The word ‘constable’ was a Norman term that by the middle of the thirteenth century came to refer to increasingly important public functionaries who had ‘hands-on’ duties to police the community and who were supervised by the magistrates or justices of the peace. These constables are lampooned by Shakespeare in the characters of ‘Dogberry’ in Much Ado About Nothing and ‘Elbow’ in Measure for Measure. These may be early examples of the common theme in British humour of parodying law-enforcers, or it may represent the popular perception that such officers were bumbling incompetents. The office of constable became increasingly burdensome in the seventeenth century because in addition to the task of maintaining the peace was the enforcement of legislation concerning church attendance, measures against drunkards and vagrants and various other duties. London constables were not known for their zeal. Some paid others to carry out their duties or obtained a reduction in their period of tenure by earning what was cynically known as a ‘Tyburn Ticket’. This was intended as a reward for bringing a serious wrongdoer to justice who was hanged for his crimes. These ‘Tyburn Tickets’ were much sought after and could be bought and sold on the open market.
By Tudor times the duties of the magistrates included supervising and regulating inns and alehouses; maintaining bridges and roads; applying regulations on weights and measures; supervising the poor relief system; dealing with vagrants and controlling the houses of correction where the unemployed and others were put to work. The magistrates had a very important role to play in pre-industrial society but they tended to run things according to their own narrow class interests which meant that little sympathy was shown for the needs of the poorer sections of society. In 1744 Parliament decreed that only those who owned land worth a minimum of £100 a year could become magistrates. The system of voluntary, unpaid members of the landed class having a juridical function had evolved to meet the needs of a rural, feudal society but was impractical for a cosmopolitan place like London. The ever-changing population meant that it would not and could not accept the traditions of authority and deference that existed in the provinces. The time-honoured system of amateur JPs and constables simply could not cope with the enormous influx of people into the new industrial towns. Manchester’s population, for example, was 6,000 in 1700 but rose to 50,000 in 1788, completely overwhelming the thin line of authority responsible for law and order. Most of London was situated in Middlesex, and it was here, not surprisingly, that appointments of stipendiary or paid magistrates were made for the first time in 1792.
Even in the seventeenth century increasing emphasis was placed on the services of volunteer associations of those citizens who believed that their property and livelihood were most threatened by criminal activity. These included the trained bands whose roll of honour included stopping the advance upon London of Charles I at Turnham Green during the Civil War. The eighteenth century witnessed the appearance of what we nowadays call vigilante bands and various groups who provided financial rewards for those who brought specified malefactors to justice.
Widely mocked were the watchmen who shuffled slowly around the streets of some of the country’s towns and cities. Henry Fielding described them as, ‘Being chosen out of those poor old decrepit people who are, from their want of bodily strength, rendered incapable of getting a livelihood by work. These men, armed only with a pole, which some of them are scarcely able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of His Majesty’s subjects from the attacks of gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate and well-armed villains.’ Even the younger, stronger watchmen were usually open to being bribed. Watchmen were generally known as ‘Charleys’ because the force may have originated during the reign of Charles I and were regarded as a pushover. This can sometimes be taken literally because young men roistering drunkenly round the streets derived great pleasure from pushing over the small wooden sentry boxes into which the ‘Charleys’ usually retreated when it looked as if there might be serious trouble. They feature frequently in satirical art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which presents a picture of stooped, gouty and asthmatic old men, hobbling round the streets at night, calling out the hour and the weather and by doing so instantly alerting any wrongdoers in the area to their presence. They were little use when it came to dealing with the increasingly ruthless gangs of well-organised criminals that were prominent at that time. During their patrols they scrupulously avoided those streets, alleys and lanes where crimes were most likely to be committed. As John Pearson said in The London Charleys of the 18th Century; or Half-past Twelve O’clock, and a Very Cloudy Sort of a Morning, published in 1827, ‘. . . the thieves are out in all weathers, and the more it rains, the more it blows, the more it hails, and the more it snows, the more the Charley will stick hard and fast to his box . . .’.1 With all their very obvious limitations it seems remarkable that tentative proposals to replace them by a regular force of efficient paid policemen led to a sudden upsurge of affection and support for the fragile thin line they offered between stability and chaos.
