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

of London . Bow Street mounted patrols operated as far out as Kent, Essex and Surrey, and the mounted officers, who were mostly concerned with apprehending highwaymen, were issued with firearms, a pattern that was not followed elsewhere in Britain until more than a century and a half had passed. Ten years later the Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, who was concerned about corruption among Bow Street Runners appointed an officer to supervise their activities. The officer himself continued to report to the magistrates.
    In 1829 the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, finally secured the Act which created the Metropolitan Police. The new force owed much to Peel’s former post as Chief Secretary for Ireland when he had set up the Royal Irish Constabulary to prevent civil disorder. The passage of the 1829 Act was only achieved by agreeing to accommodate a number of powerful interests. The City itself remained independent of the Metropolitan Police and acquired its own separate force ten years later which it retains. The Bow Street Runners, together with the forces associated with the other seven ‘public offices’ remained independent, under the control of their local magistrates, until 1839, when they were absorbed into the new force. The Thames River Police remained independent until the same date when it, too, became part of the Metropolitan Police and in 1836 the Bow Street horse patrols became the Mounted Police Division of the Metropolitan Police, losing their firearms in the process. Five years earlier the first special constables were introduced – laymen with the uniform and authority of a regular constable, but working as volunteers.
    The creation of the Metropolitan Police represented a decisive break with the past. On Saturday 26 September 1829 the recruits to the new force paraded in the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, Holborn, and were issued with their uniforms. The following Tuesday, at 6 p.m., they set out on their new beats. The old system of Charleys and reluctant ward constables was replaced by 3,000 ‘guinea a week’ constables in their blue coats, blue trousers and top hats. They were supervised by two commissioners who reported to the Home Secretary. One was Charles Rowan, a former soldier who had fought at Waterloo, and the other was Richard Mayne, a barrister, both of whom were sworn in as magistrates. The new force was not universally popular and on Guy Fawkes night, 1830, the two commissioners were burned in effigy. 41
    Many of the new constables were ex-soldiers, but their uniform had been chosen to emphasise the unmilitary character of the new force in a nation with a long-standing suspicion of standing armies – a distinction further emphasised by the decision to equip the conCatching stables with truncheons rather than firearms. Inspectors were allowed to carry pocket pistols. Three weeks training was given before launching the constables on an arduous routine of fourteen-hour days. This may account for the rapid turnover in the members of the new force. Of more than 3,000 recruits in 1829–30 three-quarters had left or been dismissed after four years. The constables’ truncheons were an emblem of their authority. They were encircled by a band of copper at one end engraved with the letters WR representing the authority of the monarch (William IV) who came to the throne in 1830. These features of their equipment account for the nicknames ‘coppers’ and ‘Old Bill’, while the alternative ‘Bobbies’ owes its origin to the Home Secretary himself, Robert Peel. The headquarters of the new force was in Whitehall Place whose rear entrance, Scotland Yard, gave its name to the building. A few Charleys survived the advent of the new force, one being photographed in his box in Brixton Road in about 1870.
    In 1835 and 1856 Acts of Parliament required boroughs to establish their own policing arrangements and the Metropolitan Police provided a model for the city, borough and county forces that