Victorian Policing
By Gaynor Haliday
(Pen & Sword, 186 pages, £12.99) Gaynor Haliday’s great great grandfather Thomas Bottomley served in the Bradford Police for 39 years. He never rose above the rank of constable, but had a long police career and was only once reprimanded. It was his life that led her to produce this lively and enthusiastic book.
Haliday is very good in her discussion of the working life of the Victorian police constable. It was a boring, repetitive job. The constable patrolled his beat in all weathers. He walked on the outside of the pavement during the day, partly to protect the passers-by from dirt and splashes from the horse-drawn vehicles; he walked on the inside during the night “shaking hands with the doorknobs” to ensure that everything was secure. If a door or window was not locked, he was to advise the owner or proprietor. If he missed an open or unlocked door or window and did not report it to the owner, he was likely to be disciplined – and the discipline was ferocious.
Constables were assaulted. Victorian society has the reputation for being demur, but crowds could try to free an individual who had been arrested, there were serious fights at general elections, and confrontations during strikes were known to result in savage violence.
It is the contextualising that occasionally lets the book down. Academic historians have been researching and publishing on police and policing for a good 40 years and, unfortunately, their work is ignored. John Beattie, Elaine Reynolds and David Cox, among others, have shown that the notion of useless constables and watchmen before 1829 is quite wrong. Haliday accepts the report of the 1836–1839 Constabulary Commission uncritically, seemingly unaware of the work of Bob Storch and David Philips. So if you want rattling good stories about Victorian policemen, look no further; but if you want an account of police development, you will need to go elsewhere. Clive Emsley is a criminologist and the author of The English Police: A Political and Social History