As the eighteenth century progressed, increasingly widespread concerns began to be expressed about crime and disorder. In the absence of reliable quantifiable evidence it is difficult for historians to establish whether there really was a dramatic rise in the volume and nature of crime which is suggested by contemporary commentators. Court records certainly suggest increasing levels of theft and rioting. Evidence of the desperation in which street crime thrived was the ‘mania’ for gin-drinking which afflicted London in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1725 it was estimated that 6,000 premises in London were selling gin, much of which was adulterated and highly poisonous. Gin attracted no excise from the Government and was therefore extremely cheap. London was a filthy, pestilential place in which life was brutish and short and gin presented a quick means whereby its most downtrodden and desperate citizens could escape from their misery. Many of them were more-or-less permanently drunk and would turn to robbery or prostitution to obtain the few pennies that were needed to buy enough gin to get dead drunk once again. Addiction to gin undermined the will to work or do anything positive. Physicians reckoned that many thousands of Londoners lived on gin alone and that gin was the cause of many premature deaths as well as untold hardship, violence, crime and despair.
The Gordon Riots in London in 1780 started as anti-Catholic demonstrations but soon degenerated into random plunder and destruction, etching themselves into the popular consciousness for the next sixty years. For several days the mob had acted with almost complete impunity while the authorities stood by seemingly powerless to make an effective intervention. In the event, soldiers and forces of armed civilians, such as the London Military Association, played a critical role in restoring order, but not before 450 people had been killed or seriously injured. This and their general perceptions led the upper and middle classes to agree that crime and social disorder were becoming acute problems requiring urgent action. However, there was little consensus about what measures should be taken or how they should be financed. Understandably, these concerns were expressed most forcibly regarding the situation in London. In the eighteenth century it experienced an enormous commercial and industrial boom and its population and geographical extent expanded with unprecedented speed. Despite the increasing overall affluence of the capital, there were many notorious ‘rookeries’. These were squalid slums consisting of labyrinthine, noisome, unlit alleys, courts and narrow streets harbouring untold numbers of people who obtained their living largely or exclusively from the proceeds of criminal or illegal activity.
The problems of maintaining law and order resulted in the evolution of two types of widely criticised functionary, the trading justice and the thief-taker. The former were professional magistrates who made a living from the fees payable for their duties, an example in literature being ‘Justice Thrasher’ from Henry Fielding’s novel Amelia, published in 1751. Thief-takers were attracted by the rewards offered to those bringing certain types of offender to justice and were effectively professional bounty hunters. Thief-takers acted in a freelance capacity but would also investigate robberies on behalf of the victims and charge them a commission for any stolen property that they recovered. The most notorious of these was Jonathan Wild, who is examined in Chapter Fourteen. He was a master criminal who controlled many gangs of London street robbers, receiving property they stole and restoring it to its owners for a fee. He was executed in 1725.
It was a trading justice, Sir Thomas De Veil, who made Bow Street magistrates’ office a centre for the administration of justice in the Westminster district of London. De Veil was an interesting character with a real zest for life. Apart from enriching himself with his judicial fees, his main interest in life was sex. He married four times and these marriages produced no fewer than twenty-five children. His legal duties provided him with many opportunities for pursuing women which he did with single-minded determination. At Bow Street he maintained a private chamber to which he conducted an unending stream of women, most of whom gave themselves to him because they had got into scrapes that De Veil was prepared to overlook if they made it worth his while. He may have been sexually rapacious but for all that he revealed great courage in bringing many of London’s most dangerous criminals to justice.
