The thin blue line hard at work over the decades
Writer IT is a challenging time for the police service.
Only last week, police federation leaders warned traditional British policing had been left “on its knees and facing extinction” after years of government austerity.
More than 20,000 officers have been lost since 2010 due to slashed budgets.
Today we raid the Sunday Sun archive for photos of North East ‘boys in blue’ performing their vital roles across the decades.
Our earliest image shows Victorian police officers in Tynemouth. Our latest, from 1990, shows officers dealing with the effects of ‘Gazzamania’ in 1990.
The day-to-day working life of a “bobby on the beat” in the old days would have differed greatly from the highpressure, hi-tech world of the 21st century police officer.
Our older photos evoke distant memories of kindly coppers giving unruly street urchins a “clip around the earhole” as they dispensed on-the-spot justice for any misdemeanour.
It was a time when local police boxes, truncheons, police whistles and “black marias” were an accepted part of the bobby’s arsenal in a world of petty larcenies and the occasional headlinegrabbing gruesome murder.
Here in the North East, the huge county-wide forces which police our area in 2019 are made up from a number of smaller town or borough forces which had existed since Victorian times.
Northumbria Police, for example, was the product of a 1974 merger of the old Northumberland Constabulary and part of Durham Constabulary.
The late-1960s had already seen the smaller forces of Gateshead, South Shields, Sunderland, Tynemouth and Newcastle-upon-tyne merge into their respective county forces.
Meanwhile, Cleveland Police is made up of the earlier Teesside Constabulary and the York and North East Yorkshire Police, while Durham Constabulary was similarly formed from smaller forces.
We have 19th-century Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel to thank for the “thin blue line” which still protects us from crime today.
He established the first British police force - the Metropolitan - in 1829,and his name also gave us the terms “bobbies”, “rozzers” and “peelers”.
Evenin’ all...
Above, officers pounce on an attacker who threw a bottle at Prince Charles’ car, moments after the prince’s visit to Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, May 1978; left, PC Jack Ansley of Sunderland Borough Police armed with a revolver, c1943