAm ivnivl f I I a Dnl ■a a \ 4i,rwvn m • DfAD n n tci aa fa r I C\f\T\ nnil Ifl I A
129. Peter Fallon, personal file. Police Museum; PDB, entries for 1900 and 1910.
130. P 1 sep seq, 1909/1009, 1909/1031, 1909/2349, 1910/610; info from Mrs M Schaw. ni on tons „ iaa- no i ions „ so, d in- f.u u;,n„
131. PG, 1905, p 246; 29.1.1908, p 52; P 7/1; Superannuation file, incl letter by Wanganui detective, 18.3.1908, NZ Police Association; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, p 350; Hill, ‘Police Super’; NZ Herald, 24.7.1903; AJHR, 1902, H-I6A; 1903, H-16B; 1906, H-16B; Otago Daily Times. 15.7.1908; NZPD. 12.9.1906, p 492.
132. Superannuation file, incl minutes of Wanganui meeting, 27.2.1908, NZ Police Association; Hill, ‘Police Super'; NZ Herald. 25.2,1908; NZPD, 21.8.1908, p 302; AJHR, 1908, H-16.
133. Superannuation file, NZ Police Association; NZ Herald. 6.3, 19.3.1908.
134. Hill. ‘Police Super’ ; PG. 22.2.1910, p 80, p 216, circular 9/10 of 16.5.1910, p 228, circular 10/10 of 23.5.1910; P 17/4/-, circulars, NARC; P 4/42, p 380, circular 1/11 of 16.1.1911; NZPD. 7.10.1908, p 983; AJHR, 1909, H-16C; 1910, H-16A; Otago Daily Times, 6.10, 7.10.1908, 21.6.1909; O’Sullivan, Mounted Police, p 126; NZ Herald, 17.6.1910, 21.9.1928; Hamer, Liberals, p 327.
135. P 4/43, p 726, Waldegrave letter of 24.5.1911; P 2/1/2 pt 2, NARC, Wright letter of 18.6.1912; P 1 sep seq, 1919/1885; Brian Walters, A History of the Waikato Police, Hamilton 1986, p 15.
.immiivi, tsuv, F i-i. 136. NZ Truth, 28.5, 2.7, 16.7, 23.7.1910, 14.1, 21,1, 16.3, 17.6.1911; AJHR, 1910, H-I6B; 1911, H-16; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, p 75; Lyttelton Times, 6.7, 12.8.1910; Press. 6.7, 11.8.1910; NZ Herald. 11.8.1910; NZ Free Lance, 16.7.1910.
137. PG, 1909, p5; 1911, pp 68, 100; P 4/42, pp 353-4, 442-3, 601; NZ Truth. 17.12.1910, 11.2, 11.3, 1.4.1911; AJHR. 1911, H-16.
138. PG, 26.7.1911, p 345; 4 10.1911, p 468; NZ Herald, 21.7.1911; AJHR, 1911, H-16.
139. NZ Truth. 17.6.1911; Otago Daily Times, 10.8.1911; Bassett, Ward, pp 189-91, 197-8, 202.
140. NZ Truth, 19.1.1907, 25.7, 5.12.1908, 28.5, 2.7, 16.7.1910, 17.6, 29.7.1911; Lyttelton Times, 4.11.1909; Otago Daily Times, 8.11.1909, 10,8.1911.
141. AZ Truth. 3.2, 10.2, 30.3, 13.4.1912, 27.11.1915; Scott, ‘Looking Back’, ch 3.
111. I ■I. J I H*ll r 1 J.T. I y I A. / . 1 JVUU, UUV.IV , VI 142. /VZ Truth, 29.7.1911. 3.2, 10.2, 9.3. 20.4.1912.
Part Four
I. PDB, Cullen entry; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 663, 919; 1912, H-16; P 1/184, 1015/91; P 1/195, 93/31; P 4/25, p 667; Pl/249, 98/1669; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547; Cyclopedia Company Ltd, Cyclopedia of New Zealand, vol 11, Christchurch 1902, p 182; NZ Herald, 17.4, 18.4.1912; Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Christchurch; info from Rory Sweetman; P 1/220, 96/593; PG, 1897, pp 163, 174; Fosdick, European Police, pp 106, 195; Bassett, Ward, pp 209-15; NZPD, 22.10.1913, p 116.
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
511
2. PI. 1898/2219, Commissioner to Cullen, 22.12.1898; NZ Truth, 19.4.1913; info from J R Reckner, incl Mayor of Auckland to Cullen, 17.8.1908; Richard S Hill, ‘Cullen, John’, in Orange (ed), DNZB 111.
3. P 2/1/2, pi 2. NARC; Holt, Arbitration, pp 72f, 11 Of.
4. NZ Herald, 24.2.1909; Otago Daily Times, 8.11.1909, 10.8.1911; Cruickshank scrapbook, incl Dannevirke Advocate, 4.3.1910, and Timaru Post, 8.3.1913, ATL; AJHR, 1909, H-168, p 473; NZPD, 22.10.1913, p 118; AJHR, 1911, H-16.
5. P 4/37, p 658, to Mitchell. 23.6.1913; P 4/38, p 704; P 4/39, p 455, 16.10.1914; Otago Daily Times, 13.6, 10.10.1912, 11.2, 15.2. 13.3, 29.7.1913; NZ Truth, 5.12.1908, 15.2, 15.3, 19.4, 19.7.1913; NZPD, 1.8.1912, pp 447-8; Egon Bittner, The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, Rockville 1970, pp 52-4; Maoriland Worker, 7.3.1913; PG, 1913, pp 97-125 (regulations); 1914, pp 537, 563; NZ Herald, 6.6.1912.
6. NZ Herald, 19.3.1929; Otago Daily Times, 16.7, 18.7, 22.7, 24.7, 3.10.1913; Maoriland Worker, 1.8.1913; NZPD, 17.7.1913, pp 688f; 1.10.1913, pp 38If; 2.10.1913, pp 395f; 2.12.1913, pp 600f; Dunstall, ‘NZ Police’, ch 1. pp 12-16; P 2/1/2, pt 2, NARC.
7. Interview with C Chesnutt; PG, 1912, pp 188, 332; P 4/38, p 315. 8. P 4/37. p 12, Cullen to Mitchell. 19.2.1913; P 4/37. p 691; PG, 1913, p 157; NZ Truth, 27.7.12, 15.2.1913, 23.9.1922; interviews with C Chesnutt and (by G Dunstall) W R Murray; Evening Post, 12.2.1960 (in Marlborough Historical Society papers); AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 353-4; 1913, H-16; Cyclopedia Co, Cyclopedia I, p 180; P 1/183, 91/696.
9. P 4/37, p 12. Cullen to Mitchell, 19.2.1913; p 713, to Kiely, 7.7.1913; NZ Herald, 3.10.1930; AJHR, 1913, H-16, p 7; J Garbult papers (R Garbutt); info from Sister Dympna (Theresa Cullen), via Mrs V Hughes; correspondence in P 1, 1887/2170.
10. The literature about and records of the Waihi Strike are numerous. See especially Stanley Roche, The Red and the Gold, Auckland 1982; H E Holland. R S Ross, and ‘Ballot Box’, The Tragic Story of the Waihi Strike, Wellington 1913; Laurie Barber, ‘The Waihi Strike of 1912’, NZ Law Journal, Feb 1983; R J Campbell, ‘The Role of the Police in the Waihi Strike; Some New Evidence’, Political Science, Dec 1974; Philip Rainer, ‘Company Town: An Industrial History of the Waihi Gold Mining Company, Limited, 1887-1912’, MA thesis. Auckland University 1976; Graham Northage. The Police and the Waihi Strike’, research essay, Canterbury University 1978; P 1 sep seq, 1912/861; Waihi scrapbooks, NZ Police; F M Jean Irvine, ‘The Revolt of the Militant Unions’, MA thesis. University of New Zealand 1937. References below represent a selection of a much broader pool of material consulted.
11. Roche, Red A Gold, ch 5; P 1 sep seq. 1916/233, Cullen, letter of 11.8.1916.
12. Campbell, Role of Police’; Roche. Red A Gold, ch 6, p 95; P 1 sep seq, 1912/861; Waihi scrapbook. Daily Telegraph, Waihi, 1.10.1912, and other clippings, NZ Police; Rainer, ‘Company Town’, ch 6; Irvine, ‘Militant Unions’, pp 114f; Erik Olssen, The Red Feds, Auckland 1988, ch 12; Northage, ‘Police’; Waihi Strike 1912 file, NZ Police; ‘Waihi 1912’ folder. Police Museum; clippings book of D Beard (Mrs E Beard).
13. Roche, Red A Gold, ch 7; Waihi scrapbooks, NZ Police; ‘Waihi 1912’ folder, incl ‘Police Intentions’ manifesto, Police Museum; info from T Miles; Maoriland Worker, 22.11.1912; info from F Morgan.
14. Roche, Red A Gold, chs 8-9; Barber, ‘Waihi Strike’; Rainer. ‘Company Town’, ch 7; Otago Daily Times, 21.11.1912; NZPD, 4.7.1913, p 161; interview with Mrs J Winn; P 4/37, p 604; Maoriland Worker, 22.11.1912.
15. P 1 sep seq. 1912/861; Otago Daily Times, 21.11.1912; NZPD, 4.7.1913, pp 160f; 7.7.1914, p 379; Maoriland Worker, 13.12.1912.
16. Roche. Red A Gold, p 150; P 1 sep seq, 1913/48. incl NZ Herald, 28.2.1913; P 4/37. p 201, Herdman to P J O’Regan, 18.3.1913; Waihi scrapbooks. NZ Police; Otago Daily Times, 21.11.1912; NZ Truth, 30.11.1912; NZPD, 15.9.1898. p 129; C Vick, ‘An Introduction to Aspects of Public Order and the Police’, in J R Thackrah (ed). Contemporary Policing, London 1985.
17. Rainer, ‘Company Town’, Postscript; Holland et al, Tragic Story ; Waihi Strike 1912 file, NZ Police, eg. Const Naughlon’s statement. 14.12.1912; NZPD. 4.7.1913. p 163;
Notes
512
20.10.1913, pp 19f; AJHR, 1913, Mb.
18. IA 1937/158/52, NZ Worker, 30.3.1932.
19. AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 294, 297; P 1 sep seq, 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 685-6; NZ Truth, 29.2.1908; Kevin J Holland, Police Unionism in New Zealand, W’ellinglon 1978, pp 12, 14; Lawrence, Police Review, p 23; Ascoli, Queen’s Peace, p 193; A V Sellwood, Police Strike - 1919, London 1978, pp 15-16; Bruce Swanton, ‘Origins and Development of Police Unions in Australia’, Australia and NZ Journal of Criminology, Dec 1976; Maoriland Worker, 16.5.1913.
20. PG, 1913, circular 4/13 of 24.2.1913; p 355, circular 14/13 of 9.6.1913; p 396 (re Smyth); P 4/39, p 451, Minister of Justice to G Hunter, MP, 14.10.1914; NZ Truth, 22.2, 19.4, 3.5, 10.5, 13.6, 21.6, 5.7, 19.7.1913; Otago Daily Times, 12.4, 15.4, 16.4, 21.4, 28.4, 7.5, 8.5, 14.5, 30.5, 12.6, 16.6, 18.6, 28.6, 14.7, 21.8.1913; Holland, Police Unionism, pp 15-18; Maoriland Worker, 7.3, 16.5.1913; Richard S Hill, ‘Smyth, Charles Gordon’, in Orange (ed), DNZB III; New Zealand Police Association, Rules of the New Zealand Police Association, Auckland [1913]; Hill, ‘First Association’; Richard S Hill, ‘An Uneasy Relationship: The Police and the PSA’, NZ Police Association Newsletter, Jan 1985; Reform Party, Reform Party Handbook, Wellington 1914; NZPD, 8.7.1913, pp 218-23; 9.7.1913, p 307; 22.7.1913, pp 688, 699; 22.10.1913, pp 119, 121; David McGill. No Right to Strike, Wellington [ 1992], pp 14-17; for a pro-Association perspective reflective of modem police attitudes, see Singe & Thomson. Authority, pp 56-8; AJHR, 1919, H-16; Smyth info from Kerr family, and Mrs A Roney; Roth Papers, ‘Kim’, in Standard, 25.3.1953, and Rosser’s list of members, ATL; Auckland Star, 19.3, 23.4, 7.5.1913; NZ Times, 8.7.1913; PSA Journal, Feb 1953.
21. Olssen. Red Feds, p 179; Irvine, ‘Militant Unions’, pp 132-3; NZPD, 4.7.1913, pp 162Si 5.9.1913, pp 453f; Maoriland Worker, 29.11.1912, 18.7.1913; NZ Truth, 8.11.1913.
22. Bollinger, Against the Wind, p 103; Olssen, Red Feds, pp 180-1; V Hughes, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, research essay, Auckland University 1977, pp 11, 16; Economic Journal, Jun 1914, p 188; H Roth, ‘General Strike in Auckland’, Here and Now, Nov 1956; McLean. Southern Octopus, p 121; P 1913/1968/1, Herdman’s note on Parr to Herdman, 4.12.1913, NZ Police.
23. Hughes, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, pp 16.23; P 1913/1968/1, Cullen to E Wilson. 30.10.1913, NZ Police.
24. For the most useful published account of the role of the military in the 1913 Great Strike, see John Crawford, ‘Overt and Covert Military Involvement in the 1890 Maritime Strike and 1913 Waterfront Strike in New Zealand’, Labour History, May 1991. A longer manuscript version of the paper, provided by the author, is mostly cited here (‘Military Involvement in the 1890 Maritime Strike and 1913 Waterfront Strike in New Zealand’, typescript nd): see for background to the military and the Great Strike, pp 8-10; Griffiths, To Guard My People, p 89.
25. Crawford. ‘Military Involvement’, p 10; AD 11, 2/1, Heard memo, p5; Olssen, Red Feds, p 182; Ronald Seth, The Specials: The Story of the Special Constabulary in England. Wales and Scotland, London 1961, p 73.
26. Otago Daily Times, 20.11.1912; MEPO 2/360, Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, to Under-Secretary, 5.1.1909, PRO; Olssen, Red Feds, p 183.
27. Interviews with A Bulterworth and W O’Donnell; Dwyer, ‘Fragments’, p 59; R J O’Halloran, ‘A Policeman’s Lot’, typescript nd; AD 11, 2/1, Heard memo, nd. H O £' . .1 .• ) 1 k J.l.tn v. a Im. ml. in n, 1 mm II 1C 1Z • A II / 1 1 T mmm/I m. .•mm n . A 1 mmam f) . J
28. Crawford, ‘Military Involvement’, pp 11, 15-16; AD 11, 2/1, Heard memo; Olssen, Red Feds, p 182; P 1913/1968/1, Cullen to Herdman, 24.4.1914. Ellison to Cullen. 3.11.1913, P 1913/1968/5, Newall to Cullen. 20.12.1913, Cullen to Heard. 23.12.1913, Cullen to Minister of Justice, 11.2.1914, NZ Police; recollections of John Herdman (Alan Henderson).
29. Economic Journal, Jun 1914; AD 11.2/1, Heard memo; Crawford, ‘Military Involvement’, pp 11-12; Olssen, Red Feds, p 183; E C Fry (ed), Tom Barker and the 1.W.W., Canberra 1965, p 13; Pat Lawlor, Pat Lawlor’s Wellington, Wellington 1976, p 70; F 1913/1968/1, Ellison to Cullen, 24.3.1914, NZ Police.
diibuii iu nz* ruucc. 30. Lawlor, Wellington, p 72; NZ Truth, 1.11.1913; Olssen, Red Feds, pp 183-4; AD 11,2/1,
513
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Heard memo; P 1913/1968/1, Cullen to Herdman, 23.12.1913, incl NZ Times, 31.10.1913, O’Halloran to Cullen. 31.10.1913, Dominion, 31.10.1913. NZ Police.
31 AD 11,2/1, Heard memo; Crawford, ‘Military Involvement’, pp 12-13; Irvine, ‘Militant Unions’, p 188; N 40, Telegram Log, Psyche, 22.10.1913-19.1.1915; Barbara Weinberger, ‘Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes 1906-26’, History Today, Dec 1987.
32. Bollinger. Against the Wind, pp 105, 113; Irvine, ‘Militant Unions’, pp 184-6; P 1913/1968/1, Herdman to Cullen, 30.10.1913, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/2, S Rawle’s testimony re Holland, and NZ Herald, 31.10.1913, clipping. NZ Police; K R Howe, Singer in a Songless Land: A Life of Edward Tregear 1846-1931, Auckland 1991, p 193; Olssen, Red Feds, p 183.
33. Crawford. ‘Military Involvement’, p 15; Fry (ed), Tom Barker, pp 12-13; Olssen, Red Feds, p 184; Laurie Barber, ‘Special Constables, 1913: Freyberg Was One’, NZ Army Journal, Dec 1987; NZ Truth, 22, 29.11.1913; Lawlor. Wellington, p 70; Hughes, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, p 36; P 1913/1968/1, Cullen to Kiely, 11.12.1913, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/5, ‘Claims for Supplies’, NZ Police; A Godley, Life of an Irish Soldier, London 1938, p 151; A J Dreaver, Horowhenua County and its People, Palmerston North 1984, p 192, citing G L Adkin’s diary; for the closing of hotels in Auckland, see JC-A 21/9, Licensing Committee correspondence, 1913.
34. Crawford, ‘Military Involvement’, p 14; AD 11, 2/1, Heard memo; Lawlor, Wellington, pp 71-2; Olssen, Red Feds, pp 186-7; NZ Truth, 8.11.1913; P 1913/1968/4, ‘Missing/ Damaged Articles’, NZ Police; Dreaver, Horowhenua, p 192; NZ Herald, 25.11.1913. 1C I ~ on a n/11 n c 11 inn I t-
35. Lawlor, Wellington, p 72; PM 9/13, Massey to Parr, 5.11.1913, cited in Alex Frame, ‘Trouble on the Wellington Waterfront’, typescript nd; AD 11,2/1, Heard memo, p 13.
36. Economic Journal, Jun 1914, p 190; Olssen, Red Feds, pp 187-8; AD 11, 2/1, Heard memo, pp 14-15.
37. AD 11, 2/1, Heard memo, p 18; Olssen, Red Feds, p 190; Roth, ‘General Strike’; Hughes, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, p 31; Irvine, ‘Militant Unions’, p 221; P 1913/1968/1, incl Mays to Cullen, 30.10.1913, Auckland Star, 30.10.1913, NZ Police.
38. Interview with Sister Dympna; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 6f. 16-17, 25, 57, 432, 467-8; Roth, ‘General Strike’; Olssen, Red Feds, p 194; G Bagnall, for info re Gunson; Irvine, ‘Militant Unions’, pp 188-92,221; P 1913/1968/1, Parr to Herdman, 4.12.1913, Grosvenor to Herdman. 26.11.1913, Cullen to Kiely, 1.11.1913, NZ Police; PM 9/13, Massey to Gunson, 31.10 and 1.11.1913, Gunson to Massey. Massey to Gunson, 11.11.1913; P I sep seq, 1905/547. 1905 Commission, pp 483-4; NZ Truth, 8.11.1913, 19.9, 10.10.1914, 29.5.1915; Auckland Star, 1.11, 3.11.1913; W B Sutch, The Quest for Security in New Zealand, Wellington 1966, p 117; Richardson, Urban Police, pp 74-5.
’ e> ’ r pp i -s 39. Hughes. ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, pp 9, 15; Crawford. ‘Military Involvement’, pp 18-19; Olssen, Red Feds, pp 190-1; P 1913/1968/5, Cullen to Minister of Justice, 11.2.1914, NZ Police; NZPD, 6.11.1913, p 602.
40. Crawford, 'Military Involvement’, p 19; Olssen, Red Feds, pp 193, 196, 198; Roth, ‘General Strike’; Hughes, Massey’s Cossacks’, p 33; P 1913/1968/1. Kiely to Commissioner, 19.12.1913, J Willcocks to Superintendent, and other papers, Cullen to Kiely, 18.11.1913, NZ Police; PM 9/13, Gunson to Massey, 10.11.1913.
41. Dwyer, 'Fragments’, pp 59-67; P 1913/1968/1, Cullen to Kiely. 3.12.1913, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/5, Cullen to Minister of Justice, 11.2.1914, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/6, correspondence between Cullen and Dwyer from 2.12.1913, P Sargood to Herdman, 8.12.1913, J Bartholomew and J Dwyer to Minister of Justice, 18.11.1913, NZ Police.
42. Crawford, 'Military Involvement', p 17; NZ Truth. 29.11.1913: Scotter, Port Lyttelton. pp 218-21; Olssen, Red Feds, pp 199-200; Economic Journal, Jun 1914, pp 191-3; P 1913/1968/5, Cullen to Minister of Justice, 11.2.1914, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/6, Christchurch correspondence from 17.11.1913, NZ Police; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, pp 78f, 128; Rachel Barrowman, ‘Who Were Massey's Cossacks?’, research essay, Victoria University of Wellington nd
43. P 1913/1968/1, Town Clerk, Tauranga, to Herdman, 20.11.1913. NZ Police; P 1913/1968/6, West Coast correspondence, NZ Police; PM 9/13, Massey to Mayor of Westport, nd; AJHR. 1914, H-16.
Notes
514
44. PM 9/13, Massey to Gunson, 11.11.1913; Barrowman, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’; NZ Truth, 1.11, 29.11.1913, 9.7.1921; Otago Daily Times, 21.4.1932; Olssen, Red Feds, p 188; AD 11, 2/1, Heard memo, p 15; Maoriland Worker, 5.11.1913; Lawlor, Wellington, pp 70-3; Industrial Unionist, 22.11.1913; P 1913/1968/1, Cullen to Marsack, 3.11.1913, Ellison to Hendrey, 9.11, 24.11.1913, Cullen to C Hawson, 7.11.1913, J Fitzgerald, report of 15.11.1913, Dominion, 7.11.1913, Ellison to Cullen, 11.12.1913, NZ Police; ‘1913’ envelope, Wellington police meeting. Police Museum; NZPD, 14.9.1917, pp 1612; Frank Glen, ‘The Police Chaplain: A Brief History’, typescript, 1987; Auckland Star, 7.11.1913, 7.2.1914.
45. Le 1/1913/236, Heard to Allen, 13.11.1913; Crawford, ‘Military Involvement’, pp 1924; Crawford, ‘Overt & Covert’, pp 82-3.
46. Olssen, Red Feds, pp 208, 210-11; AJHR, 1914, H-16; CO 209/280, 13321, PRO. Liverpool to Secretary of State for Colonies, 3.3.1914, and NZPD, 12.12.1913, cited in Frame, ‘Wellington Waterfront’; McLean, Southern Octopus, p 124; P 1913/1968/1, Gill to Herdman, nd, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/2, Cullen to Herdman, 17.12.1913, and notes attached, NZ Police.
47. P 1913/1968/3, various papers. NZ Police; P 1913/1968/1. Herdman to Chief Clerk, Treasury, nd, Cullen to Kiely, 15, 22, 27.11.1913, E Cutten to Under-Secretary of Justice. 3.12.1913, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/4, Cullen to Minister of Justice. 9.2.1914, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/5, Secretary, Ashburton Strike Defence Committee to Dwyer, 6.11.1914 and other papers, Commissioner to Minister of Justice, 11.2.1914, NZ Police; P 1913/1968/6, Cullen to Dwyer, 3.12.1913, Downie Stewart to Cullen. 24.12.1913, NZ Police; NZ Truth . 29.5.1915.
Part Five
1. NZ Truth, 11.3, 18.3.1911; 24.8, 14.12.1912; 18.1,8.2,22.2.1913; Otago Daily Times, 28.8, 8.9.1915; JC-Nelson 7/1, bundle 3, Coles depositions.
2. Clive Emsley, “The Thump of Wood on a Swede Turnip”; Police Violence in NineteenthCentury England’, Criminal Justice History, vol VI, 1985, pp 1245 el passim, interview with A Butterworth, and his similar views on ‘Police Five’ television programme, 1978 (A Butterworth); interviews with J Skinner and J McClennan.
3. PSA Journal, 20.11.1917; P 4/38, p 660, to Kiely, 27.4.1914; P 4/44, p 94. to Wright. 13.11.1916; PG, 1915, pp 644-5, circular 4/15 of 14.9.1915; Otago Daily Times, 19.8.1916; NZPD, 24.10.1917, pp 373-4; AJHR, 1917, B-7.
4. P 4/39, p 243, to Kiely, 26.8.1914; Chch Police, GO Book, Cullen to Dwyer, 26.8.1914; P4/40, p450. Commissioner to Under-Secretary, Public Works Department, 21.12.1915; NZ Truth, 26.4, 17.5.1913, 22.8.1914, 8.9.1917.
5. Gisborne Herald, 3.8.1953; AJHR, 1918, H-16.
6. P 4/38, pp 8. 213-16; P 4/39, p 338, to Government Architect, 18.9.1914; Hollander, ‘Dunedin Police Stations’; Bulletin, NZ Police, Apr 1985; P 4/41, p 56, to O’Donovan. 13.4.1916; NZ Herald, 30.12.1916; P 1 sep seq. 1905/547, 1905 Commission, pp 615, 620, 723; Otago Daily Times, 3.5.1913; AJHR, 1905, H-16B; 1909, H-168, pp xxii-iii, 392-3; 1915-18, H-16; interview with Sister Dympna.
7. P 4/38, p 128; P 1 sep seq. 1914/821; 1920/444, O’Donovan to Cruickshank, 16.12.1920; NZPD, 22.10.1913, p 117; 4.9.1914, p 771; AJHR, 1917, B-7.
8. PG, 1915, p 275, circular 2/15 of 12.4.1915; P 1 sep seq, 1917/2186; NZ Police. Circulars Book, p 6, circular 1/16 of 21.2.1916.
9. P 1 sep seq, 1920/444, includes O’Donovan to Cruickshank, 16.12.1920.
10. PG, 1913, p 95, circular 2/13 of 12.2.1913; p 204, circular 7/13 of 31.3.1913; p 236, circular 10/13 of 11.4.1913; pp 280, 325; P 4/37, p 15. to Wilson. 20.2.1913; P 4/39. p 398, to Norwood, 5.10.1914; Robert Clyne, Colonial Blue: A History of the South Australian Police Force, 1836-1916, Adelaide 1987, pp 203, 221; Lawrence, Police Review, p 25; Richardson. Urban Police, pp 67-8; Otago Daily Times, 11.6.1913; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 15, 366.
515
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
11, PG, 1913, pp 544, 634f.
12. PG, 1913, p 632; AJHR, 1914, H-16.
13. PG. 1913, pp 632f, 673 (circular 20/13 of 25.10.1913); 1914, pB7 (circular 2/14 of 10.2.1914), p 661; eg. P 4/39, p 577, to Dwyer, 19.4.1914.
14. PG, 1914, p 659; AJHR, 1915, H-16.
15. PG, 1915, p 739, incl Cullen, 1.11.1915, pp 742, 747; 1916, p 115, circular 2/16 of 21.2.1916; 1919, pp 423, 428; P 17/4/-, NARC; NZ Truth. 15.3.1913; Maoriland Worker, 2.12.1914; Otago Daily Times. 8.11.1915; NZ Herald. 24.2.1914, 12.4.1920; AJHR. 1914, H-16.
16. PG. 1916, p 890; 1918, p 16, O’Donovan, 24.12.1917; 1919, pp 421, 423, 428; PSA Journal, 21.5.1917; P 17/4/-, NARC; P 4/41, p 569, Cullen to Macassey, 25.8.1916; Maoriland Worker, 2.12.1914; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 7, 35, 154, 430.
17. Chch Police, GO Book, Cullen to Inspectors, 16.8.1912; E Jarrold and J Fleming, personal files. Police Museum; NZ Truth, 19.4,1913; letters of Jack Garbutt (R Garbult).
18. J Quinn, personal file. Police Museum; P 4/38, p 736, to Commissioner of Police, Perth, 13.5.1914; P 4/40, p 111, Minister of Justice to Prime Minister, 4.7.1914; p 222, to T Elliott, Waihi, 21,10,1914; interview with C Chesnutt; AJHR, 1913-15, H-16.
19. PDB analyses by author; P 4/40, p 753, to P Lennox, Christchurch, 13.3.1916; P 4/41, p 86. Cullen to O’Brien, Hikutaia, 18.4.1915; p 124, Herdman to Prime Minister, 26.4.1916; p 156, Herdman to Secretary, Northcote Recruiting Centre, 4 5.1916.
20. P 4/41, p 235, Minister to Colonel Stoneham, Dunedin, 20.5.1916; p 388, Minister to R Murray, Gisborne, 6.2.1916; P 4/41, p 393, Cullen to Under secretary for Justice, 8.7.1916; p 484, to D Keeffe, 22.2.1917; p 513, Cullen to Cruickshank, Greymouth, 5.8.1916; p 745, Cullen to Superintendent, Auckland, 6.10.1916; NZ Truth, 30.9.1916, 7.10.1922; PG. 1916. D 727.
21. See J Bell, personal file, Police Museum, for an example of the relaxed form of attestation; P 4/41, p 627, to McGrath. Napier, 7.9.1916; M Ryan, personal file. Commissioner to Minister, 13.12.1916, Police Museum; P 4/44, p 426, O’Donovan to Phair, 5.2.1917; Dunstall, ‘NZ Police’, ch 3, pp 6, 10; HZ Truth, 13.1.1917; W T Reay, ‘The Metropolitan Special Constabulary: The War Force - The Reserve’, Police Journal, 1928, vol I no 2; NZPD, 26.9.1919, p 987; AJHR, 1917-20, H-16; NZ Police. ‘1919 Commission’, p 6.
22. P 4/44, p 426, O’Donovan to Phair, 5.2.1917; p 528, to Officer-in-Charge, Advertising Department, 2.3.1917; p 580, O’Donovan to Kiely, 13.3.1917; PDB, pp 364f; PG, 1917, p 409 (Carmody).
23. PDB, pp 364f; AJHR, 1920, H-16.
24. P 1 sep seq, 1912/1533; P 4/37. p 74, Cullen to Mitchell, 26.2.1913; P 1944/1294, D J Cummings, personal file, incl Dominion, 13.5.1936, Police Museum; Bollinger, Grog, p 31; Eldred-Grigg, Pleasures, p 193.
25. P 4/41, p 566, O’Donovan, 24.8.1916; p 612, Cullen to Kiely, 6.9.1916; p 648, Minister to W Handyside, 11.9.1916; P 4/44, p 223; PG, 1916, p 588, O’Donovan, 23.8.1916; 1917, p 409, O’Donovan, 7.7.1917; Walter Phillips. ‘“Six O’clock Swill”: The Introduction of Early Closing of Hotel Bars in Australia’, Historical Studies, Oct 1980; AJHR, 1917, H-16.
26. P 4/44, p 322, O’Donovan to Kiely. 13.1.1917; p 378, Herdman, 25.1.1917; C Mitchell, personal file, Cruickshank to Commissioner, Jun 1918, Police Museum; correspondence from A Butterworth; Carson & Davison, Longest Beat, p 40.
....... .. ~ v -rv/ - 27. P 4/44, p 38, Cullen to Superintendent, Auckland, 27.10.1916; P 4/41, p 545, O’Donovan. 17.8.1916, and p 606, Herdman. 31.8.1916.
28. P 1 sep seq, 1915/1032; Robin Hyde, Passport to Hell, London 1936. pp 10-12.
29. P 4/38, p 112, Cullen to Ellison, 24.12.1913; P 4/37, p 388, to H Moore. Indianapolis, 15.4.1913.
30. P 1 sep seq, 1914/1541; P 4/41, p5. Herdman to G W Russell, 28.3.1916.
31. P 1 sep seq, 1915/1032, incl HZ Truth, 12.2.1916; NZG, 21 8.1916; Eldred-Grigg. Pleasures, pp 163-4; AJHR, 1915, H-16; 1917, H-16.
........ ■-< .. .V., • ■ IU. 32. P 22/21/-, incl NZ Herald, 18.11.1916, NARC; P 4/44, p 451, O’Donovan to Phair.
Notes
516
13.2.1917; Greytown Police Station. Circulars Book. 1914-1937, Cullen to Ellison, 2.9.1915, NZ Police.
33. P 1/1/74 pt I. NARC.
34. Chch Police, GO Book, Commissioner to Inspector, Christchurch, 6.5.1912; P 4/37, p 224, Cullen to Kiely, 25.3.1913; Maoriland Worker, 11.4.1913; Otago Daily Times, 18.3.1913; Paul Baker. King and Country Call, Auckland 1988, pp 11-12.
35. P 4/37, p 374, Herdman to Rhodes. 11.4.1913; p 443. to C Mackie, 29.4.1913; P 4/38. p 230, to General Officer Commanding NZ Military Forces, 11.2.1914; p 256, to AdjutantGeneral, 12.2.1914; Baker, King & Country, p 12.
36. Chch Police, GO Book, Dwyer to St Albans Station. 6.8.1914; P 4/39, p 170, to Kiely, Auckland, 18.8.1914; p 175, to H Okey, MP, 18.8.1914; p 176, Herdman to Prime Minister. 18.8.1914; AG 168/4/67, f.89, Hocken Library; Mclvor, ‘NZ Army’, ch 10.
37. AD 1/869, 24/109, 24/150; O’Halloran, ‘Policeman’s Lot’.
38. P 4/39, p 269, to General Officer Commanding NZ Military Forces, 3.9.1914; p 285, to Adjutant-General, 8.9.1914; p 483, to Wright, 28.10.1914; p 492, Herdman to Prime Minister, 29.10.1914; Chch Police, GO Book, Cullen to Superintendent, 24.12.1914, Ellison, 5.1.1915; PG, 18.11.1914, p 734; P 4/37, p 342, to General Officer Commanding NZ Forces; Graham Hucker, ‘ “New Zealand for New Zealanders; No Germans Need Apply”; The Women’s Anti-German League’, manuscript nd; P 4/40, p 561, to Superintendent, Wellington, 2.2.1916; B J Foster, ‘Zedlitz (-Neukirk), George William Edward Ernest von’, in A H McLintock (ed). An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, vol 111, Wellington 1966.
