His Home Honors
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!