Arthur Young (police officer)

Colonel Sir Arthur Edwin Young, KBE, CMG, CVO, KPM (15 February 1907 – 20 January 1979) was the Commissioner of the City of London Police in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 1971. He was also the first head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to be styled Chief Constable.

Early life

Young was born at 55 Chamberlayne Road, Eastleigh, Hampshire, the third of four children of Edwin Young (1878-1936), a builder and contractor, and his wife Gertrude Mary Brown (1880-1945). He attended Mayville Preparatory School, Southsea (1912-15) and then Portsmouth Grammar School (1915-24) where he showed no particular academic aptitude but very much enjoyed the Officers Training Corps; when in later life he returned to present prizes, he told the pupils that his parents would have been very surprised to see him in the hall on speech day because he had never come close to winning any school award. Aged sixteen, he left to join the Portsmouth City Police, against his family's wishes; his mother and grandmother never approved of his career choice, seeing the police as unsuitable for a young man from a middle-class family.

Pre-war Police Career

His father's partner Sir James Cork (a former Mayor of Portsmouth) helped to smooth the way for the boy by securing him an initial placement in the Chief Constable's office (the post of Cadet Clerk was specially created for him) in December 1924. On the advice of Thomas Davies, the Chief Constable, he first took a course in business training and accountancy.

Appointed a Constable in May 1925, he became the Coroner's Officer in April 1932. In June 1932, aged 25, he became the youngest Detective Sergeant in the UK (Northern Division, Portsmouth Criminal Investigation Department (CID)). During his tenure he led investigations into murder, blackmail, fraud and arson. He headed the enquiries into the UK's first case of manslaughter arising from the use of an aeroplane. Simultaneously, he began to take an ever more prominent involvement in the many royal visits to Portsmouth; when Haile Selassie visited the dockyard in September 1937, he acted as his personal escort and French interpreter. During these years, Young was also entrusted with what he later cryptically termed "enquiries concerning the activities of subversive persons and propaganda, and also with other matters affecting state security". It was also during these years that he acquired his passion for ever better police equipment and his personal love of new gadgets.

Young was promoted Inspector in June 1937 and appointed to Portsmouth's Southern Division. In Eastney and Southsea, he gained his first taste of the complexity of the problems created by traffic, of measures to be taken for its efficient control and of the need to promote road safety. A keen motorist (who progressed from a motorcycle to a series of fast cars), he took a pragmatic approach.

Arthur Young was already marked out for early advancement. His energy, tact and ability made that obvious. Nevertheless, as a non-Hendon graduate and a non-public schoolboy, his promotion was meteoric for the 1930s-1940s. Young wanted to head his own force and after one unsuccessful attempt (for the chief constableship of the Isle of Wight) he became Acting Chief Constable of Royal Leamington Spa in September 1938, aged 31, at a salary of £500 per annum. One year later, he was appointed to the permanent post of Chief Constable. As such, he was the youngest man ever to become a Chief Constable. In his first nine months in Leamington he secured an increase of 12 in the force's tiny establishment of 45, the first increase since 1915. He also reorganised the borough's fire brigade and among other police innovations set up 12 of the still new "police pillars", a network of two-way microphone handsets across the borough enabling the public to contact police stations and civil defence posts directly. The base of the pillar contained first aid equipment while, a Leamington innovation, a flashing red light on the top called up policemen on patrol. From Leamington onwards, Young possessed a marked capacity to persuade his police authority to increase its capital spending and a marked inclination to find technological help for the policeman.

Seconded under the aegis of the Home Office for six months in November 1940 to Coventry after its blitz to run the city's police because the Chief Constable was fully occupied as Civil defence Controller, he introduced there the 'good neighbour scheme' for bombed out civilians that he had trialled in Leamington and which was later adopted nationally by the Home Office. But Leamington's was a very small force and for a year his command was only 'acting' so, from the start, Young was looking for a permanent as well as a larger command. After several unsuccessful applications (the East Riding of Yorkshire 1939, Portsmouth 1940, Oxford 1940), in September 1941 he was selected from a shortlist of six as Senior Assistant Chief Constable of Birmingham, then the second largest police force in the UK; the salary was £1000 p.a. His particular responsibilities - training and communications - played to his strengths. It was in Birmingham that he began to experiment with police training. Learning by example and by demonstration might seem obvious now, but in 1941 it raised eyebrows - and caught the approving eye of the Home Office. He also made Birmingham the foremost British force in the use of police wireless by establishing in 1942 a 'duplex' ultra high-frequency two-way radio telephone system linking every police station and every police car.