39. P 4/40, p 571, to Kiely. Auckland, 7.2.1916; p 668, to Kiely, 25.2.1916; PG, 13.11.1917, p 656, O’Donovan.
40. P 4/41, p 477, to Superintendent, Auckland, 31.7.1916; Hucker, ‘ “No Germans”’, p 13; info from Mrs G Mason; NZPD, 25.8.1915, pp 132-3; interview with R Allan.
41. PG, 1916, pp 588,727-8 (Cullen, 17.10.1916), 893-4; 1917, p 388, O’Donovan, 2.2.1917; Chch Police, GO Book, O’Donovan, 30.9.1916; P 4/44, p 457, O’Donovan to Kiely, 16.2.1917; p 745, O’Donovan to Kiely, 18.4.1917; Greenstone Creek/Dobson Warrant Book, 1866-1967, NZ Police; P 4/41, p 211, Herdman to Clerk, Ohura County Council, 15.5.1916; H Holland, Armageddon or Calvary, Wellington 1919; Mclvor, ‘NZ Army’, ch 10; Peter O’Connor, ‘The Awkward Ones - Dealing with Conscience, 1916-1918’, NZJH, Oct 1974, p 118; C 1, 24/44/- (box 71); Baker, King & Country, pp 26-45, 56-64, 68. 70-86, 153-7.
42. PG, 1916, pp 870-4; Baker. King & Country, pp 87-95, 158-91, 202-5, 214-18; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 357-8.
43. P 4/40, p 461, G Smith. 21.12.1915; p 468, to Inspectors. 30.12.1915; p 737, to Chief Commissioner, Melbourne, 8.3.1916; PG, 1915, p 846, memo of 18.12.1915; 1917, p 327; NZ Truth, 9.10.1915; AJHR, 1918, H-16; NZ Police. ‘1919 Commission’, pp 4245. 507.
44. P 4/44, p 133. Minister to J Barth, 16.11.1916; P 4/40. p 669, to O’Donovan. 25.2.1916; P 4/41, p 155, Herdman to H Okey, MP, 5.5.1916.
45. P 4/40, p 514, to Minister of Defence. 6.1.1916; P 4/44, p 340, O’Donovan to Kiely, 17.1.1917; p 470, O’Donovan to Kiely, 9.2.1917; p 501, O’Donovan to Cruickshank, 24.2.1917; John A Lee (ed), When Labour Fought Capitalism and Sang ‘The Red Flag', Auckland 1949.
46. PG, 18.11.1914, p 734, regulations of 10.11.1914; 1915, p 507, regulations of 19.7.1915; P 4/39. Buckle St ref; Chch Police. GO Book. Ellison, 5.1, 1.2.1915; AJHR, 1917, H-16.
47. P 4/39, p 192, to Ellison. 21.8.1914; p 195. 24.8.1914; P 4/39. p 216, to AdjutantGeneral, 26.8.1914; P4/41, p 156. Herdman to Secretary, Northcote Recruiting Committee, 4.5.1916; Thomas Smith, ‘Reminiscences’ (T Smith); Dilnot, Scotland Yard, p 127; Lawrence, Police Review, p 25; Otago Daily Times, 25.6.1918; AJHR, 1915, H-16.
48. PG, 1915, pp 31, 613, 660, 819 (Cullen memos, 4.12, 6.12); 1916, pp 7, 71; Otago Daily Times, 20.8.1916; Auckland Police, Souvenir of Auckland Police Athletic Carnival, Auckland 1917.
517
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
49. P 4/39, p 444, to Ngata, 14.10.1914; P 4/41, p 124, Herdman to Prime Minister, 26.4.1916; Thomas Smith. ‘Reminiscences’, and interview with him; NZTruth, 8.4.1916; NZPD, 14.9.1915, p 602.
50. P 4/44. p 269, Herdman to Minister of Defence, 19.12.1916; p 437, O’Donovan to Adjutant-General, 9.2.1917; PDB analyses by author; PG, 1920, p 207; interviews with C Chesnutt and T Smith; NZPD, 24.5.1916, pp 363-4; 23.6.1916, pp 178-9; AJHR, 1919 and 1920, H-16; Rosalie Slerritt, ‘Constable David Sterritt, DCM’, typescript nd.
51. C Mitchell, personal file, Police Museum; P 4/37. p 196, Cullen to Ellison. 19.3.1913; P 4/40, p 458, to O’Donovan, 24.12.1915, p 614; P 4/41, p 190, Minister of Defence, 11.5.1916; Chch Police, GO Book, Mullany to Bird, 20.7.1916; W Almond scrapbook (A & K Almond); interview with C Chesnutt; Wicksteed, ‘Chronology*.
52. Interviews with W Brown and A Bulterworth; Cruickshank scrapbook, ATL; for examples of ‘local law’ earlier, see Thames Star, 24.8.1904, and NZ Truth, 17.8.1907.
53. P 4/41, p 211, Herdman to Clerk, Ohura County Council, 15.5.1916; PG , 1915, p 674; P 1 sep seq. 1917/1538; NZ Truth, 9.10.1915.
54. PG, 13.12.1915, p 830; 1916, p 843; 1917, pp 7, 388; P 4/44. p 728. 5.10.1916; Baker. King & Country, pp 128-9; Miles Fairbum, “The Farmers Take Over’, in Sinclair (ed), Oxford Illustrated History, pp 193-4; Erik Olssen, ‘Waging War’, in Binney et al. People & Land, p 306; IA 1/60; Christoffel, Censored, pp 3f; info from Ms L Harness.
55. P 4/39, p 342, to Secretary, Public Service Commissioner. 21.9.1914; ‘Rules and Regulations of the Chatham Islands Defence Rifle Club’, nd, Chatham Islands Museum; P 4/44, p 351, O’Donovan to Kiely, 18.1.1917; p 403, O’Donovan to Kiely, 1.2.1917; p 452, O’Donovan to officer in charge. Military Supplies Purchase Office, 13.2.1917; p 475, O’Donovan to Kiely, 20.2.1917; Holt, Arbitration, pp 129-31; Maoriland Worker, 26.9.1917.
56. P 1 sep seq, 1914/1997; Treadwell, NZ Trials, pp 217f; Spicer, River District, pp 165, 175; Rawle scrapbook, Wanganui Chronicle, 12.2.1915 (B Thomson); Dyne, Murders, ch 12.
57. Gee, Devil’s Own Brigade, pp 67-9; Sheehan, Lora Gorge, pp 69f; Carson & Davison. Longest Beat, pp 69f; P 1/1/2 pt 1, NARC; P 1 sep seq, 1917/2186, incl Greymouth Star, 14.11.1917, Christchurch Star, 15.2.1918; AJHR, 1915, H-16, p 9; 1918, B-7, H-16, p 10; Dwyer, ‘Fragments’, pp 67-9.
58. P 1 sep seq, 1917/2453; Cherrett, Fear or Favour, pp 248-50. cn n Ann inn a nci one nn i a x .n„ l j; i i\/ c ■
59. P 4/39. pp 109, 242-4, 251, 305, 379, 406; J A McCullough, diary, vol IV, 16.6 and 29.11.1914, Canterbury Museum; NZ Truth, 19.9.1914, 29.5.1915; Dunstall, ‘O’Donovan’; Otago Daily Times, 21.7.1914.
60. PG, 14.1.1913, p 51, Cullen; 1915, pp 31, 777; ‘The New Zealand Police at Hamilton’, NZ Police; PDB; AJHR, 1913, H-16, p \ ,NZHerald, 8.1.1915; for Mcllveney, interviews with T Collins, W Murray (by G Dunstall). W O’Donnell, A Butlerworth, R Patterson (by F McMorran); see selections from NZ Truth, 26.10.1907, 13.6, 20.6, 12.9.1908, 20.2, 22.5, 29.5, 27.11.1915; Dunstall. ‘O’Donovan’.
61. P 4/44, pp 177, 353, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410; PG, 1917, pp 86. 506; NZ Truth, 27.11.1913, 27.3.1917, 13.7, 20.7.1918; NZ Herald, 13.3.1905, 2.12.1925.
62. P 4/44, p 359, to Under-Secretary, Internal Affairs, 19.1.1917; P 2/1/2 pt 1, NARC; NZ Truth, 13.5.1922; NZPD, 22.7.1913, p 693; for Cullen’s later career, see Hill, ‘Cullen’; P 1 sep seq. 1910/610, quotes Mangaweka Settler, 16.6.1910; Dunstall, ‘O’Donovan’.
> jvp i/ i u/u iw, UUIV.J I'l jc me / , lU.U. I 7 lU, L/Ullilall, W L/UIIVJ V ill 1 . 63. PC, 4.10.1911, p 472; 1912, p 420 (31.7.1912), 440 et passim, 1913, pp 97-125; 1919, pp 417, 419, 424; Otago Daily Times, 15.2.1913; NZ Truth, 26.6.1915; NZ Police. ‘1919 Commission’, pp 72, 154, 161. 175, 179, 181, 336-7; P 1 sep seq, 1921/1087.
64. PG, 1919, pp 422, 424; P 4/37. p 268, to Ellison, 31.3.1913; p 367, Minister of Justice to Commissioner, 30.5.1913; p 517, to Ellison, 24.5.1913; p 624, Cullen to Ellison, 12.6.1913; P 4/41. p 548, O’Donovan to Commissioner. Adelaide. 18.8.1916; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 82-3, 186-7, 193, 314.
65. PG, 1913, pp 367-8, Minister of Justice to Commissioner. 30.5.1913; 1919, p 419; NZ Police. ‘1919 Commission’, pp 79, 187, 253, 426.
Notes
518
66. PG, 1919, pp 419, 422, 425; PSA Journal, 21.5.1917; P 4/41. p 548. O’Donovan to Commissioner, 18.8.1916; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 2, 26, 49, 124-6, 156, 163, 175, 248. 265, 353, 410-13; NZ Herald, 28.6.1919; NZ Truth, 27.11.1915.
67. PG, 1913, p 368, Minister of Justice to Commissioner. 30.5.1913; 1919, p 423; P 2/1/2 pt 2. NARC; NZ Truth, 3.7, 31.7, 14.8, 27.11.1915; Dunstall, ‘NZ Police’, ch 3. p 3. ch 4. p 9; NZPD, 14.7.1915, p 314; 14.9.1915, p 603; AJHR, 1919, H-16; NZ Police. ‘1919 Commission’, pp 28-9, 66, 78, 190.
68. P 4/41, p 369, Cullen to Inspector, Napier, 5.7.1916; Meltzer Papers, folder 2, ‘Miscellaneous’, NZ Truth, 10.2.1917, NZ Police Association; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 106-7.
69. P 1 sep seq. 1914/1472. *7 F\ D I cun 101/4/0 f\A A • l/\kn I I2f*ntio«r / 111/1 r D., • A 7’vti /i Kiev i tea I T /sn/1 An 101/1
70. P 1 sep seq, 1914/2004; John T -Francis, Lives of Romance: A True Novel, London 1914.
71. Circulars book, 1903-38, p 33, handwritten note, for Mcllveney’s position, and also report of Feb 1913 re Australian Chief Justice, FPB; PG, 1912, pp 310, 352; P 4/38, p 730, Cullen to Kiely. 12.5.1914.
72. CR 13/28, incl Mcllveney to E Dinnie, 21.1 1913, FPB; guardbook with Evening Post of 28.6.1913, and other clippings, FPB.
73. Guardbook, incl Evening Post, 28.6.1913, circulars book, 1903-38, p 34, and info on legislation of 1912, FPB; AJHR. 1917, H-16.
74. CR 20/90, FPB; Sheehan, Lora Gorge, pp 54f; Treadwell, NZ Trials, pp 234f; Finger Print Department, University of Applied Science, Chicago, A Study in Finger Prints, 1920; Dyne, Murders, ch 13.
75. P 4/38, p 106, Ellison to Public Service Commissioner, 23.12.1913; pp 508-9, Ellison to Public Service Commissioner. 1.4.1914 (for Madden et al ); p 720, to W Crawford, 11.5.1914; P 4/37, p 312, Cullen to Public Service Commissioner, 4.4.1913; PG, 8.12.1915, p 819; Otago Daily Times, 26.4.1909; PDB, Muggeridge entry.
76. Circulars book, 1903-38, p 41, FPB; PG. 1915, p 254, Cullen, 1.4.1915; NZ Truth, 20.2, 15.5.1915.
77. P 4/43, pp 743-5; PG, 1913, p 85, circular 1/13 of 3.2.1913; P 4/37, p 221, to Mayor of Auckland, 19.3.1913; p 264, Cullen to Ellison, 31.3.1913; p 416, Cullen to Ellison, 21.4.1913; Cherrett, Fear or Favour, p 44; H Alker Tripp, ‘Police and Public: A New Test of Police Quality’, Police Journal, vol I no 4, 1928; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge. p 74, NZ Herald. 16.5.1889; AJHR. 1898, H-2, pp 96-7; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, p 292.
78. P 4/37, p 264, Cullen to Ellison, 31.3.1913; p 416. Cullen to Ellison, 21.4.1913; PG, 1913, p 355, circular 13/13 of 5.6.1913; P 4/38, p 151, to Town Clerk, Auckland, 6.1.1914; P 4/39, p 205 (25.8.1914), p 399 (5.10.1914); interviews with T Smith and C Chesnutt; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 316-17.
79. P 1 sep seq, 1916/710; P 4/39, p 386, to Wright, 2.10.1914; P 4/38, p 649, to Undersecretary, Public Works Department, 24.4.1914; PG, 1917, p 7, circular 1/17 of 3.1.1917; Carr, Mountain Shadow, p 139; AJHR, 1910, H-16; 1915, H-16, p 7; 1917, H-16; 1919, H-16, p 8.
80. P 4/38, p 313, Minister to J W Mac Donald. 20.2.1914; PSA Journal. 16.3.1914, p 14, 20.9.18; P 4/37, p 513, to Dwyer, 23.5.1913; P 4/39, p 99, to Kiely, 3.8.1914; PG, 1914, p 188, circular 4/14 of 19.3.1914; NZPD. 16.10.1913, pp 762-3, 769-70; 22.10.1913, pp 115, 124; 10.7.1914, pp 510-11; Otago Daily Times, 17.3.1914; AJHR. 1914, H-16.
81. PSA Journal. 15.5.1914, pp 14, 26. 20.3.1918.
82. P 2/1/2 pt 1, NARC; P 17/4/-, NARC; PSA Journal. 21.5.1917.
83. P 4/41, p3, Prime Minister to Queensland Police Union, 27.3.1916; p 689, Cullen to General Secretary, PSA, 23.9.1916. sa pn lots „ An nn>nlar r/K i o loie- ioio „ sat, n/n „r
84. PG. 1915, p 612, circular 3/15 of 1.9.1915; 1917, p 506, circular 12/17 of 31.8.1917; Holford, ‘Evolution NZ Police’, p 1199.
‘ U ,U. UUU „ . . V,,W , ..... 85. PSA Journal, 20.11.1916; P 4/44, p 260, Herdman lo General Secretary, PSA, 16.12.1916
oj. rot\juurnui, z.\j. 11.1710, r p iou, nciumaii 10 vjcnciai ocuiciaiy, rort, 1 o. iz. 1710. 86. PSA Journal, 20.2.1916, pp 42-6; 20.1.1917, pp 6,44; 20.3.1917, pp 128,150:21.5.1917, p 236; 20.6.1917, p 302.
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
519
87. PSA Journal. 20.1.1917, 20.3.1918; for ’influence’, see eg. P 4/37, p 219, Herdman to Massey, 19.3.1913; P 4/39, p 419, to T W Rhodes, 8.10.1914, and p 434, ditto, 13.10.1914; Dunstall, 'NZ Police’, ch 3, pp 3, 6.
88. PSA Journal. 20.3.1918; AJHR. 1919, H-16. Cl n rto A f I ->rv "1 mio. U IJ CO lOlfi
89. PSA Journal, 20.3.1918; NZ Herald, 5.2.1919.
90. PSA Journal, 21.5. 20.6, 20.9.1917, 20.3.1918; PG, 1918, pp 198, 577, 706; NZ Herald. 10.1.1919; NZPD, 29.11.1918, p 567; AJHR, 1919, H-16.
91. PSA Journal, 20.3, 20.9.1918, 21.7.1919; PG, 1918, p 706; S King notebook, 1920, NZ Police; NZ Herald, 1.2, 2.2.1922.
92. NZ Listener, 6.7.1970; Brion Duncan, ‘Address by Superintendent Brion Duncan’, typescript 1984; A M Grant, typescript (T Olsen); G J Malony and Ross Annabell, ‘The Rua Expedition’, in Historical Review, Jun 1963; Auckland Weekly News, 13.4.1916 (in Rua Tapanui Hepetipa 1869-1937’ envelope). Police Museum; Otago Daily Times, 4.4.1916; for full versions of the invasion of Maungapohatu, see, apart from Webster, Rua, Judith Binney, Gillian Chaplin and Craig Wallace, Mihaia: The Prophet Rua Kenana and his Community al Maungapohatu, Wellington 1979 (used as a major source for this section).
93. Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, ‘Notes on Pakeha Sentencing Practices’, typescript 1981, p 2; Duncan, ‘Address’; Malony & Annabell, ‘Rua Expedition’; Binney et al, Mihaia, pp 81-2. r> a rv » a jj >. a w * . /t ryi \. n i iftiimi
94. Duncan, ‘Address’; A M Grant, typescript (T Olsen); P 1 sep seq, 1916/233.
95. Duncan, ‘Address’; P 1 sep seq, 1916/233.
96. P 4/41, p 218, to Secretary, Treasury, 16.5.1916; P 1 sep seq, 1916/233; MA 23/9, ‘Rua - Special File 198’; Otago Daily Times, 5.4.1916.
97. PG, 1913, p 645; Duncan, ‘Address’; Malony & Annabell. ‘Rua Expedition’, pp 63f; interview with A Butterworth; Rotorua Photo News, 5.5.1967, NZ Herald, 7.4.1916, both in ‘Rua Tapanui Hepetipa’ envelope, Police Museum.
98. P 1 sep seq, 1916/233, Const Blakeley’s account, Cullen to Tole, 18.4.1916, Johnston, 8.4.1916, Cullen to O’Donovan, 30.6.1916; A M Grant, typescript (T Olsen); Malony & Annabell, ‘Rua Expedition’; interview with A Butterworth; Webster, Rua, p 259.
99. P 1 sep seq. 1916/233, NZ Herald, 7.4.1916, Cullen to Tole, 18.4.1916; Meltzer Papers, folder 2, ‘Miscellaneous’, NZ Police Association; NZ Herald, 25.6.1948; Webster. Rua, pp 249-54; interview with A Butterworth.
100. P 1 sep seq, 1916/233, incl Cullen to Tole, 11.8.1916; P 4/41, p 264, Cullen to General Officer Commanding NZ Forces, 31.5.1916; NZ Listener, 6.7.1970; T G Russell (ed). Gazette Law Reports, Christchurch 1916, p 658; interviews with A Bulterworth, T Collins and J McClennan; Otago Daily Times, 4.8, 15.8.1916; info from J Binney, and her interview with T Collins; see Poverty Bay Herald, 12.5.1924, for sample of praise of Cassells; Binney et al, Mihaia, pp 126-7.
101. P 4/41, p 669. Prime Minister to T Hairupi, 12.9.1916; P 1 sep seq. 1916/233, Cullen to Tole, 11.8.1916.
102. P 1 sep seq, 1916/233, incl Cullen to Tole, 11.8.1916; Webster. Rua, p 277.
103. Info from R Melrose; P 4/38, pp 43-4, 100, 104, 222; PG, 1914, p 103; Melrose. ‘Chiefs of Police’, pp 20, 23-4, 26.
104. Melrose, ‘Chiefs of Police’. pp 20, 26. 28-30; PG , 22.7.1915, p 523, Cullen; 27.11.1917, p 685, O’Donovan.
105. W N Plimmer, The Military Occupation of Western Samoa 1914-20’ MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington 1966, pp 14-15, 21. 23, 96. 139; L P Leary, New Zealanders in Samoa, London 1918, pp 87, 90; Michael Field, Mau, Wellington 1984. pp 2-3, 11. 16, 30, 32; Mclvor, ‘NZ Army’, ch 10.
106. P 4/41, p 47, to Colonel Logan, 12.4,1916; P 1944/1294, D J Cummings, personal file, incl Dominion , 30.6.1936, Police Museum; Plimmer, 'Military Occupation', pp 27. 37, 70f, 95-6, 112-14; NZ Herald. 5.12. 20.12.1919, 27.10.1920, 22.7.1930; Otago Daily Times, 26.10.1920; NZ Truth, 26.3.1921; Field, Man. p 53; AD 1/869, 24/131; Holland, Armageddon, pp 144-5: O’Connor, 'Awkward Ones’, pp 133, 136; Thomson & Neilson, Challenge, p 288; Baker, King A Country, p 194; info from R Gillespie; IT 1/89/1 pt 1.
Notes
520
107. PDB; P 4/39. pp 208 and 301, to Wilson. Wanganui. 25.8 and 10.9.1914; P 4/38, p 245. to Dwyer, Christchurch, 13.2.1914.
108. P 1/272, 04/788, cites Evening Star, 19.4.1904; P 4/39. p 208, to Wilson. Wanganui. 25.8.1914, p 245, to Dwyer, 13.2.1914; G Dunstall to Inspector Davison, 11.8.1980 (G Dunstall); Walker, Critical History, p 87.
109. P 22/21/-, Southland Daily Times, 21.7.1914, editorial, NARC; G Dunstall to Inspector Davison, 11.8.1980 (G Dunstall).
110. P 22/21/-, incl Southland Daily Times, 21.7.1914 and Miss C Henderson. WCTU, to Herdman, 25.7.1914, NARC.
111. Joan Lock, The British Policewoman, London 1979, chs 2-3; P 22/21/-, NZ Herald, 1.4.1916; D Dawson to NZ High Commissioner, 16.6.1916; Henderson letter, 30.7.1915; Herdman to Lady Stout, 21.9.1915; Cohen to Herdman. 2.8, 28.8, 10.10.1915; Herdman to Cohen. 22.9.1915, and to Birch, 13.6.1916, NARC; AD 1/869, 24/83.
IU J, anu IU UIIUI, U.U.171U, HAIVV., nu 1/OU7, it/OJ. 112. P 22/21/-, Cohen to Herdman, 10.10.1915, and correspondence with Cullen re Australian policewomen, NARC; R J Unstead and W F Henderson. Police in Australia, London 1973, p 88; MEPO 2/1684, PRO; Clyne, Colonial Blue, pp 261-4.
‘ ' -'r V ~ .ww-r, . w V uv, - Kr ’• 113. P 22/21/-, Herdman to Cullen. 18.4.1916; Cullen to Herdman, 17.4.1916; NZ Times, 1.3.1916, NARC; Maoriland Worker, 2.2, 4.10.1916, 25.7.1917; D Monigatti, ‘Women Police in New Zealand’, typescript 1981.
114. P 22/21/- . Cullen, 17.4.1916; Herdman. 11.4, 17.4.1916; Auckland Star, 1.4.1916; Evening Star , 3.4.1916, NARC.
115. P 22/21/-, Herdman. 18.4.1916, Cullen to various police chiefs, 2.5.1916, NARC; P 4/41, p 136, Cullen to Chief Constable, Glasgow, 2.5.1916, p 458, O’Donovan to Commissioner, South Australia, 25.4.1916; HO 45/10806/309485, PRO.
116. P 22/21/-, Cullen to Herdman, 29.8.1916, E Kennedy, Secretary, Wellington LRC, to Herdman. 10.8.1916, NARC; MEPO 2/1684, PRO.
117. P 22/21/-, Cullen to Herdman, 29.8.1916; replies to Cullen. Aug 1916, NARC; P 4/41, p 565, to Kiely. 23.8.1916.
118. P 22/21/-, clippings etc, NARC.
119. P 22/21/-, Cullen to Herdman, 14.10, 16.10.1916; and Herdman to Cullen. 16.10.1916; Solicitor-General to Herdman, 16.10.1916, and to Cullen, 16.10.1916; Dominion, 19.10.1916; Hawera Star, 21.10.1916; Evening Post, 25.10.1916 (letter of 24.10.1916); Manawatu Evening Standard, 24.10.1916; Evening Star, 28.10.1916; NZ Herald, 19.10.1916, NARC.
120. P 22/21/-, Evening Star, 4.11, 7.12.1916; Evening Post, 4.11.1916, 22.3, 18.6.1917, et passim. Sun, 17.7, 14 12.1917; NZ Herald, 23.3, 9.8.1917; Otago Daily Times, 7.12, 14.12.1916, 6.7.1917; NZ Free Lance, 20.10.1916, NARC.
121. P 4/44, p 530, O’Donovan to Kiely, 2.3.1917; p 748, to Norwood, 20.4.1917, re appointment of Jane Grant, Wellington; P 22/21/-, incl Massey to Mrs E Wilson, 2.8.1917, NZ Times, 3.8.1917, Madden, list of March 1918, NARC; Dunstall, ‘NZ Police’, ch 5, pp 32, 37; AJHR, 1918, H-16, p 11; info from Mrs C Wright, re Campbell; diary of Asst Matron I Campbell. Auckland, 1917-18 entries (Mrs C Wrighl/Ms H McKenzie); Dwyer. ‘Fragments’, p 71.
■ e> » v • * • 122. P 22/21/-, Boddam report, 5.7.1917; letter in Auckland Star, 9.7.1917; O’Donovan, 14.4.1921; Evening Star, 4.11.1916, 3.6.1918, NARC; diary of Asst Matron I Campbell
(Mrs C Wright). 123. P 22/21/-, Sun. 16.7, 17.7, 20.7.1917, Press. 17.7.1917, Wilford to Mrs K Downing, 24.5.1918, Cohen, in Evening Star, 3.6.1918, Auckland Star, 14.8.1918, NARC; Dunstall, ‘NZ Police’, ch 5, pp 26, 34; Social Hygiene Act 1912.
Conclusion
1 This section is based on widespread theoretical reading and empirical research. References given are selective and little more than indications of some relevant sources.
2. J K Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power, Boston 1983, pp 11 Of; D Held and J Krieger, ‘Theories of the State: Some Competing Claims’, in Stephen Bomstein, David Held and
521
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Joel Krieger (eds). The State in Capitalist Europe, London 1984; Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Volume I: Power. Property and the State, London 1981, pp 179, 190; A de Jasay, The State, Oxford 1985, pp 47-56; Theda Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back In ’.ltems, Jun 1982; M Brogden, The Police: Autonomy and Consent, London 1982, pp 8-12; Emsley, Crime <sc Society, pp 8, 188-9, 192-4; Maureen E Cain, Society and the Policeman’s Role, London 1973, p 21; Thomson, Scotland Yard, p 87; Peter K Manning, Police Work: The Social Organization of Policing, Cambridge (Mass) 1977, p 105; Malcolm Young. An Inside Job, Oxford 1991, p 4; Robert Reiner, ‘Control on the Beat’, New Statesman, 13.11.1992; Pauline Morris and Kevin Heal. Crime Control and the Police: A Review of Research, London 1981, Introduction, p 9; R V G Clarke and J M Hough (eds). The Effectiveness of Policing, Famborough 1980; Bittner, Functions, pp 4lf.
3. Bittner, Functions, p 44; MEPO 2/148, Evening Star (London), 19.11.1872, PRO; R Foulger, ‘Building Colonial Police Forces’, Corona, Oct 1959, p 372; Richardson, Urban Police, p 8; Martin & Wilson, Police, p 7; Michael Banton, The Policeman in the Community, London 1964.
4. C Emsley, Policing and its Context 1750-1870, London 1983; W Young and N Cameron, Issues in Policing: The 1980's, Wellington 1985, p 7; Galbraith, Anatomy of Power, Robert D Storch, ‘The Plague of the Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57’, International Review of Social History, 20, 1975; L Lustgarten, The Governance of Police, London 1986, p 163.
5. Wilbur R Miller, ‘Police Authority in London and New York City 1830-1870’, Journal of Social History, Winter 1975, pp 84-5, 90, 95; Wilbur R Miller, ‘London’s Police Tradition in a Changing Society’, in Simon Holdaway (ed). The British Police, London 1979, pp 15-17; Whitaker, Police in Society, p 45; Surrey Constabulary, A Short Centenary History of the Surrey Constabulary, 1851-1951, Guildford nd, p vii (BLET 1/2), Surrey Special Constabulary Magazine, nd (BLET 1/6), in Churchill College Archives Centre. Cambridge University; C Emsley, ‘Some Aspects of the Development of Police in Britain and France’, typescript nd, p 11; Monkonnen, Urban America, pp 40-2, 52; William Cook, ‘Policemen in Society: Which Side Are They On?’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Summer 1967, p 120; Stead, Police of Britain, p 85.
6. Galbraith, Anatomy of Power, p 4; Paul G Shane, Police and People, St Louis 1980, pp 4, 191; Daniel J Bordua and Alfred J Reiss, ‘Law Enforcement’, in Paul F Lazarsfeld, William H Sewell, and Harold L Wilensky (eds). The Uses of Sociology, London 1968, p 282; J A Mayer, ‘Notes towards a Working Definition of Social Control in Historical Analysis’, and D Philips, “‘A Just Measure of Crime, Authority, Hunters and Blue Locusts’”, both in Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull (eds). Social Control and the State, Oxford 1983, pp 17, 65; E P Wenniger and J P Clark, ‘A Theoretical Orientation for Police Studies’, in Malcolm W Klein (ed), Juvenile Gangs in Context, Englewood Cliffs (NJ) 1967, p 162; Morris & Heal, Crime Control, p 19; MEPO 8/17, Instruction Book for the Government and Guidance of the Metropolitan Police Force, London 1893, p 185, PRO; J Creighton, ‘The Northwest Mounted Police of Canada’, Scribner’s Magazine, Oct 1893, p 415; Conor Brady, Guardians of the Peace, Dublin 1974, p 2.
7. Bittner, Functions, p 119; Wenniger & Clark, ‘Theoretical Orientation’, p 171; C F Hamilton, ‘The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’, Police Journal, vol I no 4. 1928, p 641.
8. J F Glynn, The New Zealand Policeman: The Developing Role of the New Zealand Police, Wellington 1975, p 27; Walker, Critical History, pp 23-4; Fairbum, Ideal Society, Giddens, Contemporary Critique, pp 170-2; Pat O’Malley. Law. Capitalism and Democracy , Sydney 1983, pp 153-4; Pratt, Punishment. Bittner, Functions, pp 18-19; M Ignatieff, ‘Stale, Civil Society and Total Institutions’, D Ingleby, ‘Mental Health and Social Order’, S Spitzer, ‘The Rationalization of Crime Control in Capitalist Society’, all in Cohen & Scull (eds). Social Control', Wilbur R Miller. Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London 1830-70, Chicago 1977. 9. Ralph Miliband. Capitalist Democracy in Britain, Oxford 1982; Ralph Miliband. The
Notes
522
State in Capitalist Society, London 1969; Shane, Police & People, p 14; O’Hara, Northland, p 84; R Bocock, Hegemony, Chichester/London 1986, pp 7, 8, 11, 28; Bloomfield, New Zealand.
10. Edward Carpenter, Prisons Police and Punishment, London 1905, p 82; ‘Report of the Task Force on Law and Law Enforcement to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence’, in James S Campbell, Joseph A Sahid and David P Stang, Law and Order Reconsidered, Washington nd, p 7; Cain. Policeman’s Role, pp 24-5; Banton, Policeman, pp 2-3; AJHR, 1895, H-28; W L Melville Lee, A History of the Police in England, London 1901, pp xi-xiii; Galbraith, Anatomy of Power, Eric H Monkonnen, ‘From Cop History to Social History’, Journal of Social History, Summer 1982, p 581; Miller, ‘Police Authority’, p 83.
11. AJHR, 1922, H-16, p6; Miller,.’Police Authority’, pp 18-23; Emsley, Crime & Society, p 2; Brogden, The Police, pp 172-4; Galbraith, Anatomy of Power, pp 6, 14, 24, 29, 32, 34-5; Wenniger & Clark, ‘Theoretical Orientation’, p 162.
12. Jerome H Skolnick, Justice Without Trial, New York 1966; Cleary papers, James Cleary’s training depot notebook. 22.11.1905 (B Thomson/Cleary family); Bittner, Functions, pp 38, 107-8, 112, 118; O’Malley, Law. Capitalism & Democracy, p 55; Manning, Police Work, p 19; Glynn, NZ Policeman, pp 27, 31, 49; Walker. Critical History, pp 23, 81; Slorch, ‘Locusts’.
13. NZPD, 8.8.1922, pp 107-8; NZ Herald, 27.6.1925; Evening Post, 21.10.1920; Dwyer. ‘Fragments’, pp 52, 75; Galbraith, Anatomy of Power, pp 63-4; Whitaker, Police in Society, p 143; Brogden, The Police, pp 170, 178-80, 184, 190, 196-7; John F Galliher, ‘Explanations of Police Behaviour’, Sociological Quarterly, Summer 1971, p 312; Norman L Weiner, The Role of the Police in Urban Society, Indianapolis 1976, pp 20-1, 40.
