A History of Police in England

by W. L. Melville Lee

In the year 1801, the population of London and Middlesex hardly exceeded a million, but how many of the individual units that went to make up this total were engaged in criminal pursuits, it is of course impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy, because the bulk of the crime was undetected and consequently unrecorded. From such data as we possess, however, it is certain that the proportion of thieves and other delinquents to honest men must have been alarmingly high. Between 1801 and 1811 the population increased some sixteen per cent., and during the same period the number of commitments rose nearly fifty per cent.[160] This increase in the number of rogues whose careers were cut short by capture, speaks well for the Bow Street Runners from one point of view; but it also indicates no less surely that these officers were making no progress at all in the art of preventing crime, which instead of diminishing as time went on, continued to grow in volume year by year. Indeed the state of the metropolis was such, that social reformers might well have despaired of ever seeing an improvement; every corrupting influence, and every criminal tendency seemed to flourish unchecked and unrebuked in the congenial atmosphere of the London slums: children, neglected by their parents and uncared for by the State, got their only schooling in the gutter, where they educated themselves, and each other, in all the tricks of vice and dishonesty. Night after night, undisturbed by watchmen or other peace-officers, hundreds of urchins of both sexes huddled together for shelter and company under the fruit-stalls and barrows of Covent Garden Market. Day after day, these homeless and unhealthy vagabonds quartered the town, street by street, and alley by alley, in search of any prey that they might be able to lay their hands on. Their pickings and stealings were turned into money with fatal ease at the shop of any one of the eight thousand receivers of stolen property, who were supposed to ply their trade in London; and however meagre might be the income realised by the juvenile criminal, drink in plenty, with gin at tenpence a pint, was within the reach of all. Such licensing laws as existed, were seldom enforced, and even after the scandalous public lotteries had been suppressed, public-houses continued to hold minor lotteries, called "little-goes," for all comers, men, women and children.

Mondays and Fridays were the great days for bullock-hunting, an inhuman and brutal sport that throve in the neighbourhoods of Hackney and Bethnal Green, with the sanction, if not with the connivance, of the peace officers of those parishes. The procedure of the bullock-hunters was as follows. A fee having been paid to a cattle drover, an animal was selected from his herd, peas were put into its ears, sticks pointed with iron were driven into its body, and the poor beast, when mad with rage and pain, was hunted through the streets with a yelling mob of men, women, and dogs behind it; the weavers left their looms to join in the pursuit, and passers-by continually augmented the crowd, until the exhausted victim could no longer be goaded into any shew of resistance or movement, when it was left to die where it fell, or when sufficiently recovered, to be removed to some butcher's slaughter-house.

On Sundays the favourite resort was a field adjoining Bethnal Green Church, and here some hundreds of men and boys assembled during the hours of divine service, to indulge in less exciting games, such as dog-fighting and duck-hunting. On holidays and fair-days these Saturnalian proceedings grew more outrageous than ever. In a letter descriptive of the occurrences that used to take place at an annual fair held in the West-end of London, which the Receiver of the Metropolitan Police wrote to Lord Rosslyn in 1831, occurs the following passage: "It will hardly be credited that within five or seven years ... people were robbed in open day ... and women, stripped of their clothes, were tied to gates by the roadside; the existing police being set at defiance."

John Sayer, the Bow Street officer, stated before a Parliamentary Committee, that there were streets in Westminster, especially Duck Lane, Gravel Lane, and Cock Lane, infested by a gang of desperate men, and so dangerous that no policeman dared venture there, unless accompanied by five or six of his comrades, for fear of being cut to pieces. These are not highly coloured fairy-tales, but actual facts as recounted in the Blue-books of the period, recounted moreover without exciting any particular notice at the time. In 1812, the crime of murder was so common, and so much on the increase, that a Parliamentary Committee was appointed to hold an inquiry as to the best means of combating the savage tendencies of the people. Offences against property were even more prevalent than crimes of violence. Spurious coin and counterfeit banknotes deluged the country.[161] In the parish of Kensington alone there were sixteen successful, and three unsuccessful, attempts at burglary in six weeks, and John Vickery, an experienced Bow Street officer, calculated that in one month property to the value of £15,000 was stolen in the City of London, without one of the guilty parties being either known or apprehended.

