A GREAT CAREER.

Hokitika Guardian, 26 April 1919, Page 1

A GREAT CAREER.

EXPERIENCES OF A FAMOUS DETECTIVE.

By the retirement recently of Superintendent Patrick Quinn, head of the Special Branch of tlie C.1.D., after 45 years’ service, Scotland Yarcl loses one of its best and most famous detectives, a man whose nanie is well known in all the capitals of the Continent. Fbr fifteen years Mr Quinn has had charge of a highly important department of police work, whose workings do not come into the courts or the public eye so frequently as the general work of the Criminal Investigation Department. It is charged with ensuring the safety of the King and all Royalties who visit this country, and it is further responsible for curbiug the activities of anarchists and political desperadoes whose objects, being political, rather than plunder-seek-ing, are of course more difficult to detect and counter than those of the general run of criminals. At Scotland Yard recently, Mr Quinn was busy clearing up his work, read)' “ to retire into a quiet life,” as he told a 11 Daily News ” representative. It was difficult to realise that the slender, shy-looking man, with the closely-cropped brown beard, who spoke with the soft accents of his native county. Mayo, was a detective who has guarded so successfully many monarchs at Home and abroad, and who has countered, often at risk of his life, the machinations of anarchists and alien criminals.

Though modestly declining to talk of the adventures and dangers of his career, Mr Quinn recalled that in the “Battle of Sidney Streejt,” on January 3rd, 19x1—when tlie .Lithuanian ruffians who had murdered city police officers in Houndsditch were run to earth in Whitechapel and accounted for by a,company of the Scots Guards after a desperate siege—he was shot in the knee. A bullet passed through his overcoat as he was standing with Sir Melville McNaghten (then Assistant Commissioner). The bullet, which afterwards fell out of his pocket, left a very severe' bruise on his leg. When Kipg Edward went abroad on his foreign tours Mr Quinn went with him, and whenever there was a big State function or royal procession'Mr Quinn guarded the King. Perhaps the uiost anxious time that Mr Quinn and his associates ever had was at the funeral of King Edward, when eight foreign monarchs visited London ; in fact, Sir Melville Macnaghten has con-fessed-that this was “the worst time ” the chiefs of Scotland Yard ever had But the police had their eyes on all the kuown desperadoes likely to cause trouble at the time, and happily' nothing untoward happened. The political crimesby Anarchists aud fanatics —including such notorious incidents as the plot to blow up the Stock Exchange 25 years ago, the explosion of the Anarchist bomb 50 yards from Greenwich Observatory in the following year, and the assassination of Curzon Wyllie by an Indian student in 1909—and the activities of the Fenians, and much later, the less spectacular exploits of the militant suffragists, were matters in which Mr Quinn had an intimate interest.

During war time Mr Quinn and his men have had anxious times unravelling the mysteries of German espionage in this country. The long list of foreign decorations and mementoes which Mr Quinn has received from France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Spain, aiid other countries is in itself a testimony to the work which he and liis department have done for other countries. Many of the secret societies and Terrorist bands in Europe have had their tentacles reaching into Britain, and more than once the information supplied by Mr Quinn and his men has been of great benefit to the Continental police.