14. O’Malley, Law, Capitalism & Democracy, p 59; Giddens, Contemporary Critique, pp 5, 169; Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge 1985; William Kelly and Nora Kelly, ‘The Development of Law Enforcement’, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Quarterly, Winter 1977, p 23; Wenniger & Clark, ‘Theoretical Orientation’, pp 163-4; Read, ‘Policing the Empire’, p 854; Otago Daily Times, 30.11.1905.
15. Oliver Duff, New Zealand Now, Wellington 1941 (3rd edn, London 1956), pp 102f; P H Hickey, 'Red' Fed. Memoirs, Auckland 1925, p 15; PG, 1912, p 440, circular 3/12 of 3.8.1912; 1917, p 181, circular 5/17 of 26.3.1917; P 4/37, p 11, Cullen to Mitchell. 19.2.1913; P4/44, p 107, to Kiely, 14.11.1916; p 167, to Inspector, Hamilton, 23.11.1916; Henry Brett and T W Leys, ‘Historical Sketch of New Zealand’, in Andrew Garran (ed), Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, vol 111, Sydney 1886 (1888 edn), p 576; Cruickshank scrapbook, ATL; Carson & Davison, Longest Beat, p 28; interview with R Allan; NZ Truth. 31.8.1918; AJHR, 1917, H-16; 1921, H-16; NZ Police, ‘1919 Commission’, pp 227-8, 242, 292, 306; Harold K Becker, Police Systems of Europe, Springfield 1973 (2nd edn 1980), p 39; Shane, Police & People, p 32; Otago Daily Times, 26.7.1913; Weiner, Role of Police, pp 11, 14-15; Lord Scarman, The Scarman Report, 1981 (1982 edn, Harmondsworth), p 62; O’Malley, Law. Capitalism & Democracy, pp 56, 190-3; Miller, Cops & Bobbies, pp 12-13; Vick, ‘Public Order’, p 163; E Cumming, I Gumming and L Edell, ‘Policeman as Philosopher, Guide and Friend’, in Richard Quinney, Crime and Justice in Society, Boston 1969, p 158; Miller, ‘Police Authority’, pp 17-18; P K Manning, ‘The Social Control of Police Work’, in Holdaway (ed), British Police, p 46; Manning, Police Work, pp 5, 19, 102, 140-1; Peter Hain (ed), Policing the Police, vol I, London 1979, p 17; Monkonnen, Urban America, pp 16-18, 22-3, 31; Monkonnen, ‘Cop History’, p 582; Cleary papers, James Cleary’s exercise book, 1906 (B Thomson/Cleary family); Helen A Cull, ‘The Enigma of a Police Constable’s Status’, Victoria University of Wellington Law Review, 8, 1975, pp 148-9, 157, 164; M Brogden, ‘The Myth of Policing by Consent’, Police Review, 22.4.1983; Brogden, The Police, pp vii, 54, 66, 74, 126, 184, 220-2, 229, 236-7, passim ; M Finnane, ‘Police and Politics in Australia - The Case for Historical Revision’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Dec 1990, pp 219, 223; Edward Troup, ‘Police Administration, Local and National’, Police
523
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Journal, vol I no 1, 1928, pp 15, 18; N Cameron, ‘Developments and Issues in Policing New Zealand’, in Neil Cameron and Warren Young (eds). Policing at the Crossroads, Wellington 1986, pp 18-22.
16. P 1 sep seq. 1919/1885, incl Evening Post, 11.10.1919.
17. P 1 sep seq, 1919/1885, incl Dominion, 10.10.1919, and Massey to O’Donovan. 14.10.1919; P 1 sep seq. 1921/1274, inc \ Auckland Star, 2.9.1921, and Press, 31.8.1921; Otago Daily Times, 27.1.1913; AJHR, 1909, H-168, pp 424, 450, 466-7; NZ Police. ‘1919 Commission’, pp 78, 88, 93, 527, 532; Clarke & Hough, Effectiveness of Policing, T R Gurr, ‘The Comparative Analysis of Public Order’, in Gurr et al (eds), p ix; Peirce et al, ‘London’, pp 209, 213; Owen Dance. ‘The Police and Community Policing’, in Cameron & Young (eds), Policing at the Crossroads, p 206.
——• “ • - e> v /> • ••• ft ■ v 18. PI sep seq, 1921/1274, incl Timaru Herald, 1.9.1921; Dominion Sunday Times, 5.11.1992; AJHR, 1909, H-168, p 355.
19. Emsley, Crime & Society, p 42.
20. Becker, Police Systems, pp 15-16; Bittner, Functions, pp 39-41; Vick, ‘Public Order’, p 166; Manning, Police Work, p 105.
21. Brogden, The Police, pp 170-95; Lyttelton Times, 24.12.1909; AJHR, 1898, H-2, pp 423-4.
22. Otago Daily Times, 25.5.1905.
Select Bibliography
For Volumes One to Three of The History of Policing in New Zealand’ Series
This bibliography mostly comprises sources cited in the footnotes (including the footnotes for Volume Two, which were not published but are on archival deposit). These sources are referenced to where they were consulted: some transfers of materials, and rearrangements, have occurred subsequently.
A. PRIMARY SOURCES
1. Archives and Manuscripts
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington
Buick Papers, folders 7, 69
Burgess, Richard: ‘The Autobiography of Richard Burgess the Murderer’, Nelson Gaol, September 1866, qMS
Burke, E J: ‘Reminiscences of Old Canterbury’, qMS
Cowan Papers, MS Papers 39
Cruickshank, Alexander: Scrapbook
Dansey Papers, MS Papers 1138
Johnson, John: Journal 1847-57, MS Papers 1662
Mac Donald, James: ‘Notes - Trip to Wellington Sept 1903’, MS 1903 P
McLean, Donald: Diary, 1845f
McLean, Donald, Papers: various folders, especially nos 124, 374, 375; Police and Native Land Purchase Department Letterbooks; Private Letters and Native Correspondence Letterbooks: MS Papers 32
New Zealand Biographies
Roth Papers, Acc 82-213
St Paul’s, Wellington, Register of Burials
Thomson, John Bell: MS Papers 1524
‘Wanganui City History’, vol II
Warre, H J, Papers, especially diary: MS 570
White, John, Papers: folder 109, MS Papers 75
White, William Bertram: ‘Reminiscences 1821-1908'
Archives Office of New South Wales, Sydney
New South Wales Colonial Secretary Papers: 4/2956, 3527, 3802, 3844, 4780, 4840, 7420
524
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
525
Auckland Institute and Museum
Kenderdine Papers, MS 18, 1855/1863
The Main Scrapbook, vol 14, 1900
Auckland Public Library
Auckland Provincial Council Papers: Sessions I-XXIV
Clendon Papers, MS 476: ‘Journal of J R Clendon 1839-1872’
Graham Papers, MS 141: ‘Ngati Paoa Invasion of Auckland 1851’
Grey Collection, GNZ MSS, especially MSS 36 (Armed Constabulary Minute Book, 1869-77), 193, 240, 245
Mathew Papers: Felton Mathew, ‘Views on the Present Condition and Future Prospects of N.Z.’ (June 1847); Mrs F Mathew, ‘Journal of a Voyage to New Zealand’
Meurant Papers; Leslie George Kelly, ‘Edward Meurant: An Account of his Ancestry, Life and Descendants’; ‘Diary of Edward Meurant, 1842-1847’
Personnel list, Auckland Provincial Government, 1856
Preece, George: Diary
Provincial History Index
Canterbury Museum
Brocker, Etienne: Papers
Canterbury Provincial Council Papers: Executive Minutes 1854-1867; Inwards Letters 1853-1868, 1872; Police Petty Cash Book 1862-71; Provincial Secretary Letterbooks; Session XIX Papers, no 27; Superintendent Letterbook
McCullough, J A: Papers, diary
Macdonald, G R: Dictionary of Canterbury Biographies
O’Neil, R B, Collection: Box 3
Ryan, Thomas Jervois: Journal
Seager, E W, Papers: ‘Old Lyttelton’; ‘Reminiscences’, nos 1, 3, 10; Scrapbook, etc.
Taylor, W A, Papers: ‘Police’ manuscript and other material
Thomson, J J: ‘Reminiscences’, 1926
Wakefield, E G, Papers: Item 58, Letterbook 1850-64
Canterbury Public Library
Ritchie, Thomas: Papers
Chatham Islands Museum
Rules and Regulations of the Chatham Islands Defence Rifle Club
Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge University
Bartlett Papers: BLET 1/1-6
Select Bibliography
526
Cook Islands Police
‘History of the Cook Islands Police’, typescript
Gisborne Museum and Arts Centre
Biographical files
Hawera Borough Council
Documentation on the ‘Hawera Republic’, 1879
Hawke's Bay Art Gallery and Museum
Resident Magistrate’s Letterbook, 1854f
The Hocken Library, University of Otago, Dunedin
Beattie, Herries: Papers, Ml 582, vol 14
Charge Book, Police Commissioner’s Office, Dunedin
Monson, Henry: Journal, 1851-61, MS 88
Otago Provincial records: AG 168 series, especially Police Letterbooks, AG 168/1/1-9, 16, 25, and 168/4/16
Police Commissioner’s Letterbook
Staff Register, Police Commissioner’s Office, Dunedin
Hokianga County Council
Correspondence
Hurunui Hotel, North Canterbury
Conditional Licence for ‘The Hurunui Accommodation House, South Bank’, 1860
Marlborough Historical Society
Miscellaneous archives and papers
National Archives, Wellington
(NB: Where individual file numbers are quoted, the final reference for ‘carried forward’ records is referred to unless otherwise stated.)
Agent for the General Government, Hawke’s Bay. AGG-HB: 3/15
Army Department. AD: 1; 11, 2/1; 24/83, 109, 131, 150; 31/14, 16; 32
Auckland Province. AP: 1/1; 2/1-55; 3/1, 3, 9; 5/1; 6
Audit Department. A: 6/2
Births Deaths and Marriages, Registrar General of. BDM: 1/2
British Resident. BR; 1/1-2; Series List, Appendix D
Civil Secretary. CS: 1/4-6; 3/3-6
Colonial Office (microfilm). CO: 201/192; 208/9, 144, 284; 209/1-62; 211/1 (Minutes and Proceedings of Legislative Council of New Zealand, Session I); 406/4
527
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Colonial Secretary. IA: 1/1-123, 290; 4/1, 265-7, 306; 12/1-8, 13, 15 (Blue Books, Colony of New Zealand); 12/9-12 (Blue Books, Province of New Ulster); 34/1
Customs Department. C: 1, 24/44/-
Executive Council Minutes. EC: 1/1
Governor, G: 15/1; 16/13; 25/2,4, 13, 18; 28/6; 30/1-12; 36/1-2
Hawke’s Bay Province. HB; 1/2, 3,6, 9, 11-13; 6/1-6; 10/1
Internal Affairs Department. IA: 1/60; 1937/158/52
Island Territories Department. IT: 1/89/1
Justice Department. J: 1, 1872/572, 1287,1351; 1898/644; 22/2-4, 5-11, 14; 46/5; J 40, PD, Box 58, 1893/598; JC-Nelson South-West Goldfields Commissioner’s Papers 1865-9; JC-Nelson 7/1
Legislative Department. Le: 1/1865/110, 129; 1/1878/9; 1/1881/168; 1/1883/120; 1/1888/109; 1/1890/12; 1/1890/160-1; 1/1892/115; 1/1892/146; 1/1896/104; 1/1913/236
Maori Affairs Department. MA: 1/1-3; 4/1, 59-60; MA-WG 2/2; Acc 1369, Maori Councils; 23-9, ‘Rua- Special File 198’
Marlborough Province, MP: 1/1-2 (Provincial Council Proceedings); 2/2-7
Navy Department. N: 40, Telegram Log, Psyche
Nelson Province. NP: 2/2; 7/13; 11/1-13
New Munster. NM: 4/1-2; 6/1; 7/1; 8/2-36; 10/1-12; 11/2-3, Blue Books 1849-52; 11/5
New Ulster. NU: 1
New Zealand Company. NZC; 3/1-3,21; 105/5; 108/1; 112/1; 131/8
Old Land Claims. OLC: 1/22
Otago Province. OP: 1/7, 16, 18, 37-40; 4/1-10; 5/1; 6, 1854-1861; 7/122,53, 55,72,75, 76; 9/1, 5, 8; 10/1,4, 6; 11/1-7; 12/1,7-9; 16/1,2
Police Department. P: Series 1, boxes 1-273, and separate sequence, especially 1878/2266, 1879/79, 1879/1994, 1879/3009, 1880/1660, 1880/1879, 1881/2014, 1884/395, 1885/2593, 1886/1304, 1888/590, 1889/1099, 1892/222, 1892/1139, 1893/243, 1893/492, 1896/40, 1898/766, 1898/1645,1900/1532,1901/1016,1902/1469,1902/1692, 1903/1916, 1904/405, 1905/547, 1905/1267, 1905/1486, 1905/1999, 1906/2134, 1907/397, 1907/462, 1907/1876, 1908/594, 1908/2035, 1908/2084, 1909/1009, 1909/1031, 1909/2349, 1910/312, 1910/610, 1910/1406, 1912/861, 1912/1533, 1913/48, 1914/1472, 1914/1541, 1914/1997, 1914/2004, 1915/1032, 1916/233, 1916/710, 1917/2186, 1917/2453, 1919/1885, 1920/444, 1921/1087, 1921/1274; 2/1-2, 717; 3/8; 4/1-4,7-28,30-1,33,36-44; 5/1-15; 6/1; 7/1; 8/1-6; 8/5/9-13; 18/1 (Thomas Hickman papers); P-Alexandra 2/2, 3/1; P-Auckland 9/2; P-Christchurch 1/10, 8/1; P-Hokitika 1/1; P-New Plymouth; P-Port Chalmers 1/1; P-Taupo 9/1; material transferred to National Archives, most of it from the New Zealand Police, by the author in 1990
Prime Minister’s Department. PM: 9/13
528
Select Bibliography
Seddon Papers. 1/8
Southland Province. SP: 1/11; 11/2-9; 14/1; 16/3, 9, 12-29; 17/1-9, 11; 17/18-78, 10B; 17/2A-SA.
Superintendent of the Southern Division. SSD: 1/2, 1849/26
Taranaki Province. TP: 1/1A-1B (Provincial Council Votes & Proceedings); 1/2, 4, 6-7; 4/1-8, 13, 14; 5/1-26; 7/10-13; 9/6
Thomas, Sir Godfrey, Papers: Journals, vols I & II
Treasury. T: 1/1, 1841/50, 1856/127; T-Nelson 1/1
Wellington Province. WP: 3/1-23; 4; 5/1; 6/1-6, 8-11; 8/2; 9/1-6; 11/10, 12
National Archives Northern Regional Office, Auckland
JC-Auckland, Acc 21, no 1, Police Office Letterbook 1842-9
JC-Auckland, Acc 21, no 9, Licensing Committee Correspondence 1913
JC-Auckland, District Court criminal records, 1840s-50s
National Archives Records Centre, Lower Hutt
Police Department. P: 1/1/74, 2/1/2, 2/1/29, 3/2/18, 17/4/-, 22/21/-
National Archives Southern Regional Office, Christchurch
Timaru Official Letterbook, 1859-71
National Bank Archives
Ross Gore Papers
Nelson Provincial Museum
Belt Collection: Accounts Book May 1845-Oct 1845, Police Dept, Nelson; Curtis family correspondence, 1852-66; Nelson Petty Sessions Registry of Criminal Matters, 1842-49; Record of Criminal Charges, 1846-7, Police Dept, Nelson; Saxton diary, vol 111
‘Maungatapu’ file
Thompson, H A: Papers and diary
New South Wales Police Headquarters, Sydney
Biographical files
New Zealand Police
Alexandra Police Station General Order Book 1861-76
Armed Constabulary Diary of Duty and Occurrences, Aongatete
‘Background Notes on Dannevirke Police Station’, typescript
‘Blenheim Police Offices’, typescript
‘Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, the Founders of the Metropolitan Police’, typescript nd
Charleston Lock-Up Register 1877-1939
Christchurch Police Station General Order Book 1862-1900
Circulars Book 1914-50
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529
Crime rate graphs
‘Day Book, Southland Constabulary’ 1863-70
Dunstan Police Station Diary
‘Evidence Taken at the Police Commission’ 1919, typescript
Finger Print Branch files, incl scrapbooks, circulars book
‘Great Strike’ envelope 1913
Great Strike files, P 1913/1968/1-6
Greenstone Creek/Dobson Warrant Book 1866-1967
Greytown Police Station, Circulars Book 1914-37
‘The New Zealand Police at Hamilton’, typescript
Hampden Police Station, Circulars and Memoranda Book
D Hannan, notebook 1876-8
Hokitika Minute Book 1877-1926
S King, notebook
‘Levin (1897 to 1980)’, typescript
‘Lyttelton Police Station Centenary 1880-1980’, typescript
‘Maxims for General Guidance of Members of the Police Force’, poster
North Island Letterbook
Police Description (Staff) Book, vol I
Tauranga Minute Book
Tunbridge correspondence (Auckland Police)
‘Waihi 1912’ envelope
Waihi Strike, 1912 file
Waihi Strike scrapbooks
‘Wairarapa Police History’, typescript
Waitangi (Chatham Islands) Police Station files
New Zealand Police Association, Wellington
Archives, box 66
Jack Meltzer Papers
Superannuation file
New Zealand Police Centennial Museum, Royal NZ Police College, Porirua
‘1913’ envelope
Barrack Regulations, Auckland Police Station
Files AC 1352/88; CR 10/136; FPB 04/-; P 1897/1494; P 1914/956; P 1944/1294
Jones, W; Papers
McLean, Senior Sergt: Papers
NZ Constabulary Force library book samples
Personnel files
‘Photographs of Prisoners 1-338’
Reserve Division material
‘RuaTapanui Hepetipa 1869-1937’ envelope
Snow, Claude, Senior Sergt: Papers
Select Bibliography
530
Subject files, miscellaneous
‘Waihi 1912’ folder
New Zealand Public Service Association, Wellington
Wellington District Committee Minute Book, 1891-97
Otago Early Settlers ’ Association Museum, Dunedin
Branigan Papers
Papers in Private Possession
Almond, William H: Scrapbook (A & K Almond)
Anderson, Grahame: Papers
Beard, D: Clippings book (Mrs E Beard)
Butterworth, Arnold: Correspondence, transcripts
Campbell, Ivy: Diary (Mrs C Wright)
Cleary, James; Papers (B Thomson/Cleary family)
Dinnie, D & E; Papers (Mr & Mrs D Dinnie/Mrs A Jemmett)
Garbutt, Jack: Papers, diary (R Garbutt)
Goodall, Samuel: Papers (Mr & Mrs F Bell)
Grant, A M: Typescript (T Olsen)
Gudgeon, W E: Scrapbook, including typescript ‘Autobiography’ (M Gudgeon)
Haddock, J: Papers (S Haddock)
Hickman, Thomas: Papers (Mrs R Gilshnan)
Hovell family: Scrapbook (Hovell family/Mrs V McConnell)
Lander, R: Scrapbook (Mrs J Lander)
McAnerin, W: Scrapbook (D Terry)
Mcßimey, Elsie; ‘Reminiscences’ (N Allan/E Mcßimey)
McGilp, Alexander: Papers (I Fidler/J Taylor)
McHugh, A: Scrapbook (M McHugh)
McLeod, Donald: Diary, papers (D McLeod)
Miller, Sergeant: Notebook (J Taylor)
Nimon, James: ‘Autobiography’ (Mrs R Steele/Mrs B Langham)
Rawle, Sidney: Scrapbook (B Thomson)
Rayner, Richard; Papers (L Stopforth)
Scott, Henry: ‘Looking Back’, papers and typescript (Mr & Mrs E Robertson)
Shearman, Robert Clarke: Clippings book (Shearman family)
Smith, S Percy: Papers (Mrs E Crompton Smith)
Smith, Thomas: ‘Reminiscences’ (T Smith)
Strange, Robert: Papers (M Strange)
Wardell, H S: Scrapbook (J Warded)
Public Record Office, London
Colonial Office: for microfilmed papers, refer National Archives Wellington
531
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Home Office. HO: 45/10806/309485; 45/11000/223532
Metropolitan Police. MEPO: 1/54, 2/148, 2/360, 2/399, 2/1684, 8/2, 8/17
Roman Catholic Diocese of Christchurch
Miscellaneous archives
Southland Regional Museum. Invercargill
‘Beware of the Natives’ exhibit and transcript
Taranaki Museum, New Plymouth
Diary of John Newland, 1841-72
Journal of F U Gledhill, NZ Militia, 1860
‘New Plymouth Jail: References from Fred. B. Butler’s Diaries’
Victoria Police Headquarters, Melbourne
Biographical files
Victoria Public Record Office, Melbourne
Chief Secretary Papers: 1861 U695; 1862-3 VI2; 1862-3 VI364, with 1876 J13638
Police Department file 88/592, box 344, series 937
Victoria University of Wellington Library
‘Criminal Notes of Judge C W Richmond, Hokitika, 1868-70’
Wanganui Regional Museum
Biographical files
2. Official Publications
Auckland Provincial Government: Acts and Proceedings/Journals
Auckland Provincial Government: Gazettes
Auckland Provincial Government: Ordinances
British Government: The Standing Orders and Regulations, for the Conduct and Proceeding of the Chief Constables, and other Constables, Dublin 1825
British Government: Statutes
British Guiana Government: Report of the Inspector-General of Police, for the Year 1903-1904, Georgetown 1904
Canterbury Provincial Government: Gazettes
Canterbury Provincial Government: Journals of Proceedings
Canterbury Provincial Government: Manual of Police Regulations for the Guidance of the Canterbury Constabulary Force, Christchurch 1862
Canterbury Provincial Government: Ordinances
Select Bibliography
532
Canterbury Provincial Government: Police Gazettes
Canterbury Provincial Government: Report of Proceedings and Evidence Taken before the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Want of Harmony stated to exist between the Superior Officers of the Police Department in Christchurch and its Effect upon the Working of that Department, Christchurch 1872
Colonial Office, Great Britain: Great Britain Parliamentary Papers
Domett, Alfred (editor); The Ordinances of New Zealand Passed in the First Ten Sessions of the General Legislative Council A.D. 1841 to A.D. 1849, Wellington 1850
Hawke’s Bay Provincial Government: Acts and Proceedings/Votes and Proceedings
Hawke’s Bay Provincial Government: Gazettes
Home Office, Great Britain: Evidence to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure: Memorandum No III: The Powers of the Police to Arrest or Otherwise Stop a Person, to Search Him, to Stop and Search Vehicles, and to Enter and Search Premises, London 1978
Marlborough Provincial Government: Gazettes
Marlborough Provincial Government: Ordinances
Marlborough Provincial Government: Proceedings/Votes and Proceedings
Metropolitan Police, London: Instruction Book for the Government and Guidance of the Metropolitan Police Force, London 1893
Nelson Provincial Government: Gazettes
Nelson Provincial Government: Ordinances
Nelson Provincial Government: Voles and Proceedings
Nelson Provincial Government: Statistics of Nelson, New Zealand, From 1843 to 1854, Nelson 1855
New Munster Government: Gazettes
New Plymouth Provincial Government: Gazettes
New Plymouth Provincial Government: Ordinances
New Plymouth Provincial Government: Statistics of New Plymouth, New Zealand, From 1853 to 1856, New Plymouth 1857
New Ulster Government: Gazettes
New Zealand Government: Compilation of the Law Respecting Unlawful Combinations, and as to Riots and Breaches of the Peace; With Observations on the Defence of Person and Property by Private Persons; and the Powers and Duties of Special Constables, Wellington 1890
New Zealand Government: Estimate of Probable Expenditure 18451846, Auckland 1845
New Zealand Government: First and Second Report of the Civil Service Commission, AJHR, D-7 and D-7A, Wellington 1866
New Zealand Government: Gaols Committee. Report on charges Against the Police, AJHR, I-4A, Wellington 1878
New Zealand Government: Gazettes
533
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
New Zealand Government: Journals and Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives
New Zealand Government: Journals and Appendices to the Journals of the Legislative Council
New Zealand Government: Manual of Rules and Regulations for the Guidance of the Armed Constabulary Force of New Zealand, Wellington 1869
New Zealand Government: Minutes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council of New Zealand, Session 11, Auckland 1843; Session 111, Auckland 1844
New Zealand Government: New Zealand Police Gazette
New Zealand Government: Officers of the General Government, 1861, Auckland 1861
New Zealand Government: Ordinances of the Legislative Council 18411853, Wellington 1871
New Zealand Government: Parliamentary Debates
New Zealand Government; The Police Act, and Regulations For the Guidance of the Police Force of New Zealand, Wellington 1887
New Zealand Government: The Police Force Act, 1913, Police Force Amendment Act, 1919, and Regulations Made Thereunder, For the Guidance of the Police Force of New Zealand, Wellington 1920
New Zealand Government: Police Force of New Zealand (Report and Evidence of the Royal Commission on the), AJHR, H-2, Wellington 1898
New Zealand Government: Police Force of New Zealand (Report and Evidence of the Royal Commission on the), AJHR, H-168, Wellington 1909
New Zealand Government; Regulations for the Guidance of the Police Force of New Zealand, Wellington 1913
New Zealand Government; Rules and Regulations of the Constabulary Force of New Zealand, Wellington 1852
New Zealand Government: Statistics of the Dominion of New Zealand for the Year 1920, vol IV, Wellington 1922
New Zealand Government: Statutes
New Zealand Government; Statutory Regulations
New Zealand Police; Bulletins
Otago Provincial Government: Acts and Proceedings/Votes and Proceedings, Gazettes, Ordinances, Police Gazettes
Otago Provincial Government: Manual of Police Regulations for the Guidance of the Constabulary Force of Otago, New Zealand, Dunedin 1865
Southland Provincial Government: Gazettes, Ordinances, Votes and Proceedings
Taranaki Provincial Government; Gazettes, Ordinances
Victoria Government: Manual of Police Regulations for the Guidance of the Constabulary of Victoria, Melbourne 1856
Select Bibliography
534
Wellington Provincial Government: Gazettes, Votes and Proceedings
Westland County Council: Gazettes, Journals of Proceedings
Westland Provincial Government: Gazettes, Journals of Proceedings
3. Newspapers and Journals
Auckland Chronicle
Auckland Standard
Auckland Times
Auckland Weekly News
Australia and New Zealand Gazette
Bruce Herald
The Bulletin (NZ Police)
Canterbury Times
Colonist
Daily Southern Cross
Daily Telegraph (Dunedin)
Daily Telegraph (Napier)
Dominion
Dominion Sunday Times
Eastern Post [British Library]
Economic Journal
Evening Post
Evening Standard
Evening Star
Fair Play
Gisborne Herald
Grey River Argus
Hawera Star
Hawke’s Bay Herald
Hawke's Bay Times
Industrial Unionist
International Police Association Journal (NZ)
Kumara Times
Lyttelton Times
Manawatu Standard
Maoriland Worker
Marlborough Express
Marlborough News
Marlborough Press
Nelson Examiner
New Zealand Advertiser and Bay of Islands Gazette
New Zealand Colonist and Port Nicholson Advertiser
New Zealand Free Lance
New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator
New Zealand Herald
535
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
New Zealand Herald and Auckland Gazette
New Zealand Journal
New Zealand Listener
New Zealand Police Association Newsletter
New Zealand Police Journal
New Zealand Spectator & Cook's Straits Guardian
New Zealand Times
New Zealand Truth
New Zealand Worker
New Zealander
Opunake Times
Otago Colonist
Otago Daily Times
Otago Punch
Otago Witness
The Plainsman
Poverty Bay Herald
The Press
Public Service (Association) Journal
Southern Cross
Southern News
Southern Standard
Southland News
Southland Times
Sun
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser
Taranaki Herald
Taranaki News
Thames Star
Timaru Herald
Waikato Times
Wanganui Chronicle
Weekly Graphic and New Zealand Mail
Wellington Independent
West Coast Times
Westport Evening Star
Westport News
Westport Times
4. Interviews
Richard Allan, J Brown (interviewed by F McMorran), Willis Brown, Arnold Butterworth, Creighton Chesnutt, Thomas Collins, Sister Dympna (Theresa Cullen), Jim Cummings (interviewed by G Anderson), Mrs L Dalgety, David Holmes, James McClennan, Mrs J McGuire, Mrs E Mcßae, W R Murray (interviewed by G Dunstall), William O'Donnell,
