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

swiftly followed, under the control of local authorities. Some were very small. The borough of Southwold, in Suffolk, had its own police force consisting of one constable. Detectives were introduced in the 1840s, an effective inspection regime in 1856 and in 1861 the blue lamp was installed outside police stations to give them a distinct identity. An exception was made for the police station in Bow Street to accommodate the sensibilities of Queen Victoria whose visits to the Opera House were not to be spoilt by recollections of the Blue Room at Windsor in which Prince Albert had died. Bow Street had a white lamp. In 1883 the Special Branch was formed (originally called the Special Irish Branch) to deal with terrorism and in the 1890s the Metropolitan Police began to experiment with fingerprinting, though it did not fully adopt the technique until 1901, as Newgate was about to be demolished. Formal training schemes for officers began at about the same time.
    None of these developments would have been foreseen by Henry or John Fielding, let alone by Jonathan Wild. Yet it remains true that the work of the playwright and his blind half-brother in establishing a reasonably honest system of detecting and punishing crime in the eighteenth century created a pattern which was later followed in London, Britain and throughout much of the world.
    POSTSCRIPT
     
    Patterns of criminal behaviour in the nineteenth century reflected changes in society and bear some strange resemblances to those of the later centuries. Burglary and murder peaked in the 1860s, but then declined, while major frauds became a more prominent feature of criminal behaviour as large business enterprises such as railways offered richer prizes to the devious. George Hudson (1800–71), the ‘railway king’, lost his fortune as a result of dishonesty, but was able to retire discreetly to the Continent in 1854 on a modest annuity. Three years later Leopold Redpath, an officer of the Great Northern Railway, was sentenced to transportation to Australia for embezzling £170,000, which had been set aside by his employers to invest in the new Metropolitan underground railway from Paddington to the City – a project that was consequently delayed for six years. In 1904 Whitaker Wright (1845–1904) was convicted of defrauding investors to the tune of £5 million in connection with the construction of the Bakerloo Line and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. A few minutes later he collapsed in the Law Courts, dead from a cyanide capsule he had been carrying. Such echoes of the twentieth century were heard again in the 1890s when the first instances of football hooliganism were recorded along with a spectacular brawl in the Old Kent Road which occurred on the August bank holiday, 1898. Many of the participants were drunk. Plus ça change !

FIVE
     
    After the Riots: The Decline of the Bloody Code
     
Executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?
    (Dr Samuel Johnson)
     
About fifty persons of both sexes who, whether awake or asleep, are beastly drunk from drinking deeply of rum, gin and beer, while every description of the most disgusting ribaldry is going on around.
    (A description of the crowd outside Newgate awaiting an execution)
     
There is as much moral cowardice in shrinking from the execution of a murderer as in hesitating to blow out the brains of a foreign invader … the plain truth is that Christianity has to have two sides. A gentle side up to a certain point, a terrific one beyond that point.
    (Sir James Stephen, jurist)
    CIVIL DISORDER
     
    Despite the success of the Fielding brothers, the latter half of the eighteenth century continued to witness the well-established traditions of rioting and other forms of civil disorder,