Then Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Ritchings—with four years of active
military service to his credit and field rank worn at the front, with a
breast-load of decorations and the proved ability to command over 3,000
fighting men—stepped over to police headquarters, took up his truncheon
and resumed his familiar duties as a common policeman in a mining town,
where the care of drunks and disorderlies alone taxed his military
genius.
There the matter might have ended but for the interests of a person who
had no particular business to come fussing around in Cardiff affairs.
This person happened to be one of those ordinary mortals who hold the
notion that certain honors attached to heroism and military achievement
are not sufficiently represented by mere medals and things, and this
person thought it in high degree outrageous that a man who had lifted
himself by valor from private to lieutenant colonel should be permitted
to walk a beat and swing a club as a means of serving the Crown. This
indignant person wrote a passionate letter to the London _Times_, with
the result that Cardiff took a second view of the situation, and the
Watch Committee (a sort of police commissioner) took the ex-lieutenant
colonel off his beat and gave him the lofty job of training the police
to the proper dignity of constabulary service.
This, however, did not entirely satisfy outside admirers of Ritchings,
honorable as it might seem to Cardiffians, so the Lord Mayor was
pressed for information whether there was any intention of appointing
the distinguished officer to a higher and more responsible position on
the force. That dignitary (and a Lord Mayor truly esteems himself a
dignitary in England) went to the extent of admitting that he thought
that he might say that all the members of the Watch Committee were
in sympathy with the idea, and that he had no doubt that when the
opportunity occurred Colonel or Constable Ritchings would be given a
place better suited to his merits.
And what said Ritchings concerning himself? Why, merely this, that
he “recognized as every right-thinking man would that he had a moral
obligation to return to the Cardiff police force for the reason that
the ratepayers had been contributing during his absence to the support
of his dependents at home.”
Well, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Ritchings, here’s hats off to you!