Select Bibliography
536
R Patterson (interviewed by F McMorran), James Skinner, Thomas Smith, Mrs J Winn
B. SECONDARY SOURCES
1. Books, Pamphlets, etc.
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r-vv. laiiu, i-, vj . if ic ly \-,uruc.i urn y i\nrij, i s Adams, Peter: Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand 1830-1847, Auckland 1977
Alderson, John; Policing Freedom, Plymouth 1979
Alexander, James Edward: Bush Fighting, London 1873
Alington, Margaret H: Unquiet Earth, Wellington 1978
Allan, Ruth: Nelson: A History of Early Settlement, Wellington 1965
Allingham, Anne: Taming the Wilderness, Townsville 1977
Alpers, O T J: Cheerful Yesterdays , Hamilton 1928 (1951 edition)
Amos, Maurice: British Criminal Justice, London 1940 (1957 edition)
Andersen, Johannes C; Jubilee History of South Canterbury, Auckland 1916
Andersen, J C and Petersen, G C: The Mair Family, Wellington 1956
Anderson, Robert: The Lighter Side of My Official Life, London 1910
‘An Ex C M R’: With the Cape Mounted Rifles, London 1881
Ankama, Silvester Kwadwo: Police History: Some Aspects in England and Ghana , Ilford 1983
Archer, Peter: The Queen’s Courts, London 1956
Armitage, Gilbert: The History of the Bow Street Runners 1729-1829, London [c. 1935]
Arnold, Rollo: The Farthest Promised Land, Wellington 1981
Ascoli, David: The Queen’s Peace, London 1979
Auckland Police: Souvenir of Auckland Police Athletic Carnival, Auckland 1917
Avery, John; Police - Force or Service?, Sydney 1981
Ay son, William: Pioneering in Otago , Dunedin 1937
Babington, Anthony: A House in Bow Street: Crime and the Magistracy: London 1740-1881, London 1969
Bagnall, A G: Wairarapa: An Historical Excursion, Masterton 1976
Bailey, J L: The Nelson Directory and Companion to the Almanack for 1859, Nelson 1859
Bailey, Victor (editor): Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, London 1981
Baker, Paul: King and County Call, Auckland 1988
Balbus, Isaac D: The Dialectics of Legal Repression, New York 1973
Baldwin, John and Bottoms, A E: The Urban Criminal, London 1976
Banton, Michael: The Policeman in the Community, London 1964
Barr, J: The Old Identities, Dunedin 1879
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Barton, J R (editor): Earliest New Zealand: The Journals and Correspondence of the Rev. John Butler, Masterton 1927
Bassett, Judith: Sir Harry Atkinson, Auckland 1975
Bassett, Michael: Sir Joseph Ward, Auckland 1993
Bathgate, Alexander: Colonial Experiences: Sketches of People and Places in the Province of Otago, New Zealand, Glasgow 1874
Beaglehole, J C: Captain Hobson and the New Zealand Company: A Study in Colonial Administration, Northampton (Mass) 1928
Beaglehole, J C: The Life of Captain James Cook, London 1974
Beaglehole, J C (editor): The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768-1771, Cambridge 1968
Beale, G C: Seventy Years In and Around Auckland, Dunedin [1937]
Beard, Charles Austin: The Office of Justice of Peace in England, New York 1904
Beattie, James Herries: The Pioneers Explore Otago, Dunedin 1947
Becker, Harold K: Police Systems of Europe, Springfield 1973 (2nd edition, 1980)
Beer, Eric and Gascoigne, Alwyn: Plough of the Pakeha, Cambridge 1975
Belcher, Trevor and Osborne, John: Armstrong and Coehorn Affair, Te Awanga 1990
Belich, James: ‘lShall Not Die’: Titokowaru’s War, New Zealand, 1868-9, Wellington 1989
Belich, James: The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Auckland 1986
Bennett, Francis: Tairua, Pauanui 1986
Bidwill, John Came: Rambles in New Zealand, London 1841
Binney, Judith: The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall, Auckland 1968
Binney, Judith; Bassett, Judith; Olssen, Erik: The People and the Land/ Te Tangata me Te Whenua, Wellington 1990
Binney, Judith; Chaplin, Gillian; Wallace, Craig: Mihaia: The Prophet Rua Kenana and his Community at Maungapohatu, Wellington 1979
Bittner, Egon: The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, Rockville 1970
Bloomfield, G T: New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics, Boston (Mass) 1984
Bocock, Robert: Hegemony, Chichester/London 1986
Boese, Kay: Tides of History: Bay of Islands County, Whangarei 1977
Bollinger, Conrad: Against the Wind, Wellington 1968
Bollinger, Conrad: Grog’s Own Country, Auckland 1959 (1967 edition)
Bonger, William: Criminality and Economic Conditions, Boston 1916 (1969 edition, edited by A T Turk, Bloomington)
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Bordua, David J (editor): The Police: Six Sociological Essays, New York 1967
Bomstein, Stephen; Held, David; Krieger, Joel (editors); The State in Capitalist Europe, London 1984
Bottomore, Tom and Goode, Patrick (editors): Readings in Marxist Sociology, Oxford 1983
Bowden, Tom; Beyond the Limits of the Law, Harmondsworth 1978
Brady, Conor; Guardians of the Peace, Dublin 1974
Brayshaw, Norman H: Canvas and Gold, Blenheim 1964
Brennan, Martin: Reminiscences of the Gold Fields , Sydney 1907
Brereton, Cyprian Bridge: Vanguard of the South, Wellington 1952
Broad, Lowther; The Jubilee History of Nelson from 1842 to 1892, Nelson 1892
Brodie, Walter: Remarks on the Past and Present State of New Zealand, London 1845
Broeker, Galen: Rural Disorder and Police Reform in Ireland, 1812-36, London 1970
Brogden, Michael: The Police: Autonomy and Consent, London 1982
Brookes, Edwin Stanley: Frontier Life: Taranaki, New Zealand, Auckland 1892
Brooking, Tom; And Captain of their Souls, Dunedin 1984
Brown, William A: New Zealand and its Aborigines, London 1845
Buick, T Lindsay: The French at Akaroa, Wellington 1928
Buick, T Lindsay: Old Manawatu, Palmerston North 1903
Buick, T Lindsay: Old Marlborough, Palmerston North 1900
Buller, James; Forty Years in New Zealand, London 1878
Bunbury, T: Reminiscences of a Veteran, vol 111, London 1861
Bunyan, Tony; The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain, London 1976
Burdon, R M: King Dick, Christchurch 1955
Burnett, RIM: Executive Discretion and Criminal Justice: The Prerogative of Mercy: New Zealand 1840-1853, Wellington 1977
Burnett, RIM: Penal Transportation: An Episode in New Zealand History, Wellington 1978
Bumey, Elizabeth: J.P.: Magistrate, Court and Community, London 1979
Bums, Patricia: Te Rauparaha: A New Perspective, Wellington 1980
Burton, David (editor): Confessions of Richard Burgess: The Maungatapu Murders and other Grisly Tales, Wellington 1983
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Butterworth, G V and Young, H R: Maori Affairs/Nga Take Maori, Wellington 1990
Byron, Ken (editor); ‘Guilty Wretch That I Am’, Melbourne 1984 Cain, Maureen E; Society and the Policeman's Role, London 1973
Cameron, Neil and Young, Warren (editors): Policing at the Crossroads, Wellington 1986
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Campbell, James S; Sahid, Joseph R; Stang, David P: Law and Order Reconsidered, Washington nd
Campbell, M D N: Story of Napier 1874-1974, Napier 1975
Carle, C J: Gateway to the Wairarapa, Featherston 1957
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Carman, A H: The Birth of a City, Wellington 1970
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Carr, Margaret: Policing in the Mountain Shadow, New Plymouth 1989
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Carrington, C E: John Robert Godley of Canterbury, Christchurch 1950
Carson, Kit and Davison, Yvonne: The Longest Beat, Greymouth 1990
Carson, W H: The Kaiwarra Mystery and More Famous Trials, Wellington 1935
Carter, Ray: ‘Beyond the Call of Duty’: A History of the Palmerston North Police District, Palmerston North 1988
Cash, Martin: The Bushranger of Van Diemen’s Land, Hobart 1870
Catran, Ken: Hanlon: A Casebook, Wellington 1985
Center for Research on Criminal Justice: The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, Berkeley 1975
Chambers, W A: Samuel Ironside in New Zealand 1839-1858, Auckland 1982
Chapman, Brian: Police State, London 1970
Chapman, Robert and Sinclair, Keith (editors): Studies of a Small Democracy, Auckland 1963
Chappell, D and Wilson, P R: The Police and The Public in Australia and New Zealand, St Lucia 1969
Cherrett, Owen J: Without Fear or Favour, [Auckland] 1989
Chibnall, Steve: Law-and-Order News, London 1977
Chisholm, Jocelyn: Brind of the Bay of Islands, Wellington 1979
Christoffel, Paul; Censored: A Short History of Censorship in New Zealand, Wellington 1989
Clark, Paul: ‘ Hauhau': The Pai Marire Search for Maori Identity, Auckland 1975
Clarke, George: Notes on Early Life in New Zealand, Hobart 1903
Clarke, R V G and Hough, J M (editors): The Effectiveness of Policing, Famborough 1980
Climie, N S and Staples, G: Karangahake: The Years of the Gold 18751935, Whakatane 1983
Clune, Frank: Murders on Maunga-tapu, Sydney 1959
Clyne, Robert: Colonial Blue: A History of the South Australian Police Force, 1836-1916, Adelaide 1987
Coalman, John: Police, London 1959
Cohen, Stanley and Scull, Andrew (editors): Social Control and the Slate, Oxford 1983
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Coleman, John Noble: A Memoir of the Rev. Richard Davis, London 1865
Collins, Hugh: Marxism and Law, Oxford 1984
Colquhoun, P: A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, London 1795 (facsimile of 7th edition, 1806)
Connell, R W and Irving, T H: Class Structure in Australian History, Melbourne 1980
Connolly, William (editor): Legitimacy and the State, Oxford 1984
Cooper, Theophilus: A Digger's Diary at the Thames, 1867, Dunedin 1978
Cousins, Mark and Hussain, Athar: Michel Foucault, Basingstoke 1984
Cowan, James: The New Zealand Wars, 2 vols, Wellington 1922 (1955 edition)
Cowan, James: Sir Donald Maclean, Dunedin 1940
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Cox, Charles Percy: Personal Notes and Reminiscences of an Early Canterbury Settler, Christchurch 1915
Craig, E W G: Destiny Well Sown, Whakatane 1985
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Critchley, T A: The Conquest of Violence: Order and Liberty in Britain, London 1970
Critchley, T A: A History of Police in England and Wales, 900-1966, London 1967 (1978 edition)
Crowhurst, T E: Life and Adventures in New Zealand, Auckland nd
Crowley, Frank (editor): A Documentary History of Australia, Volume I: Colonial Australia 1788-1840, Melbourne 1980
Crowley, Frank (editor): A Documentary History of Australia, Volume 11. Colonial Australia 1841-1874, Melbourne 1980
Cruise, Richard A; Journal of a Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand, London 1823 (1957 edition Christchurch, edited by A G Bagnall)
Curtis, R; The History of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Dublin 1871
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Dalziel, Raewyn: Julius Vogel, Auckland 1986
Davey, B J: Lawless and Immoral, Leicester 1983
Davis, Kenneth Culp: Discretionary Justice, Baton Rouge 1969
Davis, Richard P: Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics 1868-1922, Dunedin 1974
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Davison, Graeme; Dunstan, David; McConville, Chris (editors): The Outcasts of Melbourne, Sydney 1985
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De Jasay, Anthony: The State , Oxford 1985
Denoon, Donald: Settler Capitalism, Oxford 1983
Devlin, J Daniel; Police Procedure, Administration and Organisation, London 1966
Dilnot, George: The Story of Scotland Yard, London nd
Dinnie, Walter: Observations by the Commissioner of Police on the Report of the Royal Commission dated 18th October, 1909, Wellington 1909
Donajgrodzki, A P (editor): Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain, London 1977
Downes, T H: Old Whanganui, Hawera 1915
Draper, Hilary: Private Police, Hassocks 1978
Dreaver, A J: Horowhenua County and its People, Palmerston North 1984
Duff, Oliver: New Zealand Now, Wellington 1941 (3rd edition, London 1956)
Dyne, Dudley G: Famous New Zealand Murders, Auckland 1969
Earle, Augustus: Narrative of a Residence in New Zealand , London 1832 (1966 edition Oxford, edited by E H McCormick)
Eccles, Alfred: The Old Identities: Early History of Otago, Dunedin 1931
Eccles, Alfred: Records of Early Days, Dunedin 1929
Ehrman, John: The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition, London 1983
Ehrman, John: The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim, London 1969
Elder, John Rawson (editor): The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden 1765-1838, Dunedin 1932
Elder, John Rawson (editor): Marsden’s Lieutenants, Dunedin 1934
Eldred-Grigg, Stevan: A New History of Canterbury, Dunedin 1982
Eldred-Grigg, Stevan: Pleasures of the Flesh, Wellington 1984 mmro m I *n rr rr Vtairon* A \ I /) H f s ■« , • / i„l, 1
Eldred-Gngg, Stevan:y4 Southern Gentry: New Zealanders who Inherited the Earth , Wellington 1980
Elsmore, Bronwyn: Like Them That Dream, Tauranga 1985
Elsmore, Bronwyn: Mana From Heaven, Tauranga 1989
Emsley, Clive: Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900, London 1987
Emsley, Clive: Policing and its Context 1750-1870, London 1983
Fairburn, Miles: The Ideal Society and its Enemies, Auckland 1989
Paris, Irwin: Charleston: Its Rise and Decline, Wellington 1941
Featon, John: The Waikato War, 1863-4, Auckland 1879
Field, Michael; Mau, Wellington 1984
Fine, Bob; Kinsey, Richard; Lea, John; Picciotto, Sol; Young, Jock (editors): Capitalism and The Rule of Law, London 1979
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Finnane, Mark (editor): Policing in Australia: Historical Perspectives, Kensington (NSW) 1987
Flynn, Edith Elisabeth and Conrad, John P (editors): The New and the Old Criminology, New York 1978
Foden, N A: The Constitutional Development of New Zealand in the First Decade (1839-1849), Wellington 1938
Foden, N A: New Zealand Legal History (1642 to 1842), Wellington 1965
Fosdick, Raymond B: European Police Systems, New York 1915
Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish, New York 1977
Fox, William: The Six Colonies of New Zealand , London 1851
Francis, John T: Lives of Romance: A True Novel , London 1914
Fry, E C (editor): Tom Barker and the 1.W.W., Canberra 1965
Galbraith, John Kenneth: The Anatomy of Power, Boston 1983
Gardner, W J: The Amuri: A County History, Culverden 1956
Gardner, W J (editor): A History of Canterbury, vol 11, Christchurch 1971
Gascoyne, F J W: Soldiering in New Zealand, London 1916
Gash, Norman: Peel, London 1976
Gee, David: The Devil’s Own Brigade: A History of the Lyttelton Gaol 1860-1920, Wellington 1975
Gee, David: Poison: The Coward’s Weapon, Christchurch 1985
Gibbons, P J; Astride the River: A History of Hamilton, Hamilton 1977
Giddens, Anthony: A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Volume I: Power, Property and the State, London 1981
Giddens, Anthony: The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge 1985
Gifford, W H and Williams, H Bradney: A Centennial History of Tauranga, Dunedin 1940
Gilkison, Robert: Early Days in Central Otago, Dunedin 1930
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Gillespie, O A; South Canterbury: A Record of Settlement, Timaru 1958 (1971 edition)
Gilson, Richard: The Cook Islands 1820-1950, Wellington 1980
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Glasson, H A: The Golden Cobweb: A Saga of the Otago Goldfields, 1861-64, Dunedin 1957
Glen, Frank: For Glory and a Farm, Whakatane 1984
Glynn, J F: The New Zealand Policeman: The Developing Role of the New Zealand Police, Wellington 1975
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Godley, John R (editor): Letters from Early New Zealand by Charlotte Godley 1850-1853, Christchurch 1951
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Goldman, Lazarus Morris: The History of the Jews in New Zealand, Wellington 1958
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Goodway, David: London Chartism 1838-1848, Cambridge 1982
Gorst, J E: The Maori King, London 1864 (1959 edition London, edited by K Sinclair)
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Gough, lan: The Political Economy of the Welfare State, London 1979
Grabosky, Peter N: Sydney in Ferment, Canberra 1977
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Grady, Don: Guards of the Sea, Christchurch 1978 Graham, Jeanine: Frederick Weld, Auckland 1983
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Greymouth Borough Council; Greymouth: The First 100 Years, 18681968, Greymouth 1968
Griffiths, G J: King Wakatip, Dunedin 1971
Griffiths, Percival: To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police, London 1971
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Grover, Ray: Cork of War, Dunedin 1982
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Gudgeon, Thomas Wayth: Reminiscences of the War in New Zealand, London 1879
Gurr, Ted Robert; Grabosky, Peter N; Hula, Richard C (editors): The Politics of Crime and Conflict, Beverly Hills 1977
Hain, Peter (editor); Policing the Police, vol I, London 1979
Haldane, Robert: The People’s Force: A History of the Victoria Police, Melbourne 1986
Hall, Stuart; Critcher, Chas; Jefferson, Tony; Clarke, John; Roberts, Brian: Policing the Crisis, London 1978
Hall, T D H: Captain Joseph Nias and the Treaty ofWaitangi, Wellington 1938
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Hargrave, Adam: Police Work From Within, London [c. 1913]
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Harrop, A J: England and the Maori Wars, London 1937
Hay, Douglas; Linebaugh, Peter; Rule, John G; Thompson, E P; Winslow, Cal (editors): Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in EighteenthCentury England, Harmondsworth 1975
Hay, James: Reminiscences of Earliest Canterbury (Principally Bank's Peninsula) and its Settlers, Christchurch 1915
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Hermans, R T: Capital Coppers, Wellington 1985
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Hewitt, Eric J: A History of Policing in Manchester, Didsbury 1979
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Hight, James and Bamford, H D: The Constitutional History and Law of New Zealand, Christchurch 1914
Hight, James and Straubel, C R (editors): A History of Canterbury, vol I, Christchurch 1957
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Historical Records of Australia, 1914f, Series I, vols V, VII, IX, X, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX
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Holcroft, M H: The Line of the Road: A History of Manawatu County 1876-1976, Dunedin 1977
Holcroft, M H: Old Invercargill, Dunedin 1976
Holdaway, Simon (editor): The British Police, London 1979
Holdaway, Simon: Inside the British Police: A Force at Work, Oxford 1983
Holland, H E: Armageddon or Calvary, Wellington 1919
Holland, H E; Ross, R S; ‘Ballot Box’; The Tragic Story of the Waihi Strike, Wellington 1913
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Holt, Edgar: The Strangest War, London 1962
Holt, James: Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand: The First Forty Years, Auckland 1986
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Horsman, John: The Coming of the Pakeha to Auckland Province , Wellington 1971
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Howe, K R: Singer in a Songless Land: A Life of Edward Tregear 18461931, Auckland 1991
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Hyde, Robin: Passport to Hell, London 1936
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Isdale, Alistair (editor): Hauraki Chronicle, Thames nd
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Jefferson, Tony and Grimshaw, Roger: Controlling the Constable, London 1984
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Jones, Gareth Stedman: Outcast London, Oxford 1971
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Keenan, N J: The History of a Small Town Police Station, Hawera 1982
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Kennington, A L: The Awatere: A District and its People. Blenheim 1978
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uotu. uuiwn.c, mtiuuui nc i y i i King, Michael: Moriori, Auckland 1989
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Lawrence, R M: Police Review 1829-1979, Perth 1979
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Lee, Jack: Hokianga, Auckland 1987
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Lee, W L Melville; A History of the Police in England, London 1901
Lennard, Maurice: Motuarohia, Auckland 1959
Levi, J S and Bergman, G F J: Australian Genesis: Jewish Convicts and Settlers 1788-1850, Adelaide 1974
Lingard, F: Prison Labour in New Zealand, Wellington 1936
Littlejohn, Garry; Smart, Barry; Wakeford, John; Yuval-Davis, Nira (editors): Power and the State, London 1978
Lobban, R D: The Police, London 1976
Lock, Joan: The British Policewoman, London 1979
Locke, Elsie: The Gaoler, Palmerston North 1978
Locke, John: 7vvo Treatises of Government (edited by Peter Laslett), Cambridge 1960
Longley, H G; The New Zealand Wars 1845-1866, Auckland nd
Lummis, William M and Wynn, Kenneth G: Honour the Light Brigade, London 1973
Lustgarten, Laurence: The Governance of Police, London 1986
Lyons, F S L; Ireland Since the Famine, London 1971
McBamet, Doreen J: Conviction: Law, the State and the Construction of Justice , London 1981
McCarthy, Dairy: The First Fleet of Auckland, Auckland 1978
McCaskill, Murray (editor): Land and Livelihood, Christchurch 1962
McConville, Sean; A History of English Prison Administration: Volume I, 1750-1877 , London 1981
Mac Donald, C A: Pages from the Past, Blenheim [1933]
Macdonald, Charlotte; Penfold, Merimeri; Williams, Bridget (editors): The Book of New Zealand Women/Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa, Wellington 1991
Mac Donald, Colin H: The Story of the Napier Police District, Napier 1986
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
547
McDonald, K C: White Stone Country, Oamaru 1962
Macfarlane, Alan: The Justice and the Mare’s Ale, Oxford 1981
McGill, David: No Right to Strike, Wellington [1992]
Macgregor, Miriam: Pioneer Trails of Hawke’s Bay, Wellington 1975
Mclntosh, A D (editor): Marlborough: A Provincial History, Blenheim 1940
Mclntosh, Mary: The Organisation of Crime, London 1975
Mclntyre, W David (editor): The Journal of Henry Sewell 1853-7, 2 vols, Christchurch 1980
Mclntyre, W David and Gardner, W J (editors): Speeches and Documents on New Zealand History, Oxford 1971
Mack, Mary P: Jeremy Bentham, London 1962
Mackay, Joseph Angus: Historic Poverty Bay and the East Coast, N. 1., N.Z., Gisborne 1949
McKillop, H F: Reminiscences of Twelve Months ’ Service in New Zealand, London 1849
Maclean, F S: Challenge For Health, Wellington 1964
McLean, Gavin: The Southern Octopus, Wellington 1990
Macleod, Nellie F H: Fighting Man: A Study of the Life and Times ofT.E. Taylor, Christchurch 1964
McLinlock, A H: Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, Wellington 1958
McLintock, A H (editor): An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, 3 vols, Wellington 1966
McLintock, A H; The History of Otago, Dunedin 1949
McNab, Robert: From Tasman to Marsden, Dunedin 1914
McNab, Robert: Murihiku and the Southern Islands, Invercargill 1909
McNab, Robert: The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840 , Dunedin 1913 (1975 edition Auckland)
McNab, Robert (editor): Historical Records of New Zealand, 2 vols, Wellington, 1908, 1914
Macnaghten, M L: Days of My Years, London 1915 (2nd impression)
McNeish, James: The Mackenzie Affair, Auckland 1972
Maddock, Shirley; These Antipodes, Auckland 1979
Maitland, F W: Justice and Police, London 1885
Maning, F E: Old New Zealand, London 1887 (1973 edition Auckland)
Manning, Peter K: Police Work: The Social Organization of Policing, Cambridge (Mass) 1977
Manson, Cecil and Manson, Celia: The Affair of the Wellington Brig, Wellington 1978
Manson, Cecil and Manson, Celia; Tides of Hokianga, Wellington 1956
Marais, J S: The Colonisation of New Zealand, Oxford 1927
Mark, Robert: Policing a Perplexed Society , London 1977
Markham, Edward: New Zealand or Recollections of It, edited by E H McCormick, Wellington 1963
Marsh, Ngaio: Black Beech and Honeydew, Auckland 1966
Select Bibliography
548
Marshall, Geoffrey; Police and Government: The Status and Accountability of the English Constable, London 1965
Marshall, William Barrett: A Personal Narrative of Two Visits to New Zealand, London 1837
Martin, J E: Tatau Tatau - One Big Union Altogether, Christchurch 1987
Martin, J P and Wilson, Gail; The Police: A Study in Manpower, London 1969
Martin, S M D; New Zealand; In a Series of Letters, London 1845
Mather, F C; Public Order in the Age of the Chartists, Manchester 1959
Matthews, Charles E: Evolution of the New Zealand Prison System, Wellington 1923
Maxwell, J G and Bates, Arthur P: The Wanganui Story, Wanganui 1972
May, Philip Ross: Gold Town, Christchurch 1970
May, Philip Ross: Hokitika: Goldfields Capital, Christchurch 1964
May, Philip Ross; The West Coast Gold Rushes, Christchurch 1962 (1967 edition)
Mayhew, W R; Tuapeka: The Land and its People, Christchurch 1949
Metropolitan Police Force: Instruction Book for the Government and Guidance of the Metropolitan Police Force, London 1893
Mikaere, Buddy: Te Maiharoa and the Promised Land, Auckland 1988
Miliband, Ralph; Capitalist Democracy in Britain, Oxford 1982
Miliband, Ralph; The State in Capitalist Society, London 1969
Miller, F W G: Golden Days of Lake County, Christchurch 1949 (1973 edition)
Miller, Harold: Race Conflict in New Zealand, 1814-1865, Auckland 1966
Miller, J Halket: Beyond the Marble Mountain: Tales of Early Golden Bay, Motueka and Nelson, Nelson 1948
Miller, J Halket: Death Round the Bend, Nelson nd
Miller, John: Early Victorian New Zealand, Wellington 1958 (1974 edition)
Miller, Wilbur R: Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London 1830-70, Chicago 1977
Milte, Kerry L: Police in Australia: Development, Functions and Procedures, Sydney 1977
Milton, Frank: The English Magistracy, London 1967
Moir, Esther: The Justice of the Peace, Harmondsworth 1969
Moloney, Dan: The History of Addison’s Flat Gold Fields, Westport 1923
Money, Charles: Knocking About in New Zealand, Melbourne 1871
Monigatti, Rex: New Zealand Sensations, Wellington 1962
Monkkonen, Eric H: Police in Urban America, 1860-1920, Cambridge 1981
Mooney, Kay: History of the County of Hawke’s Bay, 2 vols, Napier 1973, 1974
Morrell, W P: The Gold Rushes, London 1940
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
549
Morrell, W P: The Provincial System in New Zealand, 1852-1876, Christchurch 1964
Morris, Pauline and Heal, Kevin: Crime Control and the Police: A Review of Research, London 1981
Morrison, J P: The Evolution of a City, Christchurch 1948
Morton, Harry: The Whale’s Wake, Dunedin 1982
Mosse, George L (editor): Police Forces in History, London 1975
Muir, William Ker: Police: Streetcorner Politicians, Chicago 1977
Mundy, Godfrey Charles: Our Antipodes, vol 11, London 1852
Munz, Peter (editor): The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, Wellington 1969
Murray, J S and Murray, R W: Costly Gold, Wellington nd
Muter, Elizabeth: Travels and Adventures of an Officer’s Wife in India, China and New Zealand, London 1864
Naim, Bede (editor): Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol VI Melbourne 1976
Naim, Bede and Serle, Geoffrey (editors): Australian Dictionary of Biography, vols VII-X, Melbourne 1979-86
Neale, June E: The Nelson Police, Nelson 1986
New South Wales Police Force: A Centenary History of the New South Wales Police Force 1862-1962, Sydney nd
New Zealand Police Association: Rules of the New Zealand Police Association, Auckland [1913]
Newman, S F and Thomson, lan: Mackenzie: Man and Myth, Wellington 1978
Niederhoffer, Arthur: Behind the Shield: The Police in Urban Society, Garden City 1967
Nolan, Tony: Gold Trails of the West Coast, Wellington 1975
Nolan, Tony: Historic Gold Trails of the Coromandel, Wellington 1977
Nolan, Tony: Historic Gold Trails of Nelson and Marlborough, Wellington 1976
Norris, H C M: Armed Settlers: The Story of the Founding of Hamilton, New Zealand, 1864-1874, Hamilton 1956 (1963 edition)
Nott-Bower, William: Fifty-Two Years a Policeman, London 1926
O’Brien, G M: The Australian Police Forces, Melbourne 1960
O’Byrne, William E: A Naval Biographical Dictionary, London 1849
Ogilvie, Elisabeth: Purau, Christchurch 1970
O’Hara, C R; Northland Made to Order, Whangarei 1986
O’Hegarty, P S; A History of Ireland Under the Union 1801 to 1922, London 1952
Oliver, W H: The Story of New Zealand, London 1960
Oliver, W H (editor): The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol I, Wellington 1990
Oliver, W H (editor): The Oxford History of New Zealand, Wellington 1981
Select Bibliography
550
Oliver, W H and Thomson, Jane M: Challenge and Response: A Study of the Development of the Gisborne East Coast Region , Gisborne 1971
Ollivier, Isabel and Hingley, Cheryl: Extracts from Journals Relating to the Visit to New Zealand of the French Ship St Jean Baptiste in December 1769 Under the Command ofJ.F.M. de Surville, Wellington 1982
Olssen, Erik: A History of Otago, Dunedin 1984
Olssen, Erik: The Red Feds , Auckland 1988
O’Malley, Pat: Law. Capitalism and Democracy , Sydney 1983
O’Neill, Judith: Transported to Van Diemen’s Land, Cambridge 1977
Orange, Claudia (editor): The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
[Organ, A W:] A New Zealand Jack Sheppard, Wellington 1912
Osborne, John: Carbines and Police in New Zealand 1840-1990, Te Awanga 1990
Osborne, John: Handguns and Police in New Zealand 1840-1990, Te Awanga 1990
O’Sullivan, John: Mounted Police in N.S.W., Adelaide 1979
Owens, J M R: Prophets in the Wilderness, Auckland 1974
Page, Kirk: A Tangled Web, Auckland 1982
Parekh, Bhikhu (editor): Jeremy Bentham: Ten Critical Essays, London 1974
Parham, W T; John Roberts, N.Z.C., Whakatane 1983
Parham, W T: Von Tempsky - Adventurer, London 1969
Pascoe, John: Explorers and Travellers, Wellington 1971 (1983 edition)
Felling, Henry: Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, London 1968
Pennock, J Roland and Chapman, John W (editors); Coercion, Chicago 1972
Perkin, Harold: The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880, London 1969
Perry, Stuart: The New Zealand Whisky Book, Auckland 1980
Petre, Henry William: An Account of the Settlements of the New Zealand Company, London 1842
Philips, David: Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835-1860, London 1977
Pike, Douglas: Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829-1857, London 1957
Pike, Douglas (editor); Australian Dictionary of Biography, vols I-V, Melbourne 1966-74
Pike, Michael S: The Principles of Policing, London 1985
Platt, Anthony and Cooper, Lynn (editors): Policing America, Englewood Cliffs 1974
Platts, Una: The Lively Capital: Auckland 1840-1865, Christchurch 1971
Pocock, J G A (editor): The Maori and New Zealand Politics, Auckland 1965
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
551
Polack, J S: New Zealand: Being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures, 2 vols, London 1838
Poster, Mark: Foucault, Marxism and History, Cambridge 1984
Pratt, John: Punishment in a Perfect Society, Wellington 1992
Preshaw, G O: Banking Under Difficulties, or Life on the Goldfields, Melbourne 1888
Punch, Maurice; Conduct Unbecoming: The Social Construction of Police Deviance and Control, London 1985
Pyke, Vincent: History of Early Gold Discoveries in Otago, Dunedin 1887
Quinney, Richard; Class State and Crime: On the Theory and Practice of Criminal Justice, New York 1977
Quinney, Richard (editor): Crime and Justice in Society, Boston 1969
Radzinowicz, Leon: A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, vols 11-IV, London 1956-68
Radzinowicz, Leon and Hood, Roger: A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, vol V, London 1986
Raeside, J D: Sovereign Chief, A Biography of Baron de Thierry, Christchurch 1977
Ramsay, A A W: Sir Robert Peel, London 1928
Ramsden, Eric: Busby ofWaitangi, Wellington 1942
Reed, A H; The Story of Hawke’s Bay, Wellington 1958
Reed, A H: The Story of Northland, Wellington 1956
Reed, A H (editor): Gabriel’s Gully and Dunedin in 1861, Wellington 1957
Reed, A H (editor): More Maoriland Adventures ofJ.W. Stack, Dunedin 1936
Reform Party: Reform Party Handbook, Wellington 1914
Reiner, Robert: The Blue-Coated Worker, Cambridge 1978
Reiner, Robert: The Politics of the Police , Brighton 1985
Reith, Charles: A New Study of Police History, London 1956
Report and Narrative of the Trial of Thomas Hall and Margaret Graham Houston, Charged With Attempting to Murder Kate Emily Hall, Christchurch 1886
Richards, E C; The Chatham Islands, Christchurch 1952
Richards, E C (editor): Diary ofE.R. Chudleigh, Christchurch 1950
Richardson, James F: The New York Police, New York 1970
Richardson, James F: Urban Police in the United Stales, New York 1974
Richardson, Len and Mclntyre, W David (editors): Provincial Perspectives, Christchurch 1980
Richter, Donald C: Riotous Victorians, Athens (Ohio) 1981
Rickard, L S: Tamihana: The Kingmaker , Wellington 1963
Ritchie, John (editor); The Evidence to the Bigge Reports, 2 vols, Melbourne 1971
Roach, John and Thomaneck, Jurgen: Police and Public Order in Europe, London 1985
Select Bibliography
552
[Roberts, Jonathan:] The Dictionary of Jonathan Roberts, Christchurch [1895]
Robson, J L (editor): New Zealand: The Development of its Laws and Constitution, London 1954 (1967 edition)
Roche, Stanley: The Red and the Gold, Auckland 1982
Rolleston, Rosamond; The Master: J.D. Ormond of Wallingford, Wellington 1980
Rorke, Jinty; Policing Two Peoples, Tauranga [1993]
Roshier, Bob and Teff, Harvey; Law and Society in England, London 1980
Ross, Ruth M: New Zealand’s First Capital, Wellington 1946
Roth, H: Trade Unions in New Zealand Past and Present, Wellington 1973
Roucek, Joseph S (editor): Sociology of Crime, New York 1961
Rude, George: The Crowd in History, London 1964 (1981 edition)
Rusche, Georg and Kirchheimer, Otto: Punishment and Social Structure, New York 1939
Rusden, G W: History of New Zealand, 2 vols, London 1883
Russell, T G (editor): Gazette Law Reports, 1916, Christchurch 1916
Rutherford, Alma M: The Inch, Balclutha 1958
Rutherford, J: Sir George Grey, London 1961
Rutherford, J (editor): The Founding of New Zealand: The Journals of Felton Mathew, Dunedin 1940
Rutherford, J and Skinner, W H: The Establishment of the New Plymouth Settlement in New Zealand 1841-1843, New Plymouth 1940 (1969 edition)
Sadleir, John: Recollections of a Victorian Police Officer, Melbourne 1913
St Johnston, Eric: One Policeman’s Story, Chichester 1978
Sale, E V: Historic Trails of the Far North, Wellington 1981
Salmon, J M H: A History of Goldmining in New Zealand, Wellington 1963
Saunders, Alfred: History of New Zealand, vol I, Christchurch 1896
Scarman, Lord: The Scarman Report, 1981 (1982 edition, Harmondsworth)
Schaffer, Evelyn B: Community Policing, London 1980
Scholefield, Guy H; Captain William Hobson, London 1934
Scholefield, Guy H: Notable New Zealand Statesmen: Twelve Prime Ministers, Christchurch [1946]
Scholefield, Guy H (editor): A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 2 vols, Wellington 1940
Scholefield, Guy H (editor): New Zealand Parliamentary Record, Wellington 1950
Scholefield, Guy H (editor); The Richmond-Atkinson Papers, 2 vols, Wellington 1960
Scott, Dick: Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka, Auckland 1975 (1981 edition)
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
553
Scott, Dick: Fire on the Clay: The Pakeha Comes to West Auckland, Auckland 1979
Scott, Dick: Inheritors of a Dream, Wellington 1962 (1969 edition)
Scott, Dick: Years of the Pooh-Bah, Auckland 1991
Scott, Henry: Reminiscences of a New Chum in Otago (New Zealand) In the Early 'Seventies, Timaru 1922
Scotter, W H: A History of Port Lyttelton, Christchurch 1968
Scraton, Phil: The State of the Police, London 1985
Seager, Madeleine: Edward William Seager: Pioneer of Mental Health, Waikanae 1987
Sellwood, A V: Police Strike - 1919, London 1978
Serle, Geoffrey: The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851-1861, Melbourne 1963
Seth, Ronald: The Specials: The Story of the Special Constabulary in England, Wales and Scotland, London 1961
Shane, Paul G: Police and People, St Louis 1980
Shaw, A G L; Convicts and the Colonies, London 1966
Shaw, John: A Tramp to the Diggings: Being Notes on a Ramble in Australia and New Zealand in 1852, London 1852
Shea, Patrick: Voices and The Sound of Drums, Belfast 1981
Sheehan, Jack R; The Lora Gorge Mystery and Other Famous Trials, Wellington 1935
Sherrin, R A A and Wallace, J H: Early History of New Zealand, Auckland 1890
Shortland, Edward: The Southern Districts of New Zealand, London 1851
Simpson, Tony: Shame and Disgrace: A History of Lost Scandals in New Zealand, Auckland 1992
Simpson, Tony: Te Riri Pakeha, Martinborough 1979
Sinclair, Keith: A History of New Zealand, London 1959 (1973 edition)
Sinclair, Keith: The Origins of the Maori Wars, Wellington 1957
Sinclair, Keith (editor): The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, Auckland 1990
Sinclair, Keith (editor): A Soldier’s View of Empire: The Reminiscences of James Bodell, 1831-92, London 1982
Sinclair, Keith and Mandle, W F: Open Account: A History of the Bank of New South Wales in New Zealand 1861-1961, Wellington 1961
Sinclair, R J K and Scully, F J M; Arresting Memories, Belfast nd
Singe, Miles and Thomson, David A: Authority to Protect, Dunedin 1992
Skolnick, Jerome H: Justice Without Trial, New York 1966
Smart, Maxwell J G and Bates, Arthur P: The Wanganui Story, Wanganui 1972
Smith, Phillip Thurmond: Policing Victorian London, Westport (Connecticut) 1985
Select Bibliography
554
Spencer, Herbert: Principles of Sociology, edited by Stanislav Andreski, London 1969
Spicer, Charles E: Policing the River District: The First 100 Years of the Wanganui Police, Wanganui 1988
Stafford, D M: Te Arawa, Wellington 1967
Standish, M W: The Waimate Mission Station, Wellington 1962
Stark, Rodney: Police Riots, Belmont 1972
Stead, P J: The Police of Britain, New York 1985
Steer, David: Police Cautions, Oxford 1970
Steintrager, James: Bentham, London 1977
Stephen, James Fitzjames: A History of the Criminal Law of England, 2 vols, London 1883
