Policing the Victorian Community

The Formation of English Provincial Police Forces, 1856-80

CAROLYN STEEDMAN

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317372578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The year 1856 saw the first compulsory Police Act in England (and Wales). Over the next thirty years a class society came to be policed by a largely working-class police. This book, first published in 1984, traces the process by which men made themselves into policemen, translating ideas about work and servitude, about local government and local community, servitude and the ideologies of law and central government, into sets of personal beliefs.

By tracing the evolution of a policed society through the agency of local police forces, the book illustrates the ways in which a society, at many levels and from many perspectives, understood itself to operate, and the ways in which ownership, servitude, obligation, and the reciprocality of social relations manifested themselves in different communities. This title will be of interest to students of criminology and history.

Part One Government and Policing

DOI: 10.4324/9781315672243-2

Chapter 1 Government and Policing

DOI: 10.4324/9781315672243-3

Local government in the mid-nineteenth century was a highly visible government. The meaning of local administration of law and statute was plain to see: the policeman appointed as poor law relieving officer moving vagrants towards the tramp ward; the vagrant ward housed in the same building as the police station and the magistrates’ court in some cities; the common lodging house inspected not by an officer of local government, but by the superintendent of local police. We need to be able to understand something of what people on the tramp through Cambridge, issued with a ticket to the vagrant ward by the desk sergeant at the central police office, understood of the relationship between local government and the ordering of life within local communities.

The first part of this book is designed to show what the legislative and governmental basis for that understanding was. It is divided into several sections, dealing with the provincial theories of finance and community control, the contrasts made between rural and urban social relations, and the work done by policemen within the localities that helped form distinctly modern police forces. Policemen’s capacities were defined by reaction to contemporary events as much as by legislation, and police action’ during the Murphy Riots of the late 1860s is singled out as an important example of this process. However, it is with the legislative background to the formation of provincial police forces that this chapter begins.

i Legislation

Part of a mid-nineteenth-century perception of police forces and an understanding of the role they played in local communities was dictated by successive legislative enactments of the early ninteenth century, and the types of policemen and means of government they created. This definition of police and policing fell into several clear statutory stages, a first one being marked off by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 (5 & 6 Will. IV c. 88) and the compulsory policing clauses it contained. (1)

The pre-1835 period provided a double pattern: that of the parish constable and of the constable employed under local act. The former, his powers for the preservation of community order deriving from common law, was appointed by the vestry and directed by the magistrates. His powers were local, in law, and in fact: it took time, money and effort to get him away from his neighbourhood in pursuit of an offender. The constable appointed under a local act had his duties prescribed: he operated for the good ordering of a certain place. Much the same was true of the constables appointed by the unreformed municipal corporations. If they were not inheritors of immemorable tradition appointed by the court leet and functioning as parish constables, then they were appointed by an independent body acting in the same area as the corporation with powers under local act. (2) The legislative provision for town police was extended by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which directed that the reformed corporations appoint a sufficient number of constables, and frame rules for their operation. (3)

Under the Municipal Corporations Act, local improvement boards were enjoined to hand their powers to maintain and direct bodies of police over to the reformed corporations, though they did retain responsibility for policing local areas, that is to say, for paving and lighting streets, suppressing nuisances, and so on. Within a few years several large improvement boards had voluntarily handed such policing powers over to the municipal corporations, and in these circumstances a body of police again undertook a policing role. (4) But in general, the reform of local government in the 1830s left a significant legacy for local administrators: how ever directed, whoever controlled them, whether they lit and extinguished lamps, or inspected reported nuisances or not, a body of police was seen as retaining very strong links with the much older concept of policing, and understood as being maintained for a general good ordering of a specific place.

The act of 1835 did not affect the parish constables in the counties. Neither for that matter did the permissive Rural Police Act of 1839 (2 & 3 Vict. c. 93) which enabled magistrates in quarter sessions to establish paid police forces. There were 38 English administrative counties, and by the early 1850s 18 had established constabularies, 7 had done so in some districts, and 13 had opted for injecting new life into the parish constable by using two permissive police acts, one of 1842 (5 & 6 Vict. c. 109) and one of 1850 (13 & 14 Vict. c. 20). (5) The former provided for the payment of parish constables, attempted to improve their image by restricting appointment to men assessed to the poor or county rate at £4 a year, and outlined the ideal of efficient, division-wide organisation. (6) But it was the vestry that implemented the act, a constable’s field of operation still extended no further than the boundaries of his own parish, and he was paid, not out of the general county rate, but out of the poor rate, by the overseers. Traditional financial and administrative boundaries were in fact maintained under these acts.

Under the first of these two acts, that of 1842, there was provision for justices to appoint and to pay (out of the county rate) a superintending constable. This provision was extended by the amending act of 1850. A superintendent could be appointed for each petty sessional division of a county, and he was put in charge of all parish constables and lock-ups., But his powers extended no further than the division boundaries and even paying parish constables could not provide for a superintendent’s control of them. ‘Parish constables are little better than so much live lumber)’ said one magistrate in a county that had tried the system, ‘and have rather thwarted the active superintendent than otherwise.’(7)

Twenty years before this, the Lighting and Watching Act of 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV c. 90) had attempted to deal with the difficulties inherent in organising parish constables. This act gave the power of appointing paid watchmen to an inspector chosen by the vestry. It is impossible to find out how far this act was used, and when and where, (8) but where its use is encountered it was obviously seen as a way for magistrates to avoid establishing a rural police after 1839. In eagerly petitioning quarter sessions for its application, they argued how cheap it was, and incidentally demonstrated its uselessness, for magistrates had no powers to protect property under it, and watchmen could not even serve warrants. (9) As a piece of legislation it did not, as one police historian has argued, mark ‘a reaction to the parish as a traditional unit of policing’. (10) It is true that it could apply to the ubiquitous ‘place’ as well as to the parish, and that the inspector appointed under it could unite with his colleagues from other parishes. But the financial basis for organisation remained the parish, the rating authority the vestry. It makes better sense to read this act in the light of existing improvement measures, or as a precursor of the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847. It was with this last measure that the edges between ‘policing’ and ‘police’ became statutorily blurred.

