Sir Robert Mark (13 March 1917 – 30 September 2010) was a senior British police officer who served as Chief Constable of Leicester City Police, and later as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1972 to 1977.
Mark was the first Metropolitan Commissioner to have risen through all the ranks from the lowest to the highest (a route followed by all subsequent Commissioners), although a few predecessors had served as Constables prior to fast-track promotion.
Early life
Mark was born in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a suburb of Manchester, the youngest of five children of a prosperous mantle manufacturer originally from Yorkshire. He was educated at William Hulme's Grammar School, where he was undistinguished academically, but became captain of rugby and head prefect.
Police career begins
When he left school in 1935 he got a job as a carpet salesman, but finding this boring, in 1937 he joined Manchester City Police as a constable, much to the dismay of his father, who considered it beneath him and said becoming a policeman was only one step above going to prison. While still a probationer he joined the plain clothes branch, mainly dealing with vice, and in 1938 he joined Special Branch.
Army service
In 1942, he joined the British Army, trained at Sandhurst. Mark recalled a test for claustrophobia which involved being tipped down a 45-degree drainpipe into a pitch black chamber with two false and one actual exit.
He was commissioned into the Royal Armoured Corps in October 1943. He initially served with the 108th Regiment (Lancashire Fusiliers), but through the influence of his elder brother James, who worked at the War Office, he then transferred to the Manchester Regiment in December 1943, attached to the GHQ Liaison Regiment, known as Phantom, which provided liaison with special forces units. With them, he took part in the Normandy landings. In 1945 he was promoted captain and posted to the military government at Bad Oeynhausen in Germany, where he remained until his demobilisation as a major in 1947.
Return to Manchester
Returning to Manchester and Special Branch, he was soon promoted Detective Sergeant, but considered leaving the police until he received a series of rapid promotions, to Detective Inspector in 1950, uniformed Chief Inspector in 1952, Superintendent, and finally Chief Superintendent in charge of the force's administration, still younger than any inspector in the force. He applied for the post of Assistant Chief Constable of Newcastle upon Tyne, but was unsuccessful and instead enrolled on the senior command course at the National Police College.
Appointed Chief Constable
On 1 January 1957 he was appointed Chief Constable of Leicester. There he instituted many reforms, especially regarding Leicester's traffic problems, including appointing the city's first traffic wardens. He acquired the nickname "Lone Ranger of Leicester".
Following the 1966 escape of the spy George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs, Mark was appointed to the Mountbatten inquiry into prison security. Here he attracted the attention of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, and in February 1967 was appointed Assistant Commissioner "D" (Personnel and Training) of the Metropolitan Police, where his welcome was less than ecstatic from a force that did not like outsiders; at the end of his first week, he was encouraged by Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson to apply for the post of Chief Constable of Lancashire.
The following year he was briefly appointed Assistant Commissioner "B" (Traffic). However, in March 1968, Simpson died in office. Peter Brodie, Assistant Commissioner "C" (Crime), was widely tipped to succeed him, but Home Secretary James Callaghan saw the opportunity to impose government will on the force and offered the job to Mark. Mark, realising that an outsider would not be accepted at this time, suggested the appointment of Deputy Commissioner Sir John Waldron, with himself succeeding Waldron as Deputy Commissioner.
CID reform
The Metropolitan Police had recently been rocked by exposure of massive corruption in the Criminal Investigation Department, and Mark, with the famous pronouncement, that "a good police force is one that catches more crooks than it employs", set about attempting to reform it. He changed disciplinary procedures, returned many detectives to uniform, made a number of television appearances praising the uniformed branch following student unrest and protests against the Vietnam War, and began to gather around him a group of loyal, ambitious uniformed officers who had not graduated from the old Hendon Police College.