In 1959 my dad suffered a massive coronary while we were living in Adelaide, South Australia. He was flat on his back in Adelaide Hospital for 6 weeks with a fairly dim prognosis. He was only 48 years old. Happily he pulled through and his work arranged for him to be repatriated back to Sydney to be closer to friends and family. It was a long recuperation which we spent in a little, rented fibro house in Caringbah, on what was then known as The Boulevard and is now known as Captain Cook Drive. Amazingly, in the midst of a semi-industrial area, the house survives to today, and is substantially unchanged.
One of the people who became a regular visitor to our little house was a young man who we knew as “Uncle Wes”. He wasn’t really our uncle but a close friend of the family, having been the page boy at mum and dad’s wedding. Conventions of the day frowned on children calling adults by their first name so Wes, like many of the young adults who frequented our lives, became “Uncle” Wes. His dad worked for the Maritime Services Board and was the curator of Pinchgut Island, that forboding castle-like structure in the middle of Sydney Harbour that had been used, during convict times, as a prison. We had many visits there during the years we were in Caringbah and I’m sure you can imagine what a thrill it was for impressionable little kids like us to explore the dungeons and cells as well as the other parts of the island.
Anyway, Uncle Wes became an instant hero to us boys. Tall, well over six foot in the old money, handsome and a policeman into the bargain, we idolised him. Wes worked as a traffic policeman attached to the station at Sutherland. But the greatest attraction for us was that Wes was a MOTORCYCLE policeman and he would regularly call into our house while on duty, riding his shiny, black Triumph motorcycle (see above). We loved him and his bike and we loved listening to his stories of daring deeds as part of his job of enforcing the law. Once he told us about chasing a driver down from the Lucas Heights reactor to the Lurgano Ferry. The speeder was driving a 1959 Chev Belair, you know, the one with the big fins? Well, Wes chased him till he had to stop for the ferry (serves him right for driving down what was, effectively, a dead-end street) at speeds over 100mph, (160km/h) and he said it was pretty scary. I reckon it would have been even scarier for the driver of the car, those things handled like an airport trolley.
Once we were standing out on the street as Wes was about to leave and I noticed a car drive by without a front number plate. I yelled to Wes and he hopped on the bike and zoomed off in pursuit. About 15 minutes later, he returned, “Got him,” he smiled, “And he was a cabbie as well.” I remember feeling very proud that I had played a part in bringing a criminal to justice!
Wes loved his Trumpy but was very sour when he turned up at home one day on a BMW. Traffic had been equipped with Beemers to replace the Trumpies. He HATED the thing; it was slow, it didn’t handle and even fairly basic cars could get away from it in a pursuit situation. Every time he visited he complained about it until one day he came along in a new, black Triumph! How he managed to ditch the Beemer was typical Wes.
He and his colleagues had complained to their bosses to no avail so they came up with a wheeze to convince them that the Beemer wasn’t durable enough for police pursuit work. It consisted of sitting on the bike up on the footpath until a speeder went by. The riders would then crash the bike down onto the road over the gutter and head off. It didn’t take much of this sort of abuse for the mufflers to start breaking and it didn’t take long for the continued repair process that resulted from this abuse to convince the powers-that-be that the Beemer might be OK on the smooth autobahns of Germany but they were just not tough enough to stand the tough Australian environment!
We listened enthralled as Wes regaled us with stories of law enforcement and, looking back on it now, much of what he said went straight over our young heads. For example he told us once of his first posting out of the Police Academy. It was to the station at Kings Cross/Rushcutters Bay as a general duties constable. What a first posting! On his second day on duty the Sergeant told him to bring a notebook and get in the car, he was going to take him around and show him “the patch”. Those of you that know the convoluted streets and alleyways of Kings Cross will already be thinking that this was going to be a tough assignment.
But Wes was in for a shock. Driving through said streets and alleyways the sergeant started pointing out specific buildings and locations telling him that these were places that he was to “leave alone.” When Wes asked why, he was just told to do what he was told. Once he’d been around for a bit he, of course, realised that the specific places were buildings and businesses that were owned by underworld figures who, in those bad old days, had paid off the police to leave them alone. Needless to say, it didn’t take long before he applied for a transfer out of there and was moved to Sutherland and Traffic!
Another Wes story actually involved a crime and our family. Straight across the road from us in Woodfield Boulevarde, was Caringbah Sheet Metal, a light industrial business whose main line of work was making electricity meter boxes to supply the booming new housing market. One night, very late, dad heard a noise from across the road and realised that the place was being burgled. Peering out of the window he saw two thugs dragging/carrying the safe from the office out of the factory and loading it into a van. We had no phone at home so, memorising the type of van and its number plate, dad woke mum and hustled her out of the house and up the street where she used the local phone box to call the police. (dad was unable to run or walk long distances).
As luck would have it, Wes was on duty at Sutherland that night and was dispatched with the details to try and find the van and apprehend the thieves. As luck would have it he was just putting on his gloves and helmet outside the station when the van roared down the street, heading south at a great rate of knots! Out through the suburbs the pursuit continued, Wes taking some time to catch up as the van had gotten a pretty good head start. By the time they reached the end of the “Mad Mile” as it was known, the miscreants were obviously heading for the bush of the National Park where they could dump the van and break into the safe undisturbed. Wes knew he had to stop them before that if he could so he put on his light, pulled the “squealer” and let the thieves now that he was hot on their trail.
It didn’t take long for them to realise that the jig was up and they’d better bail in order to avoid arrest. The van screeched to a stop, the two bailed out and went bush. Wes stopped the bike and pursued into the bush. It was clear that, if they got any way into the bush in the darkness he would lose them so he pulled out his service revolver and shouted out, “I’m going to fire just one shot into the air; if you don’t stop straight away, the next one will be AT you.” They didn’t stop so he fired one shot into the air. Realising that their bluff had been called, the two thieves surrendered and Wes detained them until the following police cars arrived.
It was only later when the adrenaline had stopped flowing that Wes realised that the shot had sounded a bit weird and he remembered that it did so because there was a rolled-up ten pound note stuffed down the barrel of the revolver, put there to hide it from his missus!
Finally, another Uncle Wes howler. He and his colleagues had been called to a possible robbery in an industrial area of the shire. As the bulk of the responders headed to the front of the factories to see if they could flush out the offenders, Wes, all six foot whatever of him, was dispatched down the laneway at the back of the factory units to prevent the offenders fleeing that way should they try to do so. It was a moonless, pitch black night and it was hard to see anything. Nevertheless, Wes tiptoed down the lane, ears pricked for any sound that might indicate trouble. Sure enough he heard a scrabbling sound from behind the tall paling fences at the back of the buildings and, quietly retrieving a wooden box from the rubbish lying around, he took it to the base of the fence and climbed up on it so that he could see what was happening in the back yard. As he went to peer over the fence, a cat, sitting on the railing of the fence on the inside, poked his head up, right where Wes’s face was and hissed at him! Wes staggered back, fell off the box and landed flat on his back. He scrambled to his feet, hot-footed it out of the lane and, when the sergeant asked if he’d seen anything, he told a little white lie and told him that he hadn’t seen a thing!
Uncle Wes is one of my favourite childhood memories!