Stewart, William Downie: William Rolleston, Christchurch 1940
Stokes, Evelyn: A History of Tauranga County, Palmerston North 1980
Stokes, Evelyn: Pai Marire and the Niu at Kuranui, Hamilton 1980
Stone, R C J: Makers of Fortune, Auckland 1973
Stuart, W D: The Satyrs of Southland, Gore 1982
Surrey Constabulary: A Short Centenary History of the Surrey Constabulary, 1851-1951, Guildford nd
Sutch, W B: The Quest for Security in New Zealand, Wellington 1966
Swain, Des; Pawelka, Tauranga 1989
Swainson, William: New Zealand and its Colonization, London 1859
Swanton, Bruce; A Chronological Account of Crime, Public Order and Police in Sydney I788-I8I0, Phillip (ACT) 1983
Tapp, E J: Early New Zealand: A Dependency of New South Wales 17881841, Melbourne 1958
Tapsell, Enid: Historic Maketu, Rotorua 1940
Taylor, Ian: Law and Order, London 1981
Taylor, Nancy M (editor): The Journal of Ensign Best 1837-1843, Wellington 1966
Taylor, Richard: The Past and Present of New Zealand with its Prospects for the Future, London 1868
Taylor, T E: The Shadow of Tammany. The Truth About the New Zealand Police Force: Its Condition and its Needs, Christchurch [lB9B]
Taylor, W A: Banks Peninsula, Christchurch 1937 (1948 edition)
Thackrah, J R (editor): Contemporary Policing, London 1985
Thatcher, Charles: Thatcher's Canterbury Songster, Christchurch 1862
Thatcher, Charles; Thatcher's Dunedin Songster, Dunedin 1862
Thompson, E P: The Making of the English Working Class, London 1963
Thompson, E P: Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, London 1975
Thomson, Arthur S: The Story of New Zealand, London 1859 (1970 edition. New York)
Thomson, Barry and Neilson, Robert: Sharing the Challenge: A Social and Pictorial History of the Christchurch Police District, Christchurch 1989
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
555
Thomson, Basil: The Story of Scotland Yard, London 1935
Thomson, David A and Kagei, Hendrik: A Century of Service: A History of the South Canterbury and North Otago Police, Timaru 1987
Thorwald, Jurgen: The Marks of Cain, London 1965
Tilly, Louise A and Tilly, Charles (editors); Class Conflict and Collective Action, Beverly Hills 1981
Tobias, J J; Crime and Industrial Society in the 19th Century, London 1967
Tobias, J J: Nineteenth Century Crime, Newton Abbot 1972
Tod, Frank; The Making of a Madman, Dunedin 1977
Tolmer, Alexander: Reminiscences of An Adventurous and Chequered Career At Home and At The Antipodes, London 1882
Tonkin, LC: Cumberland St. Murder .... Dunedin 1979
Tonkin, L C: Robert Butler: Accused of Cumberland St. Murder 1880 Dunedin 1979
Tonkin, L C: Robert Butler: Aus. and N.Z. Criminal, Dunedin 1980
Travers, Robert: Rogues’ March: A Chronicle of Colonial Crime in Australia, Richmond 1973
Treadwell, CAL: Notable New Zealand Trials, New Plymouth 1936
Trollope, Anthony: Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne 1873
Tullett, J S: The Industrious Heart, New Plymouth 1981
Tullett, Tom: Strictly Murder, London 1979
Turnbull, Michael: The New Zealand Bubble, Wellington 1959
Turner, Henry Gyles: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 2 vols Melbourne 1904
Unstead, R J and Henderson, W F; Police in Australia, London 1973
Vance, William: High Endeavour: The Story of the Mackenzie Country Wellington 1965 (1980 edition)
Varwell, D W P: Police and the Public, Plymouth 1978
Vennell, C W: The Brown Frontier, Wellington 1967
Vennell, C W: Such Things Were, Dunedin 1939
Victoria Police Management Services Bureau: Police in Victoria 18361980, Melbourne 1980
Wade, William Richard: A Journey in the Northern Island of New Zealand, Hobart Town 1842
Wake, Theo: The Police Department: Its Demoralisation Demonstrated, Christchurch 1895
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon: The Founders of Canterbury, vol I, Christchurch 1868
Wakefield, Edward Jemingham: Adventure in New Zealand from 1839 to 1844, London 1845
Walker, Samuel: A Critical History of Police Reform, Lexington 1977
Walters, Brian; A History of the Waikato Police, Hamilton 1986
Ward, Alan; A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand, Auckland 1973
Ward, John M; British Policy in the South Pacific (1786-1893 ), Sydney 1948
Select Bibliography
556
Ward, Louis E: Early Wellington, Auckland [1929]
Ward, Russel: The Australian Legend, Melbourne 1958 (1965 edition)
Wards, Ian: The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand 1832-1852 , Wellington 1986
Webster, John: Reminiscences of an Old Settler in Australia and New Zealand, Christchurch 1908
Webster, Peter: Rua and the Maori Millenium, Wellington 1979
Weiner, Norman L: The Role of the Police in Urban Society: Conflicts and Consequences , Indianapolis 1976
Weisser, Michael R: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe, Hassocks 1979
Wells, B: The History of Taranaki, New Plymouth 1878
Westley, William A: Violence and the Police, Cambridge (Mass) 1970
Whitaker, Ben: The Police in Society , London 1979
Whitmore, George S: The Last Maori War in New Zealand, London 1902
Wicksteed, M R: The New Zealand Army, Wellington 1982
Wigram, Henry F: The Story of Christchurch New Zealand, Christchurch 1916
Williams, David: Keeping the Peace: The Police and Public Order, London 1967
Williams, J A: Politics of the New Zealand Maori, Auckland 1969
Williams, W L: East Coast (N.Z.) Historical Records, Gisborne nd
Wilson, Helen: My First Eighty Years, Hamilton 1950
Wilson, James G: Early Rangitikei, Christchurch 1914
Wilson, James G et al: History of Hawke’s Bay, Dunedin 1939
Wilson, John: Lost Christchurch, Christchurch, 1984
Wilson, John; Reminiscences of the Early Settlement of Dunedin and South Otago, Dunedin 1912
Wilson, Ormond: War in the Tussock, Wellington 1961
Wily, Henry ERL: South Auckland, Pukekohe 1939
Wood, G A: The Governor and his Northern House, Auckland 1975
Wood, June A: Gold Trails of Otago, Wellington 1970
Woodhouse, A E; George Rhodes of The Levels and his Brothers, Auckland 1937
Woon, James Garland; Wanganui Old Settlers, Wanganui 1902
Wright, Harrison M: New Zealand, 1769-1840: Early Years of Western Contact, Cambridge (Mass) 1959
Wrigley, E A (editor): Nineteenth-Century Society, Cambridge 1972
Yallop, David: Beyond Reasonable Doubt?, Auckland 1978
Yarwood, A T: Samuel Marsden, Melbourne 1977
Yeo, Eileen and Yeo, Stephen (editors): Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590-1914, Brighton 1981
Young, G M: Victorian England, London 1936 (1953 edition)
Young, Malcolm; An Inside Job, Oxford 1991
Young, Warren and Cameron, Neil: Issues in Policing: The 1980's, Wellington 1985
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2. Articles
(NB: In most instances there is no listing of articles in edited books that contain more than one article cited in the footnotes; these books are listed in section B1 of the bibliography)
Allen, Gregory: ‘The New Police: London and Dublin’, Police Journal, Oct-Dec 1977
Arlidge, Allan S: ‘Some Thoughts on the History of the Local Government of the Maori People’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, Sep 1980
Balbus, Isaac D: ‘Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the “Relative Autonomy” of the Law’, Law and Society, Winter 1977
Ballara, Angela: ‘Toia, Hone Riiwi’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Banton, Michael: ‘Police’, The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol XIV, Chicago 1977
Barber, Laurie; ‘Special Constables, 1913: Freyberg Was One’, New Zealand Army Journal, Dec 1987
Barber, Laurie: ‘The Waihi Strike of 1912’, New Zealand Law Journal, Feb 1983
Best, Elsdon: ‘Old Redoubts, Blockhouses and Stockades of the Wellington District’, Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, vol LIII, 1921
Bethune, Norma: ‘John and Mary Johnson of New Plymouth’, New Zealand Genealogist, 13, 1982
Binney, Judith: ‘Ani Kaaro, Maria Pangari, Remana Hane’, in Macdonald, Charlotte; Penfold, Merimeri; Williams, Bridget (editors). The Book of New Zealand Women, Wellington 1991
Binney, Judith: ‘Kaaro, Ani’, in Orange, Claudia (editor). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Binney, Judith; ‘Myth and Explanation in the Ringatu Tradition’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, Dec 1984
Binney, Judith: ‘Papahurihia: Some Thoughts on Interpretation’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, Sep 1966
Bordua, David J and Reiss, Alfred J: ‘Law Enforcement’, in Lazarsfeld, Paul F; Sewell, William H; Wilensky, Harold L (editors). The Uses of Sociology, London 1968
Brett, Henry and Leys, T W; ‘Historical Sketch of New Zealand’, in Garran, Andrew (editor), Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, vol 111, Sydney 1886 (1888 edition)
Brogden, Michael: ‘The Myth of Policing by Consent’, Police Review, 22 Apr 1983
Butterworth, G V: ‘Maori Gangs - A Forced Cultural Resurgence’, New Zealand Police Association Newsletter, Jan 1979
Butterworth, G V: ‘Policing an Increasingly Troubled, Divided Democracy’, National Business Review Outlook, Mar 1982
Select Bibliography
558
Campbell, R J: ‘The Role of the Police in the Waihi Strike: Some New Evidence’, Political Science, Dec 1974
Clyne, Robert; ‘At War With the Natives: From the Coorong to the Rufus’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 9, 1981
Congleton, Ann: ‘Two Kinds of Lawlessness’, Political Theory, Nov 1974
Cook, William: ‘Policemen in Society: Which Side Are They On?’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Summer 1967
Crawford, JAB: ‘Hume, Arthur’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Crawford, JAB: ‘Newall, Stuart’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Crawford, John: ‘Overt and Covert Military Involvement in the 1890 Maritime Strike and 1913 Waterfront Strike in New Zealand’, Labour History, May 1991
Creed, Philip: ‘John Gibson’, New Zealand Genealogist, Oct 1984
Creighton, J: ‘The Northwest Mounted Police of Canada’, Scribner’s Magazine, Oct 1893
Cull, Helen Ann: ‘The Enigma of a Police Constable’s Status’, Victoria University of Wellington Law Review, 8, 1975
Dobbie, Ray: ‘Akaroa and its Postal History’, The Mail Coach, Aug 1979
Dunstall, Graeme: ‘O’Donovan, John’, in Orange, Claudia (editor). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 111, forthcoming
Emsley, Clive: ‘“The Thump of Wood on a Swede Turnip”: Police Violence in Nineteenth-Century England’, Criminal Justice History, vol VI (1985)
Fairbum, Miles: ‘Local Community or Atomized Society? The Social Structure of Nineteenth-Century New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History, Oct 1982
Fairbum, Miles: ‘Vagrants, “Folk Devils” and Nineteenth Century New Zealand as a Bondless Society’, Historical Studies, vol XXI no 85, Oct 1985
Fairbum, Miles and Haslett, Stephen: ‘Violent Crime in Old and New Societies - A Case Study Based on New Zealand 1853-1940’, Journal of Social History, Fall 1986
Farrell, Fiona: ‘Bock, Amy Maud’, in Orange, Claudia (editor). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Fauvel, John: ‘Panopticon Years’, The Listener (UK), 31 Dec 1981
Finnane, Mark: ‘Police and Politics in Australia - The Case for Historical Revision’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Dec 1990
Foster, B J: ‘Zedlitz (-Neukirk), George William Edward Ernest von’, in A H McLintock (editor), An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, vol 111, Wellington 1966
Foulger, R E: ‘Building Colonial Police Forces’, Corona, Oct 1959
559
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Franklin, Joe: ‘Branigan’s Catch: Sergeant William Hanlon’, Journal of the Orders and Medals Research Society, Winter 1981
Franklin, J A: ‘The Long Service Medal Awarded to the N.Z. Police 1886-1976’, Journal of the Orders and Medals Research Society, vol XVI, 1977
Frost, Allan: ‘New South Wales as Terra Nullius: The British Denial of Aboriginal Land Rights’, Historical Studies, Oct 1981
Galliher, John F: ‘Explanations of Police Behaviour: A Critical Review and Analysis’, Sociological Quarterly, Summer 1971
Gammage, Bill: ‘Early Boundaries of New South Wales’, Historical Studies, Oct 1981
Gamson, William A and McEvoy, James; ‘Police Violence and its Public Support’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 391, Sep 1970
Gilkison, Robert; ‘Early Days of Otago, Part I’, New Zealand Police Journal, Aug 1938
Gow, N: ‘Frank Gardiner: Prince of Tobymen’, in Canberra & District Historical Society, The Bushranger Papers, Canberra 1979
Green, David: ‘Gudgeon, Walter Edward’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Green, J J and Young, A J: “‘The Finest” - A Brief History of the New York City Police Department’, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Dec 1976
Grigg, A R: ‘Taylor, Thomas Edward’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Haigh, J B: ‘The Hokitika “Fenian Troubles’”, Historical Review, 19, 1971
Hamilton, CF: ‘The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’, The Police Journal, vol I no 4, 1928
Hay, Douglas: ‘War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts’, Past and Present, May 1982
Hill, Richard S: ‘Branigan, St John’, in Oliver, W H (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol I, Wellington 1990
Hill, Richard S: ‘Broham, Thomas’, in Oliver, W H (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol I, Wellington 1990
Hill, Richard S; ‘Burgess, Richard’, in Oliver, W H (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol I, Wellington 1990
Hill, Richard S: ‘Cullen, John’, in Orange, Claudia (editor). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 111, forthcoming
Hill, Richard S: ‘Dinnie, Walter’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 111, forthcoming
Hill, Richard S: ‘Elsdon Best and Tuhoe: A Cautionary Tale’, Historical Review, Nov 1988
Hill, Richard S: ‘The First Police Association’, New Zealand Police Association Newsletter, Dec 1984
Hill, Richard S: ‘lncorporating Maoris into the New Zealand Police’, Journal of the Police History Society (UK), no 4, 1989
Select Bibliography
560
Hill, Richard S: ‘Karira’, in Oliver, W H (editor). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography , vol I, Wellington 1990
Hill, Richard S: ‘McDonogh, Arthur Edward’, in Oliver, W H (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography , vol I, Wellington 1990
Hill, Richard S: ‘Maori Policing in Nineteenth Century New Zealand’, Archifacts, 1985/2
Hill, Richard S; ‘Part-time Policing: An Historical Perspective’, New Zealand Law Journal, Dec 1987
Hill, Richard S: ‘Policing in New Zealand - A Short History’, in Young, Sherwood (editor). With Confidence and Pride: Policing the Wellington Region 1840-1992, Wellington forthcoming
Hill, Richard S: ‘The Rise and Fall of the First New Zealand Police Superannuation Scheme’, International Police Association Journal (NZ), part 1 Sep 1985, part 2 Dec 1985
Hill, Richard S: ‘Shearman, Robert Clarke’, in Oliver, W H (editor). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol I, Wellington 1990
Hill, Richard S: ‘Smyth, Charles Gordon’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 111, forthcoming
Hill, Richard S; ‘Tunbridge, John Bennett’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Hill, Richard S: ‘An Uneasy Relationship: The Police and the PSA’,New Zealand Police Association Newsletter, Jan 1985
Hill, Richard S: ‘Worthington, Arthur Bently’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Hood, Lynley: ‘Dean, Williamina’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Hunt, Alan; ‘The Politics of Law and Justice’, Politics & Power, no 4, 1981
Jefferson, Tony: ‘Review’, The International Journal of the Sociology of Law, Nov 1980
Jessop, Bob: ‘On Recent Marxist Theories of Law, the State, and JuridicoPolitical Ideology’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, Nov 1980
Kelly, William and Kelly, Nora: ‘The Development of Law Enforcement’, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Quarterly, Winter 1977
Kettle, Martin: ‘The Keepers of the Queen’s Peace’, New Society, 25 Mar 1982
King, Hazel: ‘Problems of Police Administration in New South Wales, 1825-1851’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journals and Proceedings, vol XLIV no 2, 1958
King, Hazel: ‘Some Aspects of Police Administration in New South Wales, 1825-1851’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journals and Proceedings, vol XLII no 5, 1956
King, Peter: ‘Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750-1800’, Historical Journal, vol XXVII no 1,1984
Koroheke, Chris: ‘Te Mahuki’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
561
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Lambert, Florinda: ‘Wallath, Robert Herman’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Lange, R T: ‘The Tohunga and the Government in the Twentieth Century’, University of Auckland Historical Society Annual, 1968
Locke, Elsie: ‘Grandfather’s Irish Riot’, Islands, vol II no 4, 1973
McCaskili, Murray: ‘The Goldrush Population of Westland ', New Zealand Geographer, vol XII no 1
McCaskili, Murray: ‘Miner, Merchant and Mountain: A Study in the Political Geography of Gold Rush Westland, 1865-1876’, Proceedings of the Second New Zealand Geographical Conference, Christchurch 1958
Macdonald, Barrie: ‘Moss, Frederick Joseph’, in Orange, Claudia (editor). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
McKinlay, Peter: ‘The Role of the State’, in Royal Commission on Social Policy, The Role of The State: Five Perspectives, Wellington 1988
Malony, G J and Annabel!, Ross: ‘The Rua Expedition’, Historical Review, Jun 1963
Mark, Robert: ‘ln Comparison With Canada’, The Times Literary Supplement, 26 Sep 1975
Marriott, R E: ‘Police History and Stewart Island’, New Zealand Police Journal, Feb 1951
Miller, Wilbur R: ‘Police Authority in London and New York City 18301870’, Journal of Social History, Winter 1975
Monkonnen, Eric H: ‘From Cop History to Social History: The Significance of the Police in American History’, Journal of Social History, Summer 1982
Murphy, EJ: ‘Otago Police 100 Years Ago ', New Zealand Police Journal, Aug 1963
Murray, I H P; ‘The Armed Constabulary of Papua’, Police Journal, Oct 1931
O’Callaghan, Thomas: ‘Police Establishment in New South Wales’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, vol IX part 6, 1923
O’Connor, Peter: ‘The Awkward Ones-Dealing with Conscience, 19161918’, New Zealand Journal of History, Oct 1974
Page, Kirk: ‘A Public Circus: Auckland’s First Murder’, Metro, Sep 1982
Palmer, Stanley H: ‘Before the Bobbies: The Caroline Riots of 1821’ History Today, Oct 1977
Parrish, A S: ‘Community Policing’, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Jul 1983
Parsonson, G S: ‘The Life and Times of Hongi Hika’, Historical News, May 1982
Paterson, Tony: ‘Delving Down to Our Roots’, Police Review, Sep/Oct 1982
Select Bibliography
562
Philips, Cyril: ‘ln Search of a New Police History’, Policing, Winter 1985
Philips, Cyril: ‘Police and Public: Balancing the Scales’, Police Review, 29 Apr 1983
Phillips, Walter: ‘ “Six O’Clock Swill”: The Introduction of Early Closing of Hotel Bars in Australia’, Historical Studies, Oct 1980
Poole, Fiona Farrell: ‘Amy Bock’, in Macdonald, Charlotte; Penfold, Merimeri; Williams, Bridget (editors). The Book of New Zealand Women, Wellington 1991
Potter, Alfred: ‘The Police Force of New South Wales’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, vol VI, 1920
Radzinowicz, Leon and King, J F S: ‘Concepts of Crime’, The Times Literary Supplement, 26 Sep 1975
Read, D H M: ‘Policing the Empire’, United Empire, Dec 1911
Reay, W T: ‘The Metropolitan Special Constabulary; The War Force - The Reserve’, The Police Journal, vol I no 2, 1928
Reiner, Robert: ‘Control on the Beat’, New Statesman , 13 Nov 1992
Reiner, Robert: ‘The Politics of Police’, Politics & Power, no 4, 1981
Reiner, Robert: ‘Review’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, Nov 1980
Ross, John O: ‘Busby and the Declaration of Independence’, New Zealand Journal of History, Apr 1980
[Roth, H:] ‘Auntie’s Dead, Everything’s Yours’, Joy, 21 Sep 1959
Roth, H: ‘Blazing the Trail’, PSA Journal, Aug 1953
[Roth, H:] ‘Cyrus Haley, His Mark’, Joy , 10 Aug 1959
[Roth, H:] ‘Escape to Death’, Joy, 27 Oct 1959
Roth, H: ‘General Strike in Auckland’, Here and Now, Nov 1956
Roth, H: ‘The Maritime Strike of 1890’, Historical News, Aug 1970
[Roth, H:] ‘Riots Over His Sex Life - Chch. Sees the Last of “Worthless Worthington’”, Joy, 6 Apr 1959
[Roth, H:] ‘When Christchurch Women Fell for the Wicked Worthington’, Joy, 23 Mar 1959
[Roth, H:] ‘ “Worthless Worthington” Schemes to Deport his No 8 “Wife”’, Joy, 31 Mar 1959
Sanderson, Kay: ‘Maori Christianity on the East Coast 1840-1870’, New Zealand Journal of History, Oct 1983
Schwartz, Richard D and Miller, James C: ‘Legal Evolution and Societal Complexity’, American Journal of Sociology, Sep 1981
Seager, E W: ‘The Escapades of Mackenzie’, in Canterbury Old and New, Christchurch 1900
Shaw, A G L; ‘Violent Protest in Australian History’, Historical Studies, no 60
Silver, Allan: ‘Social and Ideological Bases of British Elite Reactions to Domestic Crisis in 1829-1832’, Politics and Society, Feb 1981
Sim, Joe: ‘Scarman: The Police Counter-Attack’, The Socialist Register, 1982
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
563
Skocpol, Theda: ‘Bringing the State Back In’, Items, Jun 1982
Slater, Henry: ‘Marmaduke George Nixon: Father of the New Zealand Cavalry’, New Zealand Military Journal, Jan 1913
Smith,LF: ‘Otago Police 100 Years Ago’, New Zealand Police Journal, Feb 1963
Smith, L F and King, A B; ‘lnvercargill Headquarters Opened’, The Bulletin, New Zealand Police, Aug 1968
Snow, Claude: ‘The Police Gazettes’, New Zealand Police Journal, Jun/ Jul 1958
Sopenoff, Ronald C: ‘The Victorian Policeman’s Lot’, Police Studies Dec 1978
Stead, P J: ‘The Kinds of Policeman’, The Times Literary Supplement 26 Sep 1975
Stewart, J T: ‘A Trip in Northern New Zealand, July-August, 1957’, Historical Review, May 1984
Stinchcombe, Arthur L: ‘lnstitutions of Privacy in the Determination of Police Administrative Practice’, American Journal of Sociology, 69, 1963
Stockdale, Eric; ‘A Short History of Prison Inspection in England’, The British Journal of Sociology, Jul 1983
Storch, Robert D: ‘Crime and Justice in 19th-Century England’, History Today, Sep 1980
Storch, Robert D: ‘The Plague of the Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57’, International Review of Social History, 20, 1975
Storch, Robert D: ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850-1880’, Journal of Social History, Summer 1976
Swain, Des; ‘Miscarried Justice’, Evening Post, 22 Jun 1991
Swanton, Bruce: ‘Origins and Development of Police Unions in Australia’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Dec 1976
Swanton, Bruce: ‘Women Police in New South Wales’, Australian Police Journal, Oct-Dec 1983
Taylor, W A: ‘The Amazing Career of “Bully” Hayes’, The Plainsman, May 1948
Thomas, Celia: ‘Native Police’, Police Life, Nov 1983
Thomson, B: ‘Police Uniform’, The Bulletin (New Zealand Police), Oct 1983
Trickett, Peter: ‘The Lost City of Cornwallis’, New Zealand Listener, 14 Jun 1980
Tripp, H Alker: ‘Police and Public: A New Test of Police Quality’, The Police Journal, vol I no 4, 1928
Troup, Edward; ‘Police Administration, Local and National’, The Police Journal, vol I no 1, 1928
Vick, C: ‘An Introduction to Aspects of Public Order and the Police’, in Thackrah, J R (editor), Contemporary Policing, London 1985
564
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Wake, C H: ‘George Clarke and the Government of the Maoris; 184045’, Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand, Nov 1962
Walker, R J: ‘A Review of the Position of the Maori Warden’, Maori Warden, Nov 1982
Walker, Samuel: ‘The Urban Police in American History’, Journal of Police Science and Administration, vol IV no 3, 1976
Ward, Alan: ‘Documenting Maori History: The Arrest of Te Kooti Rikirangi Te Turuki’, New Zealand Journal of History, Apr 1980
Ward, Alan: ‘Law and Law-enforcement on the New Zealand Frontier, 1840-1893’, New Zealand Journal of History, Oct 1971
Ward, Alan: ‘The Origins of the Anglo-Maori Wars: A Reconsideration’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol I no 2, 1967
Waskow, Arthur I: ‘Community Control of the Police’, Trans-Action, Dec 1969
Watts, Eugene J: ‘The Police in Atlanta, 1890-1905’, The Journal of Southern History, May 1973
Webber, Frances: ‘Six Centuries of Revolt and Repression’, Race and Class, vol XXIII no 2, 1981
Weinberger, Barbara: ‘Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes 1906-26’, History Today, Dec 1987
White, Stephen: ‘Howard Vincent and the Development of Probation in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom’, Historical Studies, Oct 1979
Wilentz, Sean: ‘Crime, Poverty and the Streets of New York City: The Diary of William H. Bell 1850-5 V, History Workshop Journal, Spring 1979
Wilson, James Q; ‘Dilemmas of Police Administration’, Public Administration Review, Sep/Oct 1968
Wilson, Ormond: ‘Papahurihia, First Maori Prophet’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol LXXIV, 1965
Young, Jim: ‘The Makira: Last Years of an Island Trader’, The Great Circle, Oct 1984
Young, Sherwood: ‘Wong Gye, Charles’, in Orange, Claudia (editor), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol 11, Wellington 1993
Young, S I and Hill, Richard: ‘Police Training in New Zealand’, in Mason, L B and Gordon, M F (editors), Trentham in Retrospect, Porirua 1982
3. Unpublished Works
Anderson, Grahame; ‘The Mount Cook Police Barracks, Buckle St Wellington’, typescript 1977
Anderson, Robyn: ‘Criminal Violence in London, 1856-1875’, PhD thesis, Toronto University 1990
Annan, E: ‘Police on the Goldfields’, typescript nd
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
565
Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination: ‘Notes on Pakeha Sentencing Practices’, typescript 1981
Barber, L: ‘The Militia’, typescript 1983
Barber, L: ‘The Red Tribe Arrives’, typescript 1983
Barrowman, Rachel: ‘Who Were Massey’s Cossacks?’, research essay, Victoria University of Wellington nd
Barton, B J; ‘Control of the New Zealand Police’, LIB Hons thesis Auckland University 1978
Bayly, Nora; ‘James Busby: British Resident in New Zealand 1833-40 MA thesis, Auckland 1949
Brooking, C T: ‘The Defence of the New Zealand Colonies Against the Maoris during the Governorships of Hobson and Fitzßoy: The Genesis of Defence in New Zealand’, MA thesis, Auckland nd
Browne, A P F: ‘The Otago Goldfields, 1861-1863: Administration and Public Life’, MA thesis, Canterbury University 1974
Butler, V C: ‘Captain Fitzßoy’s Governorship’, MA thesis, Auckland 1939
Chapman, R W; ‘The South Island Maori and their Reserved Lands 1860-1910’, MA thesis, Canterbury University 1966
Cheyne, Sonia; ‘Search for a Constitution: People and Politics in New Zealand’s Crown Colony Years’, PhD thesis, Otago University 1975
Clausen, Ingrid: ‘Crime and Criminals in Dunedin, 1880-1893’, research essay, Otago University 1983
Clyne, Robert: ‘The 96th Regiment and the West Coast Subdued: 1842’, typescript nd
Colbert, C J: ‘The Working Class in Nelson under the New Zealand Company, 1841-1851’, MA thesis, Wellington 1948
Conradson, Bernard J; ‘The County of Westland’, MA thesis, Canterbury University 1971
Crawford, John: ‘Military Involvement in the 1890 Maritime Strike and 1913 Waterfront Strike in New Zealand’, typescript nd
Cullen, Margaret; ‘Police Records as Material for Social History in the Provincial Period’, typescript nd
Dacker, Bill: ‘Chapters in Nineteenth Century South Island Maori History’, BA Hons essay, Otago University 1980
Duncan, Brion: ‘Address by Superintendent Brion Duncan’, typescript 1984
Dunstall, Graeme: ‘A History of the New Zealand Police, Volume IV’, draft chapters
Dunstall, Graeme: “‘Maintaining Law and Order”: A General View of the N.Z. Police 1922-81’, typescript 1981
Dunstall, Graeme: ‘The New Zealand Police: Aspects of its Constitutional Position, Organization and Morale since 1920’, typescript 1979
Dwyer, John: ‘Fragments from the Official Career of John Dwyer 1878 to 1921’, typescript 1934
Emsley, Clive: ‘Some Aspects of the Development of Police in Britain and France’, typescript nd
Select Bibliography
566
Fairbum, Miles: ‘Deviance, Violent Crime, and the Organization of New Zealand Society, 1853-1940’, typescript [1983]
Fargher, R W S: ‘Donald McLean: Chief Land Purchase Agent and Native Secretary’, MA thesis, Auckland 1947
Fitzgerald, M K: ‘Charles Heaphy, VC, 1820-1881’, typescript [l9Bl]
Fleras, Augie: ‘From Village Runanga to the New Zealand Maori Wardens’ Association: A Historical Development of Maori Wardens’, typescript 1980
Frame, Alex: ‘Trouble on the Wellington Waterfront’, typescript nd
Gambrill, R F; ‘ A History of “The Hawke’s Bay Regiment”, NZ Territorial Army 1863-1964’, typescript nd
Gibson, B: ‘Address to the 91st Recruit Wing’, typescript 1984
Glen, Frank: ‘The Police Chaplain: A Brief History’, typescript 1987
Grbnfors, Martti: ‘Police Function and Role in Western Capitalist Societies’, typescript [l9Bl]
Haldane, Robert: ‘The Force of the People: A History of the Victoria Force’, typescript 1985
Hamilton, D J: ‘Organisation and Environment’, typescript 1982
Hanham, H J: ‘The Political Structure of Auckland 1853-76’, MA thesis, Auckland 1950
Hermans, R T: ‘Wellington City Police History’, typescript nd
Hill, E O E: ‘Chronicles of an Unquiet Land: Taranaki, 1861-1881’, typescript nd
Hoffe, K: ‘Bushranging and Highway Robbery on the South Island Goldfields 1861-1869’, research paper, Victoria University of Wellington nd
Holford, Stuart Richard: ‘The Evolution of the New Zealand Police Force, 1840-1920’, typescript 1974
Hollander, Henry: ‘Dunedin Police Stations’, typescript 1986
Houston, John (editor): ‘Diary of James Livingston, 1868-9’, typescript nd
Hucker, Graham: “‘New Zealand for New Zealanders; No Germans Need Apply”: The Women’s Anti-German League’, manuscript nd
Hughes, Virginia: ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, research essay, Auckland University 1977
Irvine, F M Jean; ‘The Revolt of the Militant Unions’, MA thesis, University of New Zealand 1937
Isdale, Alistair: ‘Notes on Policing in the Thames-Hauraki Area’, typescript 1985
Isdale, Alistair: ‘Thames, 1867, Reports and Correspondence: James Mackay Reports to Provincial Superintendent, Auckland’, typescript nd
Isdale, Alistair: ‘Thames Court House’, typescript 1980
Jackman, Lesley M: ‘The Loyalist Touchstone: An Account of the West Coast Fenian Scare of 1868’, BA Hons thesis, Otago University 1974
Jackson, Rosalind Margaret: ‘Te Mea Mata Ora Raku (Mair, the weakening wedge)’, MA thesis, Auckland University 1972
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
567
Kerr, D B: ‘Discretion in Implementing the Criminal Process’, typescript nd
Kerr, D B: ‘Philosophy of Police Discretion’, typescript nd
Lorimer, P A: ‘Minnie Dean: A Case and Public Response’, BA Hons thesis, Otago University 1978
Macdonald, Charlotte J: ‘Women and Crime in New Zealand Society 1888-1910’, research essay, Massey University 1977
Mclvor, J D: ‘The New Zealand Army’, typescript nd
Mclvor, J D: ‘The New Zealand Army: Notes’, typescript nd
Mackay, D L: ‘The Origins of Race Relations in Australia 1788-1808’, typescript nd
McMeekin, Patrick: ‘Police Accountability in New Zealand: A Comparative Evaluation’, typescript 1983
Manning, Arthur: ‘Recollections of Inquiries into Lora Gorge Murder’, typescript nd
Marr, C: ‘“Mackenzie the Sheep Stealer” - Hero or Common Thief Before 1900?’, research paper, Victoria University of Wellington 1979
Mayhew, P K: ‘The Penal System of New Zealand 1840-1924’, typescript, Wellington 1959
Melrose, Ron: ‘Chiefs of Police in the Cook Islands’, typescript nd
Merrett, lan: ‘A Reappraisal of the 1890 Maritime Strike in New Zealand’, MA thesis, Canterbury University 1969
Middlemiss, Grant: ‘A History of 125 Years of Police in a New Zealand Town’, typescript nd
Missen, E A: ‘The History of New Zealand Penal Policy’, typescript 1971
Mitchell, John: ‘The History and Archaeology of the Armed Constabulary Archaeological Sites Along the Napier-Taupo Road, 1869-1885’, research essay, Auckland University 1983
Monigatti, D: ‘Women Police in New Zealand’, typescript 1981
Morgan, J: ‘The Constitutional Development of the NZ Police: Soldier or Civic Guard?’, typescript 1979
Nash, Roy: ‘The Maori People and the Educational System’, typescript nd
Ng, J: ‘Physical Violence’, typescript nd
Northage, Graham: ‘The Police and the Waihi Strike’, research essay, Canterbury University 1978
O’Connor, P S: ‘Arms Control in New Zealand, 1845-1930’, typescript [l9Bl]
O’Farrell, P J: ‘The Workers in Grey District Politics 1865-1913: A Study in New Zealand Liberalism and Socialism’, MA thesis, Canterbury 1955
O’Halloran, R J: ‘A Policeman’s Lot’, typescript nd
Orr, Gordon: ‘Police Accountability to the Executive and Parliament typescript 1983
Osborne, John: ‘Arms of the New Zealand Police’, typescript nd
Select Bibliography
568
Osborne, John; ‘The History of Coehom Mortars & Shrapnel Shells: Their Use by Police Forces in New Zealand 1846-1886’, typescript nd
Osborne, John: ‘Percussion Revolvers’, typescript nd
Patterson, B R: ‘Land, Men and Sheep: The Development of a Regional Economy’, typescript nd
Patterson, B R: ‘National Objectives Versus Provincial Ambitions: The Context of the Nationalisation of Survey Administration’, typescript nd
Patterson, B R: ‘Provincial Land Politics’, typescript nd
Patterson, B R: ‘Reading Between the Lines: People, Politics and the Conduct of Surveys in the Southern North Island, New Zealand 18401876’, PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington 1984
Patterson, B R: ‘Rising Settler Feeling; The Politics of Frustration’, typescript nd
Patterson, B R: ‘The Search for a Survey System in the Wellington Provincial District 1849-1876’, typescript nd
Phillips, J R: ‘A Social History of Auckland 1840-53’, MA thesis, Auckland University 1966
Plimmer, W N: ‘The Military Occupation of Western Samoa 1914-20’, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington 1966
Pocock, Penelope: ‘John Robert Godley - A Study in Practice and Theory’, MA thesis, Canterbury 1949
Poff, B J: ‘William Fox: Early Colonial Years 1842-1848’, MA thesis, Canterbury University 1969
Powell, C: ‘Brief History of Mokau Sub-District’, typescript nd
Prickett, Nigel: ‘The Archaeology of a Military Frontier: Taranaki, New Zealand, 1860-1881’, PhD thesis, Auckland University 1981
Rainer, Philip: ‘Company Town: An Industrial History of the Waihi Gold Mining Company, Limited, 1887-1912’, MA thesis, Auckland University 1976
Ross, John O: ‘McDonnell of Hokianga: The Life and Times of Lieutenant Thomas McDonnell R.N.’, typescript 1976
Salmon, H W: ‘The Armed Constabulary in New Zealand ’, typescript nd
Savage, R C; ‘Address to Cadet Wing Graduation’, typescript 1977
Scott, Donald: ‘Autobiography of Donald Scott 1863-1962’, typescript 1962
Shawcross, Kathleen: ‘Maoris of the Bay of Islands, 1769-1840: A Study of Changing Maori Responses to European Contact’, MA thesis, Auckland University 1967
Skerman, P J L: ‘The Dry Era: A History of Prohibition in the King Country 1884-1954’, MA thesis, Auckland University 1972
Smith, A L: ‘Ko Tohu Te Matua: The Story of Tohu Kakahi of Parihaka’, MA thesis, Canterbury University 1990
Spring-Rice, Wynne: The History and Archaeology of Fort Galatea, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, 1869-1969’, Auckland University 1983
569
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Standish, M W: ‘Government Administration in New Zealand 18481852’, MA thesis, Wellington 1948
Sterritt, Rosalie: ‘Constable David Sterritt, DCM’, typescript nd
Stevens, Mark H S: ‘New Zealand Defence Forces and Defence Administration 1870-1900’, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington 1977
Stronge, Jack: ‘The “Harriet” Story: The Clash of Redcoats and Maoris on the Egmont Coast, 1834’, typescript nd
Swanton, Bruce: ‘A Chronological Account of the Police of Sydney 1788-1862’, typescript 1983
Tennant, Margaret; ‘lndigence and Charitable Aid in New Zealand 18851920’, PhD thesis, Massey University 1981
Thomson, Barry: ‘Police Transport in New Zealand’, typescript nd
Tilly, Charles; Levett, Allan; Lodhi, A Q; Munger, Frank: ‘How Policing Affected the Visibility of Crime in Nineteenth Century Europe and America’, typescript nd
Trendle, N: ‘The Office of Constable’, typescript nd
Van der Voom, Marianne: ‘The Police Department on the Otago Goldfields: Dunstan 1861-1864’, BA Hons thesis, Otago University 1979
Vaney, Neil P: ‘The Dual Tradition: Irish Catholics and French Priests in New Zealand: The West Coast Experience, 1865-1910’, MA thesis, Canterbury University 1976
Victoria Police: ‘Origin and History’, typescript 1977
Wards, Ian: ‘The Army in New Zealand’, typescript nd
Wards, lan: ‘The First Militia’, typescript nd
Wards, lan: ‘The Royal New Zealand Fencibles’, typescript nd
Watson, John: ‘The Impact of the Threat of the Anglo-Maori Wars on Auckland 1862-3’, MA research essay, Auckland University 1982
Watson, M K and Patterson, B R: ‘Property, Class and Politics in the Wellington Province during the 1860s and 1870s’, typescript nd
Whelan, P J: ‘The Care of Destitute, Neglected and Criminal Children in New Zealand 1840-1900’, MA thesis, Wellington 1956
Wicksteed, M: ‘A Chronology of the New Zealand Army 1827-1984’, typescript nd
Wilson, T Y: ‘New Zealand Prisons 1880-1909: The Administration of Colonel Arthur Hume’, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington 1970
Wiseman, Dorothy: ‘Pioneer Days in Detective Force: Colourful Incidents in Career of Late J.A. McGrath’, typescript nd
C. ASSISTANCE FROM INDIVIDUALS
The list which follows names people who have contributed to the History of Policing in New Zealand project in various ways, mostly in a voluntary fashion and mostly to provide material which I was able to use in a significant way in one or more of the volumes in this series. Many others
570
Select Bibliography
also kindly provided information which I was unable to use or used only marginally; their contributions can be found in the archive of this project.
