eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Square Mile Bobbies is a history and casebook of the City of London Police between 1839, when the force was first established after general recognition that London was not being policed effectively, and the Second World War. During this time the City Police were involved in a succession of major cases, from the attempted assassination of the Rothschilds in 1862 and detective's pursuit of forgers in 1873, to Jack the Ripper's brutal killing of Catherine Eddowes in 1888 and the notorious siege of Sidney Street in 1911.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750953405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 03/13/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Square Mile Bobbies
The City of London Police 1839â"1949
By Stephen Wade
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Stephen WadeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5340-5
CHAPTER 1
THE EARLY YEARS
1839–1900
In the great Magna Carta of 1215 we have the words: 'and the city of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs both by land and by water.' From that point, and into the Medieval period, the enduring vision of law and order in the city is that of the constables from all wards entering armed into their streets at the curfew bell. In other words, London has always been extremely difficult to police. In the eighteenth century, as the city population expanded and the burgeoning middle classes needed more elbow room and therefore more protection to carry on their trades, the illicit practices of the receivers and thief takers meant that something more was needed than the Watch and Ward of the 'Charleys' (so-named during the reign of Charles I) who sat on a nightshift with a sword and lantern.
In the advances of the Fielding brothers, novelist Henry and blind brother John, we have the first significant attempts to do more towards moving to a tighter control of the ever threatening mob and street crime. In 1780, the Gordon Riots made the situation regarding protection of persons and property more acute. Newgate itself had been wrecked and the forces of law had cowered for some time in defeat.
But there was also another variety of crime in the eighteenth century that the City had to deal with, the crime within the broking community. In 1719,Daniel Defoe's tract, The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley or A System of Stock-Jobbing, highlighted some of the worries that were to explode the following year in the South Sea Bubble, when fortunes were lost in speculation. Defoe wrote: 'Tis a complete system of knavery; that 'tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick, wheedle, forgeries, falsehood and all sorts of delusions.'
By the first years of the nineteenth century, there had been plenty of serious thought given to policing. The river police and a few night patrols helped, but a large-scale theoretical plan by Patrick Colquhoun had only been accepted and implemented in terms of settling the river police force. Colquhoun wished to establish a central group of police commissioners working directly for the Home Office. He wanted to reform the watch system and planned a method of paying police officers which would ease the burden on ratepayers. But he was before his time, and it took Sir Robert Peel to establish the Metropolitan Police in 1829.
This momentous year was the time in which the first professional police (the 'Peelers') appeared, but from the start, they were not to work in the City. The new force covered the parishes within 12 miles of Charing Cross. Peel knew that to include them in the City boundaries would have infringed upon the ancient chartered rights of the City, and he kept well clear of such an issue. There had been no change in the City government since Tudor times: the Lord Mayor and the guilds were the base of the structure. Central to the management of the city was the Guildhall which served several functions, including acting as a court and as a debating room. The Court of Common Council and the aldermen provided the unifying principle to the organic workings of the city and its rulers. For centuries, the City fathers, mayor and sheriffs had been at the hub of administration and law in this square mile. In some sense, the strength of this came from the small scale; the community was easily identified and watched. But in this also lay a weakness which was most apparent when it came to crime on their 'patch'.
Therefore, when the two new police commissioners for the Metropolitan Police set up their base at Whitehall Place and the new constables were recruited, drilled and sworn in, London had a police force. As for the City, it would have to wait a little longer, still relying on the Watch and the Bow Street Runners. But we must recall that, in spite of common criticisms of these runners and of the supposedly ancient and useless 'Charleys' of the Watch, there had been a certain amount of visible control, at least on the surface. The problem was that historical process and social change had accelerated so drastically between about 1790 and 1830 that it was apparent that the City also needed a police force to equal Peel's new men. The organisation of the City Marshall, his Under Marshall and six marshal men was looking outdated and inadequate in this restless, aggressive, and overcrowded urban world.
In these years, Britain had fought the wars with France and with Napoleon. There had been huge social problems as a result of this, including a fear of insurrection and sedition as the authorities felt that there could be a revolution in Britain, following on from France. The gap between rich and poor was immense; there was an increasing problem with poverty and beggary in the London streets and gangs and mobs were a constant threat to order and personal safety. In 1812 Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister, had been shot dead, while in 1819 the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester had illustrated the paranoia of the government, as the crowd assembled to hear Orator Hunt speak was attacked by hussars. Eleven people were killed, and over 400 were injured.
In the 1830s, just as the new police were striving to be effective in a culture which both rejected and were largely suspicious of them, some massively important social movements developed. Chartism, the campaign to bring a reform of Parliament and the vote for the working man, accelerated and had a violent element known as the 'Physical Force' men, led by Feargus O'Connor. The Poor Law had been reformed in the New Poor Law Act of 1834, creating a Board of Guardians and Poor Law Commissioners, and there had been agitation and debate over Catholic emancipation in 1829.
