Provincial Police Reform in Early Victorian England

Cambridge, 1835–1856

Roger Swift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367688691
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000378832
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The establishment of 'new police' forces in early Victorian England has long attracted historical enquiry and debate, albeit with a general focus on London and the urban-industrial communities of the Midlands and the North. This original study contributes to the debate by examining the nature and process of police reform, the changing relationship between the police and the public, and their impact on crime in Cambridge, a medium-sized county town with a rural hinterland. It argues that the experience of Cambridge was unique, for the Corporation shared co-jurisdiction of policing arrangements with the University, and this fractious relationship, as well as political rivalries between Liberals and Tories, impeded the reform process, although the force was certified efficient in 1856. Case studies of the careers of individual policemen and of the crimes and criminals they encountered shed additional light on the darker side of life in early Victorian Cambridge and present a different and more nuanced picture of provincial police reform during a seminal period in police history than either the traditional Whig or early revisionist Marxist interpretations implied. As such, it will support undergraduate courses in local, social, and criminal justice history during the Victorian period.

1Cambridge

The Unreformed System

In 1835, the ancient university town of Cambridge was a relatively prosperous county town lying at the heart of a rich agricultural hinterland based on arable and dairy farming. The town had long been the chief administrative, judicial, commercial, and educational centre of Cambridgeshire, yet to contemporary visitors, it presented a somewhat quaint image. Arriving in Cambridge in 1840 to embark upon five years of study at Trinity College, Charles Astor Bristed, a young American student who had recently graduated from Yale, was moved to observe,

Imagine the most irregular town that can be imagined, streets of the very crookedest kind, twisting about like those in a nightmare, and not unfrequently bringing you back to the same point you started from…. The houses are low and antique; sometimes their upper stories project out into, and over the narrow pathway, making it still narrower; and their lower stories are usually occupied as shops – tailors and booksellers being the predominant varieties. Every now and then your road passes over a muddy little river, not larger than a tolerable canal, which rambles through and about the town in all sorts of ways, so that in whatever direction you walk from any point, you are pretty sure to come to a bridge before long. Such is the town of Cambridge – the bridge over the Cam. Amongst these narrow, ugly, and dirty streets, are tumbled in some of the most beautiful academical buildings in the world.¹

Yet despite such imagery, this ‘irregular town’ was expanding rapidly. Between 1801 and 1851, the population of Cambridge almost trebled, rising from 10,087 to 27,815. The increase in population, in part the result of in-migration, was mirrored by the physical and spatial expansion of Cambridge away from the congested old town around the Castle and Market Square, a process facilitated by Enclosure Acts in 1801 and 1807, and the draining of Fenland. Suburban development was particularly evident towards the east along the Newmarket Road, where the population of Barnwell, in the parish of St Andrew the Less, rose from 252 in 1801 to 11,776 in 1851 (more than the town’s population had been in 1801). Yet there was also suburban development in the north towards Chesterton, in the west towards Newnham, and in the south towards Cherry Hinton and Trumpington.²

Although Cambridge was famed for its salubrity, the rapid growth of the population exacerbated social conditions in the central courts and alleyways of the town, as evidenced by William Ranger’s report to the General Board of Health in 1849, which revealed gross overcrowding, filthy and insanitary conditions, the absence of public baths, and an inadequate supply of freshwater. ‘The inhabitants’, he observed, ‘have no resource but the sluggish and polluted Cam’.³ Subsequently, improvements were effected when Cambridge was constituted a district under the terms of the 1848 Public Health Act and the Improvement Commissioners, established in 1788 with the responsibility for the lighting, paving, and drainage of the town, became the local Board of Health.⁴

During this period, Cambridge continued to serve as an important regional trading post, monopolizing commerce on the River Cam. As Pigot’s Directory observed in 1831, Cambridge has of late years been rendered a considerable thoroughfare…and being the county town, and owing to its advantageous situation at the head of the inland navigation from (Kings) Lynn, it unavoidably secures an extensive trade in coals and corn, particularly oats and barley.⁵

