In that good-Aussie catagory

Just before Ken Phillips began his 31-year police career, he was all set to start a new job as a prison guard. The former naval airman and young family man had applied to both the Department of Correctional Services and SAPOL for work in 1958.

While no response came from SAPOL, Correctional Services was quick to endorse his application and offer him a job. Ken decided he would accept, but told his wife, Shirley, he would have preferred to become a police officer.

At her insistence, he called SAPOL to find out what ever had happened to his application. To his delight, he learned that police recruiters had accepted it but were still to notify him. Ken happily passed up the prison-guard job and, in late January ’58, began recruit training at Thebarton police barracks.

Sadly, after three decades of police service and 16 years in retirement, he died of prostate and bone cancer in the Bartonvale Gardens Nursing Home. He was 76.

The son of an Adelaide-born WWI veteran, Ken – one of seven children – lived with his family in Brompton, after moving from Prospect.

After a Catholic primary school education, Ken attended a local high school, which he eventually left to take up work in a foundry.

In 1948, he met his then future wife, Shirley, in the Flinders Ranges, where the two were spending their respective holidays. They were married in 1950.

Two years later, as they had their first child, Ken, then 23, joined the Royal Australian Navy. Although assigned to work on board ship as an aircraft handler, he underwent specialist driver training. And, with the expertise he acquired from that, he soon became a driver to his ship’s captain.

In that role, he always had to be first off the ship whenever it docked, and ready with a car to whisk the captain away.

He loved the navy life and made many close friends but decided to leave after six years. By then a father of three children under six, he submitted his job applications to Correctional Services and SAPOL.

To Ken, with his growing family, the appeal of the then prospective employment was its security.

After he graduated from recruit training in July ’58, he served terms in the City Watch House, on Minor Patrol, and in the Information Bureau, until 1964. In that year, he began an eight-year stint at Warrants Section in the then Angas St police headquarters.

And, by May 1967, he had taken an interest in the Police Association and become its representative for his workplace.

“My earliest memories of Ken are as a Warrants Section officer,” said association president, Peter Alexander. “I can remember liaising with him and his colleagues in the section; and, in those days, it was a very close police community, particularly around No. 1 Angas St.

“Ken was one of those larger-than-life people around the police building; and everybody was aware that he was an association rep.”

Ken continued on in his representative role until 1973, when he won election to the association executive committee, on which he would serve for eight years. Mr Alexander said that, in that period, the association “was trying to improve wages and conditions, which had fallen way behind the norm in the community”.

Through the latter part of his police career, Ken worked in the Adelaide, Unley, North Adelaide, Burnside and Norwood police stations. He loved police work and the comradeship of the job, and never thought of leaving to try an alternative career.

In 1984, he became the 29th recipient – since 1911 – of life membership of the Police Association. And no one else would receive that special honour for another six years.

“He’ll be very much missed because he was part of PASA history,” said Mr Alexander. “He was a salt-of-the-earth type of bloke, and I think it’s fair to put him in that ‘good-Aussie’ category.”

Ken, whose health had begun to suffer by the time he reached his mid-50s, retired from SAPOL on grounds of invalidity in June 1989. He nonetheless kept a connection to the police community through the Retired Police Officers Association.

He served as an RPOA committee member for two years from 1988 and as treasurer for 12 years after that.

Away from policing, Ken was an avid gardener and cook. But his greatest passion, which emerged in the mid-1970s, was for Japanese language and culture. He went to university to study the language, and became involved with the Japan-Australia Association.

Ken and Shirley billeted more than 100 Japanese students over the years, and made three trips to Japan through the 1980s.

Ken was farewelled by his family and friends in a private funeral service at Enfield Memorial Park on April 12.

He is survived by his wife, six children, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

– Brett Williams