There were more immediate and visible problems too. In 1831, a police constable was stabbed to death in Clerkenwell, and many more officers were attacked and abused. At the heart of the issue was the military nature of the new police, and therefore the fact that they were also linked in the public perceptions of them to espionage – the use of agents provocateurs by the Home Secretary during the suppression of sedition during the war years. In 1799 and 1800, the Combination Acts had made it illegal for small groups of people to gather on street corners. Journalists were always under the threat of prosecution as the perceived 'police state' intensified its work.
We can gather some idea of the fears felt by ordinary householders in London from a pamphlet written in 1831 entitled Householders in Danger from the Populace by E. Wakefield esq. of London. Mr Wakefield noted, 'The moment that the system of pillaging the people seemed to be drawing to a close, a new apprehension sprung up, that the rich were about to be pillaged by the poor.' He adds, 'Because law ceases to be an instrument of pillage, must anarchy, riot and general scramble ensue?' In other words, he was writing after the reforms of the 'bloody code' of the eighteenth century, which placed well over 200 capital crimes on the statute books. The wealthy naturally looked to the law to protect them and their property, but often saw the function of the officers of the law as being oppressive and brutal – meeting like with like.
Capital punishment and transportation meted out before Robert Peel's reduction of the number of capital crimes appeared to many people to solve the problems of the mob and of gangs. This was largely because, for many of the underclass, prison was preferable to a life of mendicancy. The area between the Mansion House and Cheapside and Poultry was notorious at the time for disorder and threats of violence to persons. Historian Donald Rumbelow makes this clear in his book, I Spy Blue, when, by 1848, the windows of the Mansion House had been smashed so many times that a special lookout had to be hired to watch for the beggar women who daily milled outside ... and who had ... baskets of paving stones to hurl through the Lord Mayor's windows ...'.
But crimes of violence were not the only cause for concern. Forgery and 'clipping' coins were common. In 1833, for instance, a certain Robert Spencer appeared in the Mansion House, the City court, charged with 'having forged the acceptance of T.W. Coke Esq. of Norfolk, for the sum of 405 pounds'. Notes with practised forged signatures were found on the prisoner, and he had also sent begging letters. The Times reported the Lord Mayor's comment that 'a great deal of ingenuity had been practised in this case, and that 'he believed a great deal of mischief was created by the facility of getting the handwriting of gentlemen of property'. Again, the Mayor noted that the abolition of capital punishment for forgery and uttering had encouraged crooks like Spencer to try their hand in the forgery business. But he did concede that the government had resolved that 'forgers should undergo all the hardships of the convict's life'.
There had been a lot of committees in the decade before the Police Act of 1829, all dedicated to forming some kind of police force. In the City, 1838 saw the arrival of a force of 500 men who formed the Day Police and Nightly Watch, with a superintendent in charge. But there was a clamour for more numbers and a stronger presence on the increasingly dangerous streets and alleys of the City wards, and in 1839, the City of London Police was created, with Daniel Whittle Harvey as the first commissioner.
Harvey was a complex man, with a chequered history. He was born in 1786 in Witham, Essex. His father was a merchant banker and his mother was a daughter of Major John Whittle of Feering House, Kelvedon. Harvey stepped into Feering House in 1807 and worked as a country solicitor after his marriage to Mary Johnston of Bishopsgate Street. He was often involved in litigation, including a case of slander with another lawyer, a man named Andrew. He was later admitted to the Middle Temple and applied for the Bar, but was rebuffed. Twice, over a period of twelve years, Harvey was rejected by the benchers, which even a Select Committee of the House of Commons could not change. The benchers thought him to be a man of questionable integrity; but as it happens, reports of the two trials he had been involved in were later deemed inaccurate, so Harvey was wronged and his career consequently suffered. The Select Committee of the Inns of Court reported on his case in 1834 and cleared his name.
Unlike Richard Mayne, his counterpart in the Metropolitan Police, Harvey was a man with a background in controversy and enmity. Mayne had been a provincial lawyer, working on the Northern Circuit, when called for an interview by Peel. Harvey had even been prosecuted for libel – successfully – in 1823, after stating that George III was insane. Harvey served a prison term in the King's Bench.
Well before the establishment of the City Police, Harvey was busy in other things. He worked as a member of the Common Council of the City for ten years, and was elected MP for Colchester in 1818, and in 1835, for Southwark. He became a known radical and was often involved in sensational cases and in business until his appointment as Commissioner. He had taken possession of the Sunday Times and sold it for a profit and controlled the paper, the True Sun for seven years. As he was constantly in financial difficulties, the salary of Police Commissioner must have seemed to him a very attractive prospect. He had already taken on another role, as registrar of Metropolitan carriages, in 1839.
Harvey had support, however, where it mattered – among the members of the Corporation. Unfortunately, so that he could carry on with his expensive lifestyle, he wanted to be an MP as well, and Peel opposed this. It was specifically stipulated that the new commissioner could not have other earnings from that source. After all, there might have been awkward situations in the House if the commissioner and the Home Secretary were at odds on any matter. Harvey was sworn in as Commissioner on 11 November 1839. A report in The Times stated that Harvey was sworn in by Baron Rolfe and that 'Mr Harvey has therefore entered upon the onerous duties of the office, and virtually vacated his seat for the borough of Southwark.' The bill forming the City of London Police had been passed a few days previously, on 7 August.