J Adams, M Alington, N Allan, D Allen, G Anderson, J Archer, P Backshall, G Bagnall, Y Baker, E Beard, J Belich, F Bell, F Bennett, J Binney, J Blakeley, F and S Boyes, T Braggins, K Brewer, M Bridger, M Brogden, W Buckley, F Bulford, E Burke, B Burnett, K Burr, H Bym, P Cadenhead, R Cairns, R Campbell, C Carle, R Carter, R Chan, J Cleary, 0 Cherrett, Mrs Coad, H Coffey, R Cook, M Craig, J Crawford, E Crompton Smith, S Cull, L Dalgety, B Dailey, G Dallow, W Day, D Dinnie, E Dobbie, L Donnelley, M Doyle, G Dunstall, S Elise, E Emerson, S Emerson, M Ephrem, H Everett, M Fairbum, I Fidler, A Findlater, F Finnegan, J Fitzgerald, M Fitzgerald, P FitzGerald, P Flannigan, A Frame, T France, N Francis, J Franklin, L Freed, W Gamble, R Garbutt, J Giesking, R Gillespie, R Gilshnan, F Glen, J Goring Johnston, E and M Grace, M Grant, R Greenaway, M Gudgeon, S Haddock, R Haldane, R Hale, R Hall, C Hamann, D Hamer, D Hansen, D Harlen, L Harness, D Harris, D Hartle, A Henderson, R Hermans, D Hill, J Hill, M Hill, C Hirst, M Hoare, M Hodder, T Hoggard, H Hollander, D Holmes, J Holmwood, P Hosking, W Houston, V Hughes, D Jago, A Jemmett, P Joblin, B Johnson, P Johnson, I Jones, K Jones, R Keam, N Kearney, Z Keast, N Keenan, R and M Kerr, R Knight, J Lander, B Langham, J Langman, P Lawrence, A Levett, G Loftus, J Logan, E Mcßirney, V McConnell, J McCracken, C Mac Donald, H McDonnell, S McFarland, A McFarlane, R McGlashen, E McGrath, M McHugh, D Mclntyre, Miss Mcllveney, W McKinnon, A McLean, F McMorran, A Manning, C Marr, G Mason, A Matheson, E Mattar, R Melrose, T Metcalfe, R Meyer, M Meyrick, W Mickelson, G Middlemiss, T Miles, P Miller, J Mitchell, D Monigatti, G Moore, F Morgan, J Moriarty, R Morrissey, J Mould, J Ng, M Nolan, B O’Brien, J O’Donoghue, R O’Halloran, C O’Hara, T Olsen, R O’Reilly, R Ormerod, L Ormsby, J Osborne, P O’Shea, B and K Patterson, M Parker, B and M Pearson, D Petersen, A Polaschek, B Pook, M Poole, B Purton, J Reckner, J Reid, D Retter, T Reynolds, B Ringer, E Robertson, Mrs Robertson, J Robinson, S Robinson, F Rogers, A Roney, H Roth, A Rutherford, H Salmon, O Sanders, K Scadden, E Scannell, M Schaw, A Schenk, D Scott, M Seager, J Sewell, A Shallcrass and other descendants of R Shallcrass, Shearman family, K Slattery, D Smith, 1 Snell, T Sparks, C Spicer, R Startup, O Steel, R Steel, R Sterritt, J Stirling, M Stoddart, L Stopforth, S Strachan, M Strange, M Stronge, C Styles, M Styles, M Sutherland, D Swain, R Sweetman, B Symondson, P Tasker, B Taylor, J Taylor, D Terry, G Theobald, B Thomson, D Thomson, M Timms, O Trotter, D Tso, J Tweedie, W Tyrrell, P Ward, J Wardell, E Watson, H Webb, M Wellington, J Wills, C Wilson, D Wilson, H Wilson, D Woodcock, E Woodhouse, B Wright, C Wright, V Wright, J Young, P Zillwood.
Index
Abbott, Norman: 230
Acts Interpretation Act, 1908: 280
Accommodation: 36,40-1,92, 101-2, 112, 113, 118, 138-9, 154, 155, 184, 216-17, 219, 224, 232, 258-60 passim. 111. 281, 308, 309, 312, 315, 318, 329-30, 339, 374, 380, 381,399, 404,426
Adam, J: 370
Adelaide, Australia: 370, 398
Admiralty, United Kingdom; 309-10, 360
Africa: 165
Agent-General, London: 47, 165
Ahaura, West Coast: 42
Akaroa, Canterbury: 168
Albany, Auckland region: 316
AlcoholAlrunkenness
and police: 16, 19, 28-9, 36,46, 48, 50, 53, 59, 82, 86, 88-9, 96-9, 104, 110, 116, 119,120, 129, 143,148,155,156, 158, 175, 176, 179, 182, 206-8, 211, 224, 233, 235, 238, 239, 242, 251, 253-4, 277, 311, 313, 321, 322, 328, 341-3, 358, 359, 363, 395
and politicians: 22, 32-7, 46. 88-9, 96-7, 116-17
and public: 3, 16, 19, 22, 26, 31-9, 42, 45, 46, 55, 64, 71, 74, 84, 91, 92, 96-9, 129, 132-3, 137, 153, 168, 185, 186, 190, 194, 198, 199, 205-8, 222, 223, 233, 235, 237, 242, 245-8 passim. 265-6, 275, 316, 327, 341-3, 348, 35760, 369-70, 382, 390, 393, 395, 397-8, 400,413,420
Alexandra, Central Otago: 22
Alexandra/Pirongia, Waikato: 63
Alien enemies', policing of: 348-50,353-5,364
Alien Enemy Teachers Act, 1915: 349
Aliens, Commissioner of: 364
Allan, Richard: 118, 153, 199, 350, 420
Allen, James; 306, 308, 321, 353, 393, 402, 403
Allowances; 9, 10, 11,41,48,50,53,60,83,92, 99-102, 105, 107, 113, 121, 122, 139, 142, 165, 171, 181. 203, 204, 219, 221-2, 229, 230, 237, 258-9, 261, 265, 299, 302. 340. 368, 375, 376
Anarchists, surveillance of: 57, 125-6, 354
Anderson, Anders: 223-4
Anderson, John; 45
Andrews, Arthur: 366
Anglo-Maori Wars: 127, 311, 316,411
Aotea Harbour, Waikato: 62
Apia, Western Samoa: 392, 394
Appeal Court: 69
Appeal rights: 44, 233, 238, 337
Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives: 159
Argentina: 167
Ariadne: 93-4
Armed Constabulary; 7, 8, 97
Arms
and police: 2, 27-31, 52. 62, 63, 65. 94, 134-7, 192-6, 243-4, 248-9, 289, 308, 312,318, 354,383-9, 391-2
and public: 27, 42, 51, 65, 70, 71, 74, 131, 134-7, 189, 190, 192-6, 243-6, 260, 289, 293-4, 309, 312, 318, 354 , 358, 360-1, 382, 383, 385-7, 390, 393
Arms Act, 1880: 246
Army Medical Corps: 384
Arnold, James: 224-5, 228,232, 235, 236, 251 268
Ashhurst, Manawatu: 192, 193, 195
Atchison, Frederick; 17
Athenic: 313
Atkinson, Christopher: 391
Atkinson, Harry: 12, 31, 62, 68
Attorney-General: 205, 280
Auckland: 17-22 passim. 40, 42, 57-61 passim, 70. 71. 75, 86, 92, 93, 96, 97, 114, 121, 122, 125, 126, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136. 139, 149, 154, 155, 171-2, 173, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, 186-7, 190, 197, 198, 203, 204, 209, 210, 213, 219, 224, 229, 231, 232, 236, 248, 250, 253, 254. 273, 275, 281, 285, 292, 293, 296-301, 303, 307, 309-10, 311, 314-15, 317. 322, 330, 335, 336,343-50pajsim, 356,360-4 passim, 368, 372, 374-6, 378, 384, 386-92, 394, 401, 404, 420 police stations: 155, 184. 343
Auckland Harbour Board: 250, 314, 315
Auckland Law Society; 390
Auckland Prohibition and Temperance League: 82
Auckland Provincial Farmers' Union Rifle Clubs: 383
Auckland Star: 198, 315
Australia, Australians: 23, 26. 46, 57. 71, 72, 76. 86, 89-90, 99-100, 101, 151. 160, 167,
514
Index
572
169, 172, 173, 187, 191, 220, 289, 293-4, 310, 340, 342, 353-4, 370, 372, 373, 380, 399, 421
criminals arriving from: 58, 125, 186, 197, 200, 224, 232, 370
Austria. Austrians: 126, 130, 348, 350, 396 See also: Dalmatians
Avarua, Cook Islands: 242
Avon Refuge, Christchurch: 57
Avondale Asylum, Auckland: 294
‘Baby farming’: 23-4, 152
Bagrice, John: 246
Baigent, H; 157, 159
Bailey, George: 311
Baker, William; 207
Balclulha, South Otago: 35, 357 Rallonro Inkn- 70 1A 11 A 7
Ballance, John. 7. 9. 16. 31. 62
Balzac, Honore de: 151
Banks Peninsula. Canterbury: 57
Barker, Tom: 311
Bassett, W G; 56
Batons, use of: 2. 25. 65. 73, 94. 185. 289, 291, 309-13, 318, 320, 348, 392-3
Bay of Plenty region; 211, 247, 362
Baylis, Charles: 301
‘Bear, Sir Robert’: 151
Beat system: 8, 40, 90, 92-3, 110-13, 153, 157, 158, 176, 178-80, 183, 184, 185. 208-10 passim, 218, 258-9, 302, 332, 340, 344. 355, 357, 373-4, 380,418, 426
Beattie, R M: 294
Beazley, John; 135-6, 244
Beck, Adolf: 167
Beck, Sarah; 139
Beere, R; 308
Beetham, R; 25
Belgium: 350
Bell, Catherine: 55-6
Bell, Donald: 56
Bell, Francis: 428
Bell, Jane; 55-6
Bell, John: 12
Bell, Richard; 54-6
Bell Gully; 200
Benjamin, Lionel; 51-2, 55, 124
Benmore Station, North Otago: 76-7
Bentham, Jeremy: 411
Berlin, Germany: 126
Bern, William: 129-30
Bertillon anthropometric identification system; 166, 167, 172
Best, Elsdon; 133
Bickerton, Alexander; 61
Biddle, Tori: 388-9
Bidois, Louis; 245
Bird, John; 157, 158
Bishop, Frank; 337
Bishop, H W: 178-80, 212, 225-40, 251-6, 258, 259, 265-8 passim, 273, 276, 328, 329
Black, James; 93
Black, Patrick: 146, 179, 181, 209, 220, 227, 229
Blackball. West Coast: 276, 283, 420
Blake, Francis: 391
Blake, William; 391
Blatch, Arthur: 125, 146-7
Blenheim, Marlborough: 42, 61, 238
Blomficld, E C: 243
Bluff, Southland: 191, 327
Board of Appeal, Police Force: 279
Bock, Amy; 191
Boddam, Tudor: 121, 125, 204, 363, 394, 404 • d • d on i i a tc nc iin ill
‘Boer War’. Boers: 89, 114-15, 126, 130, 311
Bosher, Stephen: 57
Bourke, Ernest; 223-4
Bowman, John: 212
Boxing, regulation of: 24. 186, 187, 346-7
Bradford, Edward: 47
Bradley, William: 329
Branigan, St John; 44 Dkiaiiw L* amnnn ' AC,
Brieux, Eugene; 346
Briggs, John; 113
Brisbane, Australia: 138
British Empire, policing in: 1, 7. 67, 111, 166-7, 277, 302, 306, 375, 388,411,428
British Guiana: 167
British Red Cross: 356
Broberg, Charles; 40. 121, 125, 133-4, 200, 201-2, 234, 260, 363, 364
Brogden, Mike; 423
Broham, Thomas: 12, 13. 17. 19. 21, 22. 25, 27. 33, 34. 37-8. 41. 50, 53. 63. 75. 76. 87. 92, 93, 94-5, 96, 119, 142-3, 145, 149, 275
‘Brown, James’; 266
Browne, CT: 9, 50,51,53
Brunner, West Coast: 42
Buckland, South Auckland: 316
Buckley, Alfred: 12
Bulford, William; 42
Bullen, Robert: 12, 66
Bunting, James: 208
Bureaucralisation/rationalisation
of policing; 2, 7. 14. 161. 231, 235. 249. 254, 269, 279-80, 398, 409-10, 416
of society; 2. 3. 21. 138-40, 205-6, 331, 406. 411, 413, 416. 419, 428
Burnham, Canterbury: 176
Burrell, Arthur: 156-60
Butterworth, Arnold: 327, 384-5, 387
Caffrey, John: 57
Cahill, Timothy: 243
Cain, Henry; 93
Calwell, William: 234
Cambridge, Waikato: 17
516
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Campbell, Ivy: 404
Campbell, William: 52, 204, 404
Canada; 1, 197, 396,410,411
Canterbury Progressive Liberal Association: 44
Canterbury Provincial Police: 12, 93, 107, 120
Canterbury region: 12, 141-2, 378
Canterbury Women’s Institute: 140
Cape Foulwind, West Coast: 71
Cape Town, South Africa: 174
Carmody, Patrick: 340
Carpenter, Edward: 415
Carr, HC; 309-10
Carran, William: 245 Carter, W A: 388-90
Cassells, John J: 121, 195, 204, 327, 333, 363, 385-8, 390
Cato, Euphemia: 182
Censorship: 23, 24, 151-2, 312, 346, 351,353-5, 359, 397
Chaffey, Robert: 318, 348
Chain of command; 50, 54-5, 84, 113, 123-4 146, 225-6, 230, 371, 423
Chapman, Frederick: 186, 372, 387-8
Charitable Aid Boards: 20
Charleston, West Coast: 54, 118, 153, 350, 420
Chatham Islands: 59-60, 63-4, 206, 212, 213, 359
Chemis, Annie; 52
Chemis, Louis: 51-2, 61
Cheviot, North Canterbury: 212
Chicago, United States: 399
Chinese and policing: 22, 59, 152, 188-9, 200, 369, 392-3, 398
Chisholm, Hugh: 55
Christchurch, Canterbury: 17, 19, 21, 22, 24-6, 27, 33, 46, 57, 60-1, 74, 86, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 112, 113, 114, 119, 120, 122, 125, 130, 140, 142, 171-2, 178,185-6, 187, 190, 197, 198, 200, 204, 208, 210, 213, 217, 222, 223, 227, 256, 260, 263, 265-6, 268, 275, 281, 296, 299, 301, 315, 317-28, 320-2 passim, 328, 347, 348-9, 361, 362, 369, 371, 373, 374, 404, 405, 418, 423
police stations: 184, 249
Christianity' and War: 353
Chrystal, William: 61
Chudleigh, E R: 213
Churchill. Winston: 309
Citizens Defence Committees, 1913
Auckland; 314
Wellington: 313
Civil libertarianism: 23, 98, 159-60, 178, 207-8, 276, 347, 349, 350, 402, 403, 405, 423
Civil Service Association: 303; see also Public Service Association
Clancy, John: 172
Clarke, Andrew: 75
Cleary, H VV: 273
Cleary, James; 216
Clendon, J S: 135, 233
Clerical staff, work: 12, 14,45,61, 83, 101,102, 113, 121, 122, 123-4, 146-7, 165-6, 181, 193, 209-10, 217, 219, 225, 229-34, 238, 239, 249, 252, 254-5, 257-8, 265, 277, 281, 355, 372, 391,404
Clinton, South Otago: 211
Clouston, George: 246
Clutha electorate: 32, 88, 98
Clutha Mounted Rifles: 131
Clyde, Central Otago: 104, 116
Coals, Jane; 139
Cohen, Mark: 397-9, 402
Colchester, England: 125
Coleman, John; 29
Collective action (‘combination’) by police: 43-4, 85-6, 100, 102, 103, 144, 154-5, 223, 228-9, 230, 234, 263, 279, 280, 296-303, 315, 320, 321, 335, 366, 375-81, 406
Ceilings, Eliza: 139
Collins, Tom: 387
Collinson, Leonard: 171, 200
Collyer, J: 370
Colonial Forces, Commander of: 7
Colonial Treasurer: 8
Commerce Protection Society, Dunedin: 317
Commissions/commitlees of enquiry; 260, 268, 329, 332, 334, 364. 419, 425, 428 demands for: 32, 46,47-9, 69, 124, 159-60, 177, 222, 257, 291, 293
1897: 82-3
1898: 13, 18, 49, 59, 81-92, 120, 121, 134, 146, \4S-50passim, 155,178,179,182, 212-13, 227, 233, 279, 296 report of: 85, 87-9, 91. 96-116, 121, 122, 127, 141-5, 148, 149, 150, 155,212, 229,233
1900; 153
1905: 154, 178-82, 205, 209-10, 216, 217, 219, 220-1, 227, 228, 239, 262, 281, 296, 329, 330
1909: 31, 173, 202-3, 212, 218, 225-40, 249, 251-9, 267, 269, 273, 276, 277, 281, 296, 315, 327, 329-30
1914; 362
1915: 328
1919; 204, 280, 337, 367-8
Compensation
for discharge, etc: 11, 12, 17, 19, 44, 103, 143, 144, 265, 328
of public: 125, 390
Conditions of work: 9, 36, 40-1, 55, 83, 116, 118, 120, 139, 154. 155, 184, 202, 216, 219, 225, 229, 229, 231, 235, 237, 249-50, 258, 268, 277, 296-9, 301-2, 329-30. 337, 371, 374, 375-81,427
Connelly, William; 223-4
Index
517
Conscription for First World War: 350-3
Conscription: The Workers' Hell - Who Shall Escape?: 354
Conscription Bill, 1916 (United Kingdom); 351
Conscription Repeal League: 369
Consent, age of: 24, 98, 346, 402
‘Consent’ of public: 1. 32, 36. 47. 81, 92. 116, 142, 207-8, 218, 402. 405. 408-10, 413-17, 420, 428-30
Constabulary Force Ordinance, 1846: 278
Continuum of social conlrol/coercion: 1. 3, 176, 177, 269, 274, 307. 361, 364-5, 392-3, 406, 407-21 passim, 424
Cook Islands, policing of; 241-2, 391-2
Cooney, John: 176. 204
Cooper, Theophilus; 196
Coromandel Peninsula: 283
Cornwall and York, Duchess of: 125, 153
Cornwall and York, Duke of: 125, 153
Corruption, accusations of: 47-9, 87, 88, 103-4, 124, 144, 150, 174-9, 182, 223-4, 239,255, 328, 389-90,418, 426, 427
Cost of living: 9, 10, 116, 117, 210, 219-22 passim, 229, 237. 240, 296, 331, 352, 377-8, 380
Cotter, S J; 114
Coulthard, John: 360
Cox, Fane Strange: 204, 365
Craig, George: 291, 294
Crampton, J W: 393
Crawford, W: 355
Crime: 18,22-4, 137. 191, 197,400,406,407-8, 425
definition of: 423-4
causes of: 212, 347
kdUSta Ul. I levels of: 3. 18. 20-1,58, 88. 89,91-2, 132, 150-1, 153, 155, 157, 175, 185-6, 192, 212, 358, 360, 398, 401,403, 413, 426
Criminal Code Act, 1893: 25, 111
Criminal Investigation ; 370
Criminal Registration Branch: 363, 370-2
Criticism of police: 14, 18. 19, 29, 31-8 passim, 47-9, 59. 82-3, 98-9, 122, 124-5, 133, 141-5, 151, 160, 178, 182-3, 187-9, 193-9, 208-9, 222-8, 232, 234-6. 269, 274. 327, 361, 363
of detectives: 49-58 passim, 119-20, 224, 254
Cromwell, Central Otago; 117
Crown Law Office: 276, 294, 314, 388
Cruickshank, Alexander; 13, 179, 276, 361, 363, 400, 421
Cullen, John: 13, 18. 37. 82. 97, 99. 115, 118. 120, 126, 130, 131, 141, 149, 179, 181, 185, 186-7, 198, 203, 209, 211, 213, 217, 221, 225, 229, 230-4 passim, 238, 239, 243-8 passim, 252-7 passim, 260, 268-9,
Part Four, Part Five. 424, 427
appointment as Commissioner of: 273-5, 370
retirement of; 363-4
Cummings, Denis J: 231, 233, 238, 249. 268, 341, 383, 387
Cummings, James: 152
Cummings, Timothy: 246
Curzon-Siggers, W: 402-3
Customs Department: 50, 351
Cutten, E: 198
Dalmatians; 135, 295, 364; see also Austrians
Damaged Goods: 346
Dannevirke, Hawke’s Bay: 27, 243, 276, 421
Dardenelles, Turkey: 334
Dargaville, Northland: 41 Darroch, Robert: 333
Dart, John W M; 202, 217, 231, 233, 235, 236. 264, 298, 333, 393
Davey, T: 265-6
Dawson, Darner; 397
Day, John: 42
Dean, Minnie: 23-4, 185
Deaths of police staff: 11. 19. 41-3, 83, 105-7 passim, 165-6, 173, 181, 193-5, 245, 249, 262, 265, 274, 365, 425-6
Defence, Minister of: 7. 8, 10, 11, 12. 13. 14, 15. 16. 22. 26, 27-31 passim, 34, 35, 36,43,44. 53. 55. 61, 66. 69. 72. 76-7, 103, 150, 306, 359, 393
Defence, Under-Secretary for: 7, 14, 28, 31
Defence Act, 1886: 27, 149
Defence Act, 1909: 131, 249. 306, 347
Defence Department: 7, 27, 109, 130, 308, 347-8, 350, 353, 364
Delaney, James; 286
Demotions: 12, 17, 50. 51. 52, 53, 143, 200, 202, 208, 222, 251, 328, 372
Denniston, West Coast: 319
Dennislon Coal Miners’ Union; 71. 74
De Norville, Thomas: 248
Detection, detective branch: 32, 33, 47, 49-58, 61, 72, 85, 93. 101, 119-26, 138, 165-71 passim, 182-3, 199-204, 210, 211, 221-2, 239, 251, 254, 260, 268, 311, 327-8, 331, 360-1, 363, 365-72, 400, 404, 429
liaison with overseas forces: 57. 125-6, 167, 169, 171, 172, 186, 200
public suspicion of: 49. 98-9, 124, 147
relations with uniformed police; 49-51. 53, 55. 119-24, 200-4, 209. 239, 331, 337, 363, 365-9
staffing levels: 50, 53, 58, 119. 121, 203, 365
Devonport, Auckland: 350
Dew, Samuel J: 267, 336, 364
Dinnie, Donald: 165
Dinnie, Edmund W: 170-3. 195,225.228.371-2
518
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Dinnie, Walter; 118, 154, Part Three, 276, 281 296, 393
appointed as Commissioner of Police: 165, 167, 169
removed as Commissioner of Police: 23840, 251-7
Direct Action : 353
Discharges/dismissals: 16, 29, 36, 53, 57. 59, 66, 67, 83, 86, 88, 103, 105, 107, 109, 113, 114, 119, 129, 141-4, 148-9, 158-60, 175, 177-8, 182, 183, 208, 222, 224, 227, 232, 235-6, 242, 251, 254, 257, 265, 277, 300-1, 327-8, 338, 350, 362 threats of: 43, 44, 115, 145,350
Discipline: 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 19, 26, 29, 30. 36, 40, 41, 43, 44-5, 48, 81, 82-4, 90, 102-3, 108, 110, 113, 115-16, 119, 123-4, 142-4, 148-9, 150, 155-60, 161, 166, 173, 174-84, 203, 208-10, 214, 216, 218, 222-5, 227-40 passim, 253, 257, 260, 266, 274, 276-82, 296-8, 300-2, 311, 315, 317, 327-8, 337, 356, 363, 366, 375-81 passim, 391, 393, 395, 397, 402, 406, 418, 422, 424, 427
Discretion, use of: 8, 28, 33, 36, 40, 48. 83, 99, 114, 133, 207, 208, 215, 248, 269, 282, 320 327-8, 354, 358,401,402,417-19,421-3
District, part-time constables: 59-60, 64, 65, 66, 102, 127, 129,212,244-5, 383 numbers of: 59, 127,212,213
Districts, police: 12, 16-18,54-5, 141, 146,211 12, 239, 281, 362, 364
Auckland (Waikato and Bay of Islands): 12, 17,19,51,64, 141,145, 146,152,154, 202-3, 211, 234, 239, 245, 275, 277, 282, 284, 362, 401
Bay of Islands: 17, 64
Christchurch (and North Otago)/Canterbury; 12. 16, 19, 51, 61, 141, 142-4, 145, 147, 211, 239, 267, 401
Dunedin (Southland and Lakes): 12, 16, 51, 62, 87, 141, 147, 175, 178, 211, 239, 253, 267, 400
Hamilton: 362, 400
Hawkes Bay/Napier (and East Coast): 12, 16, 17, 19, 51, 66, 83, 141, 146, 147, 211,231,245,267.400
Kawhia: 12
Lake: 9, 13
Lawrence: 12
Nelson and Westland: 16-17, 41, 141, 142, 145, 379
Oamaru: 12, 16
Soulhland/Invercargill: 12, 13, 51. 54-5, 146, 211, 239, 253, 267
Taranaki: 12, 17, 62, 374
Tauranga; 12, 17
Thames: 12, 66. 211, 239, 245. 267, 283-4, 362
Timaru: 12
Waikato (and East Coast): 12, 17, 18
Wanganui (and West Coast): 12, 17, 18, 19, 61, 141, 147, 262, 400
Wellington (and Marlborough): 12, 16, 17, 19,51,61, 102, 114, 141, 143, 145-7, 193, 211, 364
Westland/Greymoulh; 9.12.16,51,69,211, 239, 400
Dog tax, resistance to: 64, 70, 128, 245 Hokianga Dog Tax Rebellion’: 134-7,233 243,311
Dominion: 174, 195, 312
Dominion Scouts: 194
Donovan, Michael: 234
Donovan, Timothy: 233
Dorgan, James: 426
Doyle, Arthur: 294
Doyle, B: 347
Doyle, John: 42, 265
Dublin, Ireland: 112
Dudding, Vivian: 425-6
Duff, Oliver: 420
Duffm, John: 19, 143
