Policewomen

Reveals the story of the first female bobbies on the beat

The first two women to be employed by London Metropolitan Police in 1883 did not investigate crime. Instead, the role of these ‘police matrons’ was to search and generally oversee female suspects and convicts in police stations and in courts. Their other responsibility was to prepare women’s bodies in the mortuaries for their inspection by the police surgeons. Other forces also appointed matrons in the second half of the 19th century, often selecting them from police sergeants’ wives.

As was the case in many other professions, women stepped forward to fill the gap when policemen were called up to fight in the First World War. In London, the force reacted swiftly. With the approval of the Home Office, Margaret Damer Dawson and suffragette Nina Boyle formed the Women’s Police Volunteers in 1914. Their work involved meeting female refugees arriving by train, and later developed to policing pimps and gangsters in order to safeguard women from being enticed into prostitution. Dawson went on to form the Women Police Service (WPS) assisted by her second in command, Mary Allen.

Manchester’s police force was slower to recruit women, despite being urged to do so at a public meeting in May 1916. Only four women were employed by Manchester

Police by 1921. Its chief constable Sir Robert Peacock was responsible for this, pronouncing that women were ineffective at controlling prostitution, the main issue for him at the time.

The National Union of Women Patrols emerged in response to the outbreak of war, with 500 patrol groups throughout the country. Women were recruited mainly from the educated middle class. While they were expected to wear uniforms, they were not sworn in and had no powers of the duty of the police, [but] is yet closely allied to it”.

At the end of the war, the Met integrated women patrols directly into the police force as an ‘experiment’, making the police force responsible for the women’s recruitment and organisation. Edith Smith had become the first woman with power of arrest after she was sworn in as a constable in Grantham Borough Police in 1915, but most women working in the police remained unsworn.

By February 1919, the Met

The number of women working in National Union of Women Patrols in 92 different areas in 1917

Elizabeth Bather The name of the first female chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Service in 1949

work’: escorting women and children, overseeing the custody of female prisoners in hospitals and police stations, taking fingerprints and inquiries about missing women and children, typing up statements, deporting women aliens and maintaining the central index of prostitutes.

Only with the introduction of the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act did the police force move into the modern world, and the separation of men and women into male and female police divisions was finally brought to an end.

WEBSITE

METROPOLITAN WOMEN POLICE ASSOCIATION

w metwpa.org.uk/history-of

women-police-officers.html This useful timeline includes the names of some key figures.

is a historian and author of Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires (Reaktion, 2019)

1

Prepare Your Photograph The higher the resolution of your original scan, the better the results are likely to be. If you still have the original photo, then scan it again, cropping into a face and increasing the resolution setting to 600 dpi (dots per inch). Try using your scanner’s auto-correct tools to clean up the photo. 2

Clean Up Further If issues remain – such as speckles, scratches or poor lighting – open the scan in your image editor and perform additional tweaks to try to correct it as much as possible (see scantips.com/restore.html for pointers). Here, I’m using Paint.NET, which is available for Windows: getpaint.net. 3

Access The Tool Browse myheritage.com/photo-enhancer, where you’ll see an example photo of a face that’s been enhanced using the photo-sharpening tool. Drag the vertical slider left and right to view the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions. When you’re ready, drag your own photo onto the existing picture to upload it.

4

Review Results The photograph will be uploaded and the tool will perform its magic. When it’s done, your photo will appear on-screen. Use the slider to preview – although the effect works best on slightly blurred shots, it’ll work on any photo where it can detect the basic facial features. 5

Check A Close-Up Beneath the photo, there will be a list of all the detected faces. Click one and you’ll be able to see a close-up of the facial changes. If the original photograph was small or very blurred, they may look somewhat strange, but the jarring effect will be less noticeable in the main photo. 6

Colour Your Photo You’ll also be given the opportunity to colour the photograph – click ‘Colorize this photo’ to do so. Photos are automatically stored in your MyHeritage account – click ‘Go to my photos’ to view them, or choose ‘Download photo’ to download a watermarked copy of the image to your hard disk.

Manage Your Collection Any photographs that you upload will appear in your personalised photo library. You can see which ones have been enhanced or colourised by the small icons displayed next to them. Click one to edit it, and you’ll also see options to tag the photo to people in your MyHeritage family tree. 8

Batch- Select Images Alternatively, click the tick-box next to a photo to select it, then repeat for other photographs. You’ll see a button next to ‘Print as wall art’ that allows you to download the photos (all watermarked) to your hard disk. To delete the photos, click the vertical ellipsis button to its right instead.

Create An Album You can also file photos into custom albums by selecting the ‘Add to album…’ option. You can select an existing album, or click ‘Create’ to set one up. Note that these are public by default, so untick ‘Public album’ if you want to keep it private, before giving it a name and clicking ‘OK’.