The town’s markets were famed throughout the county, with a corn market on Saturdays and a market for every weekday, except Sunday and Monday, for poultry and butter (chiefly from Norfolk and the Isle of Ely, which was also sent to the London markets), cheese (famously from Cottenham), fruit and fish, including freshwater fish from the Isle of Ely. Moreover, the two great fairs held in Cambridge each year – Sturbridge Fair and Midsummer Fair – provided a great mart for the county and was attended by wholesale dealers and country shopkeepers.⁶

The coming of the railways to Cambridge in 1845, when the Eastern Counties Railway line from London to Norwich was established, gave an added impetus to the economic development of the town. Prior to this, Cambridge had long been an important transport centre, with a profusion of daily coaching services to London, the Midlands, and East Anglia from local inns, especially the Hoop Hotel, the Eagle Inn, and the Sun Hotel. However, the advent of the railways, which provided closer and speedier access to the London markets, witnessed the gradual demise of travel by coach and its associated trades. It also encouraged further suburban development in the neighbourhood of the railway station at New Romsey; engendered new employment opportunities, particularly in the construction industry; and enhanced the town’s growing popularity as a tourist centre. Nevertheless, many of Cambridge’s trades and industries continued to depend in part on supplying the needs of its renowned university, with its 17 colleges and nearly 2,000 students by mid-century,⁷ through services such as banking, printing, tailoring, domestic service, and the law, whilst traditional retail trades and local industries, including iron and brass foundries, brick and tile works, currier’s works, breweries, maltings, flour mills, nurseries, and tobacco manufactories continued to flourish.⁸

However, the absence of a factory system or, indeed, of large manufactories, made class distinctions in Cambridge less polarized than in the industrial towns of the Midlands and the North, with the result that the class-segregated districts of the industrial city were largely absent from Cambridge. By 1851, the wealthier central parishes of St Mary the Great, St Giles, and St Andrew the Great, which encompassed some of the university colleges, contained a high proportion of professional, non-manual skilled workers and manual skilled workers. Here, over half of all women were employed as domestic servants, one-third of whom were live-in servants. By contrast, in St Andrew the Less (Barnwell), the bulk of the population were unskilled or low-skilled manual workers, with domestic service the major occupation for women, and parts of this densely populated and largely working-class district became synonymous with poverty, urban squalor, and crime by mid-century. Yet even here, there was a considerable body of professional and non-manual skilled workers and, as elsewhere in the town, people of all social classes lived in relatively close proximity to one another.⁹

Cambridge was essentially conservative, parochial, and paternalistic, and it had long been a corrupt Tory pocket borough, dominated by the Duke of Rutland and the Manners family, and by 1830, in a town with a population of 20,000, only 118 freemen had the vote, which was easily manipulated. However, parliamentary reform in 1832 briefly challenged Tory hegemony in the town. By the Reform Act, the Cambridge electorate in the parliamentary constituency was increased to 1,499, and in the election which followed, two Whig members of Parliament, George Pryme, professor of political economy at Trinity College, and the Right Hon. Thomas Spring Rice, secretary of state for war and later chancellor of the exchequer in Melbourne’s ministry, were elected to represent the town, albeit by narrow margins, serving until 1839 and 1841, respectively.¹⁰ Although Liberal members were again returned in 1845 (Robert Adair, later Ist Baron Waveney, until 1857) and 1847 (Hon. William Campbell, until 1852), thereafter, however, Tory members were returned consistently by both the parliamentary borough and Cambridge University, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Cambridge: The Unreformed System
• Chapter 2: The Problem of Crime
• Chapter 3: The Process of Police Reform (I): Establishing the ‘New Police’, 1836–47
• Chapter 4: The Process of Police Reform (II): Consolidation and Incorporation, 1848–56
• Chapter 5: The Policeman’s Lot
• Chapter 6: The Police and Crime
• Chapter 7: The Police and the Criminals
• Chapter 8: The Police and the Public
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index