Group photograph of recruits in Petrie Terrace Police Depot, Brisbane, March 1899. (PM2366)
Since July 1997 the Police Museum has been maintaining and adding to a database of Queensland police officers. In the lead up to the Queensland Police 150th birthday in 2014 we made a concerted effort to make sure the list was accurate for the years between 1864 – 2014 and added any names into it that we found in the course of our research. We also hold information on officers who served between 1842 and 1863.
The information we keep on each officer can include biographical data; entry and separation dates; lists of rank attainment; station transfers plus other data such as reward and award information; family details; death and burial data.
QPServiceHistory AHERN John
A large percentage of the service histories for officers serving prior to 1900 are as complete as we can make them i.e. each service at least includes entry dates, separation dates, ranks and transfers.
To increase access to this information about the service of police officers we are using our online collection management site eHive to store this documentation as a PDF. Where an image such as a portrait or a copy of a swearing-in certificate can be found, it will also be added to the entry. Both the PDF and any associated image can be downloaded for future reference.
eHive Service History Page
Currently there are 25 officer service histories on eHive. They are stored under the Archive tab. 20 of these histories refer to pre-1900 officers with the surnames (Agen, Ahern, Apjohn, Armstrong, Ashton, Atkinson (2), Aubin, Barry (3), Beale, Beasley, Beggan, Blakeney (2), Cahill, Marrett, McCluskey and Power). The remainder represent the service of the first four Queensland police Commissioners Seymour, Parry-Okedon, Cahill and Urquhart plus that of the 12th Police Commissioner Bauer. Additional pre-1900 service histories will be progressively added over the coming months.
Our site on eHive also hosts 208 of our objects and 1528 of our photographs so feel free to investigate those collections as well.
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This information was written by Curator Lisa Jones with information supplied from the best museum resources available at the time of writing. The Police Museum is open 9am to 4pm Monday to Thursday and 10am to 3pm on the last Sunday of the month (Feb-Nov) and is located on the Ground Floor of Police Headquarters at 200 Roma Street, Brisbane. Contact: E: museum@police.qld.gov.au
“FROM the VAULT: 19th century police officer service histories now online” by the Queensland Police Service is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.5 Australia Licence. Permissions may be available beyond the scope of this licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/legalcode