Arthur Young (police Officer) - Personal Life

Personal Life

Brought up in a household with strong Anglican evangelical beliefs (the family attended St Jude's, Southsea for matins and evensong every Sunday as well as week-day meetings), experiencing Portsmouth's slums and docks as a young constable had an effect on Young. Guided by his curate, the Reverend Frederick Dillistone, later Dean of Liverpool, he decided that he must seek ordination. The Bishop of Portsmouth, Neville Lovett, however, rejected his application to attend theological college, telling him at interview that "policemen do not become priests". Although later in life Young would drift away from regular worship, the impact of Portsmouth on his world-view never shifted. Shocked by the poverty and injustice which he discovered, Young became a staunch Christian socialist and, very rare for a chief constable, a lifelong Labour Party voter. Throughout his career, he sought out contact with clergymen and in the later 1960s, encouraged by the Bishop of London, again considered Anglican ordination.

Young married three times. On 11 April 1939, at Boarhunt parish church, Hampshire, he married Ivy Ada May Hammond (born 20 December 1909), a nurse from the Royal Portsmouth Hospital whom he had courted for years - custom then dictated lengthy enagements and police pay then was very low. She died of cancer on 14 September 1956. They had one son, Christopher John Young, born in 1941.

Young married Mrs Margaret Furnival Homan, née Dolphin, in 1957. The marriage fell apart quickly and they separated. She committed suicide in Malta in 1966.

On 16 April 1970, he married Mrs Ileen Fryer Turner (née Rayner, born 19 April 1914), whom he had known since she was his police driver in Birmingham during the war and who at one time had been the mistress of his great friend Sir Edward Dodd, Chief Constable of Birmingham and later Chief Inspector of Constabulary. She died on 31 December 2002. In the 1980s, she declined a proposal of marriage from Sir Graham Shillington, Young's successor as Chief Constable of the RUC.

Read more about this topic:  Arthur Young (police Officer)

Famous quotes related to personal life:

    Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.
    Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)