Wartime activities

The war overtook Young's career again in February 1943 when he was one of a number of chief constables seconded to the War Office Civil Affairs Training Centre and attended the first course for senior officers. Before the course was finished, he was transferred to the instructing staff and in June 1943 he was appointed the first commandant of the new Police Civil Affairs Training Centre at Peel House, London (gazetted with the rank of Lt. Colonel) and charged with the task of setting up the training school for policemen and provost officers who would maintain law and order in Axis territory as it was liberated by advancing Allied forces. Barely was that centre up and running and its first students through their course when Young found himself a Colonel and moved from the classroom in July 1943 to be Senior British Police Officer in the Mediterranean Theatre, stationed in North Africa awaiting the invasion of Sicily. Ashore on day two of the invasion, Young became Director of Public Safety in the first functioning Allied military government - the Allied Control Commission for Italy; in December 1943 he was given the additional role of Director of Security, responsible directly to the Commander-in-Chief for hunting saboteurs and enemy agents as well as the removal of fascist officials from public offices. In Italy, Young now commanded not just British officers but the 120,000 men of the entire Italian police and had responsibility for all Italian prisons, fire brigades and civil defence. The models Young developed in Italy were later applied across Allied occupied Europe in 1944-45, but his proudest achievement was the restoration and reorganisation of the carabinieri - with whom he maintained an association for the rest of his life. He also fell in love with Italy, returning regularly and frequently holidaying in Positano and visiting his wartime friend Colonel Alfredo Zanchino ('Freddy') of the Carabinieri.

Post-war police career

Appointed Chief Constable of Hertfordshire in 1944 (but released from the army only in April 1945), Young now commanded an establishment of 515 at a salary of £1290. Still aged only 38, he had 21 years of experience of small, medium and large city and borough forces. From Hertfordshire, he set the pace in revitalising long-debilitated county police forces, pushing his police authority to fund major expenditure on officers' pay and conditions. Police housing was one of the outstanding issues of the time. Young persuaded his police authority to fund a building programme that in six years would provide a police house for every married man in the county force; the design and equipping of these houses was agreed between the county architects and a 'housing committee', recruited through the county Police Federation, not only of men of all ranks but, at Young's insistence, of officers' wives. In 1946, he wrote::"I hold the view that the police organisation is not a police force but a police service, which offers to the right individual not merely a job but all the advantages of a professional career. I believe in doing everything reasonably possible by way of improving the conditions and amenities for all ranks of the service, and in particular in delegating both authority and responsibility to officers according to their rank. Having done this I am prepared to accept nothing but the highest standard of service by way of return."

At the same time, he persuaded his authority to fund major capital spending to sustain modern police efficiency. The Home Office authorised Hertfordshire to be the first force after the war to introduce a wireless system, one which Young adapted for rural circumstance from his Birmingham model. To make it as effective as possible, the Home Office accepted his proposal that the wireless network needed to be set up for a larger area than one county so the neighbouring county force of Bedfordshire was added. Almost simultaneously, Young was appointed by the Home Office to a committee chaired by Sir Percy Sillitoe, chief constable of Kent, to consider the wireless needs of all forces. Young's action plan for the co-ordination and standardisation of all inter-force communications was rapidly accepted.

His Hertfordshire years also saw the beginnings of a professional relationship with James Callaghan. They already knew each other from Portsmouth where their mothers had both worked at Agnes Weston's Sailors Rest; Jim had tried unsuccessfully to court his sister, Eileen. Callaghan was now a junior minister at the Ministry of Transport. They met up with each other again on a road safety committee and became working allies to extend speed restrictions and improve road markings; cat's eyes were perhaps the most significant fruit of their labours. They worked together again when Callaghan was Home Secretary and it was Callaghan who selected Young to go to Ulster in 1969 to implement the Hunt Report.

