Colonel Sir Arthur Edwin Young (15 February 1907 – 20 January 1979) was a British police officer. He was Commissioner of Police of the City of London from 1950 to 1971 and was also the first head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to be styled Chief Constable. Young was instrumental in the creation of the post of Chief Inspector of Constabulary.
In the early 1950s, Young played a key role in the decolonisation of policing in the British Empire. His exit from Kenya at the end of 1954 became a political scandal and cause célèbre. During the 1960s, he led the way in modernising British police recruitment and in improving the training of senior officers.
Clive Emsley commented:
Young shared the heroic vision of the British Bobby and was always focussed on the idea that police officers should enjoy good, even friendly relations with the people that they served.
Young gained a reputation as the "policeman's policeman", associated with his concerns for the conditions of work of serving police officers. He liked to use it of himself.
Early life and education Young was born at 55 Chamberlayne Road, Eastleigh, Hampshire, one of four children of Edwin Young (1878–1936), a builder and contractor, and his wife Gertrude Mary (née Brown; 1880–1945). He attended Mayville Preparatory School, Southsea from 1912 to 1915 and then Portsmouth Grammar School from 1915 to 1924.
Aged sixteen, Young left school to join the Portsmouth Borough Police, against his family's wishes.
Early police career
Portsmouth Police Young's father's business partner John Henry Corke secured him an initial placement in the office of Chief Constable Thomas Davies in December 1924. Young had the post of cadet clerk. On the advice of the chief constable, he first took a course in business 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 United Kingdom, serving with the Northern Division CID. During his time there, 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 to 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.
Leamington Spa Borough Police Young wanted to head his own force. After one unsuccessful attempt, for the chief constableship of the Isle of Wight Constabulary, he became acting chief constable of Leamington Spa Borough Police 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. In his first nine months in post, he secured an increase of twelve in the force's establishment of 45. He also reorganised the borough's fire brigade.
Among other innovations, Young set up twelve of the then new "police pillars". They were 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.
After the Coventry Blitz of November 1940, Young was seconded by the Home Office for six months to run the Coventry City Police, the chief constable being fully occupied as civil defence controller. He introduced there a "good neighbour scheme" for civilians who had been bombed out that he had previously set up in Leamington.
Birmingham City Police Young made several unsuccessful applications for promotion: the East Riding of Yorkshire Constabulary in 1939, Portsmouth City Police in 1940, Oxford City Police in 1940). In 1941 he was selected as senior assistant chief constable of Birmingham City Police. The chief constable (1941–45) was William Clarence Johnson.
It was in Birmingham that Young began with police training. He also established in 1942 a radio telephone system linking police stations and police cars.
Wartime service In February 1943, Young was one of a number of chief constables seconded to the War Office's 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 in London (gazetted with the rank of lieutenant-colonel) and charged with the task of setting up the training school for policemen and provost officers. Their duties would be to maintain law and order in Axis territory as it was liberated by Allied forces.
Shortly afterwards, Young was promoted colonel, and moved in July 1943 to be senior British police officer in the Mediterranean Theatre. He was stationed in North Africa awaiting the Allied invasion of Sicily. After the invasion, he worked in the Allied Control Commission for Italy. In December 1943 he was given the role of director of the security branch of the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories. His post with the Control Commission in Italy lasted to 1945. The approaches Young developed in Italy were adapted elsewhere Allied occupied Europe in 1944–1945. He considered his major personal achievement was reorganising the Carabinieri.
Post-war police service Young was appointed Chief Constable of Hertfordshire Constabulary in 1944; but he was not demobilised until 1945. He emphasised pay and conditions for his officers. 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."
He was appointed by the Home Office to a committee chaired by Sir Percy Sillitoe to consider the wireless needs of all forces. At this period he became re-acquainted with the politician James Callaghan, from Portsmouth, now a junior minister at the Ministry of Transport.
Young applied unsuccessfully to be chief constable of Kent in 1946. Through Home Secretary James Chuter Ede he was appointed in 1947 Assistant Commissioner "D" of the Metropolitan Police in London, in charge of organisation, recruitment, training and communications. Things, however, did not go well, since colleagues shunned him. Then Young was the first former police constable to be appointed Commissioner of Police of the City of London, in March 1950. He held the post to 1971.
Colonial police reforms of the 1950s In 1948, W. C. Johnson, Young's old chief from Birmingham, was appointed to the Colonial Office, as police advisor to the Colonial secretary. From 1949, he was Inspector-General of Colonial Police. He left that position in 1951 and was succeeded by his assistant George Abbiss. The post was an innovation, created with as its motivations both Cold War fear of communist influence, and the wish (clearly signalled and raising concern in colonial forces) to bring colonial policing into line with British practice.
Young was sent on colonial missions for police reform. First came a short period in the Gold Coast. The Convention People's Party was arousing police interest, ahead of the 1951 Gold Coast general election. Young was there in 1950, for two months, with Chief Superintendent Wilson of the Metropolitan Police, and wrote a substantial report for Matthew Collens, the inspector-general of police.
Malaya In 1952–1953, Young was seconded to the Federation of Malaya as its commissioner of police, during the Emergency. He arrived in February 1952, bringing again Chief Superintendent Wilson who was to train uniformed police. In broad terms Gerald Templer and Young conformed to the "Briggs Plan", proposed by Harold Rawdon Briggs, for resettling rural Chinese-Malayans. Success was obtained from 1952 onwards in limiting the insurgency. Young chose his successor, William Carbonell, without regard to seniority.
Kenya In 1954, Young undertook a further secondment, in Kenya as commissioner of police during the Mau Mau rebellion. He followed the parliamentary delegation that went to Kenya in January 1954, led by Walter Elliot and Arthur Bottomley, and reported some months later. Oliver Lyttleton, the Colonial Secretary, visited Kenya three times in the period 1952–4, before resigning from the third Churchill ministry in July 1954. Young arrived in Kenya in March of that year, and immediately required that policing should be carried out with minimal physical force.
Young appointed Duncan MacPherson (1912–1989) from the Royal Hong Kong Police Force as head of CID, to investigate allegations against the army, police and Kikuyu Home Guard. From 1951 CID had been under John Timmerman, a Canadian RCMP and WWII intelligence officer who was assistant police commissioner, brought in to reorganise it, and who from 1955 worked for the Department of External Affairs in security. The trial on 10 December 1954 for perjury of George Horsfall of the Kenya Police, and Derek Searle of the Reserve, was met by demands for an inquiry from Reserve officers into CID methods.
Young resigned after less than eight months. He saw widespread interference of the executive in policing. His resignation letter to Evelyn Baring was suppressed. His replacement was Richard Catling, a sceptic when it came to George Erskine's policy on detention of Kikuyu. He had arrived from Malaya in April as a deputy commissioner and police trainer. John Whyatt, Attorney-General of Kenya and an ally of Young, was made Chief Justice of Singapore in 1955.
Before leaving Kenya, Young asked MacPherson to compile a concise file of issues with Baring's administration: it was not circulated, but Young used his Anglican contacts to make the content known. Karl Hack reports Young's resignation as driven by the failure to have murders by the Kikuyu Home Guard investigated. He comments also on the differences between Malaya and Kenya, stating that in Young's view efforts to make policing "friendly to the public" initially had failed in the latter, having largely succeeded in the former.