Cecil Smith
Cecil Smith was appointed to the Queensland Police on 30 October 1936, he was 21 years old. He spent most of his career in the Fingerprint Bureau, receiving a Favourable Record for the arrest of six men for the wilful murder of a shop owner at Newstead and leading the fingerprinting of 1100 residents on Ocean (Banaba) Island to help solve a double murder in 1949.
This interview took place on 16 July 2004 between oral historian Suzanne Mulligan and retired Superintendent Cecil Smith. In this excerpt Cecil explains how fingerprints were captured directly from the hand and at crime scenes.
Transcription
“What was fingerprinting like in those days. What did you do?”
“You’d have a thick slab and some printer’s ink and a rubber roller and you’d put spots of ink on the slab, roll the ink out on the slab and get a thin film of ink on the slab, and put the fingers on the slab, get the ink on them and put them on the form.”
“Hasn’t really changed that much, in that respect anyway.”
“No.”
“What about crime scene fingerprints?”
“At that stage we used mercury and chalk. When I first went there we used a very light powder (called lico podium) that you threw on the print and blew the thing off and that left the outline of the print and then you carefully brushed that off and put some mercury and chalk on to make it more permanent. But that had a greater risk of damaging the print when you were wiping the lico podium off and so we gave the use of the lico podium away altogether and went straight to putting mercury and chalk on.”… Continue reading