This title I will admit is a bit of a come-on. It hints shamelessly at mystery, intrigue and murky goings-on with sinister personages and that I will give you the inside goss on it. Well I have to do something to get people to the last session of a conference. I don't have the answers, but I do have a mystery. It revolves around Police Commissioner Eric Henry Compton, who was appointed in early 1953 and resigned under curious circumstances a little over two years later. To this day no other permanent head or chief executive of any New Zealand government department has crashed virtually on take-off.

What I am going to say is not so far found in any account of Compton's rise and fall. I came to a new interpretation of a familiar story by actually going and looking at something and realising that the accepted story did not add up. (I'll get to that quite late in the paper, so be patient.) This led to my pressing more firmly than perhaps I otherwise might have done for access to the records of the old Special Branch of the Police, now held by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. The SIS was very helpful about these old records, which are no longer sensitive. We didn't come to a conclusion about what was going on, but at least I got to boldly go where no one had gone before.

The first mystery is why Compton was appointed at all. In a service where retirement was at 65, promotion came very slowly. Compton, aged 50, (i.e., with over 14 years' service ahead of him) was a mere sub-inspector, promoted to this rank only six months earlier in June 1952, when he was transferred to Police Headquarters. In a hierarchical service in which seniority was all-important, he was the newest kid on the block. The commissioner of the time, J. B. Young, was in poor health after the strain of the 1951 waterfront dispute, as indeed were a number of the older superintendents who were his obvious successors. Young was on sick leave for much of 1952. A rank of assistant commissioner was created late in 1951 to provide for a deputy, but it was still vacant. On 22 December 1952, with the commissioner critically ill, an inexplicable appointment was made, Eric Henry Compton. Young, when told, is said to have exclaimed, 'Over my dead body!' Unfortunately, less than a week later, this was indeed the case.

Compton's career had been mostly served in the CIB around the Palmerston North Police District. He transferred in 1939 to Wellington where he eventually became Chief Detective. His record of solving murders as chief detective in Wellington was notably poor. For most of his Wellington time he was in charge of policing of illegal gaming, particularly bookmakers.

His claim to elevation to assistant commissioner remains a mystery and is generally attributed to the favour of the Minister in charge of Police, the lacklustre W. H. Fortune, as both men were members of the Plymouth Brethren, a denomination known for its austere lifestyle. Other than that, his chief distinction seems to have been that he was a tall, handsome man who looked well in a uniform and had been chosen to form part of the escort to two royal tours of New Zealand (the Duke and Duchess of York in 1927 and the Duke of Gloucester in 1938.). These facts seem to suggest some unseen hand advancing his career but no other evidence has ever been produced.

The official reason for advancing such a junior man over the heads of the entire officer corps was given by Fortune. The police was in desperate need of being modernised—this was certainly true—and to do this required a commissioner young enough to expect several years at the top, instead of the elderly men with a year or two to go, which tended to be the pattern. There is not a scrap of evidence beyond the official statements, and there is much to suggest that the government was determined to break the resistance to promotion by merit and so bring the police into line with public service practice. Brad Patterson, who most of you will know, is the son of a country constable of that era. Brad told me that in his (Brad's) childhood his father spent many a companionable evening with his old friend, a previous Commissioner, Jim Cummings. They often mulled over how Compton got the job and while both had their theories, they knew no more than we do now.

Compton became the heir apparent with only a few months' experience as an officer, never having attended an annual conference of commissioned officers and with the certainty of having every man's hand against him if he were advanced to commissioner. The government hesitated for about ten weeks, referring the matter to a Cabinet sub-committee, before finally appointing him commissioner on 11 March 1953.

He would probably have failed under any conditions and for that reason the exact circumstances of his failure have never been probed very closely. They turned out to include some rather intriguing cloak-and-dagger stuff that has never previously been noticed. There were three main factors and I want to identify them immediately because they will get terribly muddled otherwise.

