With men at war, Guelph police hired its first female officers

No one can deny the contribution female police officers have made to our community.

They have served with distinction in keeping Guelph safe, upholding the law, and demonstrating high standards of devotion to duty and responsibility. They have been nominated for policing awards and have laid their lives on the line.

But there was a time when the prevailing attitude was that women should stand aside and leave policing to men, even when female officers had shown that they could handle the job.

During the Second World War, when the large number of Canadian men in uniform left many employers and professions short-handed, women were called upon to do jobs that had traditionally been considered “men’s work.” They kept factories running, laboured away on construction sites, harvested crops and drove taxis.

And in some places, like Guelph, they worked as police officers.

At the start of the war, the Guelph Police Department had 15 constables. Ten of them enlisted in the armed forces. Some of their positions were filled by men who were veterans of the First World War or had been classified as medically unfit for military service. But with so many other potentially qualified men joining the armed forces, finding replacements for all of the absent officers wasn’t easy.

In September of 1942, the Guelph Police Service Board authorized Chief Const. Harold Nash to employ women on the city’s police department.

Anne Hillis, age 31, became Guelph’s first female police officer. She would be paid a starting salary of $800 a year. Male officers started at $1,200 a year.

Within a few months it became clear that the war-depleted ranks of the police department required still more help. Two more female officers, Dorothy Colley and Margaret Thompson, joined Const. Hillis.

Colley and Thompson both had husbands serving in the RCAF. Hillis was a widow with three small children.

Chief Nash told the Mercury that Guelph was the only small city in which the “experiment” with female officers was being tried, and he had no doubts about its success. He said that he, Insp. Robert Gill, and a constable named Derry who had been to the provincial police training school in Toronto would give the women the same instruction police cadets received there. They would receive lectures on law, police administration and investigation. Training would take about five months.

The story of the female officers in the Guelph Police Department even made the Toronto Daily Star. “Pretty, Efficient and Super-marksmen are the Women of the Guelph Police Force,” said a headline in the big city newspaper. The choice of words reflected the attitude of journalists and editors in what was also a male-dominated field.

The notion was supported sometime later when the Star ran an article about women joining the city of Chicago’s police department, and stated that in that major American city, tough police sergeants were wearing lipstick.

Most of the work undertaken by Guelph’s first female constables involved radio communications, taking reports and working with minors. The women were not thought to be suited physically or emotionally to many of the traditional police duties carried out by male officers.

Nonetheless, they did contribute to investigations and prosecutions. As Chief Nash later put it in an interview with a Mercury reporter, “The ladies in blue carried out their duties with the utmost efficiency and decorum. During the period of their employment, when male help could not be obtained, they were as great asset to the department.”

Hillis, Colley and Thompson had accepted their positions with the police department on the understanding that when the officers they had replaced returned home from the war, they would step aside so those men could get their jobs back. With the surrender of Germany in May of 1945 and Japan the following August, the female constables volunteered to resign to make room for the returning men.

However, they were asked to continue with their work until all of the former male members of the department had returned to their positions.

On November 14, 1945, the Mercury announced, “Women Constables Here Will Retire From Force: To Be Replaced By Men From Forces.”

Chief Nash said, “The employment of female constables was an innovation in police work here.”

The newspaper suggested that Anne Hillis might stay on as a stenographer. The end of the war meant that the “innovation” was over – but only for the time being.