THE AUSTRALIAN

25 JUL 2005
Blamey quit after back-seat sex romp
By Stuart Rintoul

Australia's supreme commander during World War II, Thomas Blamey, was in the back seat of a car with a prostitute when a shooting took place that forced him to resign from his former job as head of the Victorian police force.

Blamey's reputation was almost destroyed after he was found to have lied to a royal commission about an incident in which a CIB head, John Brophy, was shot during an attempted hold-up.

Brophy was shot three times in May 1936 while sitting in a car late at night with two women and another man, none of whom have ever been identified, in Melbourne's Royal Park.

According to a new account of the incident, by Kevin Morgan, in his book Gun Alley, the unidentified man was Blamey.
Morgan's source for the allegation is a former chief of Melbourne's homicide squad, Bill Donnelly.

According to Donnelly's account, Blamey, who had been knighted the previous year, was in the back of a Daimler with a prostitute. The car was owned by Madeleine Orr, a hotelier and friend of Brophy. The car was parked in a notorious "lover's lane'' near Melbourne Zoo.

"Blamey was drunk and had 'stripped off' the prostitute in the back seat,'' Morgan writes. "He was engaged in a sex act with the prostitute and had his head 'down' when three men appeared around the car.'' After Brophy pushed one of the men to the ground, the man "growled like a dog'', pulled out a gun and shot Brophy three times.

At Russell Street police headquarters, a telephone call was received from Mrs Orr, asking to speak "to someone senior''. Donnelly, who died in 1996, was on duty the night of the shooting, but told Morgan his source was "a senior source in whom I have the utmost confidence''.

Blamey's handling of the shooting -- first saying Brophy had shot himself accidentally (three times) and then admitting he had been shot by criminals -- forced the government to hold a royal commission, during which Judge Hugh Macindoe found that Blamey "gave replies which were not in accordance with the truth''.

Blamey, who was 52, was forced to resign. Brophy left the police force the following year and died in 1946.

The shooting was the second scandal in which Blamey was involved as police commissioner. In October 1925, soon after his appointment, his police badge was found in a Fitzroy brothel during a police raid.

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