• Corruption

Compton and a couple of other Wellington detectives were widely believed in the police to be corrupt, in the pay of bookmakers. This was investigated by a Commission of Inquiry that dragged on through 1953 and 1954, but found nothing proved. I have talked to many old Wellington policemen who have given chapter and verse about how Compton was able to afford a house well beyond the income of an erstwhile Senior Detective; how he had new cars when they were virtually unobtainable; how there was a sort of roster of prosecutions for bookmakers—they took turns at being put before the courts occasionally, instead of all being pursued all the time. One told me of being approached himself, by bookmakers who told him it would be all right as they were already paying off the commissioner. The corruption issue is fairly straightforward and got a lot of publicity at the time. I am not going to pursue it here, because as far as I know it is not connected with the other two factors. It was not proved, but it walked like a duck, it quacked like a duck, I think we can assume it was out for a duck. It is one of the things which made Compton's position untenable.

• Promotion of specialists
• The security intelligence dimension.

These last two are not straightforward and they are connected in a way that nobody at the time noticed. Up till the end of World War II there were virtually no specialists in the New Zealand Police; there were a couple of fingerprint people and some photographers who combined the work with ordinary police duties. It was a unitary service in which rank and promotion assumed that all members had the same generic police skills. The war changed that. By the end of the war, world-wide, a whole raft of skills was coming into policing, which required people to specialise in order to be truly expert. These included fields like ballistics, photography, which had come a long way with the invention of colour and cine photography, and radio communications. For many reasons it was thought better to equip serving police with the specialist skills than to bring in civilian specialists.

This created a massive problem within a unitary system: if you wanted the skills you had to create some sort of career path for them, but in specialising in one area police members disqualified themselves for promotion, which was based explicitly on the performance of all the duties of the rank. This is a conundrum which has not been fully solved to this day, though there have been many different approaches to it.

To be fair to Compton, he recognised the need to upskill the police but he got into trouble very quickly when he tried to accelerate the promotion of three specialists, who became known as the 'Three Sergeants'. They were advanced to inspector rank (missing the ranks of senior sergeant and sub-inspector) in order to strengthen police headquarters in the fields of fingerprints, ballistics and legal work. The Police Association—the police trade union—did the unthinkable, took Compton to court and won on the grounds I have just stated and the three new inspectors reverted to the ranks. In some ways it was a victory for a completely reactionary outlook, but Compton's own appointment, based as it apparently was on favouritism, created suspicions that he was about to stuff the officer corps with his own favourites and cronies, hence the violent resentment. It all helped to destroy him.

The Security Intelligence dimension

What we get into here is very shadowy, but I have talked it over with a number of retired police of the period and also with some members of the SIS and, though it cannot be proved, no one can come up with any alternative explanation to the one I will offer. I have had the privilege of using the archives of the Special Branch that are held by the SIS, but I was warned that if something was really secret it may never have been committed to paper. I have put it together from bits and pieces scattered through a lot of files, mainly to do with the establishment of police telecommunications.

The connection with the previous issue is that it involves the status of the only man in the police who had any real expertise in the field of radio communications, Detective Stan Wrigley of Police Special Branch. I need to explain about the role of Special Branch. This was the precursor of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service and is a fascinating subject in its own right. It was set up in a small way in 1948 but was reconstructed in 1952 on the recommendations of the head of MI-5, Sir Percy Sillitoe. Between late 1952 and the establishment of the SIS in 1956, Police Special Branch was the only agency carrying out internal security. The military were not in the business for this period. Whatever was going on was, therefore, related to the police, not to military intelligence.

The Special Branch was not large and was spread thinly throughout the country. The vast majority of its work was vetting of recruits for the armed forces during the Korean War and of appointees to some sensitive government positions. It also attempted, with very little success to infiltrate the New Zealand Communist Party and its front organisations and with more success to keep tabs on the more volatile trade unions. Until about 1955 it made virtually no attempt to keep the Soviet Embassy and its diplomats under any sort of surveillance.

The picture painted by the radicals of the period of a sinister secret police spying on every sign of independent thought and looking for reds under every bed is almost comically mistaken. Special Branch had no legal powers to intercept mail, to use listening devices or to tap telephones and had no practical means of doing so. It had little training, not much status and every radical in town knew exactly who its members were, so it was not exactly secret. I may add, however, that its own documents suggest its members had admirable common sense about who might pose a genuine security risk and those who merely flirted with left wing politics.

