| Notes |
- See also http://www.thepeerage.com/p32721.htm#i327210
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-john-nightingale-613591.html http://www.essex.police.uk/museum/history_43.htm
More on his ancestors at . https://wc.rootsweb.com/trees/616047/I000014/johnsircyprian-nightingale/pedigree?isText=false
In Essex he was appointed to Chief Constable in 1962, after serving as Deputy Chief Constable, and held this position until his retirement in 1978. CBE 1970, knighted 1975
Managed to get out of the police (a reserved occupation) and served as a 1st Lt on a destroyer in Med. in WW2.
Obituary in Essex Chronicle, Published Thursday October 10, 2002
Sir John Nightingale (Essex)
Distinguished former Essex Chief Constable Sir John Nightingale, who was known for modernising the police force, died on October 1, aged 89.
Sir John joined the police force in 1935 serving with the Metropolitan Police and moved to Essex as Assistant Chief Constable in 1958. He also served with the National Police College and as Commandant of Eynsham Hall Police Training Centre in Oxfordshire.
He received the British Empire Medal for saving a man from a burning building during the Second World War and also served with the Royal Navy as an anti-submarine officer.
In Essex he was appointed to Chief Constable in 1962, after serving as Deputy Chief Constable, and held this position until his retirement in 1978.
As leader of the police force in Essex Sir John was responsible for the amalgamation of Essex and Southend Borough Police Forces. He also introduced university degrees for promising officers.
In 1965 he was awarded the Queen's Police Medal, he was made a CBE in 1970 and was knighted in 1975.
After retiring he served as a Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Essex, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, chairman of the Police Council and a member of the Parole Board.
Sir John was an approachable Chief Constable and made time for his officers.
He was well respected, with a down to earth manner and took a keen interest in what happened in his force.
Sir John made his home in Little Baddow and died in a nursing home at Witham. Lady Nightingale, whom he married in 1947, survives him, as does a stepson and two stepgrandchildren.
Essex Chief Constable David Stevens said: "Sir John will be remembered with admiration and fondness. He made an immense contribution to the police service and in many other areas.
"He was a forerunner of the modern Chief Constable and set a fine example for others to follow."
Retired Chief Constable Geoffrey Markham described him as a true leader and commander.
He said: "He had a great impact on the modernisation of Essex Police and its approach to policing."
Mr Markham will deliver the eulogy at Sir John's funeral, which will take place at 10.15am on Monday, October 14, at Chelmsford Crematorium. Police officers are welcome to attend. Sir John's family have requested that donations be made to the Essex Police Benevolent Fund instead of flowers.
Published Thursday October 10, 2002
Brought to you by the Essex Chronicle
Sir John Nightingale
Classics graduate for 16 years Chief Constable of Essex
The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-john-nightingale-613591.html
Wednesday, 9 October 2002
John Cyprian Nightingale, police officer: born London 16 September 1913; BEM 1941; Assistant Chief Constable, Essex 1958-62, Chief Constable 1962-69, 1974-78; QPM 1965; Chief Constable, Essex and Southend-on-Sea Joint Constabulary 1969-74; CBE 1970; President, Association of Chief Constables 1972-73; Kt 1975; Chairman, Police Council 1976-78; married 1947 Patricia Compton (née Maclaren; one stepson); died Witham, Essex 1 October 2002.
When serious public disorder threatened in Southend in the early 1970s John Nightingale agreed that all the young men arriving at the railway station be made to surrender their belts, braces and shoelaces. This earned the opprobrium of civil-rights campaigners, but the victims were far too busy holding on to their trousers to cause any trouble and the day passed off peacefully.
Alongside his old-fashioned approach to policing, Nightingale left his mark on the police force as an inspiring leader and key modernising influence. During his 16-year stint as Chief Constable of Essex he set the pace for reforms which were subsequently taken up across the force as a whole. In particular, he instituted a policy of sending serving police officers away to university and played a central role in the watershed negotiations of the 1970s which led to a better-paid and better-motivated police force.
A Classics graduate, he was at first sight a somewhat unlikely candidate for the police force. His mother having died in the 1918 flu epidemic when he was five, he moved with his father (just returned from four years on the front in France), his younger brother and sister to live with his two grandmothers and three unmarried uncles in a powerfully matriarchal household in New Cross, south London. He was educated at the Roman Catholic Cardinal Vaughan School in Kensington (his father was a mathematics teacher at the Sloane School in Chelsea) and took a Classics degree at University College London.
He joined the Metropolitan Police in 1935 under the Trenchard scheme, the fast-track promotion scheme of its time. (Four years earlier, the First World War air chief Viscount Trenchard had been appointed Commissioner and undertaken extensive police reforms, including the founding of Hendon Police College.) University graduates were then an extraordinary rarity in the police but Nightingale proved his credentials by serving spells on the beat in the East End (where he earned a British Empire Medal for bravery during the Blitz) and Chelsea (his sister remembers being startled on realising the policeman standing outside Harrods was her brother).
