Bad as the ‘Black Hats’ were in Sydney,
and no matter how much the tenor of the times made Chicago of the same period
look like a Sunday-school picnic, there were those who stood up against the
mayhem and took a stand against evil. In this and the following lists we’ll
look at the other side of the equation in Razorhurst.
As usual, or the purposes of this
listing, individuals are listed in order according to their surnames; in the
case of Chinese, Japanese and some other nationalities, the family name comes
first and the individual will be placed according to these names, where known.
Fictional characters are designated with an ‘F’.
William ‘Big Bill’ MacKay
(1885-1948)
Police Commissioner Bill MacKay was born
in Glasgow, Scotland, son of Murdoch MacKay, police inspector, and his wife
Isabella. He joined the Glasgow police force in 1904 and was promoted to detective
constable two years later. On 2 December 1909 he married Jennie Ross Drummond
before migrating to Sydney; he joined the New South Wales Police Force in April
1910. His knowledge of shorthand led to his appointment in the administration
section as chief clerk.
Early in World War I with Detective
Nicholas Moore, MacKay attended meetings in the Domain of the Industrial
Workers of the World to make shorthand reports which assisted in the
prosecution of speakers. MacKay was made sergeant in 1922 and thereafter gained
rapid promotion, partly as a result of the publicity he obtained in being
credited with suppressing the Darlinghurst razor-gangs. By 1928 he was
detective inspector in charge of the Criminal Investigation Branch and was sent
for eight months to Britain to study police methods.
With the onset of the Depression, the
police became increasingly involved in political surveillance as unemployment
and the ensuing dissent became more widespread. MacKay was often in the
forefront of such events as at lock-out of the Rothbury mine in December 1929,
when police, guarding the mine, fought against the miners and a young miner was
shot dead. By the time the “Old Guard”, the “New Guard” and the “All for
Australia League” had become organized to fight against Jack Lang, McKay had
inserted policemen into these groups, as well as the Communist Party of
Australia. MacKay rejected the claims of the New Guard that its main cause of
existence was to aid the police when the trade unionists and communists tried
to seize power; he dealt firmly with a New Guard demonstration outside the
Liverpool Street Court on 1 April 1932. The New Guard leader Eric Campbell condemned
MacKay for not welcoming their proffered assistance and publicly impugned him
for not having enlisted during the war.
With the dismissal of Lang and the
election of the new premier, Bertram Stevens, MacKay was instructed on 7 June 1932
to increase surveillance on the Communist Party; his officers that year
produced much of the material for the Lyons government and its attorney-general
John Latham to launch proceedings against the Communists and declared them an
unlawful association under the Crimes Act. MacKay was awarded the King's Police
Medal in 1932 and appointed Police Commissioner in 1935.
In April 1936 he again left for an
eight-month tour of Britain, Germany, Italy and the United States. MacKay was
impressed by J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was even
more impressed by the efficiency of the German police and the discipline of
Nazi society, praising their labour youth battalions because, he said, they
'subordinate the individual to the welfare of the nation'. On his return to
Sydney, he established the first of the Police Boys' clubs in April 1937 and,
in the following year, what was to become the Federation of Police-Citizens
Boys' Clubs.
By 1938, under the strain of inquiries
and royal commissions into matters involving illegal off-course betting and
police officers, MacKay became unwell and was nearly retired due to ill health.
The Police Association of New South Wales openly criticized his arbitrary
methods of promoting officers in the force and he turned on them in January
1942, posting all seventeen members of its executive to country outposts. The
premier, William McKell, took onboard the administration of the Police
Department and had the seventeen returned to their original positions. On the 9th
of January 1943, another clash between MacKay and his force occurred over an
incident in which two constables arrested a man in a public urinal, who turned
out to be the editor of the Daily
Telegraph for whom the proprietor, Frank Packer, interceded. The two constables
were dismissed from the force because it was alleged they had an extensive
record of making these types of arrests; one was later reinstated, but only as
a result of active Police Association lobbying and a widespread sense of disgruntlement
in the force.
In April 1942 under Curtin’s Federal
Government, MacKay was appointed director of the re-organised Security Service,
established to work with the army and maintain surveillance of enemy aliens and
communists and to issue security clearances; this was as a result of his
already having established a combined police and military intelligence unit
within the police force in 1938. He sought to expand the Security Service,
imagining it as an F.B.I.-style organization; however, he only ended up
offending the Intelligence officers, and he returned to the Police Force in
September. Nevertheless, he continued to expand the force's work in maintaining
surveillance of local communists and other radicals.
During his time as Commissioner, MacKay
set up the police cadet system, and established the vice, drug, motor and
pawnbrokers squads in line with other international police forces. Known in the
force as 'Big Bill' (he was 6 ft / 183 cm tall and weighed 15 stone / 95 kg),
he had a reputation when young for smashing down doors. While this pugnacious
ability to overcome obstacles was something of a trademark with him,
particularly against those who opposed his administrative schemes, he developed
with age a more subtle style of using information in his possession to place
possible opponents in his debt. He spoke with a strong Scottish accent and was
proud of his ancestry: he even converted the police military band into a
Scottish pipe band dressed in the MacKay tartan. He also established a police
air wing by purchasing an obsolete aeroplane rather than continue the expensive
practise of hiring aircraft.
In 1946 MacKay suffered a recurrence of
his old infirmity and, on the 22nd of January 1948, he died suddenly
at his Edgecliff home while entertaining senior police colleagues. He was
buried in Randwick cemetery.
Napoleon
‘Bony’ Bonaparte (F)
“...A man of medium height and build,
dressed in a light-grey tweed. His tie matched his shirt, and so did the soft
felt hat now resting on the edge of the writing-table. The visitor’s face was
turned downward to the busy fingers engaged in making a cigarette, and with no
little astonishment the sergeant noted that the man’s hair was fine and
straight and black, and that his skin was dark brown. And then he was gazing
into a pair of bright-blue eyes regarding him with a smile.”
-Arthur W. Upfield, Wings
above the Diamantina, 1936
Bony is a half-caste aboriginal
detective, famous in the series of outback-based pot-boilers penned by Arthur
W. Upfield in the 20s and 30s, and which sold very well both in Australia and
America. Raised by a straight-laced nurse at an outback station, who fondly
named him after the French emperor, his skills of observation and logical
deduction were honed by both his association with his mother’s tribe and his
work as a police tracker for the Brisbane police force. In the later tales he
rises to the rank of Detective Inspector and receives nation-wide recognition
for his skills as a detective.
Disdaining standard procedure and
protocol – “I have always declined to permit red tape to control me” – Bony
thinks around obstacles both procedural and legal to ensure that his quarry is
brought to justice. He affects an overly-educated verbosity to disarm the usual
prejudice with which newcomers generally receive him and he cuts through class
divisions by insisting that he be called ‘Bony’ by all comers, regardless of
rank. He smokes like a chimney while cogitating and often uses the time taken
in questioning witnesses to roll his own cigarettes.
Nowadays, these novels are a little
difficult to read as they are bogged down with the stereotyping and
sensibilities of a bygone age, much as Dorothy L. Sayers’ or Agatha Christie’s
novels sometimes tread a fine line when it comes to discussing Jewish
characters. Still, Upfield’s “blacks” are often the most engaging and
pro-active characters in the narratives, despite being treated with a tinge of
disdain. Readers should tread warily when dipping into these sources – although
their observations of the Australian Outback and life there are wonderfully
sketched and worthy of investigation – and try to see them as the artefacts of
a past age that they are.
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