Colonel Sir Arthur Edwin Young, KBE, CMG, CVO, KStJ, KPM (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 called the Chief Constable, instead of Inspector-General. Young helped create the post of Chief Inspector of Constabulary.
In the early 1950s, he played a crucial role in policing decolonisation in the British Empire, and developed a model of public service policing that was not liked by everyone in some colonies but which time has shown to have been a good idea. During the 1960s, he led the way in modernising British police recruitment and in improving the training of senior officers.
Early life and education
Young was born in Eastleigh, Hampshire, the third of four children of Edwin Young (1878–1936), a builder and contractor, and his wife Gertrude Mary (née Brown; 1880–1945). He went to school in Southsea from 1912 to 1915 and then Portsmouth Grammar School from 1915 to 1924. He was not very good at school, but liked the Officers' Training Corps; later he returned to present prizes and 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 Borough Police, against his family's wishes. His mother and grandmother never approved because they thought the police an unsuitable career for a young man from an middle-class family. When his maternal aunt Emma Brown married Superintendent Samuel Bowles of the Hampshire Constabulary, she made him resign.
Portsmouth Borough/City Police
Young's father's business partner Alderman Sir John Henry Corke (1850–1927) helped Young get his first job 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 and accountancy.
Made 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. While he was 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.
At the same time he got more involved 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 called "enquiries concerning the activities of subversive persons and propaganda, and also with other matters affecting state security" - looking for spies. 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 (equivalent to Lieutenant in US police forces) in June 1937 and appointed to Portsmouth's Southern Division. In Eastney and Southsea, he first had to deal with the problems created by traffic, including ways for its efficient control and of the need to promote road safety. Young was a keen motorist, who moved from a motorcycle to a series of fast cars.
Leamington Spa Borough Police
Young was qualifiedor promotion, but for someone who did not graduate the Hendon Police College and did not go to a public school, his promotion over the next dozen years was meteoric for the 1930s and 1940s.
Young wanted to head his own force and tried to become chief constable of the Isle of Wight Constabulary, before 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. He was one of the youngest men ever to become a Chief Constable. In his first nine months in Leamington he persuaded the council to hire an extra twelve officers, the first increase since 1915. This meant he had 57 police officers to cover all of Leamington Spa.
He also reorganised the borough's fire brigade, and, among other police innovations, set up twelve of "police pillars", a network of two-way microphone handsets across the borough so that the public could 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.