Dunedin, Otago: 13, 17, 19, 33, 34, 53, 54, 57, 72, 73,90, 92, 93, 103, 110, 111, 114, 120, 122, 130, 131, 138-9, 145, 153, 155, 170, 171-82, 184, 187, 191, 197, 203, 204, 205, 209, 210, 214, 216, 220, 224, 229, 235, 258, 262, 266, 267, 273, 275, 281, 299, 302, 315, 317, 327, 330, 349, 362, 363, 369-70, 381, 397, 403, 414, 418, 430
Bishop of: 48
police stations: 40. 138-9, 249
Dunedin's Men’s Mission: 402
Dunedin Social Reform Association: 44
Dunne, Charles: 60
Durbridgc, Frederick: 155-60
Duties: 8, 10, 14, 20-2, 24, 38-9, 54, 59-60, 90-2,95. 104,110-11, 112, 121-2,123,129-31. 138-9, 152-3, 175, 180-1, 191, 200, 201, 203, 205-6, 209-13 passim. 219, 220, 222, 225, 230-1, 237, 242, 245, 278, 281, 298, 308, 330, 334, 336, 339, 348-61, 366, 368-9. 373-4, 392. 395-406 passim. 419, 426
Dwyer, John: 111, 114, 144, 147, 166, 181, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191, 199, 222-3, 229, 231, 266, 281, 315, 317, 362.401,418,424
Eade, Edward; 170
Earl, Alexander: 242
East Coast. North Island: 68, 343
EastEyreton, Canterbury: 153
Ebbcll, Frank: 386
Economy, slate of: 9, 10, 13. 15, 70-1, 90. 103, 134-7 passim. 139. 188, 212, 213, 229, 242-3. 377, 382-3
Index
519
Education Department: 153, 206, 331, 332,400
Eggers, Frederick W: 331, 361
Elections, electoral system; 7. 15. 75, 76, 87, 137-8, 150, 267, 274, 280, 318, 375-6
Elingamite: 212
Elites, policing and; 1-3, 76, 190-1, 233, 295, 373-4, 407-11,416-17,423
Elliott, Howard: 359
Ellis, James: 171. 200. 260
Ellison, John W: 61. 90, 114, 141, 145, 147, 194, 206. 217, 218, 231, 235, 256, 257, 258, 264, 266, 275, 279, 280-1, 296, 308, 310, 320, 329, 343. 344, 345. 362, 363, 364, 366, 373
Emerson, A T: 424
Emerson, John; 12. 17. 19. 63, 69, 70, 71. 74 82-3, 121, 141, 142, 146, 182
Employers’ Defence Committees
Christchurch: 317
Greymouth: 319
Empty-heads’, desirability of as policemen: 110, 115, 185, 214-15, 218, 231-2, 259, 337
Emsley, Clive; 428
England; 14, 19, 20, 23.47. 103, 125, 161, 167 173, 200, 327, 370, 398.401.428
Englishmen as policemen: 37, 258
Entrapment, accusations of: 32, 98-9, 120, 147, 207-8, 248
Epiha, Jack: 247
Erdletsberger, T: 349
Espionage, infiltration duties: 54, 67, 72, 120, 126, 207-8, 317, 349. 353-4, 368, 395 within Police Force: 147, 157, 223, 230, 275, 281
Evans, Bird: 260
Evans, Frederick George: 288-93, 297, 306 Evans, John: 14
Evans, W: 355
Evening Post: 371, 403
Evening Star: 397, 399
Examinations; 13-15,40, 109, 113-16, 147,21519. 231-4, 258-9, 277-8, 299, 332-7, 365-6, 369, 380, 384
Exhibitions: 131, 172, 185-6, 187, 200, 347 397
Expenditure on policing: 11. 18,45,46,90, 101, 102, 105, 109, 112, 127, 131, 138, 177, 180, 220, 239, 244, 249. 255, 263-5, 317, 318, 322, 329, 374, 386, 390,401,406. 421
Eyre-Kenny, H: 82-3
Farmers’ Union Constabulary Corps: 316 Faulds, Henry: 166, 167
Favell, Edward: 344
Feast, Harry: 120, 256
Federation of Labour, ‘Federationisls’; 283,285
290-5, 297, 300-23, 388, 389, 420 Female searchers: 55, 138, 395, 396, 401
Fergus, Thomas: 11, 12. 19, 27
Fiji Constabulary: 242, 393
Finance, Minister of; 363
Findlay, J: 187-8
Findlay, John: 185, 194-6, 201, 203, 205, 225, 227, 255-6, 258, 265-9
Finger Print Branch, Police Force; 169-74, 186, 255, 363, 370
Finger Print Bureau. Prisons Branch: 168-70
Fingerprinting: 166-74, 188, 193, 195, 197, 217, 228, 239, 254, 370-2
public fascination with: 170-4, 371-2
Fire Police, proposed: 130
First Offenders’ Probation Act, 1886; 20
First World ('Great') War: 3, 172, 187, 323, 329-31, 334, 336, 338-61, 368-70, 372-3, 375,377-80,382-3,390, 392-403,413,418, 419,420, 424,425
police serving in: 355-7
Fisher, George: 147
FitzGerald, Garrett: 167, 170, 187
FitzGerald, James Edward; 43 it:* i„i nn
Fitzgerald, John: 320
Flanagan, Anna; 24
Flanagan, Daniel; 24
Flanagan, Sarah; 24
* Id lid £4II, JUldll. it Fleets of the World: 353
Fleming, James: 338
Folkestone, England; 397
Forest Rangers: 316
Fosdick, Raymond: 273-4
Fouhy, William; 267, 362, 363, 364
Fowler, J; 372
Fox, James Graham; 14, 61
Fox, Morris: 106, 261
Foxton, Manawatu: 173, 192, 245
France, Anatole: 409
France, French: 51, 57, 198, 282
Franklin, Tom; 288
Fraser, J FM; 174
Fraser, Peter: 291, 311
Frasertown, Hawke’s Bay: 212
Frazer, Francis V: 285, 345, 346
Freemasons and police: 148, 223, 230, 265-6, 268
Freke, Nicholas; 94
Funcke, Henry: 42
Galbraith, J K: 1,414
Gallagher, John; 195
Galton, William: 166
Gamble, Richard; 42
Gambling: 19, 22, 24, 82, 98, 105, 152, 186, 242, 328
by police: 56. 82. 176
Gambling and Lotteries Act, 1881; 24
Gaming and Lotteries Amendment Act, 1907 186
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
520
Gaols/gaolers, police: 144
Garbutt, Jack: 337
Geraldine. South Canterbury: 331
Germany, Germans; 55, 57, 126, 333, 348, 349, 350, 353, 354, 360, 361, 383, 392-3. 396
Gilbert, Charles; 66
Gillespie, J M; 394
Gillies, Robert J; 90, 141, 147, 208, 217, 227, 231, 266, 267, 268
Gisborne, East Coast: 18, 68, 82, 222-3, 245, 328, 384, 385
Glasgow, Scotland: 278, 399
Glenelg: 135
Globe Mine, West Coast: 331
Godley, A J: 334
Goldfinch, J M: 14, 61
Goodall, Samuel; 12, 16, 66, 68-9
Goode, E J: 190-1, 260
Gordon, Douglass; 114, 181,215-17
Gore, Southland: 98 rirwprnmpnt Arfuarv 1
Government Actuary: 106
Government Architect; 330
Government Insurance Department: 261
Grace, Martin; 57, 58,61, 198
Grace, Tom: 185
Graham, John; 159, 160
Grant, Andrew: 244, 383, 384, 385, 387
Great Barrier Island; 42, 57
Great Britain: 100, 110, 114, 151, 165, 167,258, 278, 306, 333, 337, 380, 392, 396, 408-12
passim, 415, 418, 422
Great Strike of 1913: 303-23, 344, 312, 376, 383
Green, Henry: 146, 179, 180, 181, 267
Greene, Michael: 230
Gregor, Andrew: 242
Grey, George: 66. 133, 333
Greymouth, West Coast: 16. 43. 74, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 155, 204, 274, 300. 319, 361, 363,400
Griffith, Thomas: 179, 208
Gudgeon, Walter E: 8-14, 17, 19, 20, 23, 27, 29, 38, 44, 45, 51, 52, 53, 59, 63, 64-9 passim, 71, 103, 213, 241-2
Gunn, Dennis; 372
Gunson, J H: 314-16, 320
Habitual Criminals and Offenders Act. 1906 184, 188. 191. 196
Haddock, John: 102-3, 143
Haddrell, Walter: 102. 132, 133
‘Half-a-Policeman Policy’: 59
Halinen, Olaf: 223-4
Halke, Charles: 371
Hall, John: 93
Hall, Kate: 93
Hall, Thomas: 93
Hall, William: 360
Hamillon, Waikato: 12, 17, 18. 19, 211, 330, 363, 384, 386
Hamilton District Law Society: 390
Hampton, Erie: 192-3
Hanan, J A: 205, 273, 275, 279, 280,403
Hancox, Henry: 265
Hangings/execulions: 20, 24, 57, 61, 63, 120, 132, 174, 188, 200, 360, 361,372
Hanlon, A C: 94. 174, 223-4
Hannan, Daniel: 143
Harbour Boards Act: 212
Harper, Leonard; 19
Harvey, Walter: 287-91, 293-4
Hassett, J P: 312
Hastie, George: 267, 333, 363
Hastings, Hawke’s Bay: 124
Hawera, Taranaki: 247
Hawera Star 133
Hawke’s Bay region: 42, 69. 124-5, 171, 200, 418
Hawkings, Thomas; 51-3
Headquarters, Police: 14, 31. 45, 60, 61, 92, 165-6, 168, 169, 173, 192, 210, 225. 228, 229-30, 232-4, 239, 249, 252, 254-5. 257-8, 265, 266, 267, 276, 280, 281, 329-30, 364, 372, 375
Health Department; 153. 248, 405
Health patrols: 405-6
Heard, Edward: 306-9, 312, 313, 315, 318, 321
Hegemonic controls; 1.47,66. 142, 175-6, 184, 217, 274, 407-9.413-16. 420
Heke Ngapua, Hone; 136
Heke Pokai, Hone: 136
Henderson, Alexander; 53, 119
Hendrey, Charles W: 61. 185, 210, 234. 281
tj, V.lldlU-3 . VJ 1 , lOJ, i.l v, 308, 400
Henry, Edward R 110. 166-7, 169
Hera: 248
Herbert, Patrick: 54, 103, 173, 176, 191, 262, 264, 362, 369-70
Herdman, Alexander: 277-80, 287, 288, 290-2, 297-323, 330, 334, 338-9, 343, 349, 350, 355, 356, 359, 362, 366-70 passim. 375-7, 383, 388, 390. 396-403
Herschcl, William 166
Hi, Remana: 64-5
Hickey, Pat; 42(
Hickman. Thomas 62. 132-3, 246, 247
Hickson, James: 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 55, 58. 70 86, 103, 111, 134-6. 141-2, 146, 149, 275
Hill, Mary: 248
Hinemoa : 360
Hira, R P; 245
Hogbcn, George 15. 231
Hogg, A: 87
Hogg, Charles: 11
Hokianga, Northland; 64-5,70,134-7,243-4,31
Index
521
Hokitika, West Coast; 16. 42. 319, 329
Holland: 396
Holland, Harry E: 295, 310-11, 320
Holmes, Frederick; 242
Holmes, Sherlock: 120, 361
Home Office. United Kingdom: 166
Home Secretary, United Kingdom: 309
Houhora, Northland: 212
Hours of work: 8,45,54, 90, 99, 113, 120, 129, 203, 219, 225, 230, 297, 302, 368, 369, 371, 380, 426
Houston, Margaret; 93
Houston, R M: 253
Hovell, H K: 212 Howard. John; 327
nowara, jonn: jz/
Hughes, Catherine: 345
Hume, Arthur: 3, Part One, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 91, 95, 96. 100, 103, 109, 110, 111, 113, 116. 117, 119, 121, 138, 148, 167, 168, 175, 187, 205,214, 274,415
appointed as Commissioner of Police: 14
replaced as Commissioner of Police: 39, 47,81,94
Hume, J E: 312
Humfrey, C A: 14
Hunt, Henry: 191
Huntly, Waikato; 66. 74, 265. 304-5, 314, 321 362, 386
Hutchison, William; 103
Hull County Council: 52
Hull Valley. Wellington region: 22, 120
Hutton, David: 364 Hyde, Robin; 343
Immigrants: 2. 184, 213, 338, 412, 415, 416 in Police Force: 214, 337, 338
Indecent Publications Act, 1910: 359
India: 166-7, 173
Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. 1894; 16-1, 276, 283
Industrial Schools: 20. 23. 152-3, 159, 176, 206, 331
Industrial Workers of the World: 311, 312, 322 353
Infant Life Protection legislation: 23, 24. 138 139, 152, 20-6,400
Infidelity ; 359
Inger, Tom: 59
Inglewood, Taranaki: 354
Injuries to police: 42, 65. 102-7 passim, 167, 189, 190, 262, 309, 357, 386
Insanity among police; 12, 19, 42-3, 104, 139 245, 372
Insurance scheme for police: 103, 106, 113
Internal Affairs, Minister of: 295
International Association of Policewomen; 398
Invercargill, Southland: 17, 23, 54-5, 92. 99, 130, 146, 155, 166, 197, 207. 208, 211,
225, 229, 230, 302, 363
Ireland. Irish: 37-8,75, 100, 112, 259, 275,280, 306, 315, 337, 338
Irwin, John: 42, 222
Isitt, F W: 36, 88, 96
Isitt, L M: 36
Issell, Robert: 371
Italy, Italians; 51, 354
James, Isaac: 360
James, William H; 12
Jane's Fighting Ships: 353
Jeffreys, F R: 346
Jeffries, John: 117
Johnston, James: 266, 281, 364, 384-5
Johnston, T H: 289, 294
Jolliffe, W; 359
Jones, Emma: 56-7
Jones, Joseph, 56-7
Jones, Richard; 60
Joyce, John: 47
Joyce, M: 317
Judiciary: 3, 21, 24. 51, 52. 67, 88, 91. 174 177, 189, 208-9, 229, 241, 247, 294, 327. 341, 370. 389, 418; see also Magistrates
Juries, jurors: 21, 24,43, 52,91, 177, 188, 189, 195-6, 223-4, 291, 294, 341, 387-8
Juriss, Alexander: 178
Justice, Minister of: 27, 31, 37, 46, 83, 109, 124, 131, 136-7, 139, 143, 150, 157, 158, 160, 167, 168, 175, 180, 189, 194, 205, 218, 221, 225, 236, 238, 248, 252, 254, 256, 260, 265, 267, 273, 277-80, 347, 366, 373, 388, 390, 403,418
Justice, Under-Secretary for: 178, 225, 256, 273
Justice Department: 31. 54, 208, 256, 258, 265, 268, 280, 281 Prisons Branch: 167-9
Justices of the Peace: see Magistrates
Justices of the Peace Act, 1882: 198, 244, 279
Juvenile Smoking Suppression Act; 206
Kaiapoi, Canterbury: 374
Kaihau, Kerei: 63, 70
Kaikohe, Northland: 243
Kaiwharawhara, Wellington: 51
Karaka, Arama: 129-30
Karamea, West Coast; 212
Karangahake, Thames region: 290, 293
Karo, Ani. 64
Karori Stream. Wellington: 189
Kalikati, Bay of Plenty: 60
Kauhanganui; 137
Kelly, Charles: 230
Kelly, Ned: 185
Kemp, Thomas: 156-8
Kennedy, Herb; 288, 289, 292
Kennedy, James; 208
522
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Kermadec Islands; 361
Kerry, Thomas: 93-4
Kettle, Charles; 233, 234
Kiely, Nicholas: 122, 147, 160, 211, 266, 267, 278, 281, 315-16, 322, 347, 360, 401
Kiely, William A: 12. 16, 17. 67
Kihikihi, Waikato: 63
Kimbolton, Manawatu: 195, 196
King, Thomas: 210-11
King, Truby; 151
King, William: 244
King Country: 30. 36-7, 63, 67. 68. 70, 99. 190, 211, 353, 362
Kingitanga/King Movement: 62, 63, 129, 132, 246, 421
Kirby, Austin; 51, 56, 75, 82
Klenner, Mary: 190
Knights of Labour: 57
Kohukohu, Northland: 11, 135
Kotahitanga; 128, 129, 137
Kruger, P; 126
Kuao, Iraia: 243-4. 248
Kuao, Mira; 244
Kuluz, M N: 295
Kum Yung, Joe: 188
Kupapa/’friendly’ Maori: 65, 66, 67-8, 134, 136. 245, 247
Labour, Minister of: 75
Labour Party/govemment; 295, 406
Lanauze, Henry; 12
Larrikinism; 19. 21-2, 73, 115, 186, 347
Latimer, David; 114
Lawrence, Central Otago: 265
Leahy, Michael: 233
Leahy, Patrick: 42
Leave: 83, 107, 113, 116, 147, 150, 167, 187 228, 229, 237, 238, 256, 258, 266. 277, 297, 299, 302. 315, 362, 363, 376, 379, 391,427 for war service: 355-7
Lecond, Madame: 198, 199
Lectures to Police Recruits: 114
Ledger, Catherine: 404
Leeston, Canterbury: 57
Legal expertise, value of: 61, 111, 112. 114, 122, 180-1, 208, 217, 242, 249, 254. 279, 285, 333, 364, 375. 380, 388, 393
Legion of Frontiersmen; 383
Legislation, general: 7, 10, 131, 151, 152, 168, 184, 187, 198, 215, 217, 248, 275, 299, 341, 345, 347, 360, 364 , 399, 401, 416, 417, 423
Levin, Wellington region: 246, 312
Liberal Party/govemment: 15-18, 31-2, 34,43-6 passim, 69-70, 75-7, 84, 87-91 passim. 100, 103, 109, 128, 137, 155. 182, 205, 224, 241, 269, 273, 276, 280, 283, 285, 362,
374, 377, 398. 406, 421-2. 430
Licensed Victuallers Association: 370
Licensing Acts Amendment Act, 1904: 207
Lillywhite, Charles: 125
Lindegreen, William: 182-3
Liquor legislation; 16. 32-9, 62. 67, 82, 88-9, 96-9, 105, 120, 132-3, 160, 190, 199, 206-8, 238, 245. 247, 260, 341-3. 357, 382-5, 415
Liverpool. England; 399
Liverpool, Lord: 306
LiITU|<UUI, l/UIU. jva; Lives of Romance : 370
Livingstone, Thomas: 23
Lloyd, Jack: 185
Lloyd’s of London; 94
Loft, William; 190
Logan, Robert: 392-3
London. England: 48. 94. 165, 170, 249, 258 267, 333, 339, 397
London Metropolitan Police: 8, 27, 47. 49. 83, 92, 96. 100, 110, 119, 147. 165. 166-7, 170, 256, 278, 296, 391, 396, 399. 409-10, 417, 424. 426
London Missionary Society; 241
Long-service medals: 10, 31, 259
Lora Goree. Southland: 54-6
Los Angeles. United Slates: 396
Louisiana, United Slates: 353
Lower Hult, Wellington region: 206, 349
Lowry, William: 133
Luckner, Felix von; 361
Lundon, Jerry R: 293, 294, 388-90
Lusk, DH: 316, 322, 383
Lyell, West Coast: 189
Lyttelton, Canterbury: 47, 57, 72, 74, 130, 251, 313, 317-19
McAlister, John: 245
McArdle, Henry; 143-4
Mcßirney, William; 242
McCallum, Alexander: 76
McClennan, James; 327
McCombs, James; 318
McGowan, Alexander; 386
McDonald, Alexander: 17
Mac Donald, Gordon: 362
McDonald, James: 177, 178, 214
Macdonell, Ewen: 55. 99, 122, 123-4, 145-7, 155-7. 170, 222-3, 266
McGill, Patrick; 16
McGilp, Alexander; 65. 135-6, 233
McGovern, Francis: 16. 19. 62. 64-5, 83. 124, 131. 141. 146
McGowan, James: 150, 158, 167, 169, 175-8 201. 205, 211, 213, 228, 232, 233. 234 239, 258, 362
iJO, JUi McGrath, Joseph A: 53, 123-4, 146, 147, 185 201.202,203, 281,400
McGrath, Patrick: 157
Index
523
McGuire, John P H; 193-6, 249
McGuire, Mary; 265
McHugh, Andrew: 187. 303, 356
Mcllveney, James: 121, 204, 366, 369
Mcllveney, W B: 56,121, 166, 186, 201,223-4, 230, 232, 242, 254, 264, 268, 339, 345, 346, 363, 364, 370-2
Mclntosh, Captain: 74
Mclntyre, Daniel: 186
Mclvor, Lewis: 190, 260
Mackay, Edward: 155-9
McKenzie, James: 196
McKenzie, John: 171, 200
Mackenzie, Thomas: 273
Ivldl IVCII&IC, 1 IIUIIIdJ. C < McKernan, Ada; 124
McKinnon, William H: 267, 281, 284, 288 318, 319, 362, 373, 424
McLeod, Donald: 101, 133, 249, 250
McLeod, Neil; 41-2
McMahon, Elizabeth: 361
McMahon, Peter T; 204, 365, 378, 404
McNab, Robert; 280
McNamara, John; 217, 258-9, 339
Mcßae, Donald: 55
Mcßae, John: 54-6
Madden, R F; 281, 364, 404
Maddern, William: 121, 125, 222
Maher, John; 190
Magistrates; 7. 13. 25. 33. 34, 35, 63, 64. 67, 73. 74. 82-5 passim, 91. 97. 98-9, 100, 119, 121, 129, 134, 135, 136, 155, 156, 178, 185. 198. 206, 212-13, 223,225. 232-5 passim, 243, 248, 253-5 passim, 265, 274, 285, 290, 294, 296, 310, 311, 316, 317, 319, 322, 336, 342, 345, 346. 363, 373, 383, 393, 398; see also Judiciary
Mahia Huakeke: 389
Mahoney, Denis: 265
Makuri, Wairarapa: 59
Mallard, Frederick: 87, 177, 178
Maloney, Gerald: 385
Maloney, Peter: 328
I’latuiivj, i iiu . jco Manaia, Taranaki; 14
Manawalu region: 191-7, 354
Manchester. Mancunians: 46. 126
Mangatoa, Northland; 70
Mangawhare, Northland: 41
Mangonui, Northland: 67
Manhirc, B P: 265-8
Maori, policing of: 2, 3, 34, 36-7, 42, 59, 60, 61-70, 91, 126, 127-37, 199, 242-8, 269, 274, 343, 348, 353, 382-90, 408, 410-16 passim, 418, 421,428,429 expeditions against: 2, 30, 62, 63, 64, 6870, 128, 131, 134-7, 243, 382-90
l\J, ICO, IJ I , IJ**-/, ttJ, JO4-7U Maori Councils, police appointed by; 127-9, 246-7
Maori Parliament; 128, 137, 246
Maori police: 65-7, 70, 127-30, 135-6, 243-5, 247, 389
regulars; 65-6, 245, 356, 384-6, 406 unofficial: 64, 241, 243, 244, 246
Maoriland Worker : 302, 334, 354
Maritime Strike, 1890; 54, 71-5, 322
Marsack, Richard: 94. 123, 125, 198, 200, 202, 363, 364
Marshall, Frances; 344
Mason, William: 17, 142
Massey, William Ferguson: 280, 291,292, 293 306-10, 313-15, 320, 321, 351, 353, 388 404, 426
Masterton, Wairarapa; 207, 373
Matakohekohe, Northland: 244
Matatua District Maori Council; 246
Matawhero, East Coast: 67
Matenga, Hare: 133-4, 200, 250
Mathieson, William: 217, 230, 235, 333, 364
Matrons, Police: 55. 138-40, 169, 213, 222, 395-6, 399-405
Matthew, Duncan: 373
Matthews, C E: 257-8, 265, 268, 281
Maungapohatu, Urewera region: 130, 244, 382, 384-90
Maxwell, C F: 241
Mayne, Richard: 92, 405, 409, 417, 423, 426
Mays, Selwyn; 314, 390
uviTTjii. j n, j/u Melbourne, Australia: 112, 186, 200, 353, 381
Mercer, Waikato: 70, 247
Mercury Bay, Thames region: 41
Meremere, Taranaki; 247
Mete, Hone; 136
Mexico; 329
Middlemarch, Central Otago; 175, 370
Middleton, Thomas; 76-7
Military: 2, 7-8, 14, 62, 83, 171, 264, 360, 378, 392-4, 397, 408, 422, 425, 429, 430 police as reserve for: 28-31, 149, 249 police links with: 26, 27-31, 110, 130, 14950, 322, 347-8, 354-5, 361, 364, 384 policing by; 8, 27, 28, 62, 63, 64, 67-70, 72, 73, 74, 128, 130-1, 135-6, 149, 185, 192, 194, 243-4, 305-13, 315-18, 321-2, 348-9, 355, 393-4,416
Military Service Act, 1916: 351-2
Military Service Board: 357 kCIU. T AAA AC.
Millar, J A: 44. 46
Mills, Frederick; 42
Milton, South Otago: 38
Mitchell, A J: 124. 145-7, 182, 209. 234, 239. 257, 258. 267, 281, 297-9. 304-5, 314-15. 317, 328, 362, 425
Mitchelson, E: 68
Moawhango, Central North Island; 60
Mokau, Taranaki; 153 C A O
Moller, Soren: 42 Monte Carlo. Monaco: 165
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
524
Montevideo. Uruguay; 186
Moore, David: 245, 247, 248
Moore, Samuel: 12, 13, 16, 17,73
Moral exemplars, police as: 41, 66, 89, 94, 96 110, 154, 156, 208-9, 214, 215, 217-18 250, 259, 274 , 328-30, 335, 339, 345-6, 391, 396-9, 402, 406, 415, 416, 418, 421, 425-30
Moral reform campaigns: 3, 22-6 passim, 31-4 137-8, 151-2, 197-9, 359, 395-406
Morale: 9, 19, 20, 26, 33, 38, 40-1, 45-6, 54, 72, 84, 86, 87, 89, 99-104, 108, 114, 116, 123-4, 143-4, 154-5, 161, 178, 184, 191, 200-4 passim, 220-5 passim, 221, 230, 232, 238-9, 254, 258, 260, 264, 267-9, 277, 296-9, 360-3. 329, 335-7, 355, 364, 366-8, 376, 378-81
Moravians: 191
Moriarty, Robert; 260
Morice, Francis; 17, 51
Moroney, Bartholomew; 42
Moses, Thomas: 175-8, 214
Moss, Frederick: 241
MotorCar Regulation Act, 1902: 153
Motueka, Nelson region: 350
Motuihe Island: 350, 36!
