A policeman in the 19th century didn’t know that he made the biggest arrest of any policeman’s career. I told a version of this story live on Ipswich’s West Bremer Radio.
One hundred and seventy-five years ago next month, James Patrick Knox was born during the Irish Famine in Limerick, Ireland, on the 15th of December 1851. He came to Queensland at the age of twenty-three and joined the Queensland police force. His stations included Ipswich, Rosewood, Gatton, Pittsworth, Clifton, and Warwick, but Ipswich was always his preferred home.
For many years he held the rank of sergeant and was offered a promotion to senior-sergeant with a transfer to North Queensland, but he declined. The reason why was a seventeen-year-old girl in Ipswich by the name of Ellen Sherman. She was the daughter of an Ipswich railway ganger from Kilkenny, Ireland. Knox married the girl and had 8 children, one of their sons became an alderman on the Pittsworth town council.
Knox was involved in some really interesting crimes.
In 1883, the then mounted constable Knox served the summonses for the Ipswich police court to all the witnesses in an extortion case against the Maroske brothers. The brothers had allegedly extorted £100 from the licensee of the Marburg hotel in exchange for staying quiet about his alleged rape of one of their wives. Incredibly none of Knox’s witnesses turned up. I’ll tell you more about that another time.
In 1886, senior-constable Knox had to perform the most dreadful duty anyone would ever have to do. That was to forcibly tear a baby out of the mother’s arms. Knox was called by a doctor to Oxley to attend what was described as a wretched-looking woman named Ann Ridge. The woman was drunk and violent. Knox arrested the woman and handed the baby to the father. The poor child died during the night. It was second baby of the same name that the couple had lost in four years, and one of the most heart-wrenching jobs that Knox would ever attend.
In 1905, when sergeant Knox was stationed at Clifton on the Darling Downs, he sensationally arrested the schoolteacher Harry Archibald Bidgood and charged him with wilful murder. The teacher was found not guilty, was promoted, and took a parent of one of his students to court after he and the parent got into a brawl at the school. I might tell you more about that one day too.
But standing out amongst all that excitement, in 1896 Knox made an arrest that would have been the highlight of his career, if only he knew it.
He arrested Dr. Harry Westwood Cooper for practising medicine without a license. Knox successfully had the fake doctor convicted and fined £10, at which point the man was released.
But what Knox didn’t know was the Cooper was an international criminal genius for whom police around the world had dossiers on him under dozens of different aliases. These included Sir Harry Westwood Cooper, Surgeon-Major Swinton Holme, V.C., D.S.O., Dr. Henry Irving Llewelyn Cooper, Dr. Ernest Moore Chadwick, Surgeon-Commander Percy Parker, and more.
Shortly before Knox arrested him, Cooper had bigamously married a fifteen-year-old girl in Sydney and extracted money from her, and then after being convicted by Knox, he went to Brisbane where be bigamously married a seventeen-year-old girl and defrauded her of £3,000 which is over $3.5 million in today’s money.
In the 1890’s alone Cooper robbed victims of more than half a million pounds. That’s almost $600 million dollars today. Hundreds of detectives in the United States, England, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia were eager for his capture. The Ipswich policeman Knox briefly had him behind bars but had no idea of the man’s true identity and knew nothing of his crimes.
James Knox retired to Ipswich where in 1932, at the age eighty, he passed away at his home on Nicholas Street. He’s buried at the Ipswich cemetery with no indication of the international policing fame that was so close to being his.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY AS TOLD ON WEST BREMER RADIO
Photo credits:
The Arrest of a Lifetime – Harold Peacock with Copilot 2026.
Ipswich Old Courthouse 2024 – Harold Peacock.
Andrew John Gibson, NSW Police, CIB file, Scotland Yard Photos – 20th September 1937.
James Patrick Knox, Ipswich Cemetery – Anne – here lies 2018 via Find a Grave website.
