Bronte’s most unlikely policeman

Around 1919, a slightly built plumber from Bronte Surf Club decided on a change of career – he would join the NSW Police Force.

So Frank Fahey signed up and eventually passed his final test, graduating in early 1920. His final hurdle was an interview, during which the senior officer immediately decided Fahey was just the man for a new special duty: he was to leave the Paddington Police Station, and assume a role as an undercover special constable, working directly under the command of senior CIB detectives.

Fahey’s first task was to shadow a couple of suspected warehouse burglars. To prepare for this assignment he had his motorbike modified to operate noiselessly, and night after night he dogged their footsteps, until finally they made their move.

Once they had climbed through the warehouse window, Fahey signalled a brace of young plainclothes men who arrested the burglars. Then the men were taken away, none the wiser on how it was that they had been caught.

“Deafy” Ellis and his accomplice were sent down for a couple of years and Detective Constable Fahey moved on to “bigger fish”: counterfeiters, cross-dressers (a shocking thing in those days!), drug smugglers and safecrackers.

The invisible Fahey continued his sterling role for thirty years, and the press named him “The Shadow”.  His photo was never published. One of his favourite surveillance methods was to have his motorbike with sidecar parked opposite a suspect’s house, even in broad daylight, while he was concealed, crouched, in the sidecar fitted with a peep-hole! On its bodywork it advertised “Joe Smith: Knives & Scissors Sharpened”.

“The Shadow” continued his work until World War II when he helped Intelligence monitor foreign agents in Sydney. At least one of these, a Japanese Army officer, spotted this suspicious passenger on a Sydney to Canberra journey. And he wasn’t too trusting of The Shadow’s girl companion either.

When Fahey retired, his secrets were revealed when veteran reporter Vince Kelly published his memoirs as “The Shadow” in 1950.  It was a bestseller!

The criminals he hunted had always suspected there was a leak somewhere in their circle but they never uncovered the ex-plumber turned thief-taker from Bronte.

Many thanks to the Local Studies Unit of Waverley Library for help with material in this article. The next two speakers at the Waverley Historical Society meetings on the first floor of Club Bondi Junction in Gray Street will be Emma Grahame on Monday, April 6 speaking on a new online resource tool on Sydney’s history and Bondi View writer Peter McCallum’s “How trams helped the development of our Municipality”.

– BY JOHN RUFFELS