Simultaneously, he began to take an ever more prominent involvement in the many royal visits to Portsmouth; when Haile Selassie visited the dockyard in September 1937, he acted as his personal escort and French interpreter. During these years, Young was also entrusted with what he later cryptically termed "enquiries concerning the activities of subversive persons and propaganda, and also with other matters affecting state security". It was also during these years that he acquired his passion for ever better police equipment and his personal love of new gadgets. Young was promoted to Inspector in June 1937 and appointed to Portsmouth's Southern Division. In Eastney and Southsea, he gained his first taste of the complexity of the problems created by traffic, of measures to be taken for its efficient control and of the need to promote road safety. A keen motorist (who progressed from a motorcycle to a series of fast cars), he took a pragmatic approach. Young had risen moderately quickly and he was marked out for further advancement. His energy, tact and ability made that obvious. Nevertheless, as a non-Hendon graduate and a non-public schoolboy, his promotion over the next dozen years was meteoric for the 1930s and 1940s. Young wanted to head his own force and after one unsuccessful attempt (for the chief constableship of the Isle of Wight Constabulary), he became Acting Chief Constable of Leamington Spa Borough Police in September 1938, aged 31, at a salary of £500 per annum. One year later, he was appointed to the permanent post of Chief Constable. As such, he was one of the youngest men ever to become a Chief Constable. In his first nine months in Leamington he secured an increase of twelve in the force's tiny establishment of forty-five, the first increase since 1915. He reorganised the borough's fire brigade, and, among other police innovations, set up twelve of the then new "police pillars", a network of two-way microphone handsets across the borough enabling the public to contact police stations and civil defence posts directly. The base of the pillar contained first aid equipment while, a Leamington innovation, a flashing red light on the top called up policemen on patrol. From Leamington onwards, Young possessed a marked capacity to persuade his police authority to increase its capital spending and a marked inclination to find technological help for the policeman. Seconded under the aegis of the Home Office for six months in November 1940 to Coventry after its blitz to run the city's police because the Chief Constable was fully occupied as Civil Defence Controller, he introduced there the "good neighbour scheme" for bombed out civilians that he had trialled in Leamington and which was later adopted nationally by the Home Office.