The Town Police Clauses Act (10 & 11 Vict. c. 89) was designed to provide a pro forma for local acts. With ratepayer sanction commissioners were to appont a superintendent and a number of constables. These were to be properly sworn police officers of the crown. Commissioners had the power to make bye-laws and to fine for a whole range of nuisance offences. (11) Any local authority could take the Police Clauses Act upon itself — boards of guardians, vestries, municipal corporations. But in county areas magistrates had long recognised that, theoretically at least, parish constables were better routine executors of the law than policemen appointed in this new way, with their powers severely curtailed by local bye-laws.

Traditional deployment of the parish constable cut across the neat lines of legislative development. So, to a much greater and less examined extent, did the local executive agencies of the administrative state. The Local Government Act of 1858 (21 & 22 Vict. c. 98) superseded the Lighting and Watching Act and the Town Police Clauses Act, and was in this way a confirmation of local act. Boards of health became policing authorities. Municipal corporations, improvement boards, and boards of guardians were constituted boards of health under the Public Health Act of 1848 (11 & 12 Vict. c. 63) and the Local Government Act of 1858 and it is therefore not surprising to find police forces performing policing functions — the inspection of lodging houses, the surveying of cellar dwellings — in the second half of the nineteenth century. (12) When they acted in this way policemen were performing an administrative function, the job that a local government inspector would otherwise have done. Policemen were obliged to do this work because for most urban authorities they were the most convenient and cheap executive force to hand. The cleaning of the streets, responsibility for lighting, the suppression of street begging and many other policing functions like these were devolved on to local police forces by local bye-laws and local acts. The distinctive feature of the social discipline experienced by local communities in the midnineteenth century was this devolution on to police forces of those powers of surveillance inherent in the policing functions of local authorities. In this way, as will be seen later, the discipline and punishment of people living in those communities was provided for by much more than the definition of crime and the operation of the criminal law.

With such a history of legal provision, and under such administrative circumstances, lack of reaction to the County and Borough Police Act of 1856 (19 & 20 Vict. c. 69) — and what some historians have called its lack of impact — is partly explained. The new act in fact gave a clear legal prescription for the kind of policing described above: it empowered magistrates to make a local police force perform duties other than peace-keeping ones. In the early months of 1857 there was a rush of quarter sessions orders to appoint policemen as assistant poor law relieving officers and inspectors of weights and measures. The parish constable had always had a responsibility for nuisances that affected the wellbeing of the community, though this responsibility had often been unused. But there were specific administrative circumstances to greet the Police Act of 1856 which allowed the extension of policing within local communities to become widespread and stabilised.

The establishment of any one county force after 1856 meant that it covered a multiplicity of administrative areas. Cheshire constabulary, to take one extreme, covered an area in which there were twenty-six places that administered central sanitary provision under the Local Government Act of 1858 (21 & 22 Vict. c. 98). For the police to operate this act (and in Cheshire they did) meant the inspection of common lodging houses and the control of nuisances. Even a rural county like Dorset presented its police with twelve such areas. (13) A borough police might be more used to performing this kind of policing function, but many corporations also became boards of health for the first time in 1858, and so the range of borough policing was extended and consolidated in the years after 1856. (14)

Recently, it has been noted that one county police force extended its dealings with ‘normal’ crime in the years after 1856, rather than concentrating, as it had previously done, on repressing disorder. (15) If this conclusion is to be extended to other areas and a longer period of time, then it has to be recognised that a large amount of police activity was concerned not only with the anomalies that the criminal law defined, but also with the area of public impropriety outlined by administrative law.

ii Towards 1856: Models and Theories

The legislative background outlined above is an inadequate way of assessing how the police were understood in the years after 1856. But it does indicate two unifying approaches: a way of accounting for police presence in nineteenth-century terms, and a delineation of the financial and administrative context of the locality. The principles paraded in Parliament and the furore of municipal agitation against Palmerston’s police bills of 1854 and 1856 all passed into quiet acceptance in the winter of 1856–7. The ‘new’ police of 1857 was not new; the stages of growth indicated in the last section had provided for the mobility of personnel and the dissemination of different ideas of what a policeman was.

There has been some argument about the transference of a Metropolitan model of police to the provinces, and discussion has centred on the number of men lent to the provinces by the Metropolitan police commissioners in the years after 1829 (when the Metropolitan force was established). This number was undoubtedly small, (16) but there is evidence of a high mobility among the officer class of English police forces in the 1840s and 1850s, and for the practical purposes of earning more and. improving status, not much distinction was made by these men between county, borough and superintending constable systems. A number of men did leave the Metropolitan force, not on loan, but having handed in their resignation in order to become provincial policemen.

But it took more than a railway journey and a man’s new job to transfer a model, especially when it is unclear what that model was seen to be. Charles Reith, using the casual evidence of many nineteenth-century policemen, argued that the model embodied the great principle of ‘prevention’ — the prevention of crime. According to his argument ‘prevention’ was an ideal inculcated into the Metropolitan officers in the formative years of the force. Promotion through the ranks, a prescribed attitude of officers to men, ‘firm and just, kind and conciliatory’, was the bedrock of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One Government and Policing
• Part Two Men and Policemen
• Notes
• Bibliography and sources
• Index