Ever ambitious, Young applied unsuccessfully to be chief constable of Kent in 1946, but his next job was offered to him. So impressed was the Home Secretary (James Chuter Ede) with the young Chief Constable of Hertfordshire that in 1947 he appointed Young to the vacant post of Assistant Commissioner 'D' in the Metropolitan Police. To bring in an outsider to such a rank in the Met was unprecedented, but it was not an appointment casually made. The Home Secretary realised that the nation's constabularies were wedded to obsolete methods and needed the invigorating shake-up that the young chief constable had already delivered in Hertfordshire; Scotland Yard must not be left out. Things did not go well and it is difficult to see how it could have turned out otherwise. The Commissioner tolerated him (which is odd since Sir Harold Scott was an outsider too), but senior colleagues cold-shouldered him; Robert Mark found that nothing had changed when he was moved to the same job thirty years later from the chief constableship of Leicester. Within D Department, Young worked wonders, but that success only alienated the hierarchy even further and, unlike Mark, Young had not been sent there to take over as commissioner. Yet that brief service with the Met proved the stepping-stone to winning a post whose authority and independence allowed Young to exercise a powerful influence on national and international police affairs: Commissioner of the City of London Police. The first beat bobby to be made a commissioner (1950), Young entrenched there his reputation as "the policeman's policeman". He imparted a cool professionalism to the service of the City and its policing. Improved pay and conditions and professional standards remained his constant pre-occupations. The police under his command found him forceful but gracious, intolerant of the slipshod in himself as much as in others. No wonder then that from Portsmouth onwards, he was renowned for his popularity with all ranks under his commanded, apart from in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

Young came to love the City of London. He relished command of a force small enough to know every constable well. He enjoyed the City's rich social life too, and he much valued the invitation to join the Goldsmiths Company. But his professionalising influence reached far beyond the square mile. Many of Young's priorities had clear been clear since Leamington and Birmingham. The police needed to recruit and with considerable success he set about making service more attractive. Pay and allowances were increased, housing modernized, and catering improved. Uniforms were made more comfortable and practical. At another level, he pushed through changes in career structures. He engineered a national recruitment revolution in the British police, running command courses and seeing through a fast-track entry scheme to attract graduates - and for many years he was Director of extended interviews for the Special Course, Senior Command Course that he had founded. These and other changes were designed to facilitate the promotion of talent. Young realised that the police could no longer rely on habits little changed for a century. He fought for the recruitment and promotion of women. He resisted the well-ingrained tradition of parachuting senior officers from the armed forces into police commands; and only with great reluctance did he give in to the demand from the Hertfordshire police committee that he use his wartime military rank. He sternly opposed Lord Trenchard's officer-class philosophy as wholly inappropriate for the British police service. Rather, he was the first senior officer wedded to Sir Robert Peel's intention that the police be "filled from the bottom up". The young man whose own family had thought that being a policeman was far from suitable dedicated his own long career to making the police a respected and attractive profession. Unlike every other commissioner and chief constable of significance, he had seen active service as a beat bobby. The contrast with some, notably Eric St Johnston, could not have been greater. Young cannot be understood outside that context.

Young's lobby of the 1960 Royal Commission on the Police overcame Home Office objections to a strengthened police inspectorate, although Sir Charles Cunningham blocked Young's selection as inaugural Chief Inspector of Constabulary.

In November 1969 (until 1970) Young was seconded to be the last Inspector-General and the first Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. James Callaghan, the British Home Secretary, sent him to implement the Hunt Report which introduced the standard British rank system for police officers in Northern Ireland and disbanded the controversial Ulster Special Constabulary (the 'B Specials'). Young thus started the long, complex and painful process of ending Northern Ireland's gendarmerie and creating in its place a British police service.

Young's career in high-level policing spanned thirty years. His energy and administrative skills made him doyen among British police chiefs of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most trusted and admired among senior British policemen, his services were always in demand. Ambition alone will not explain some of the jobs that he accepted, especially his secondments to Malaya, Kenya and (most of all) Northern Ireland. Young had grown up with a powerful sense of duty and he felt himself to be the custodian of the hopes of others.

He chaired the Police Council for the UK, the ACPO training centres committee and the education committee of the National Police Fund. He was a governor of the Police College and of Atlantic College, and a member of the committees of the Police Advisory Board, the National Police Fund, the Royal Humane Society, the National Rifle Association, the National Scout Council and the Thames Group Hospitals. He was President of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 1962.

Colonial Police Reforms

One distinctive feature of Young's career was as a police reformer in colonial hotspots. Young was sent on four such missions. Drawing on empirical realities from his experience of policing wartime Italy as well as his years in various parts of Britain, Young set about instilling in uncongenial soils the ethos and philosophy of policing as a civilian public service. First came a short period in the Gold Coast in 1950 preparing the blueprint for the role of the police as the colony was being prepared to become the first British territory in Africa to be granted independence. Then in 1952-53, Young was seconded to the Federation of Malaya to be Commissioner of Police during the Emergency. In 1954, Young was asked to undertake a second secondment in Britain's troubled colonies - this time in Kenya as Commissioner of Police during Mau Mau.