For the last two years of the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy – first escorting convoys across the Atlantic and then on a destroyer in the Mediterranean.
He was appointed Assistant Chief Constable in Essex in 1958 and became Chief Constable in 1962. This was a time when the service was underpaid and officers were leaving in large numbers. He was instrumental in restoring morale both through his direct leadership style and new policies. He made it his business to visit regularly every one of the beat stations (mostly rural stations operated by a single constable) across the county, getting to know each station, the officers within them and the problems which they faced. He made it quite clear that he saw these men as the most important part of the force and would always insist on holding those at the top accountable for mistakes rather than those at the bottom.
Perhaps influenced by his own experience of the Trenchard scheme, he opposed proposals made in the late 1960s to fill the higher ranks by the direct recruitment of graduates. Instead he introduced a ground-breaking policy of sending two officers a year from the Essex force to university.
It is hard to appreciate how novel this was at the time, when far fewer students went to university and officers with university degrees were still a very rare species. Two men a year was not many, but the policy's influence was immeasurable, both in the numbers of those from the Essex scheme who have gone on to become chief constables or assistant chief constables in other forces, and in the way it provided a model which in time was adopted by forces across the country.
From the outset, he insisted officers should attend university full-time and resisted the imposition of any contract requiring them to return at the end of their degree course: he made it clear that this was a matter for them and if they decided to leave the force that was fine – it merely showed he had picked the wrong man. In practice none did.
He also believed the choice of course should be up to the individual officer, though he was ready to warn them off reading law ("If you don't already know enough law to do your job I shouldn't have promoted you") and to encourage them to read the humanities – his own grounding in the Classics was an enduring influence ("I couldn't have done my job without it").
Appointed CBE in 1970 and knighted in 1975, he became the President of the Association of Chief Constables and Chairman of the Police Council. In these roles he played a central part in the negotiations that led to the Edmund Davies Report of 1979 which ushered in a new climate for promoting better pay and conditions in the police force. He was a powerful negotiator; he exuded a sense of integrity and straightforwardness, while his taciturn manner gave away little or nothing to the other side. That he was never to benefit from these better conditions was not something that would have concerned him. For him the police force was everything and in his retirement he would advise younger colleagues not to leave until they were thrown out at 65.
Above all, he inspired colleagues and subordinates through his qualities of integrity, loyalty and service – the commonplaces which all commanders are supposed to have but are inevitably more evident in some than in others.
Outside the police force Nightingale was a man of few words; he would frequently tell those in his force that a policeman had to retain a degree of separation from the rest of society – an inch of difference – and he certainly felt that a chief constable could not mix freely with the establishment if he was to make the difficult decisions which the job sometimes demanded. His wife, Patsy, was something of a foil to him here; ebullient and a keen entertainer. Relatives and friends would describe how Nightingale would get up in the middle of a lunch or dinner party and retire next door to listen to classical music or read.
He did not make it easy for them to understand the police work to which he was so devoted. Asked by a family member, on his appointment as Chief Constable, what chief constables actually do, he replied, "Attend the funerals of other chief constables."
Thomas Dene
The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-john-nightingale-613591.html
Chief Constable John Nightingale
The Very Model of a Modern Chief Constable
By Martin Lockwood (Issue No.43)
Essex Police Museum
http://www.essex.police.uk/museum/history_43.htm
The death on the 1st October 2002 at the age of 89 years, of Sir John Nightingale, saw the passing of a man whose name perhaps more than any other in living memory was synonymous with the Essex County Constabulary.
John Cyprian Nightingale was born in Brixton, London in September 1913. His mother died in the 1918 ‘flu epidemic and, when he was five, he moved with his father, younger brother and sister to live with his two grandmothers and three unmarried uncles in a powerfully matriarchal household in south London. He was educated at the Roman Catholic Cardinal Vaughan School, Kensington and University College, London where he obtained an honours degree in Classics. In 1935 he joined the Metropolitan Police as a constable, at a time when University graduates were a rarity in the police service. This was the start of a career that was to last for some 43 years.
Not long after joining, Nightingale was selected to attend the Metropolitan Police College at Hendon, under a scheme that had been introduced by Lord Trenchard to train selected individuals for the highest ranks in the police service.
Air Marshall Hugh Trenchard, (regarded by many as the ‘Father of the RAF), had been appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police [1931-1935] at a time of much dissatisfaction in the police service (including a 10 per cent wage cut) Trenchard set about a number of reforms of the police service, including the founding of Hendon Police College.
Trenchard’s ideas were to catch the most able young constables, by competitive entry or recommendation for accelerated promotion, and to recruit well-educated young men from public schools, colleges or universities, all with the promise of immediate appointment to the newly created rank of Junior Station Inspector, after successful completion of a two year course at Hendon. The scheme was unpopular with the newly formed Police Federation and was ended in 1935 with Trenchard’s retirement.
