Newgate: London's Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday Read Free Book Online

Edmund Burke declared that, ‘The Justices of Middlesex were generally the scum of the earth – carpenters, brickmakers and shoemakers; some of whom were notoriously men of such infamous character that they were unworthy of any employ whatsoever.’ The quotations that open this chapter, written in 1729 and 1794, reflect the continuing corruption in provincial courts.
    Henry Fielding is remembered chiefly as an early exponent of the English novel whose depiction of life in eighteenth-century England was as sharp and unflinching as that of his friend and contemporary Hogarth. But Henry and John Fielding had brought about an irrevocable change in public expectations of the office of Justice of the Peace as exercised in London. Never again would corruption be regarded as an inevitable accompaniment of the office. In the words of a recent historian of the period, ‘Between them they made the name Fielding synonymous with peacekeeping for a generation of Londoners’. 39 They thereby set a pattern for the administration of justice in London and eventually elsewhere, which survives and flourishes in the twenty-first century.
    THE METROPOLITAN POLICE
     
    The work of the Fieldings was both appreciated and perpetuated, but many obstacles remained before a reasonably effective system of policing could be established. In 1785 the government introduced a Bill to extend throughout the metropolis a system of paid commissioners who would supervise a professional police force throughout the capital. The Bill failed because the Lord Mayor objected to any infringement of his jurisdiction within the square mile of the City of London itself and the Justices of the Peace, who had traditionally supervised policing, saw the commissioners as a threat to their authority. 40 In 1792 the government managed to secure the passage of a private member’s bill proposing a more restricted measure. The Middlesex Justices Act established throughout the metropolis seven other ‘public offices’ modelled on Bow Street. One of them was south of the river, in Southwark, though the City itself was excluded. Each office had three stipendiary magistrates, paid £400 a year, and six constables, paid 12 s a week. Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court survived into the 21st century and is now a luxury hotel. The buildings and personnel were funded by the Home Secretary, but Bow Street continued to be paid for from the Secret Service fund and the Bow Street office remained the personal property of the chief magistrate until this anomaly was removed in 1842. By 1835 there were thirty stipendiary magistrates in London, all barristers, and in the meantime the system had been extended to other communities, Manchester being the first in 1813. The title stipendiary magistrate was retained until the twenty-first century when it was replaced by the designation district judge.
    In 1795 a merchant and stipendiary magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun (1745–1820) who was a follower of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) estimated that over 100,000 people in London (more than 15 per cent of the population) lived largely on the proceeds of crime. He wrote a Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis , which advocated a national police service. This and all subsequent attempts to establish a national service were successfully opposed despite the advocacy of such influential figures as Bentham himself and the great social reformer Edwin Chadwick (1800–90). However, Colquhoun’s campaigning did bear fruit in 1798 in the creation, by a group of dockland merchants, of the private Thames River Police to protect their tempting and vulnerable premises from theft. The Thames River Police is thus the world’s oldest surviving police service.
    Further improvements slowly followed. In 1805 Bow Street horse patrols were instituted, following the model advocated by John Fielding exactly fifty years earlier in his 1755 Plan for Preventing Robberies Within Twenty Miles