Roy Henry, who died at home in England last Friday, aged 71, had only one ambition. He wanted to be a British colonial policeman. He made his first application aged 14 when he was a schoolboy in Scotland. He wanted to serve in Malaya or Singapore, which in 1942 were under Japanese occupation. He was confident Britain would be back in Asia and wanted to get his name on the list.
He joined the Palestine Police as soon as he left school, and served for two years. With the creation of Israel in 1948, that force was disbanded and in a dwindling empire the waiting list to serve in Malaya stretched for 10 years.
Then Chin Peng, the man decorated by the British as an anti-Japanese guerilla leader, took to the jungles of Malaya. Suddenly the long queue for colonial police jobs evaporated. Henry's ambition came true. At 20, he was in the jungles of Perak, the frontline against the Malayan Peoples' Liberation Army.
He was to be a colonial policeman for the next 37 years. The former commissioner of the Royal Hong Kong Police retired in 1985.
A popular commander who led the force through difficult times after the anti-corruption clean-up of the 1970s, Henry was liked and admired by most of those who served under him. In many ways, he was the man most responsible for transforming the police into a modern, efficient and sophisticated law enforcement agency.
In his first job, in the Malay Federated States where colonial police served in a paramilitary role fighting a brave and determined foe, there was little concept of civil policing. But as commissioner in Hong Kong, a major thrust of Henry's policies was to mould the rapidly growing police force to the community it served.