In 1749, after De Veil had died, the energetic Henry Fielding took over at Bow Street and following him his half-brother Sir John. Between them they launched the first systematic attack on London’s criminal world. They took a more holistic view of their mission than De Veil had done, realising that prevention was at least as important as the cure of crime and that crime could not be prevented unless some attempt was made to understand its causes. In 1751 the elder Fielding published his ‘Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbery’ which contained perceptive insights into the nature and causes of crime and telling criticisms of the system of administering justice. He was convinced that gambling and gin-drinking were major contributory factors because those who were addicted needed to steal to finance their habits. Henry Fielding inherited a force of eighty constables and soon decided that only six had the necessary qualities. He also recommended that the reward for information leading to the conviction of highwaymen should be increased to £100.
In 1754 Henry died and was succeeded by John, widely known as the ‘Blind Beak’, who compensated for his total lack of sight with his uncanny hearing. He presided over affairs at Bow Street for twenty-six years and it was said that he could recognise 3,000 villains by their voices alone. It was the Fieldings who set up the patrols that evolved into the famous Bow Street Runners, who were professional thief-takers paid by results and whose services were open to hire by any who could afford them. Both Fieldings had extensive underworld contacts and these enabled them to get information quickly when crimes were committed and to gain an accurate idea of who had perpetrated them.
In the 1790s horse patrols were organised from Bow Street to watch the main roads into and out of London from evening until midnight, and these undoubtedly had the effect of restricting the activities of highway robbers. Other measures aimed at controlling highwaymen inaugurated by John Fielding were the circulation of printed handbills to stable-keepers which gave details of known highwaymen and their horses, and also the provision of armed guards on stagecoaches at times when highwaymen were known to be at large. These guards were recruited from retired cavalry soldiers and their inflexible methods meant that observant criminals were able to predict exactly where the patrols would be at any particular time. One highwayman, when captured, was found to be in possession of a complete roster of their patrols. Overall, however, they were successful enough to encourage the Government to provide some financial help. Bow Street was not popular with the criminal fraternity but the relative success of these early initiatives helped to create a climate of opinion that assisted Sir Robert Peel when, in April 1829, he presented his bill for a Metropolitan Police Force to Parliament. Another of Sir John Fielding’s enterprises was the publication of a crime journal that circulated nationwide entitled ‘Hue and Cry’. This made life increasingly difficult for those who carried out highway and street robberies and needed to find buyers for the articles they stole because it collated lists and descriptions of stolen items and also details of those who were wanted for questioning in connection with unsolved criminal offences.
In 1798 a group of shipping owners asked a leading London magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, for advice on what measures to take in order to counter the massive, highly organised pilfering from ships that was taking place in and around the Pool of London. On his advice a marine police force was established in 1798 and in 1800 the Government stepped in and took the force over, calling it the Thames River Police. It was a well-disciplined force of regular officers not dependent for their livelihood on freelance activities and they quickly proved their worth. The Thames River Police are of key importance in the history of British crime because they were effectively the first open professional police force.
Various attempts were made to force Parliament to take action on the issue of the creation of a police force but they failed for a number of reasons. Proposals for a regular police force were likened to threatening Britain with the kind of notorious political police spy network that was familiar in France. It was argued that this would be inimical to the much vaunted if mainly illusory political liberties of the English subject. In 1811 two families were brutally killed on the Ratcliffe Highway in London’s East End. The shock that these atrocities evoked sharply focussed attention on the lawlessness that was so rife in that cosmopolitan part of the capital and as Leon Radzinowicz said, ‘Never before, not even after the Gordon Riots which brought the capital so close to total destruction, and gave so striking an illustration of the failings of the justices and parish constables, did the public express so vigorous and persistent a condemnation of the traditional machinery for keeping the peace.’2 A select committee was established to consider what could be done to prevent similar crimes being committed. A member of the House of Lords, however, wrote at the time that as far as he was concerned the murder of half a dozen people every few years on the Ratcliffe Highway was preferable to the use of the police intimidation introduced in France at the height of the Jacobin Terror and associated with the dreaded name of Joseph Fouché, the Minister of Police. This noble peer was not, of course, an inhabitant of the East End.
