The oldest police force in England is not, as many people erroneously assume, the Metropolitan Police Service, established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 with a staff of 1,000 constables and based at 4 Whitehall Place in London. The building had a back door in Great Scotland Yard that was used as the entrance to the police station and eventually the shortened form ‘Scotland Yard’ entered common usage as a synonym for the Metropolitan force. The ‘peelers’, as they quickly became known – the name a nod to the surname of the founder – were modelled on a law enforcement organisation created in Ireland in 1814, again by Sir Robert Peel, a force that morphed into the Irish Constabulary in 1836. Peel is known as the founder of modern policing, and it’s probable that the later nickname ‘Bobbies’ for police officers is derived from his Christian name. But to discover the earliest organised police force in England it’s necessary to look back over thirty years before, to the end of the previous century.
What became known as the golden age of piracy began, broadly speaking, in about 1650 and lasted until the 1730s with pirates and privateers – essentially licensed pirates carrying a ‘letter of marque and reprisal’ issued on behalf of their monarch to authorise their lawless activities against the ships and ports of countries perceived to be enemy states – plying their brutal trade first in the Atlantic and Caribbean and later in the Pacific and Indian oceans. But by the end of the eighteenth century arguably the richest pickings for pirates were to be found a lot closer to the British Isles than the Caribbean Sea, and in many cases there was no need to even bother boarding a boat in order to participate in the trade.
It’s been reliably estimated that in the 1790s the value of the cargoes held on the thousands of merchant ships moored or anchored in the River Thames at any one time typically exceeded £80 million when converted to today’s currency. And, equally typically, river pirates and gangs of dockyard thieves were known to make off with around £50 million worth of that cargo in an average year.
Such massive losses were obviously unsustainable, and in 1798 the Marine Police Force was formed on the instigation of three men – a Scottish magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun, an Essex-based mariner and Justice of the Peace called John Harriott and, as a somewhat unexpected participant, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham – initially with a staff of just fifty officers to police an estimated thirty thousand river and dockside workers.
Against the odds the organisation, based in Wapping High Street, was effective and two years later an act of Parliament – the Marine Police Bill – converted this private police force into a public entity and in so doing created the first uniformed police force anywhere in the world. Almost forty years later, in 1839, it merged with the fledgling Metropolitan Police Force to form Thames Division.
Today, it’s still based in Wapping High Street and is now known as the Marine Policing Unit, or MPU. It’s an elite division within the Met, responsible for the safety and security of about forty-seven miles of the tidal Thames within Greater London between Hampton Court to the west and Dartford Creek to the east. Like all British police forces, the MPU is on duty 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, operating boats of various types from RIBs – rigid inflatable boats – up to 31-foot Fast Response Targa vessels in its patrols of the river.
Just like police officers on land, the crews of the MPU boats are keenly attuned to the traffic they see in their patch, and do not hesitate to intervene when they think it’s necessary, stopping and questioning the crew of any vessel that raises a red flag in their minds. And the old and somewhat battered cabin cruiser that had just passed under Lambeth Bridge had raised at least two of them.
First, it was heading north along the river towards the open sea at the mouth of the Thames, several miles distant to the east. That didn’t mean the people on board were planning on going that far, obviously, but in the opinion of the MPU officers what they were looking at was strictly a river craft, and an old one at that, entirely unsuited to tackling the rough water conditions that might be found even in the Thames estuary.
The second point was related to the first, because it appeared to be very heavily laden. Most boats have a colour change at the waterline, often a white hull above the water while the lower section of the hull is painted a much darker shade. On the cabin cruiser Anna – the name, inscribed in capital letters on the stern of the vessel, was visible to the skipper of the Targa launch through his binoculars – no part of the darker lower hull could be seen, and the boat appeared to be wallowing slightly, as if it was either unbalanced because it was overloaded or because the man standing in the rear cockpit was very inexperienced. Or possibly both.
It could all of course be entirely innocent, but it never hurt to make sure and to ask the appropriate questions. And Sergeant Paul Carter, the Targa’s skipper, had several. He also thought it was worth running a preliminary check. All boats on the Thames are required to be licensed with the Environment Agency, though it didn’t look to Carter as if the owner of such an old vessel would necessarily be interested in complying with all the rules.
‘Get someone to check the registry, Bob,’ he instructed the constable standing beside him, ‘and find out who owns that wreck.’
At the same time Carter goosed the throttle slightly to start closing in on the suspect vessel from behind.
‘I think there’s a problem,’ Constable Fisher said a couple of minutes later, having done Carter’s bidding. ‘There are three boats registered on the Thames with the name Anna, but none of them are anything like that.’ He pointed ahead. ‘But about a fortnight ago a cabin cruiser named Hannah was reported stolen from a mooring up at Walton-on-Thames and the description of the missing boat is pretty much a match for what we’re looking at. I reckon the aquatic tea leaf who did the job just painted over the first and last letters of the name and figured that would fool us.’
‘I’m not certain,’ Carter replied, ‘that I’d be particularly enthusiastic about getting it back if I owned that boat. I think I’d prefer the insurance payout, but that’s another story. Okay, Bob. We’ll go alongside and get this sorted.’
As well as Carter and Fisher, there was another constable, Mark Crichton, making up the crew of the patrol boat, and as they headed towards the vessel he suspected was stolen, Carter issued the appropriate orders.
‘We’re going to come alongside the cabin cruiser ahead of us, starboard side to. As soon as we’re next to it you two get on board, arrest the guy driving it and anyone else and give them the usual warning about it being a suspected stolen vessel. Get cuffs on them as soon as you can and each of you take a spare pair as well in case there are other bodies inside the cabin. Take over the controls and obviously keep it running until our lords and masters decide where they want us to park it, and we’ll sort it out from there. Any questions?’
It was the kind of operation that the team had carried out dozens of times before, and Carter was completely unsurprised when both constables shook their heads.
He looked ahead, estimating the distance to the cabin cruiser by eye rather than using the radar because the two vessels were now quite close together.
‘Three minutes, maybe four,’ he said. ‘Get ready.’
Just like marked police patrol cars on land, the MPU’s Targa launches have sirens and blue lights as attention-getters in case anyone should fail to recognise the word ‘POLICE’ in large white capital letters on either side of the dark blue hull, or didn’t notice the bright blue and yellow Battenberg-pattern paint on the superstructure.
As the Targa closed to within about a hundred and fifty yards of the cabin cruiser, Carter switched on the blue lights and gave a brief whoop of the siren.
Immediately, the man standing in the stern of the cabin cruiser turned round and stared at the approaching police boat. But, conspicuously, he failed to reduce speed. In fact, it looked to Carter as if he had actually opened the throttle still further.
‘Possible failure to stop,’ Carter reported, his voice untroubled. There was no possibility the probably stolen vessel could outrun him, and there was also nowhere on that stretch of the river where it could hide.
It was all standard and routine, though stopping a stolen boat was actually something of a rarity, and Carter guessed that his men would have control of the cabin cruiser within a matter of minutes and shortly after that they would know whether or not the vessel was the stolen Hannah.
And then, as the police boat closed to within about eighty yards of the cabin cruiser, the incident stopped being routine in any sense of the word.