Now this finally brings us back to Stan Wrigley, the commisioner and the role of the specialists. In the early 1950s the police basically did not have a radio network. (That's how I can be so sure they were not conducting radio surveillance.) For reasons too complicated to go into here, the Post and Telegraph Department had a government mandate to control allocation of radio frequencies and for many years would not provide the police with frequencies of their own. The Wellington police had to depend upon a P&T transmitter in Brooklyn that did not give adequate coverage and caused enormous frustration. Until the late 1960s the police in many parts of the country were forced into an embarrassing reliance on the radios of their confreres, the traffic officers.

Stan Wrigley, the only police radio technician, had come into the police during World War II. During a spell in the Army he taught recruits in the Signals Section, then joined the police in 1943 as a constable. Why he was permitted to transfer in wartime is never explained, but the context suggests that he had an expertise in security work, which was made available to the police.

In 1947 Wrigley oversaw the installation of experimental radios in police cars and in 1951, because he was already working with Special Branch, he was given the rank of detective. In 1951 he was sent to Australia to study police communications and the following year was sent to Scotland Yard to a conference on police communications and security. This, however, proved to be very embarrassing.

As a mere detective, Wrigley was far outranked by everyone else attending and he seems to have been so snubbed that he had to be brought home early. An article in NZ Truth, probably correctly, considered Wrigley's experience to have been the starting point of the 'Three Sergeants' Case', because the sergeants were promoted when one of them had to go to an overseas conference and it was desirable to give him suitable rank to avoid a repetition of Wrigley's experience.

For several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s Wrigley pursued a 'turf war' with the Post and Telegraph department over a separate police radio system, but the P&T would not yield. In October 1950 he complained to Commissioner Young about the situation:

The Army, Navy and Air Force have all the radio channels they require, the State Hydro Electric Department have their radio scheme in operation. The State Forest Service has its own scheme, Civil Aviation Branch their scheme, Transport Department operate radios from one end of New Zealand to the other, the Wellington Harbour Board have their own scheme, some Taxi firms in some of the smaller towns are allowed to own and operate their own base stations, House removal firms have their radio, and three well known Communists are licensed to operate a radio telephone set with which they can if they wish, communicate with Russia, but, for some reason the Police Department are not allowed to have anything in the way of radio, I therefore submit that the whole position is farcical...[emphasis added]

Nothing further happened. The matter was probably swept aside by the upheaval of 1951 and Young's illness. Then in early February 1953, out of the blue, the new Acting Commissioner Compton advised the Director-General of Post and Telegraphs that as from 1 April the Police would take over and maintain its own VHF radio base station at Wrights Hill. (Wright's Hill is a commanding hilltop in the suburb of Karori well suited to radio transmission and already used by the military for this purpose.) The base was to consist of three 40-foot (13m) wooden masts and associated aerials and transmitter.

In the circumstances the only way the Police could have outflanked the P&T's objections and set up their own bases was by pleading security intelligence considerations. There was no criminal activity sophisticated enough to warrant radio surveillance. However, the system was also used for the control of police radio-equipped cars. It was reported to be much more successful than the transmitter operated by the P&T from the suburb of Brooklyn, so for about 18 months the Wellington police district had satisfactory radio coverage. Evidence was later given to the commission of inquiry that Wrigley was actively planning during 1953 to create a national police radio service, though this was not carried into effect. If that was the case he was trying to create it surreptitiously under cover of the plea of national security.

The next development is enigmatic, but proved disastrous for Compton. The public reasons given for it do not withstand scrutiny and no others have come to light. In May Compton authorised Wrigley to set up two more 40-foot masts and VHF aerials in the grounds of Compton's own house in Khandallah Road. These were to be connected to a monitoring set concealed in a window seat inside the house, but the full array was never installed. Since Compton knew little about radio, the suggestion must have come from Wrigley. The reasons subsequently given to the commission of inquiry were that Compton wished to improve the reception of his radiogram for overseas religious broadcasts and that he wished to monitor the behaviour of police car-radio operators, who were alleged, no doubt rightly, to do unauthorised things like asking each other to pick up fish and chips.

Now we have finally got to the point that sparked my interest. I knew the address where Compton lived and thought, 'I'll just go to see what sort of radio reception he could have got there.' I have a feeling for technical issues even where I don't know the details. If he was down a gully, back in those days of patchy broadcast coverage he might very well have needed tall masts for domestic reception. But his house is in Khandallah Road, not far from the brow of the ridge. There was no way in the world he needed what even at the time were considered exceptionally tall masts. He was not a radio 'ham' and so I thought the story had to be hooey; there had to be some other explanation.