Thieves and receivers, drivers of hackney coaches, and sometimes toll-gate keepers, conspired together to rob the travelling public. Their favourite modus operandi was as follows—the thief climbed on the back of the conveyance, unfastened the ropes that secured the luggage, and with the assistance of an accomplice, removed the trunk or other booty when close to the house of the confederate receiver. As soon as the loss was discovered, the coachman repudiated all knowledge of the affair, and having at the first opportunity put away the false and resumed his registered number, became to all appearance an honest cabman, against whom the police could prove nothing. The transformation was not difficult, because numbers were not then painted on the coach as on hackney carriages they now have to be, but were displayed on a removable iron label.

Still more serious were the conspiracies in which solicitors and police officers were concerned, which had for their object the levying of blackmail from bankers and others. In this organized system of fraud the following method was usually adopted—a man of education, with money behind him, would plan a bank robbery, purchase the necessary information, and hire expert thieves to do the actual work. The robbery having been duly effected, some time would be allowed to elapse, and then the prime mover in the affair, through his agent the police officer, would notify to the manager of the bank that the stolen notes or securities had been traced, and might be recovered, if a large enough reward was forthcoming. This offer was invariably coupled with the proviso that, in the event of the proposed restitution being carried out, no further questions should be asked, nor further proceedings taken.

The trick seldom failed, because the parties who had been robbed knew, that in the absence of any detective police agency worthy of the name, acceptance of the terms offered them was the only chance they had of recovering their property. Under the circumstances, they could hardly be expected to be public-spirited enough to incur the heavier loss, and at the same time, through advertising the affair, suffer some diminution of credit, for the sake of the principles involved.

The Committee which sat in 1828, and which investigated the whole question, considered it advisable not to publish the evidence brought before them, but stated that they had abundant proof that frauds of this description had for years been carried through with almost uniform success, and to an extent altogether unsuspected by the public. They were satisfied "that more than sixteen banks had been forced to pay blackmail, and that more than £200,000 worth of property had, in a short space of time, been the subject of negotiation or compromise," and stated that about £1200 had been paid to blackmailers by bankers alone, "accompanied by a clearance from every risk, and perfect impunity for their crimes."

Between 1805 and 1818 there were more than two hundred executions for forgery alone, that is to say at the rate of one execution in every three weeks. When one considers that only a few of the forgers were caught, that of these not all were convicted, and that of the convicted but a moderate percentage were hanged, we get some idea of the prevalence of this particular offence. The alarming frequency with which mobs began to appeal to violence to compel attention to their grievances, real or supposed, by force of arms, was one of the most dangerous symptoms of the age. The Food Riots of 1800, the Luddite disturbances of 1811-1816, Spafield (1816), Manchester (1817), Peterloo (1819),[162] and the riots throughout the manufacturing districts in 1828-9, were all cases in point which convinced the thoughtful that, unless something better than the shoddy defence, which was all that the civil power could then muster, was quickly forthcoming, the mob would soon obtain a complete mastery, to the destruction of all law and order, just as had recently happened in France.

The mania for duelling, again, which was now at its height, was an indication that the prevailing spirit of lawlessness was not confined to the masses. When hereditary lawgivers, and even Cabinet ministers, could find no better way of settling their differences than by calling each other out, little wonder that the rank and file followed suit, and took the law into their own hands. It is no valid argument to say that duelling was merely a passing fashion; by the Law of England any duel is a gross breach of the peace; and that such deliberate infractions should have become fashionable only proves that the law was held in contempt, and that the police system which failed to compel people to keep the peace was totally inadequate to the requirements of the times. There was a period when the vendetta was the natural defence adopted by semi-civilised communities to diminish the frequency of murder, and to protect the honour of their women: in time blood feuds gradually died out, not because any great change had overtaken human nature, but because there was no longer any need for the individual or the family to perform duties which could be executed with greater discrimination, impartiality, and thoroughness by judges and policemen. After the disappearance of the vendetta the custom of duelling remained. It was felt that personal honour was too delicate a matter to be delegated to any outsiders, and that questions in which honour was concerned must continue to be settled by the principals themselves. Eventually however, the same influences that rendered blood feuds unnecessary removed the excuse for the practice of duelling; under modern conditions, a man can usually vindicate his honour by an appeal to public opinion, or, in the last resort, by an action for slander, without having to submit his cause to the uncertain arbitrament of the rapier or the pistol.