One of Harvey's first duties was to find places for the new stations. He advertised for property:
City of London police stations wanted to rent or purchase. A part of ground or buildings for the above purpose, between Queen Street, Budge Row and Upper Thames Street ... also south of Fenchurch Street between Mark Lane and Minories; also east of Bishopsgate Street and north of Houndsditch near petticoat Lane. Any parties having suitable land or premises are requested to forward information to the Clerk of Works, Guildhall. 4 June 1840.
The recruitment of men was, of course, the most pressing matter. Desirable men were required to be under 40 years of age, literate and physically fit. They needed to have basic arithmetical ability and possess a suit of clothes. In terms of pay, it is estimated that an average family could just about survive in 1840 on a guinea a week. Peel had started pay for his men at 3s a day. But the real difficulty was that the pay had to cover housing costs, clothing and medical bills. Harvey sensibly set about increasing his own constables' pay by creating five groupings of pay levels conceived to reward the officers on merit. A dedicated and reliable man could earn the top of the scale – 22s 6d a week. By 1861 there was a desperate need for more men, but the guidelines then were that they should be under 40, over 5ft 7in tall and with the usual related qualities. The recruits struggled; many earned well below the 22s as there was a probation system whereby they earned much less.
The living conditions of the officers were generally poor. There were often sublet rooms and most men could only afford to have two rooms. One of the most insurmountable problems was that illness led the officers into money troubles; an officer would be fined a shilling a day if his illness was not related to police work, which was notably harsh. Their work was physically very demanding. They worked shifts of eight hours, but usually there was not much of a break between shifts. Often, the clothes supplied were inadequate and poorly made, which added to the general discomfort of the job. The most telling feature of the work was the general tendency for most men to stay in their post for around four years. Between 1840 and 1860, Harvey had over 3,000 men recruited, yet 2,562 of them left and 600 were sacked. Heavy drinking, insubordination and inefficiency were rife. Harvey's answer was to employ part-timers who would be hired on a casual contract. Finding the right kind of man was very hard indeed; from his recruitment campaign in 1861, Harvey had 570 applicants and of these only thirty-eight were suitable, leaving him seven posts to fill.
In 1861, an anonymous correspondent to The Times, signing himself 'a police constable' wrote:
There is now a considerable deficiency in numbers in the Metropolitan police and the Commissioner of the City of London police is advertising for men; but if recruits arrive they will not remain unless greater encouragement is offered than the police now receive. At present a great number of men enter the police service as a temporary refuge in distress and do not even stay long enough to learn their duties.
Clearly, the recruitment situation was rather desperate, and it is impossible to see how Harvey could have altered things, given the general poor health of Londoners at the time and the prolonged economic distress under which they had to survive.
Structure and organisation soon developed and six divisions were created, each with a station. Harvey's call for properties led in one instance to a public house, the Greyhound near St Bartholomew's Hospital, being converted as the City's first station. Others followed at Moor Lane, Bow Lane and Bishopsgate watch house. Harvey's own offices were created at 26 Old Jewry, bought in 1842 and used by the detectives.
Harvey was destined to be embroiled in one argument or another, and many of his difficulties were due to the slow workings of law and administration at the time, famously parodied by Charles Dickens in Bleak House. In his first year, for instance, Harvey sensibly drew up a code of rules and regulations for the general government of the force. He submitted this to the Court of Mayor and Aldermen in January 1841. He did not receive printed copies for everyday distribution and use until September 1843. This led to problems, such as one case in 1844 in which one of his men arrested a certain Jardine for smoking in a carriage of the Blackwell Railway. Jardine gave in his watch and then returned to the magistrates' court the next day. He asked for his watch but could not supply a receipt, so it was not given to him. The officer, Mr Brake, was served with a writ to recover the watch. The poor man had to appear before Lord Denman at the Guildhall, and his fate depended on whether Harvey's regulations could operate with force of law. In other words, the bureaucratic delay in producing the rules had caused the whole problem. Mr Brake was ordered to pay £33 to the plaintiff. It is not surprising that Harvey wrote to The Times to complain and made it clear to readers that he was doing his best against difficult and slow administration procedures, and that his men were suffering as a result.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Square Mile Bobbies by Stephen Wade. Copyright © 2013 Stephen Wade. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1. The Early Years (1839–1900),
2. Murder at the Coffee House (1846),
3. Murdered at Sea (1857),
4. The Haymarket Killing (1858),
5. Murderous Threats & Attacks on the Rothschilds (1862 & 1912),
6. Robberies in the City (1865),
7. The Cannon Street Murder (1866),
8. The American Gang (1872),
9. Jack the Ripper (1888),
10. Forgers, Fraudsters & an Old Chartist (1850–1900),
11. The Houndsditch Murders & the Siege of Sidney Street (1910–1911),
12. The Police 'Mutiny' (1918 & 1919),
13. ITL[The Matchmaker]ITL Libel (1928),
14. Two Murders & A Suicide (1932),
15. War, Women Officers & Issues (1940–1949),
Afterword,
Acknowledgements,
Sources & Bibliography,