The first public reason makes no sense because Compton already had good short-wave reception and he grumbled that the new arrangements spoiled the reception he had. The second is unbelievable because it was not the commissioner's job to monitor police car radios; it had been Wrigley's job since 1949 and he carried it out from police premises. Expert witnesses at the commission of inquiry later in the year doubted that car radios all over Wellington could have been successfully monitored from Compton's home.

Since the public stories cannot be true it is most likely that we are looking at a security issue, but what Wrigley was trying to achieve has never been explained. There is no reference to it in the Special Branch files. Perhaps it was a back-up station for Wright's Hill, perhaps it was to cover a dead spot in the transmission area or some unidentified specific target, most obviously the Soviet Legation in Karori. It is significant that two of the three communists with radio licences lived very near to Compton himself. Perhaps Special Branch was acting in co-operation with its Australian counterpart, which was aware of active espionage by members of the Soviet embassy in Canberra. If this were so, however, it would have been top secret and was probably not recorded at all. It cannot be assumed that the evidence given by either Compton or Wrigley to the commission of inquiry was truthful if a security issue was involved. They were obliged at all costs to conceal it, and indeed the Prime Minister went so far as to warn the press that the activities of the Special Branch were out of bounds.

Whatever the reason, no secret was made of the installation at Compton's house. Compton paid for the materials from his own pocket, but the installation was carried out by police labour in work time. This attracted the attention of a very astute Truth reporter, R. J. (Rob) McCormick, who was the police roundsman and an acquaintance of Wrigley's.

He was aware of discontent in the Wellington Police, over two issues, one being a feeling that Compton was misusing his position to have work done privately on his house and the other that there was an unspecified story connected with security issues. He also picked up a rumour that some years earlier Compton tapped the telephones of suspected bookmakers in order to obtain evidence. This was not actually illegal at the time it was done but was considered very unethical.

Police folklore has it that Wrigley approached Truth, because he was supposedly aggrieved about his low rank as a specialist. It appears rather that McCormick approached, even badgered, Wrigley about evidence McCormick had already collected. Wrigley was reluctant to be involved, but because of the security issue, he struck a bargain with McCormick and with the chairman of directors of Truth, the lawyer, P. J. Dunn. This was that he would confirm the evidence about the first two matters in return for their not pursuing the security issue.

Because Wrigley was risking his police career by this co-operation, Dunn agreed that Truth would find a job for him if necessary. Wrigley then allowed Compton's improvised wire-tapping apparatus to be photographed. On 24 September, just before the story broke, Wrigley was granted a late-night interview with the Prime Minister, Sidney Holland, to lay out his concerns. The fact that the Prime Minister would entertain a direct approach from a mere detective is the strongest evidence that there is something serious here.

On 30 September Truth finally struck with banner headlines 'Strong Suspicions 'Phones Being Tapped: Police Inquiry Imperative.' True to the bargain, the security issues were mentioned but not pursued, and the only charges made concerned telephone tapping and private work done by policemen on Compton's house. (Apart from the radio masts, this was very small stuff.)

A storm of protest followed which eventually forced the government to set up a commission of inquiry to look into a range of issues about Compton himself and about police behaviour and policy. These included the question of the wire-tapping, whether Compton had private work done on his house by police labour, whether there was known bribery of police by bookmakers, how effectively the licensing laws were administered, and whether any police recruits had convictions prior to their enlistment. It was an odd miscellany; the commission of inquiry spent almost a year on it and in the end found no significant offences disclosed. The main reason for this was that Holland absolutely refused to grant immunity from prosecution to witnesses involved in any offence. No one therefore was prepared to come forward and incriminate himself.

It was a whitewash that, however, completely failed to exonerate Compton in public estimation. He could not be sacked and showed no inclination to resign. The government tried to patch the situation up by appointing two senior officers, one of them the head of Special Branch, to act with him as a three-man commission, but it was a fiasco. His own officers moved a vote of no-confidence in him. He finally resigned in April when the government agreed to pay out a huge sum in what Wellington wags immediately dubbed 'Comptonsation.' It was the greatest crisis the New Zealand police has ever undergone. Some of its causes are obvious, but lurking behind, I am convinced there is still an untold story.