The actual word ‘police’ was not to be found in English usage before 1714 and the ideological climate into which a visible and official body of law-enforcers, effectively paid for from taxes, could fit simply did not exist in the eighteenth century. However, two highly covert police forces were already operating. The King’s Messengers kept an eye on ‘subversive’ movements, while the Press Messengers investigated publishers of seditious literature. In reality a secret service had long been established and extensive use was made of networks of spies and agents provocateurs. Nevertheless, as far as public pronouncements were concerned, this was the age of laissez-faire. Although the volume of goods and money being stolen every year was a matter of concern, it was argued that any resources made available to fight crime would be best spent offering rewards to individuals to seek out, inform on and capture known offenders. The provision of incentives to informants, often with accompanying free pardons, and the encouragement of the thief-takers, maybe criminals themselves, were the main solutions to the problem of crime detection in the eighteenth century. It was to take more than just a few murders, no matter how ferocious, to convince Parliament that a professional, visible police force was needed.
Earlier, in 1692, bounties had been made official when a general Act offered a reward of £40 for the conviction of a highwayman. Additionally, a free pardon where appropriate was available for the informer who also enjoyed the bonus of the highwayman’s horse, weapons and money, unless they were known to have been stolen. The Government practice of offering rewards was followed by similar inducements from insurance companies, businesses and private individuals. Common informers and bounty hunters have always been loathed but in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the conditions existed in which they could thrive. An informer needed a thorough knowledge of national law and also of local by-laws and could attract rewards varying from sums of 50s to over £150. For the really unscrupulous informer there were also lucrative opportunities for blackmail. Usually the common informer operated on a small scale and his victims were often petty offenders. More formidable and more feared were the professional thief-takers or bounty hunters. The opinion in Government circles in the eighteenth century was that the motivation for human behaviour was primarily self-interest and people, it was believed, were fundamentally greedy. Private enterprise in apprehending criminals and bringing them to justice and terror through exemplary punishment was believed to be the best way to control what was seen as the growing problem of crime. Evidence of concern about rising crime and the use of self-help in the absence of Government action was seen in the establishment of what can best be described as vigilante groups. In 1786, in Manchester for example, an Association of Proprietors had been set up to patrol the business premises of its members at night. In 1788 another local organisation, the Society for the Prosecution of Felons and the Receivers of Stolen Goods, was proud to declare that the prosecutions it had initiated the previous year had led to thirteen transportations, seven imprisonments and five whippings.
In 1795 Patrick Colquhoun’s ‘A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis’ was published. He was convinced that the overall decline of religious observance and the general decay of morals, most of all among the poor, were contributing to a serious increase in the amount of crime. He did not believe, however, that this could be cured by the simple introduction of increasingly draconian punishments. His answer was a police force totally independent of the judiciary and designed to prevent and detect crimes. He backed his argument with a mass of statistical evidence, which even in its raw state highlighted the scale of the problem facing the city of London. Each year £2 million was lost in the city simply through theft, while 115,000 people supported themselves through criminal, illegal or immoral activity of various sorts. Although too much reliance should not be placed on Colquhoun’s statistics, this does not detract from his forcible argument in favour of the establishment of a police force. He went on to advocate the compulsory inspection of drinking places and the close supervision of prostitutes, gypsies, itinerant ballad sellers and others whose activities were seen as immoral or subversive. He advocated that severe punitive measures be taken against receivers because he argued that without them much of the activity of highway and street robbers would have been impossible. His ideas met with strong criticism from those who objected to the idea of snoopers and secret police, while others argued that he was attacking the symptoms of crime rather than its root causes. Colquhoun has an important place in the history of criminal theory because he was the first prominent person to seek explanations for criminality in material factors rather than metaphysical theories about morals, temptations and original sin.