Mounted policing: 1, 25, 27, 60, 131, 188, 189 192, 219, 243-4, 286, 287, 297, 305-13 315-22, 358, 374, 375, 385, 410, 411,424
Muggeridge, Amos: 102, 147, 165, 233, 238 255, 372, 384
Muir, James; 369-70
Mulholland, Hugh; 117
Mullany, Luke; 364
Mumford, George: 93-4
Municipal bylaws, policing: 21, 38, 134-7, 153 212, 345
Municipal Corporations Act, 1886: 130
Murchison. West Coast: 189-90
Murders/homicides: 17, 18, 22, 23-4,41-2,51-7, 61,62,63,93, 120, 124-5,132,143-4, 153, 170, 171, 173, 187-90, 195-6, 197, 200 223-4, 242, 246, 260, 289-93, 331, 341, 344, 360-1, 369, 372, 374 rates of: 360 suspected: 182-3, 365
Murphy, John: 59
Murray, G W: 309
Museum, Police: 173
Muter, P: 261, 263-4
Napier, Hawke’s Bay: 18,19, 56, 60, 121, 124-5, 145, 170, 183, 233, 245, 274, 341, 358 362, 384, 401
Narrow Neck, Auckland: 348
Nash, F: 393
Nash, John (Constable): 391
Nash, John (Sergeant): 12
National Council of Women: 402
National Freedom League: 352
National Ministry, First World War: 280, 377 430
National Peace Council: 347
National Registration Act, 1915, National Register: 349, 351-3
National Union of Women Workers of Great Britain and Ireland: 399
Native Constables: 65-7,70, 102, 127-30, 135-6, 244-7
numbers of: 65. 67, 127, 213, 245
Native Land Court: 14, 64. 67. 69. 128, 129, 243-4
Native Minister: 68, 247
Native Samoan Armed Constabulary: 392-3
Neame, Walter; 189
Neil, John; 386
Neil, Thomas: 27, 51
Neil, William; 245, 356. 384-6, 389
Nelson Citizens’ Vigilance Committee: 159,160
Nelson region: 211
Nelson urban area: 19, 21, 40. 44, 54, 92, 117, 143-4, 155-61, 175, 327
New Caledonia: 51, 57
New Hebrides: 242
New Plymouth: 19, 54, 132, 141, 190, 204, 363, 364, 378, 401
‘New police’: 49, 96, 114, 127, 220, 274, 40910,416
New South Wales. Australia: 18. 57, 114, 167, 170, 171, 174, 202, 264, 342. 368
New York, United States: 46. 88. 138, 314. 399
New Zealand : 349
New Zealand Alliance: 32
New Zealand Boxing Association: 187
New Zealand Constabulary Force: 7. 8. 9. 27, 31,62, 111, 112, 227, 264, 274
New Zealand Expeditionary Force. First World War; 334, 338-9, 348, 350-3, 355-7
New Zealand Farmers’ Union: 305. 315-16
New Zealand Freedom League: 322
New Zealand Gazette: 9
New Zealand Herald : 288. 290
New Zealand Law Society: 390
New Zealand Maritime Council; 73. 74. 75
New Zealand Now: 420 Maui 7 o n I n 4 Ddrm ■ 7 I 1 7I ,
New Zealand Permanent Staff: 311. 316, 318
New Zealand Police Association: 264, 298-303, 375, 376, 380, 406
New Zealand Police Gazelle 45. 123, 165, 171, 172, 197, 208, 232-3, 236, 239, 252, 353, 371, 375, 377
New Zealand Staff Corps: 311
New Zealand Times: 196, 292, 309
New Zealand Truth: 25, 171, 222-4, 251, 257, 265-6, 268-9, 277, 300-1, 323, 327. 345, 365, 422
Index
525
New Zealand Volunteer Force; 28; see als> Volunteers
New Zealand Worker Newspaper Company: 298, 353
New Zealanders as policemen: 37, 115, 166, 213-14, 225, 338
Newall, Stuart: 135-6, 311
Newman, A K: 396, 398
Ngata, Apirana: 128, 247, 356, 383
Niue: 241
Nixon, George: 125, 200
Noakes, Oliver: 287-8
Non-commissioned officers, importance of: 9. 10. 17, 19-20, 30, 35-6, 40, 45-6, 50. 84, 85. 103, 108-9, 176, 179-84, 200-4, 20911, 219-20, 234, 239, 265, 267, 281, 328, 336, 357, 363, 368-9, 380, 424
Norsewood, Hawke’s Bay: 341
North Cape, Northland: 67
North Island; 191,353
Northcroft, H W: 97. 391
Norway, Norwegians: 223-4
Norwood, Samuel P: 621, 146, 210-11, 267 280, 363
Oamaru, North Otago: 13, 17, 38, 76. 143, 144 166, 168, 207,210, 238, 267, 328
O’Brien, Rose: 139
O’Brien, Terence: 50. 90, 122, 146, 176, 179, 180, 189, 202, 203, 209, 238, 258, 267
O’Callaghan, T: 200
O’Connor, C Y: 71
O’Connor, Maurice; 60, 119
O’Donovan, Florence: 42, 185
O’Donovan, John: 13, 42, 87, 112-14, 126, 147, 182, 184-5, 193-4, 197, 210, 217, 229, 231, 257, 267, 268, 329, 339-40, 352, 357, 362-5, 375, 379-82, 401, 422. 424-6
Offensive Publications Act, 1892: 24. 151-2 186
O’Grady, John; 331
O’Grady, Thomas: 76, 143
Ohaeawai, Northland: 244
Ohakune, Centra! North Island; 334
O'Halloran, Lott; 309, 348
Ohinemuri Mines and Batteries Employees Union; 286
Okaihau. Northland: 65
‘Old police’: 127, 428
Omanaia, Northland: 136
‘One policeman’ policy: 62
O’Neill, Patrick: 110
Ongaonga, Hawke’s Bay: 212 a i i I. n c
Onslow, Lord: 75
Opoliki, Bay of Plenty: 42, 68, 69. 129, 211 383
Opualia, Waikato; 70
Opunake, Taranaki: 246, 247
Orange Lodges: 37-8, 359
Orari River. South Canterbury: 331 r\ r A* r AT 1 A'IA « A 'll
Order-imposition; 421, 424-5, 427
Order-maintenance: 421-5, 427
O'Regan, P J: 291
O’Reilly, Charles: 42
Osborne, Oliver: 177
Ostler, H H 333, 336
Otago Daily Times ; 251
Otago Provincial Police: 24. 45, 81, 230, 231
Otago region: 13, 47, 100, 154, 179, 336, 378
Otaki, Wellington region: 42
Otatara, Northland: 136
Otorohanga, Waikato: 99
Overton, Henry: 194
Pacificalion/occupation policing; 62-5, 175, 392-3,410
Pacifists, policing of; 347-8, 350-4, 358
Paeroa, Thames region: 70, 206
Pagenkoff, Count: 126
Pahialua, Wairarapa: 192, 194
Paku: 248
Palmerston North. Manawatu: 42, 124, 141, 191-5, 197, 211-12, 260, 299, 303, 308 327, 373
Pankhurst, Adela: 351, 369
Papahurihia; 64
Papakaio, North Otago: 187-8
Papawai, Wairarapa: 128
Papua: 67
Paramilitarism: 8, 26. 82, 83, 95, 107, 116, 220, 229, 231, 234-5, 269, 273, 276-7, 280-2, 296, 297, 352, 375, 383, 401, 406, 418, 424, 428, 430
Pardy, William S; 12. 18. 19, 21, 34. 50, 54, 55, 57, 62, 85. 87. 92. 94, 95. 100, 103, 120, 124, 134. 139. 147, 176
Parihaka, Taranaki: 62, 64, 70, 131-3, 135, 311
Parr, C J: 314-15
Parry, Bill: 285, 295, 302
Patea, Taranaki: 248
Patone, Hohoia: 65
Patton, William; 206
Patulahi, East Coast: 382
Pawelka, Joseph; 173, 191-7, 260, 265
Pay, salaries; 29, 94, 99-102, 104-7, 119, 120, 122, 124, 173, 200-2, 204, 210, 219-22, 237, 241, 259-60, 281, 297, 299, 330, 356, 365, 368, 375-80 passim
Adequacy of: 100. 215, 216, 220-1, 225, 229, 231, 235, 240, 250, 268, 296-9, 302, 331, 338, 376, 380, 393
District constables: 60
Female employees; 138, 222, 377, 395,404
Increment system: 100, 101, 108, 119,150, 165, 219-22 passim. 237, 259, 260, 330, 355, 376
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
526
Long-service: 9-10, 11, 100, 101, 103, 259
Native Constables; 66, 67, 129, 245
Police Surgeons: 362
Probationers: 113, 220-2, 237, 259, 337 376
Special constables, 1913: 322
Temporary constables: 339-40
Pender, Peter: 7, 16. 17, 19, 21, 24, 27, 39, 41 42, 51, 58. 60, 92, 94, 101, 110, 111, 112 114, 123-4, 125, 143, 145-7, 160
Penguin: 189
Penn, Henry: 57
Pensions, Old-age; 105, 152-3, 206, 219
Pensions, police: 10-11,85,99, 103-7, 109, 113 142, 143, 147, 161, 236, 261-6, 296, 297 302, 340, 356-7, 362, 377, 391, 419, 427
Penton, A P: 30, 149
Permanent Artillery: 27,29, 110, 115, 130, 131 135-6, 149, 185
Permanent Mililia/Force: 7, 27-30, 59, 63, 70, 72, 73, 74, 111, 115, 127, 131, 149, 264 306
Perquisites: 117, 121, 200, 202, 203, 219, 222, 245, 298, 330, 375-6
Petitions, memorials: 35, 43, 52, 69, 157, 159, 178, 196, 262, 295, 301, 335, 388, 390
Petone, Wellington region: 56
Phair, William J: 95, 148, 184-5, 210, 234 267, 280, 319, 363, 400
Philadelphia, United States: 399
Philpott, Frank: 120
Photography, use of: 92, 124, 126, 168-73 passim. 236, 252, 253-4, 370-2, 375, 384, 386 PiKora 11/t no 1
Pihere, Hone: 135
Pilcher, Mildred; 344
Pitt, Albert: 84
Plunkett, Mary: 25
Poles: 354
Police, Minister of: 196, 205, 280, 358, 380-1, 428
Police Complaints Authority; 427
Police Force Act, 1886: 7, 10, 11, 43, 48, 275, 278-9
Police Force Act, 1908: 264, 275
Police Force Act, 1913: 278-80, 302, 330, 336-7, 362, 364, 367
Police Force Amendment Act, 1919: 340, 357
Police offences legislation: 105, 113, 130, 184, 212, 278, 304, 345
Police Provident Fund: 105-7, 143, 261-5, 377
Policing the Colonial Frontier. 410
Political intervention in/control of policing: 14-19 passim. 26, 33-6, 44-8 passim, 53-4, 61, 62, 81, 83, 84-9, 91, 97, 100, 108-9, 116-17, 131, 142, 144, 149, 150, 155-61, 181-2, 206-7, 211, 214, 217, 223, 230, 233-4, 236, 239, 247, 251-3, 265-9, 274,
278-80, 283-95, 300, 302, 304-23, 332, 362, 379. 407-9,421-4
Pomare, Maui: 391
Pooley, Albert: 187, 356
Port Albert, Northland: 59
run /MUCH, MUI UlldllU. Port Awanui, East Coast: 212
Port Chalmers, Otago: 11, 175, 329
Porter, Henry: 11
Porter, T: 68-9
Post and Telegraph Department: 308, 310
Post Office: 331, 354
Poverty Bay: 63,67
Power Boat Association: 361
Poynton, Joseph W: 84, 103, 124, 178, 262
Praise of police: 94, 144-5, 157, 161. 173, 182, 186, 189, 191, 199-200, 216, 255, 266, 269, 361, 421, 427-8
Pratt, George: 245
Pratt, John: 17, 19,71,274
Preventive policing: 1,92, 127, 138, 396,400-6, 410, 426, 429
Prisons, imprisonment: 14, 31, 47, 81, 91, 130, 134-6,138-9, 153,155,167-73 passim. 177, 178, 185, 188, 191, 192, 195-6, 205, 208, 222-4 passim. 244,248, 285-6, 289-91,311, 312, 327, 329, 330, 344, 348, 350, 352, 369, 370, 371, 382-3, 387-9, 391,395, 403, 411,420, 428
Prisons, Inspector of: 14, 256
Prisons Amendment Act, 1912; 371
Prisons Department; 91, 255
Private detectives; 56, 256, 257
Probation system: 2, 152, 346. 403
Probationary period, probationary constables; 21, 50, 59. 111-16, 123, 194, 195, 199, 215-17, 221, 224, 232, 237, 258-9, 339, 365, 368
Professionalisation/modemisation of policing: 10, 13, 34, 47, 81, 83, 88, 92-3, 102, 107, 112-16, 118, 127, 130-1, 150-1, 154-5, 161, 171, 213, 218, 231, 241-2, 276-82, 296, 330-6, 340, 370-5, 391, 398, 421-4, 427
Prohibitionists, temperance movement: 3, 22, 31-4, 36-8, 45. 46, 82. 84, 86, 94. 96-8. 138, 142, 145, 147, 206-7, 341, 395, 3%
Promotions: 9, 10, 20, 43, 45-6, 50, 51, 84, 85, 88, 108-9, 142, 146-8, 165, 181, 184, 200-4 passim, 214, 217-20, 225, 229-34 passim. 237-9 passim. 253, 254, 259-60, 267, 277-8, 297, 299, 330, 332-7, 363-7, 380
disadvantages of: 101-2, 210-11, 219, 380
obstacles to: 10, 13, 15, 19, 45-6, 97. 233, 254, 268-9
of individuals: 13, 17, 19, 33, 37, 48, 53-4, 62, 82, 97, 114, 119, 122, 141, 144-7, 166, 170, 173, 181, 182, 184,185, 197, 201, 210-11, 217, 219, 225, 233, 254-5,
Index
527
267, 268, 274, 280-1,315, 339, 362-5, 372, 421
Prosecutions of police: 12, 52, 56, 107, 156, 174-7, 208-9, 222, 224, 236, 327
Prostitution: 19, 22-3, 33, 48, 107, 120, 125, 137, 152, 156, 176, 191, 197-9,208, 342-5, 398, 400, 425
J7O, tV/V, Protestant Political Association: 359
Provincial police/policing; 12, 19, 87, 108, 142, 147
Psyche: 309-10 Dnklif' Ua'illU Kfmirtar rtf- A O
Public Health, Minister of: 405
Public service/servants: 15, 35,43, 87, 103, 105, 106, 107, 144, 166. 182, 225, 232, 252, 255, 256, 262-4, 278-81. 293, 296, 302, 303, 308, 318, 331, 333, 335, 356, 364, 372, 377
Public Service Act. 1912: 279, 303, 422
Public Service Association: 43-4, 303, 335-7, 375-81
Public Service Association Journal : 44, 377-9
Public Service Classification and Superannuation Amendment Act. 1908: 377
Public Service Classification and Superannuation Amendment Act, 1909: 264, 377
Public Service Commissioner: 422
Public Service Superannuation Act, 1907: 262-3
Public Service Superannuation Board: 264
Public Service Superannuation Fund; 262-5
Public Trust Office: 219
Public Trustee: 84, 178
Public Works Department; 71
ruum TTuiKj L/tjjai uiiciu. / i Pukekawa, Waikato; 63
Pukekohe, South Auckland: 316
Puna: 247-8
Pungarehu, Taranaki: 62, 132
Purangi, Taranaki: 128
Puranui, Wanganui region: 62
Pyramus: 309-10
Quartermain, Arthur G; 170, 173, 174, 193-6, 254
Queensland, Australia; 18. 138, 364 DnI■ /i n I Tnmn p "7*7*7
Queensland Police Union; 377
Quill, Edward; 177
Quirke, Michael: 194-5
Quirke, Thomas: 191-2, 194
Raglan, Waikato; 42
Railways, railway workers: 60, 63, 70, 72, 128 129, 130, 137, 145, 152, 189, 199, 211 239, 289-90, 304, 318
Railways Department: 44, 302
Haiti, Piri; 67
Ramsay, David: 17, 107
Ramsay, Peter: 369
Ramsay, William; 182-4
Kamsdcn, Horatio; 369
Kanfurly, Lord; 132
Ranks: 12, 17, 19-20, 45-6, 49-53 passim , 84, 85. 100-1, 108, 122-3, 141, 143, 145, 146, 150, 180-1, 201-4, 209-11, 230, 239, 245, 254, 267, 280-1, 365-9
Rarotonga, Cook Islands: 242, 392
Rasmussen, Hans: 54
Ratapiko, Taranaki: 354
Raukawa District Maori Council: 246
Raukumara range: 143, 250
Raurimu, Central North Island: 362
Rawene, Northland; 135-6, 219, 233
Rawle, Sidney; 120
Rayner, Richard; 59-60, 64, 212
Reactive policing; 1, 92, 127, 396, 401, 410, 429
Reader, Henry E: 9
Records of merit: 10, 108, 331
Recruits/recruiting: 9, 16, 29, 30, 85, 88, 100, 103, 109-15, 148. 156, 175-8, 181-2, 185, 194, 199, 213-18, 220-5 passim. 227, 229, 232, 234-7, 240, 242, 245, 255, 258-9, 268, 282, 285, 293, 305-12, 314-20, 337-40, 357, 376, 378
direct entry: 29-30, 115, 121-2, 149, 216, 221, 236, 338
entry requirements: 112, 122, 150, 181,21415. 231-3, 236, 248. 251-3 passim , 258-9, 302. 337-40
from military; 7, 28-30, 40, 59, 89, 111, 115, 149
of detectives: 50, 53-4, 119, 121-2 of female staff; 139-40, 401,404
Red Federation’, ‘Red Feds’: see Federation of Labour
Reddington, M: 174, 177, 182
nvuuiiigiuu, :>t t / , if, Redwood, Percival; 191
Reefton, West Coast: 36, 148, 357
Reeves, W P: 75, 165
Reform Party/governmcnt: 276-80, 301, 315 321, 376, 377, 398, 423, 430
Reforms, policing; 34. 44, 46-7. 81. 84, 85, 89, 107, 117, 118, 124, 125, 145, 147, 150-1, 154, 161. 165-6, 174, 175, 205, 223, 251, 257-60, 266, 268-9, 275, 276, 279, 280, 296, 299, 302, 366, 376, 379, 380, 406
Religion and policing: 14, 17, 37-8, 64-6, 137, 147-8. 159, 230, 246-8, 257, 266, 268-9, 273, 275, 280, 321, 350, 359, 362, 364, 397
Rennie, W; 187-8
Retirement age: 11, 13, 103-7 passim, 147, 238 261, 265-7 passim, 335, 340, 364, 377
Retrenchment, restructuring: 7-13, 16-18, 40. 41. 43, 50-1, 53. 57, 61. 67. 69. 84. 175, 264, 329-30, 375, 377, 406
Rewards: 10. 49. 50. 104, 106, 108, 109, 121, 155, 195, 199, 200, 260, 289, 330-2, 339, 361, 369
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
528
unofficial: 97, 331
Reynolds, W R: 242
Rhodes, Cecil; 188
Rhodes, Charles: 286
Richards, Arthur: 288-9
Richards, Wesley; 288
Riddell, William G: 310, 336
Riots, demonstrations: 25, 27. 72, 74, 190, 212, 243, 286-95, 305, 331, 347. 348. 355, 380, 392-3, 426
Ripa Island. Lyttelton Harbour: 5
Roberts, Jonathan: 57-8
Robertson, John: 292, 304, 315
Robinson, James: 11
Rolleston, Canterbury; 27, 51
Rome, Italy; 143
Rongokako Maori Council: 128
Roosevelt, Theodore: 46
Rosser, Arthur; 298, 300-2
Rotorua, Bay of Plenty: 42, 67, 129, 210, 212, 245, 356, 384, 388-9, 394
Rotorua Boxing Association: 347
Rottmann, Arthur: 360
Rowan, Charles; 92, 405, 409, 417, 423, 426
Royal Artillery: 242
Royal Humane Society: 155
(Royal) Irish Constabulary: 24, 94, 100, 110, 112, 116, 148, 274, 279, 280, 297, 337, 338, 384, 399.410
Royal Navy; 309-10, 333
Royal New Zealand Artillery: 131, 306, 309
Royal visits, policing of; 125-6, 153
Rua Kenana: 244-5, 247, 343, 382-90
Ruahine Station. Central North Island: 199
Ruatahuna, Urewera region: 384
Ruatoki, Bay of Plenty: 245
Rudd, Michael; 290
Rules and regulations: 8-11 passim, 30, 34. 36. 40, 43-5 passim, 83-4. 92. 102, 104. 107, 112, 113, 116, 118, 120, 122, 123, 138, 145, 150. 156, 159, 176. 215, 219, 229, 235, 237, 252-4 passim, 265, 266, 268,275 82. 296-9, 303, 328, 332, 334-7. 356. 364, 365-7, 374, 376, 379. 381. 399
Runanga, offical system: 128, 392
Runanga, West Coast: 360
Rural policing, police: 8, 9, 14, 18, 35-6, 51, 59-60, 118, 127, 138, 153, 180, 189, 249, 330, 339, 342-3, 358, 374, 375-6, 378, 379, 410,418,420,424,426, 427
attractions of; 36, 46. 102, 148, 203, 21820, 231, 298, 302
See also: District, part-time constables
Russell, Andrew: 311
Russell, G W: 405
Russell, Northland: 67
Russell, William: 13. 16. 27. 35. 36. 62. 311
Russia. Russians: 57, 126, 396
Rutledge, Barrett; 335
Ryan, Maurice: 339
Salmond, J: 352 C 1 A IQ
Salvation Army: 38
Samoa Relief Force: 393
Samoan Constabulary Force: 394
San Francisco, United Stales: 397-9 passim
Savage Island: see Niue
Scandinavia; 396
Scandrett, George: 229
Scanlan, Michael: 42
Scarman, Lord: 293, 408
School Attendance Act, 1894: 20
Schools, Inspector-General of; 231, 427
Science, use of; 3. 47. 52. 58. 61.92-4, 166-74, 369-72, 375
Scotland, Scots: 54-6. 165, 166, 219, 223, 225, 282
Scotland Yard/New Scotland Yard: 125, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 228. 256, 330, 371, 393
Scott, Donald: 190, 264
Scott, Edward: 189
Scott, Henry; 206, 359
Scully, Patrick; 104
Seacliff, Otago: 139, 151
Seamen’s Union: 310
Second World War; 259
Seddon, Richard John; 16. 17. 18. 21, 26. 28. 31, 32. 34. 39. 41.44-9 passim, 54. 55. 69. 70, 76. 81-9 passim, 96, 100, 103, 106, 109, 116, 128, 131, 135, 137, 144-6, 149, 150, 158-61 passim, 165. 205, 206, 214, 233, 241, 274
Seeadler 361
Semple, Robert: 285, 299, 310-11
Seniority: 9, 13, 19, 45, 46, 84, 108, 109, 119, 146, 200-4, 211. 217, 219, 225, 234, 238, 254, 255, 268, 274, 278, 332, 355, 356-7, 366-7, 379, 391-2
Sewell, Joseph; 189
Sharman, Edward; 229
Shearers and Labourers Union: 76
Shearman, Robert C; 12. 45. 50
Sheehan, Bartholomew: 202. 230. 267. 363. 384. 387
Shirley, Paul: 111
Shore, James 56
Sickness among police staff and their families: 12. 41. 44. 53. 81. 82-3. 102-7 passim 113, 142, 143. 146. 149, 150, 154, 160 161. 165. 170, 212. 266. 329, 393
Siddclls, James J: 204. 233. 246, 247. 248
Simla. India: 173
Sims, VV; 393
Skinner. Arthur; 186-7. 237, 286, 384-5. 388 389
Index
529
Skinner, Lewis: 219
Smith, J E; 242
Smith, Jane: 93 Cmith DnKprl
Smith, Robert: 340
Smith, Thomas: 299, 356, 357, 374
Smith, Ursula; 55. 395
Smyth, Charles: 300-1
Snow, Charles: 371
Social Democratic Party; 303, 304
Social Hygiene Act, 1917: 405 U irn.pnp C ACiptlr - A fVI
Social Hygiene Society: 404
Social status of police: 118, 237
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: 130
130 Society for the Protection of Women and Children: 402-3
Solicitor-General: 264, 352, 401
Somes Island. Wellington Harbour: 350
South Africa: 115, 174, 188. 242. 347. 358
South America: 57
South Australia: 18, 89, 93, 296, 332
South Island: 85, 189, 302, 306, 360
Southey, Henry: 288-9
Southland: 54-6, 146, 177, 337 Ci-vtifhlonrl Troupe onri I oKrvnr Pniinnl* OHS
Southland Trades and Labour Council: 205 Sovereign of the Seas: 57
Special constables: 60, 65, 67, 72-4, 126, 130, 194-5, 212-13, 242, 243, 278-9, 305-23, 338, 339, 359, 383, 392, 405-6
Sport and recreation; 38, 41, 111, 113, 154, 165, 185, 186-7, 217, 218, 230, 237, 258, 307, 337, 352, 356, 370, 426
Stabilisation, social: 1-3, 9, 16, 18, 20-1, 27-9 passim, 38, 47, 58, 61,66, 70, 81, 90, 91-2, 94-5, 117-18, 127, 149, 152, 153, 161, 184-6, 189, 193-4, 205, 213-14, 220-1, 235, 248-9, 254, 259, 269, 275, 276, 279, 296, 361, 364-5, 381-2, 398, 406, 408, 412-30 passim
passim Staffing
adequacy of: 18, 21, 38-9, 81. 83, 84, 85, 89-90, 91, 122, 153-4, 180, 206, 213, 232, 305-6, 334, 339-40, 355, 358, 361, 378, 416
distribution of: 18, 88, 109, 148, 154, 212, 213, 305
zip, juj levels of: 7, 18, 39, 84, 89-90, 91, 108, 185-6, 203, 213, 240, 255, 264, 267, 334, 338-40, 357, 401-6 passim, 415, 419
ntv ratios: 18, 21, 89-90, 91,92, 240, 249, 275, 415-16 419 491
415-16, 419. 421 turnover: 211, 334. 338
Stafford, West Coast: 143
Star : 33. 361
Stark, James: 318
Stephenson, Alfred; 42
ruuvu. Sterritt, David: 357
Stewart, Hugh: 11
Stewart Island; 212
Stoke. Nelson: 159
Stout, Anna; 396, 399, 401-3
Stout, Robert: 1. 32. 46. 87. 91. 172, 320, 396
Stratford, H; 13, 14
Stratford, Taranaki: 42, 87, 386 c.~;i— ; ....... i in n T7l T7A
Strikes, industrial disputes: 3, 70-7, 273, 276, 278, 279, 283-97, 300-23, 333, 351-2, 357, 359-60, 362, 381, 389, 429
Strode, Alfred; 155
‘Students of Truth’; 25-6
Stychc, Elizabeth; 93
Styche, Henry; 93
Subculture, police: 2, 275, 297, 327-8
Sun: 403
OUH. HUJ Supreme Court; 69. 197, 223-4, 255. 383, 386, 390
Surgeons. Police: 112-13, 150, 213, 216, 229, 232, 362
Surveillance: 2, 3, 7-8, 14, 16, 54, 57, 58, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 120, 121, 122, 125-6, 127, 130, 152-3, 176, 200, 243-5, 249, 348, 34954 passim. 357-8, 366, 369-70, 383, 392, 396, 400, 406, 410, 411, 415, 419, 424, 426, 429-30
Sutherland, Charles: 113
Switzerland, Swiss: 350
Sydney, Australia: 21,51,56,58.100,125,126, 151, 174, 186, 346, 353, 384, 398
Symes, W H: 113
Taihape, Central North Island: 199, 207
Takerei, Hare: 66, 67
Talune: 56
Tapanui, West Otago; 211
Taranaki Maori Council: 128
Taranaki Provincial Police: 19
Taranaki region: 24, 131-3, 353, 354
Tarawera eruption, 1886: 42
Tasker, John 14. 51, 165-6
Tasmania. Tasmanians; 166, 243
Taumarunui, Central North Island: 186, 190, 327
Tauranga, Bay of Plenty: 12, 17, 18. 66. 134, 148. 319, 384
Tautoro, Northland: 243
Tawhiao; 63, 70
Taylor, Robert: 57
Taylor, T E: 34, 36, 37, 46-8, 81-9 passim, 109, 116, 141-5 passim, 151, 161, 183,206, 224, 232, 251, 257, 265
Te Araroa, East Coast; 212. 343
Te Awaite Station, Wairarapa; 171, 200
ic rvwdiic otdiiuii, wdiidiapa. i / i, Te Awamulu, Waikato: 63, 99
Te Kaha, Bay of Plenty: 245
ic i\una, oay ui ricmy. Ly. Te Kahu Te Maari: 128
Te Kcpa Tawhiao: 245, 389
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
530
Te Kooti Rikirangi: 68-70, 246, 382
Te Kuili, Central North Island; 63
Te Mahuki (Te Manakura); 63
Te Maipi Te Whiu: 386, 387
Te Pouwhare: 245
Te Raina Kingi: 245
Te Rata, Tara: 66
Te Tahuhu, Himeona Wi: 64
Te Tarawhiti, Karaka; 66
Te Wai-iti, Urewera region: 383, 388
Te Whaiti, Urewera region: 70, 211, 244, 245, 383
Te Whiti o Rongomai; 61-2, 63. 64, 131-3, 134, 135
Telegraph, use of: 68, 249, 287, 288, 291, 292, 314, 322, 352, 374
Telephones, use of: 60, 92, 249, 309, 331, 374
Temporary constables: 339-40, 360, 378
Territorial Force: 192, 249, 306, 308, 311, 315, 321, 347-8, 358, 392
Terry, Lionel; 188-9
Thames: 12, 18, 19, 204, 211
The Classification and Use of Finger Prints: 167
The Colonial Frontier Tamed: 412
The Devil’s Bondsman: 359 Th/> If rositTesr C/innt/i' 7^o
The Kreutzer Sonata: 359
The Nuggets, South Otago: 191
The Press'. 73
The Shadow: 188
The Shadow of Tammany: 88
The Tragic Story of the Waihi Strike: 295
Thomas, Mr: 388
Thompson, Andrew (Constable): 260
Thompson, Andrew (Inspector): 12, 16
Thompson, J: 312
Thompson, Thomas: 31,32, 39, 46, 47,48, 84, 86-7, 144, 149-50, 293
Thomson, Harold: 54
Thomson, John Bell: 12, 16, 17, 19, 51-2, 54, 62, 64
Timaru, South Canterbury: 23, 56, 73, 93, 97, 167, 168, 181, 267, 401, 426
Titokowaru: 62
Tohu Kakahi: 132, 135
Tohunga, suppression of: 63, 137, 246-8
Toia, Hone: 70, 134-6
Tokaanu, Central North Island: 211
Tokerau District Maori Land Board: 256
Toko Rua: 385-7
Tokoraaru Bay, East Coast: 343
Tolaga Bay, East Coast: 249
Tolc, J A: 389, 390
Torch: 135
Torpedo Corps: 27
Torr, Walter: 60
Traffic duly: 3, 20, 153, 218, 373-4, 416
Training: 30, 31, 34, 47, 59, 81, 85, 110-16, 122, 150, 154, 161, 166, 168, 170, 173, 181, 186-7, 193, 194, 199, 215-18, 232, 236-7, 248, 252, 258-9, 337, 339-40, 368, 375, 384, 400, 417, 423
military: 28-31, 110-13 passim, 149, 218, 277, 297, 311. 316, 397
Transfers: 9, 13, 35,48, 57, 69, 88, 90, 95, 109, 111, 114, 117, 141, 142, 145-8, 166, 175-6, 182, 193, 210, 211, 212, 214, 219, 267, 275, 281, 301, 315, 329, 335, 340, 343, 363-4, 372, 378-80 passim, 418, 421
as punishment: 33-6, 51, 54, 97, 116-18, 124, 157-9, 175-6, 180-4 passim. 208, 222, 235, 236, 238, 239,251, 253, 254, 267-8, 300-1, 314-15, 328, 362, 393, 424
between uniformed and detective branches 122, 201-4, 363, 366
policy: 19, 34-6, 116-18, 393
requests for: 142, 300
threats of; 21, 36, 150, 344
to and from military: 7, 28-30, 100, 110, 149
Transport: 60-1, 92-3, 133, 373-5, 384
Transvaal: 126
Treanor, James: 135
Treasury: 322
freasury, Secretary to the: 84
Treaty of Waitangi: 243
Tregear, Edward: 15, 87, 311
Trender, James: 55-6
Tribes/iwi, sub-tribes/hapu and tribal confederations
Arawa: 66, 134
Moriori; 64
Ngailai: 68
Ngapuhi: 64, 243-4
Ngati Mutunga: 63
Ngatiporou: 68
Ngati Tama: 63
Rarawa; 243-4
Te Atiawa; 63
Tuhoe: 133, 245, 383
Tuakau, South Auckland; 70, 245
Ttimi, Epo: 128
Ttmhridge, John Bennett: 30-1, 61 Part Two, 167-8, 175, 177, 206, 209, 211, 227, 235, 237, 238, 251, 253, 261, 269, 296, 337 becomes Commissioner of Police: 47-9, 59, 70, 81
resigns as Commissioner of Police; 155. 158. 160-1, 165
Thohy, James: 51
Tuparoa, East Coast: 245, 343
Turner, Thomas: 20
Typewriters, use of: 60, 93, 281, 372, 375
Index
531
Uniforms, accoutrements: 31, 59. 60. 94. 99, 100, 106, 155, 165, 216, 219, 229, 242, 245. 282, 285, 299, 329, 360, 372, 375, 376, 384, 392. 404, 424-5
Union Steam Ship Company: 71, 305
United Empire : 420
United Federation of Labour: see Federation of Labour
United Kingdom; 39. 46, 50. 91. 127, 143, 170, 353, 396, 399, 403,410, 426
United Labour Party; 291
United Stales of America: 25. 26. 46, 125, 126, 174, 275, 332, 353, 372, 396-9, 414
Upper Hull, Wellington region: 265
Urewera region: 30, 70, 128, 130, 133, 244-5, 247. 353, 382-90
Urquhart, Harry; 353
Utiku, Central North Island: 207
Veterans’ Homes; 205 \/,p<Ano A nrlrn 11 *1 ■ IQ I*7 A
Victoria, Australia: 18, 174, 364, 370
Victoria, Queen; 52, 128
Victoria Police: 12, 13. 24, 47, 50, 94. 102, 105, 112, 202, 279, 368
Vigilantes: 192-5
Vogel, Julius; 8, 15
Volunteers: 14 , 68, 73-4, 131, 135, 149, 194, 347
for ‘Boer War’: 130
for First World War: 350-1, 356
for ‘Rua expedition’; 383
Waddell, Rutherford: 403, 405
Wade, Gerald; 289, 293
Waihi, Thames region: 283-95, 297, 300. 304, 305, 320, 321, 384, 386, 389
Waihi Gold Mining Company: 286
Waihou, Northland: 64-5, 70
Waikaremoana, Urewera region: 212
Waikari, North Canterbury: 212
Waikato region: 19, 63. 211, 315, 353, 362
Waikato River: 247
Waikino, Thames region; 284, 288. 290
Waikiwi, Southland: 207
Waima, Northland: 134-6
Waimangu, Bay of Plenty; 212
Waimate, South Canterbury: 44, 96, 176
Waiotahi, Bay of Plenty: 68
Waipawa, Hawke’s Bay: 18, 260
Waipiro Bay, East Coast: 63, 245, 329
Wairarapa: 42
Wairarapa region; 128, 200
Wairoa, Hawke's Bay: 60. 168, 182-3
Waitaki River, Otago/Canterbury: 93, 188
Waitangi, Chatham Islands; 59
Waitara, Taranaki; 190
Waitolara River, Wanganui region; 62
Wake, Theo: 33-4, 46. 110, 142
Waldegrave, Frank; 178, 185, 225-6, 252, 25660. 265-9, 273, 276. 279, 281, 297, 363
Wales: 103
Wales, Prince of: 381
Walker, John: 51, 53
Wallath, Robert: 54
Wallnutt, William 290, 295
Wanganui urban area: 45, 102, 130, 141, 171, 204, 210, 262, 263, 378, 384, 393, 401
War Legislation Amendment Act, 1916: 339-40
War Regulations: 341-2, 345, 349, 350, 352, 354-5, 360, 364, 368, 375, 425
War Regulations Act, 1914; 354
War Regulations Amendment Act, 1916: 341
War Relief Funds: 356
Ward, Alfred; 260
Ward, Joseph: 159, 160, 194, 205, 247, 251, 256, 257, 263, 267, 268-9, 273, 309, 314, 353
Ward, R Lascelles: 167-70, 331, 361
Wardell, Herbert Samuel: 84, 85
Warkworth, Northland: 103
Water/wharf police: 60, 75, 102, 250, 318, 343, 349
Waterman, Frederick: 247
Webb, Paddy: 303
Wehi: 132-3
Weldon, Thomas K; 12, 13, 53
Wellington urban area: 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 28, 39, 43, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59. 64, 72. 73, 74, 84, 85, 90, 92. 93, 99, 101, 102, 113, 114, 119, 122, 123-4, 125, 130, 139, 145-7, 150, 152, 167-73 passim, 179, 180, 184, 187, 188, 189, 194, 196, 197, 200, 204, 206, 208-10, 213, 216, 218, 222, 224, 228-9, 230, 232, 234, 236, 242, 249, 256, 263, 267, 276, 281, 285, 287, 296, 299, 305-14, 315-22 passim, 335, 336, 343-5, 348, 349, 352, 353, 355, 358, 360, 363, 366, 369, 372-4, 376, 379, 380, 384, 403, 404, 425
police stations: 40, 41, 92, 102, 111, 11214, 139, 158, 189, 192, 195, 215-17, 252, 280, 308, 329-30, 357
Wellington Law Society: 185
Wellington Mounted Rifles: 311
Weraroa, Levin: 192
West Riding Police, Yorkshire: 165
Western Australia; 89-90, 167, 296, 338
nuauaua. 07-70, iu/, u, JJO Western Samoa, policing of; 392-4
WestlandAVest Coast of South Island: 17, 41, 42, 48, 73, 74, 84, 109, 145, 268, 300, 314, 318-19, 331, 343, 351-4, 360-1
Westport, West Coast: II, 71, 73, 223-4, 201 319
Whakalane, Bay of Plenty: 245, 246, 384
Whangarei, Northland: 319
532
The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove
Whangaroa, Northland; 340
Whatu Rua; 385
Wheeler, Ralph 359
Whitcombe and Tombs: 309
White, Billy: 67
Whitmore, George S: 7-10, 45, 62. 138
Wi Hapi: 388-9
Wilder, George: 196
Wilford, Thomas: 172, 380, 405, 418
Wilkie Brothers: 71 \ \7lll Inmnr C- A OAH
Willcocks, James S: 246. 260
Williams, Joseph: 156-8 passim Williams, Thomas: 129
Wilson, Edward: 122, 145, 146. 147, 189, 190, 192-4, 196, 247, 260, 262, 281, 363, 400
Winton, Southland; 23, 54-5. 117
Wobblies’: see Industrial Workers of the World
Wohlmann, W G: 100, 155, 231-2, 283, 289, 294, 295, 333, 394
VVolfendale, Thomas: 385
Women and policing: 22-4, 37,55,64, 82,124-5, 126, 135, 137-40, 143, 148-9, 155-9 passim. 213, 342-6
wives of policemen: 35, 138, 169, 176, 395 nolioa. CC lIQ 'IOC AAA
women as police: 55, 138, 395-406
See also: Female searchers, Matrons
Women Police Service, Great Britain: 397
Women Police Volunteer Corps, Great Britain; 397
Women Volunteer Police, Great Britain: 399
Women’s Christian Temperance Union: 22, 395, 396, 399, 402
Wong Gye, Charles: 59
Wong Way Chung: 369
Woods, Arthur: 314
Woods, Frederick; 245
Woodville, Hawke’s Bay: 189
Workers’ Compensation for Accidents Acl 1900: 265
Workers’ Union: 44
Working class and policing: 2, 20. 23, 70-7, 98. 100, 101. 118, 152, 213, 274. 276, 283-95, 304-23, 328, 350-3, 398-400 passim, 408, 416-18, 429
Worthington, A Bently: 24-6
Wounded Soldiers’ Fund: 356
Wright, Arthur H; 13, 61, 94, 123-4, 146-7, 165-6, 210, 211, 212, 225. 230-4 passim, 236, 239, 249, 254-5, 265, 266, 267, 275. 276, 283-6, 294, 362, 363, 400
Wright, William: 386
Wroblenski, J: 309
Yass, New South Wales: 170
Yorkshire, England: 165
Young, J Bruce: 259, 303, 331
Young, Tom: 310-11
Young Maori Party; 128, 137
Young Women’s Christian Association: 398
Zedlitz, George von: 349
Zola, Emile: 24. 151
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Bibliographic details
APA: Hill, Richard S. (1995). The iron hand in the velvet glove : the modernisation of policing in New Zealand, 1886-1917. Dunmore Press in association with the New Zealand Police and with the assistance of Historical Branch, Dept. of Internal Affairs.
Chicago: Hill, Richard S. The iron hand in the velvet glove : the modernisation of policing in New Zealand, 1886-1917. Palmerston North, N.Z.: Dunmore Press in association with the New Zealand Police and with the assistance of Historical Branch, Dept. of Internal Affairs, 1995.
MLA: Hill, Richard S. The iron hand in the velvet glove : the modernisation of policing in New Zealand, 1886-1917. Dunmore Press in association with the New Zealand Police and with the assistance of Historical Branch, Dept. of Internal Affairs, 1995.
Word Count
255,502
The iron hand in the velvet glove : the modernisation of policing in New Zealand, 1886-1917 Hill, Richard S., Dunmore Press in association with the New Zealand Police and with the assistance of Historical Branch, Dept. of Internal Affairs, Palmerston North, N.Z., 1995
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