The Best Police in the World

An Oral History of English Policing from the 1930s to the 1960s

Barbara Weinberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351894074
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Based on interviews with former police officers, this book addresses two main issues. Firstly, the question of how the police themselves viewed the priorities of the job and what they considered their role to be. This is the first study to consider this question and its implications for the style and content of police work. Secondly, it challenges the view of the prewar period as a "Golden Age", and shows that policing from the 1930s to the 1960s was not as unproblematic as has often been assumed. Police violence and the fabrication of evidence were more prevalent than the cosy image of the British TV series Dixon of Dock Green would have us believe. The fact that this image often went unchallenged has much to do with prevailing concepts of masculinity and with the greater moral certitude of the police within a more stable and stratified society.

CHAPTER ONE

Origins and Sources

The beginning of the 1930s was the start of a difficult era. A general sense of crisis permeated the atmosphere, from the Cabinet and government downwards. Economic and financial difficulties abounded that no one seemed able to solve, while the unemployment figures climbed inexorably upwards. A minority Labour government saw unemployment more than double over the two years that it was in office, with a budget deficit and consequent flight from sterling adding to the crisis. The government, forced to act against its principles and election pledges, fell in the summer of 1931 over its proposal to cut unemployment benefit. It was left to an all-party National Government to carry out the unpopular economies it decided the situation demanded. The ‘equality of sacrifice’ called for by the Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, resulted in a government decision to cut unemployment benefit by ten per cent and the salaries of public servants from between ten to twenty per cent.¹

The police were one of the groups directly affected. The May Committee, appointed by the outgoing Labour government, proposed a cut in police pay of twelve and a half per cent, but by the time the new government came to implement its economy measures, this had been whittled down to five per cent from the end of 1931 with another five per cent to follow later, plus a lower pay scale ‘B’ for new recruits.

Despite these pay cuts, policing remained a sought-after job. Since the large police pay increase which followed on the recommendations of the Desborough Committee in 1919, policing had been ahead of most working-class occupations as far as earnings were concerned, and a cut of five or even ten per cent still left the police towards the top of the league. According to Critchley’s calculations for the inter-war period, a constable’s maximum pay scale of £4 15s was fifty-five per cent higher than the average industrial wage, quite apart from the fact that the police had free accommodation or rent, as well as other allowances.² Another inestimable advantage was the freedom from the threat of unemployment and the prospect of a pension at the end. So even with the wage cuts, joining the police in the depression years of the early 1930s seemed like the answer to many a young man’s prayer. This is bourne out by the large numbers who applied but failed to get in to the service.

Joining the Police

Nearly all the men interviewed commented on how lucky they were to get taken on, and spoke of the many who were turned down. The average success rate in the early 1930s seems to have been around ten per cent out of the hundreds who applied. Physical requirements were stringent. One man was turned down because he had acne on his back; another because he had more than the allowed seven teeth missing; others because they were half an inch too short; or, in the case of miners, because of the blue marks on their face and hands. There was a written examination covering the rudiments of English and arithmetic to be got through, over which some candidates sweated, while selection might be further tailored to meet more specific requirements. Thus, motor mechanics and drivers were at a premium at a time when motorisation was beginning in the service and such skills were in short supply. Prowess at football or playing a musical instrument also came in handy when chief constables were on the lookout for candidates for the football team or the police band. But the basic requirement was height and physical fitness, and it was chiefly the Metropolitan police – with its huge requirement for men – which was prepared to lower the height limit somewhat (to 5 feet 8.5 inches).³ Even so, standards generally were beginning to shift, leading the 1930s generation of recruits to comment on the previous generation of huge bobbies of six foot and over. By the 1930s, 5 feet 10 inches (midgets in the older men’s eyes) was becoming more acceptable, as other criteria – especially clerical skills – made up the balance. Nevertheless, entry into the service involved a great deal of effort and desperate resolve. One man who was interviewed, along with 500 others, for thirty vacancies in Liverpool in 1934 recalled:

… there were chaps there from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, and some very well educated chaps as well. I remember one chappie who sat next to me, a qualified marine engineer and in desperation he came here to join the police force … There were others, one had been to Oxford, others who were well up in languages, French, German …⁴

It was a heartrending business. A successful recruit remembered the reaction of some who had not been so lucky: ‘I saw men sit there and cry, they’d never worked in their lives’.⁵