Despite his experience as a constable, John Nightingale’s selection as Junior Station Inspector in 1937 meant that he did not entirely escape the criticism of chief constables of the fifties, sixties and seventies, who were drawn from the 'officer class' produced by Trenchard's pre-war Hendon Police College and had little experience of life at the ‘sharp end’.
The emphasis at Hendon was on physical fitness and character building rather than academia, and whilst at Hendon John Nightingale had a distinguished career, being captain of both rugby and swimming, as well as obtaining ‘firsts’ in Local Government, Constitutional Law and Police History.
After leaving Hendon, he served as a Junior Station Inspector on the East and West End Divisions. In October 1941, whilst he was serving as a Station Inspector at Chelsea Police Station, he was awarded the British Empire Medal for Bravery, when he took part in the rescue of a man trapped in a building as a result of an air raid.
From 1943 until 1945, Nightingale served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He was commissioned and saw action in the Western Approaches as an anti-submarine warfare officer and also the Mediterranean in a destroyer flotilla. He was to describe his war career as ‘quiet and peaceful.’
In 1946 he resumed his police career with the Metropolitan Police and inarch 1948 he was promoted to the rank of Chief Inspector. In 1950 he was appointed to the Directing Staff of the Police College, which was at the time located at Ryton on Dunsmore, where he was to remain for 3 years, after which he took up an appointment as Commandant of the Police Training Centre at Eynsham in Oxfordshire, which was responsible for training raw recruits.
Returning to the Metropolitan Police in 1956, he was later that year promoted to the rank of Chief Superintendent in charge of ‘H’ Division, which included Whitechapel, Mile End, Bethnal Green, Bow, Poplar and Limehouse, which at that time had an establishment of over 800 officers.
In 1958 the Essex County Constabulary decided to appoint a second Assistant Chief Constable for the Force, and John Nightingale was appointed to this post on the 1st January 1958 at an annual salary of £1,920 per annum.
He was subsequently appointed First Assistant Chief Constable and Deputy to the Chief Constable in March 1959 and, on the retirement of Sir Jonathan Peel, to the post of Chief Constable in 1962, a position he was to hold until his retirement in 1978.
In addition to his BEM, he received a number of honours during his police career. He was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal in 1965 for distinguished service, appointed CBE in 1970, and knighted in 1975. He was a member of many police working parties. He became President in 1973 of the Association of Chief Police Officers and was also Chairman of the Police Council. In this latter post he was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the 1979 Edmund Davies Report, which brought in a new climate of promoting better pay and conditions in the police service. He also saw the amalgamation in 1969 of the Essex and Southend Borough police forces.
Sir John also served as a Deputy Lord Lieutenant for Essex and as a member of the Parole Board.
In 1947 he had married Patricia Compton and they lived in the house provided for the Chief Constable at Police Headquarters in what is now the Chief Officers’ accommodation. In an interview in 1973, he said that ‘the trouble with living in a place like this is that you get used to it. When I retire I shall have to move out…A comparable place to this would cost the earth nowadays, so it looks like we shall have to look around for a semi-detached tent or something.’
He was a private man, who tried to keep his personal life separate from his work, which must have been difficult ‘living on the job’. He also had a wonderful sense of humour. He himself recalled the story of going along to a dinner in his full dress regalia, sitting down and being addressed by the guest at his side. “Tell me”, asked the man, “and who are you?” “The Bandmaster,” he replied, quick as a wink. It was not until coffee was being served that the man turned to him and said, “But there isn’t a band.”
Nightingale was a man well respected for his down to earth manner and keenness to make time to visit regularly every one of the rural police stations within Essex, getting to know each station and the officers within them and the problems they faced. He made it quite clear that he saw these men as the most important part of the force and would always insist on holding those at the top accountable for mistakes, rather than those at the bottom.
Very much influenced by his own time at university and his experience at Hendon he introduced, in the 1970s, a scheme to send two police officers from Essex each year to study full-time at Essex University leaving the choice of subject to the individual. At the time it was far removed from the popular image of policemen – but the scheme was adopted by police forces across the country.
Mr David Stevens, Chief Constable of Essex Police said, “Sir John will be remembered with admiration and fondness. He made an immense contribution to the police service and in many other areas. He was the forerunner of the modern Chief Constable and set a fine example for others to follow.”
Sources:
1. Essex Police Magazine. [Summer 1958]
2. Obituary-Independent Newspaper [8th Oct]
3. Interview in ‘This Essex’ Magazine. [August 1973]
4. History of Police in England and Wales. Critchley [1957]
5. Interview in the Standard Magazine [14.12.1973]
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Ancestorium Family Tree Collaboration
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