Once the initial furore surrounding the Ratcliffe Highway murders had dissipated the mood changed to complacency and no political leader was prepared to urge the establishment of a permanent police force with effective financial support from the public purse. However, events soon overtook this attitude. The period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the 1840s saw unprecedented economic turmoil and political unrest which undoubtedly terrified the ruling class of the time, who saw subversion and possible revolutions everywhere. It can now be seen that these events reflected a temporary and unique conjuncture of socio-economic factors. They included the Luddite Riots of 1811, the Corn Law Riots of 1815, the ‘Blanketeer’ March and Riots of 1817, the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ in Manchester in 1819 and fierce outbreaks of rioting in many corners of the country, both urban and rural. Against these much use was made by the authorities of the hated yeomanry who were perceived as being dominated by well-to-do factory owners and industrialists and their sons, all eager for a scrap with the lower orders and starting off with an unfair advantage because they were mounted. Their mere presence at flashpoints, let alone the role they played and seemed so much to relish, was therefore highly provocative. Some political leaders wanted to develop increasingly coercive and repressive measures to crush the spirit of revolt for once and all. Others argued for a more gentle approach.
In 1820 investigations by Government spies revealed the Cato Street Conspiracy, the brainchild of the confused but fanatical Arthur Thistlewood. His plan was to assassinate the Cabinet, destroy the institutions of the City of London such as the Mansion House and the Bank of England, set fire to the city and then establish himself as dictator. He and his fellow conspirators learned that the entire Cabinet would be dining at the house of Lord Harrowby in Grosvenor Square in London’s West End on 23 February 1820. They decided to attack them with knives, pistols and hand grenades. The ministers were to be slaughtered there and then but the heads of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh, the main proponents of increasingly repressive measures, were to be removed and taken away. This preposterous scheme failed because spies easily infiltrated the ranks of the conspirators. The historical importance of the Cato Street Conspiracy was that it concentrated the minds of the politicians. Some, such as Sidmouth, thought it vindicated more coercive measures. Shortly after the Cato Street affair, there was a further shock to the Government’s sense of security. A small number of guardsmen mutinied when ordered into action against a mob that was attacking the houses of several prominent and unpopular ministers in London. The combination of the Cato Street Conspiracy and this uprising convinced one Cabinet member, the influential Duke of Wellington, that London urgently needed a new and very different kind of security force.
In January 1822, Sidmouth was persuaded to retire and the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool inspirationally replaced him as Home Secretary with Robert Peel. It was known that Peel favoured the idea of a thorough overhaul of the criminal law and the establishment of a centrally controlled police force. Peel faced a delicate situation because there were many MPs who were not yet convinced of the need for a police force. At first he shrewdly concentrated on the less controversial matter of reform of the criminal law and he carefully used this issue to develop his credibility and his allies. Few could argue with him about the need for action when he revealed that although the population had increased by 15½ per cent between 1821 and 1828, crime had increased by over 40 per cent. He was a master of the art of marshalling facts and presenting them in a persuasive way and he systematically built up his case for what he described as ‘a gradual reformation’ rather than by advocating root-andbranch change. Tactically it was a wise move to get the Duke of Wellington to introduce the Metropolitan Police Bill into Parliament via the House of Lords. The Bill met with little opposition and became law in 1829.
The resultant ‘Bobbies’, or ‘Peelers’, checked the apparent headlong growth of crime in London. Their duties were restricted entirely to the city at first and they were the first English policemen employed full-time on a regular wage which obviated bounty-hunting and the opportunities for crime and corruption that went with it. The very high turnover in the first few years was indicative of the stresses involved in establishing this pioneer force in what was the hub of Britain’s criminal activity. The early ‘Peelers’ seemed to think that arrests were what policing was about and as a result they zealously rounded up drunkards, beggars and prostitutes in large numbers for various street offences because such action seemed to bring quick results. While this did not immediately make the streets of London a safer place, it is likely that their visible presence deterred street robbers. However, this did not mean that these offenders disappeared, and many street thieves and other criminals simply moved out of London to provincial towns which they regarded as providing easier and safer conditions for their activities. With some reluctance local authorities in the provinces set about establishing police forces of their own, modelled largely on the London example. Their slowness in doing so led the Government to intervene and pass the County and Borough Police Act in 1856 by which it became mandatory for counties and boroughs to set up police forces in the areas over which they had control.