Personal life

Brought up in a household with strong Anglican evangelical pieties (the family attended St Jude's, Southsea for mattins and evensong every Sunday as well as week-day meetings), Portsmouth's slums and docks shook the youthful middle class police constable's sensibilities. Guided by their curate, Rev Frederick Dillistone, later Dean of Liverpool, he decided that he must seek ordination. The Bishop of Portsmouth, Ernest Lovett, however, rejected his application to attend theological college, telling him at interview that "policemen do not become priests". Although later in life Young would drift away from regular churchmanship, the impact of Portsmouth on his world view never shifted. Shocked by the poverty and injustice which he discovered, Young became a staunch christian socialist and, very rare for a chief constable, a life-long Labour Party voter. Throughout his career, he sought out contact with clergymen and in the later 1960s, encouraged by the Bishop of London, again considered Anglican ordination.

Young married three times. On 11 April 1939 at Boarhunt parish church, Hampshire, he married Ivy Ada May Hammond (born 20 December 1909), a nurse from the Royal Portsmouth Hospital whom he had courted for years - custom then dictated lengthy enagements and police pay then was very low. She died of cancer on 14 September 1956. They had one son, Christopher John Young, born in 1941.

Young married Mrs. Margaret Furnival Homan, nee Dolphin, in 1957. The marriage fell apart quickly and they separated. She committed suicide in Malta in 1966.

On 16 April 1970, he married Mrs Ileen Fryer Turner (nee Rayner) whom he had known since she was his police driver in Birmingham during the war and who at one time had been the mistress of his great friend Sir Edward ('Ted') Dodd, chief constable of Birmingham and later chief inspector of constabulary.

He liked weak China tea, had a penchant for Mark Twain and the poems of John Betjeman, loved the music of Nat King Cole and enjoyed walking on the Sussex Downs.

Orders and medals

Young's career made him the most decorated policeman of his era.

British

*1937 Coronation Medal
*1939-1945 Star
*1939-45 Italy Star
*1939-45 Defence Medal
*1939-45 War Medal
*1951 Officer of the Order of St John
*1952 King's Police Medal for Distinguished Service
*1953 General Service Medal (bar for Malaya)
*1953 Commander of the Order of St Michael & St George
*1953 Coronation Medal
*1954 Africa General Service Medal (bar for Kenya & oak palm for mention in despatches)
*1962 Commander of the Royal Victorian Order
*1965 Knight Bachelor
*1971 Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Civil Division)
*Police Long Service & Good Conduct Medal

Foreign

*Argentina: Commander, Order of Merit.
*Austria: Commander, Honour Badge for Merit of the Republic.
*Belgium: Commander, Order of the Crown.
*Cameroons: Officer, Order of Valour.
*Chile: Commander, Order of Merit.
*Denmark: Commander, Order of the Dannebrog.
*Finland: Commander, Order of the White Rose; Commander, Order of the Lion.
*France: Medal of the Surete Nationale.
**French colonial: Commander, Order of the Black Star of Benin.
*Germany: Commander, Order of Merit of the Federal Republic.
*Greece: Commander, Royal Order of the Phoenix.
*Iceland: Knight Commander, Order of the Icelandic Falcon.
*Iran: Officer, Order of the Lion & the Sun.
*Iraq: Grand Officer, Order of El-Rafidain (Military Division).
*Italy: Grand Officer, Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
*Ivory Coast: Commander of the National Order.
*Japan: Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class. [ [http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=article&no=8245 L'Harmattan web site (in French)] ]
*Jordan: Commander, Order of the Star of Al Kawkab Al Urdiun.
*Liberia: Knight Commander, Liberian Humane Order of African Redemption.
*Malaysia: Federation Meritorious Service Medal.
*Nepal: Commander, Order of Trishakti-Patta.
*Netherlands: Commander, Order of Orange-Nassau.
*Niger: Commander, National Order of Merit.
*Peru: Commander, Distinguished Service Order.
*Portugal: Grand Officer, Military Order of Christ.
*Senegal: Commander, National Order of Merit.
*Sudan: Commander, Order of the Two Niles.
*Thailand: Commander, Order of the Crown.
*Tunisia: Commander, Order of the Republic.
*Sweden: King Gustaf VI Adolf's Gold Merit Medal.

He was also Honorary Police Commissioner of New York, a position that he much appreciated.

References

External links

* [http://www.psni.police.uk/index/pg_police_museum/pg_academic_research/pg_sir_arthur_young.htm Sir Arthur Young: The Quintessential English Policeman]