Arthur Young (police Officer) - City of London Police

City of London Police

The first former constable to be appointed Commissioner of Police of the City of London, in March 1950, Young entrenched there his reputation as "the policeman's policeman". Improved pay and conditions and professional standards remained his constant pre-occupations. The police under his command found him forceful but gracious, intolerant of failings in himself as well as others. In all his forces, he was renowned for his popularity with all ranks under his command.

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. The police needed to recruit and with considerable success he set about making service more attractive. Pay and allowances were increased, housing modernised, 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 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 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.

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.