In such circumstances, the motivation to join the police is not hard to discover. Recession and high unemployment pushed well-educated and respectable young men towards an occupation they might otherwise never have considered, that offered adequate if not ample pay, job security and a pension. The precise balance of supply and demand that made up the equation in the early 1930s was rarely to be so favourable for the police institution. Here, oral testimony bears witness to many a recruit’s lost hopes for further training or education, as recession bit hard into family budgets or threw men from their chosen occupations. In an earlier period there had been more stress on size, physical strength and the experience of disciplined service, as nervous police authorities built their defences against possible Bolshevist insurrection and turbulence on the industrial front. But for the recruits, both then and later, the principal motive for joining the police was the wage and security the service offered, for whose sake men were prepared to accept strict discipline and the many hours of extra duty for no pay. Indeed, acceptance of harsh conditions is the key differentiating factor between pre and post-war entrants to the service. ‘We knew life wasn’t a bed of roses and that we couldn’t do what we liked’ remarked one pc when describing the tyrannical discipline imposed by his sergeant, ‘but we were prepared to put up with it, we knew nothing else’.⁶ It was this outlook that enabled the service to provide twenty-four hour coverage without paid overtime, that was to prove increasingly untenable in the post-war era. The pcs of the early 1930s perceived that hard times gave little space to vocational preference or complaints over conditions. Vocational preference thus had little to do with it, and it was chiefly the sons of policemen who said they had always wanted to join the police. Apart from this, wages, security, and the lack of prospects in their chosen occupations (such as motor mechanics) were the reasons given by most applicants, while chance suggestions from policemen they knew or friends who had joined encouraged others. This finding contrasts with that in Robert Reiner’s study, in which well over half the men after 1960 joined for what he calls non-instrumental reasons, relating to intrinsic aspects of the work itself, with only eleven per cent stating that they had been motivated solely by instrumental factors such as pay, status or security. But as Reiner himself notes, this contradicts the findings from other, earlier police studies. As he also points out, this simply emphasizes the historical relativity of the reasons men had for joining the police, with the variation depending largely on the current levels of unemployment.⁷ Nevertheless, either wage levels or job security remained the crucial element, depending on the state of the economy, whatever the other reasons given. In the inter-war period, it was fear of unemployment and the search for job security that dominated job choice, even if an underlying preference for an outdoor life, for variety, and for excitement is discernible among pre-war as among post-war recruits. Nor, it would seem, were these largely working class men unduly troubled by the ambiguous class position that was a by-product of their job choice.

Social Class Position

The anomolous class position of the police and its consequences has been discussed by a number of police historians and sociologists. Steedman, for the Victorian era, stressed their servile status: as paid servants of their police authorities Victorian policemen, she believes, adopted a stance of neutrality and passivity as a way of dealing with their contradictory situation. On the one hand, this underlined their sense of powerlessness, their unimportance, as far as the ratepayers and authorities were concerned, on the other it expressed their essential functionlessness within the working-class community. Not until the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1879 was there general legal sanction for the disciplining of working class social life by the police.⁸ From that time onwards, however, the policeman became a more authoritative and distanced character who aroused fear and hostility as well as deference, compliance and support from his working class peers. A number of elements in addition to the legal were later brought into play here. With the upgrading of police pay and conditions and the establishment of the Police Federation, following on the recommendations of the Desborough Committee in 1919, the police began to lay claim to a professional status that ultimately weakened their links with their peers and with their local employers. This enhanced sense of independence from their local police authorities was increasingly (if inadvertently) encouraged by the Home Office in the early inter-war period. By ignoring the local authorities, and establishing close links with provincial chief constables to see that Home Office policy was carried out during critical periods, support for the doctrine of constabulary independence was encouraged that had its effect on the self-image of the police.⁹

This image of professional independence allowed policemen to resolve their contradictory class position in favour of a ‘classless’ solution.¹⁰ Reiner argues that while the police should be categorized as working class in economic terms, the part they play in contributing to the political and ideological domination of capital over labour makes their overall class place a contradictory one. This contradictory position is an uncomfortable one, and while the police, I believe, are not simply the instrument of a dominant ruling class but are caught in the interplay between a number of competing interests and ideologies, they seek to detach themselves from these through the doctrine of constabulary independence. It is this stance which makes them ‘classless’. This was acknowledged by the men themselves. ‘You were treated like a servant by the upper classes and like a lord by the lower’ said one – with the result that policemen felt they were a race apart.¹¹ While not denying their mainly working-class origins, the majority were hard put to it to decide to which class they now belonged – and most settled for ‘no class’ or ‘a separate group’. This was both cause and consequence of their socially inward-looking private lives. The police mostly socialized with their own – as did policemen’s wives, especially in rural areas,¹² partly because of the unsocial hours they kept and partly because of mistrust which knowledge of their occupation aroused in civilians. A mutual suspicion inhibited spontaneity, so that when in civvies and on holiday, many policemen said they would never tell others what they did for a living. Consciousness of the possibility of conflict with sections of the public made many policemen keep aloof. A village policeman put it this way:

Do you think you didn‘t have so many friends because you were a policeman?

Oh, yes, absolutely. From two ways. From their point of view they didn’t want to be the village policeman’s friend, and from our point of view we had to be careful who we made as friends because you could be up against the situation where your friends could be doing something wrong, and you are the law …¹³

In consequence class relations were ‘messy and confused’.¹⁴ The thesis that working class policemen kept their class identification and used it to support their own classes’ concept of justice and order, and to protect fellow members of the working class cannot really be sustained. Nevertheless, as put forward by JoanneMarie Klein, the thesis is important and convincing on many counts. It is her contention that the majority of policemen came from the respectable working class, which had its own cultural norms and values that they applied to their jobs. She seeks to show that they were able to resist control from above and to transform the police from inside through their own definition of the meaning of justice. Their working-class identification was further demonstrated, she believes, by their adherence to working class marriage patterns.¹⁵ There are several pertinent points here. I would agree that the value system of most policemen was strongly grounded in that of the respectable working class and its views on what constituted fair play, justice and decenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Origins and Sources
• Chapter 2 Organizing the Daily Round
• Chapter 3 Prospects and Careers
• Chapter 4 Policing the Motorist
• Chapter 5 The CID
• Chapter 6 Policewomen and Police Wives
• Chapter 7 Policing in Wartime
• Chapter 8 Policing Crime
• Chapter 9 Policing Public Order
• Chapter 10 Police Scandals
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index