War set failed novelist on a different course
Fifty years ago, and after a long and quiet retirement, one of the key figures in the history of British policing died at her Hampshire home. Eugene Byrne looks at how Dorothy Peto and her Bristol training school gave women a place in the thin blue line.
IN 1914 there were no uniformed women police officers in the UK, and there was no such thing as a female police detective. By the end of the Great War, this would all have changed.
Much of this was thanks to Dorothy Olivia Georgiana Peto, born in Hampshire in 1886 into a wealthy and well-connected family. She was one of the six children of Morton and Olivia Peto (née Maude). Her father was a partner in the family building business established by her grandfather Sir Samuel Morton Peto, the engineer and contractor whose many achievements included building the new Palace of Westminster after the fire which destroyed the Houses of Parliament in 1834.
Her wider family also included her uncle Harold Ainsworth Peto, architect and landscape gardener who laid out the gardens at Iford Manor (see www.ifordmanor.co.uk if you fancy a visit). At least four of her relatives were West of England MPs at one time or another. With her wealthy background, she decided to become a novelist, but this didn’t work out.
The First World War set her life on a new course. In 1914, aged 28, she joined the women’s patrol movement in Bath.
The war meant a huge expansion in the size of the army. Now there were men in uniform in every town, and everyone knew it would cause problems. The social prejudices of the time held that silly workingclass girls would fall for anything in uniform; what was called “scarlet fever” in the Victorian era when the British army still wore red tunics was now “khaki fever”.
(The fever in Bristol peaked – allegedly – in early 1915 when the men of a Highland brigade billeted around the city, and who had arrived in trousers, were issued with their kilts.)
Across the country, patrols of women, usually in pairs, would go around the streets to intervene in situations where young women and girls (sometimes children, too) were in trouble, or looked as though they were likely to get into trouble.
This often meant rescuing young women who were drunk, or looked uncomfortable in the company of soldiers. They intervened in fights, helped inebriated women get home or tried to stop girls going off with soldiers without their parents’ knowledge, and in any other situation where they felt they could prevent women getting into “trouble”. This was an age when getting pregnant outside of wedlock was a catastrophe for the woman involved.
The patrols enjoyed widespread support. Many women, mostly middle- and upper-class, became patrol volunteers as they saw it as a practical way of helping with the war effort. Much of the patrols’ early organisation was down to the National Union of Women Workers (NUWW), which co-ordinated voluntary work by women.
It was led by middle- and upperclass ladies of impeccable establishment connections, though almost all of them wanted women to have the vote. Many patrol volunteers had been active suffrage campaigners just a year or two previously.
In January 1915 Peto arrived in Bristol to help run the NUWW’s new training school for patrol leaders and women police.
Police forces around the country did employ women, but only in administrative roles, or supervising the custody of female prisoners. This was now to change, and the patrols played a crucial role by proving that women could do the job, and by normalising the idea of women on the streets as responsible and trustworthy figures.
At the same time, some women in London had set up an unofficial Women (sic.) Police Service (WPS). As Deputy Director of the Bristol school, Peto tried to work with them, but found they had a lot of differences. The WPS and the NUWW patrols fell out and worked independently of each other.
Part of the problem was the question of what were women police and patrols actually for?
To the WPS, female patrols were to act as moral guardians of society. The Bishop of Bristol went further; he said that the soldiers had to be protected from women, who might lead them astray. If our troops were morally polluted, we might lose the war!
To Dorothy Peto and the NUWW, it was the other way around: The women needed protection from the soldiers.
Meanwhile, the war’s insatiable demand for manpower saw many employers hiring women for what had been men’s jobs. Bristol Constabulary had lost large numbers of men who had volunteered, often for heavy artillery, early on in the war.
It enrolled its first uniformed constables in 1917, making it one of the first forces – if not the first - in the country to do so, but a full year before this it had done something which appears even more radical. It hired its first female detectives in early 1916.
The plainclothes women were not solving murders or major crimes, but were used for more mundane roles, such as catching out shopkeepers contravening regulations. They were also used to catch clairvoyants. Fortune-telling was illegal and there was widespread public disdain for what were seen as charlatans taking money from women worried about loved ones at the battlefront.
Dorothy Peto helped set up NUWW training schools in Liverpool and Glasgow before becoming director of the Bristol school in 1917, now based in Berkeley Square in Clifton.
Here, patrol volunteers and those ambitious to become police officers were trained over three months in the basics of criminal law, first aid, “memory and observation” and “Jiu-Jitsu.”
“We feel that a candidate for our work,” Peto said in 1918, “should possess a good, normal physique. She should be rather large, rather benign and should convey the impression that she sees good in the people she meets, rather than evil.
“The points which we seek to draw out in her during training are acute and accurate observation, swift decision, a combination of initiative with discipline, and sympathy with judgment, of ready adaptability, with the courage to stand on her own feet.”
In 1918-19 the surviving menfolk returned and numbers of policewomen across the country were reduced. Most forces also now chose to train their own female recruits and so the Bristol school was closed in 1919.
Peacetime brought many frustrations for Peto, but all borne with a good grace. She got a job with Liverpool Constabulary, and following some years with the National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases, she rejoined Liverpool to head the city’s ten-strong female police contingent.
Policewomen were here to stay, and in 1930 she joined the Metropolitan Police and drafted its first regulations for women police. She was head of all the Met’s women officers by 1932.
The Second World War would be very different. During the First her job had been to prove the value of women police. Now the case had been proven, women officers had to contend with an immense additional workload.
She retired in 1946, having arguably done more than anyone to establish the principle of female policing, a job which had required great patience and tact in the face of male prejudice and a formidable political skill in choosing her battles carefully.
In a private memoir, she described herself as “tall, middleaged, and somewhat grim,” though in fact others found her approachable, dedicated to her women, and respected by all. She never married and had no children, and lived quietly at her home in Hampshire until her death on February 26 1974.