The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  The King’s luxurious cars were, of course, extremely expensive both to buy and to run; and most people still considered, as The Illustrated London News put it in 1905, that the motor-omnibus, which had ‘come to stay, had the same attraction for the masses as the motor car had ‘for the classes’.44 But small cars were available for well under £200 and these could be run for about 4d a mile. The Vanguard, a cheap, economical car introduced in 1908, was designed especially for doctors.

  By 1910 over 100,000 cars had been registered as compared with 23,000 in 1903 when registration became compulsory; and by 1914 the number had risen to 132,000. Most of these were either imported or were assembled in England for Henry Ford’s company in Detroit; but by the time war broke out William Morris’s factory in Oxford was producing his bull-nosed Morris-Oxfords which did up to fifty miles on a gallon of petrol, could travel at fifty miles an hour, and cost £165. The increasing cheapness of private transport was beginning to bring about a transformation in English society as momentous as that brought about earlier in the century by the coming of the railways.

  58 Law and Order

  When Mr and Mrs Manning were hanged on the roof of Horsemonger Lane gaol in 1849, Charles Dickens was ‘astounded and appalled by the wickedness’ of the spectacle. ‘You have no idea what the hanging of the Mannings really was,’ he told a friend. ‘The conduct of the people was so indescribably frightful that I felt for some time afterwards almost as if I were living in a city of devils.’1 As late as 1864, at the execution of Franz Müller for the murder of a bank clerk in a railway carriage, The Times reported that ‘robbery and violence, loud laughing, oaths, fighting, obscene conduct and still more filthy language reigned round the gallows far and near’. The spectators comprised the most ‘incorrigible dregs’ of London – ‘sharpers, thieves, gamblers, betting men, the outsiders of the boxing ring … the rakings of cheap singing halls and billiard rooms’.2

  For centuries such scenes had been common at public executions, yet it was not until 1868 that a private Member’s Bill – introduced by J. T. Hibbert and providing for the future carrying-out of executions within prison walls – was accepted by the government; and it was to be a further century before sentence to death by hanging was abandoned.

  It had long been held that capital punishment was an essential deterrent not only for murder but for crimes against property too. In the early years of the nineteenth century Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, had strenuously opposed a suggestion that shoplifters found guilty of stealing less than 10s should not be hanged. He was convinced, he said, ‘with the rest of the judges, that public expediency [required] there should be no remission of the terror denounced against this description of offenders. Such will be the consequences of the repeal of this statute that I am certain depredations to an unlimited extent would immediately be committed.’3

  It was a familiar argument. It had been advanced against Sir Samuel Romilly who had urged his fellow-Members to remember that ‘cruel punishments have an inevitable tendency to produce cruelty in the people’ and who had committed suicide in a sudden access of despair after the failure of yet another of his Bills attempting to reduce the number of capital offences. And it had been advanced against Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton who had declared in a parliamentary debate: ‘We rest our hopes on the hangman; and in this vain and deceitful confidence in the ultimate punishment of crime, forget the very first of our duties – its prevention.’

  In Fowell Buxton’s day an extraordinary number of crimes were punishable by death. According to his own estimate, there were as many as 223 of them, four made capital in the reign of the Plantagenets, twenty-six in the reign of the Tudors, thirty-six in the time of the Stuarts and no less than 156 since.4 Apart from such crimes as treason, murder, piracy, arson, stealing, rape, sodomy and various breaches of the game laws, which had been capital offences for many years, it was an offence punishable by death to send a letter demanding money signed with a fictitious name, to impersonate a Chelsea Pensioner, to make a false entry in the books of the Bank of England, to strike a Privy Councillor, to damage Westminster Bridge, to refuse to remain in quarantine, and to commit many other crimes, more or less reprehensible, some of which had not even been crimes, let alone capital ones, before.5

  Admittedly the numbers of malefactors hanged were not so high as they had been in previous centuries; but executions were still common enough. A witness giving evidence to a parliamentary committee said that he had twice seen forty men hanged in a single day; and out of every twenty criminals hanged, so it was estimated, eighteen were less than twenty-one years old. Many were under fifteen. In 1801 a boy aged thirteen was sentenced to death for breaking into a house and stealing a spoon; two sisters aged eight and eleven were similarly sentenced at Lynn in 1808; and as late as 1831 a boy of nine at Chelmsford for setting fire to a house. Two years later another boy of nine was sentenced to death for pushing a stick through a cracked shop window and taking two pennyworth of printer’s colour.6 Yet there were those who argued that the failure of executions to reduce the rate of crime was due to hanging being Not Punishment Enough. This was the title of a pamphlet whose author recommended breaking on the wheel, hanging alive in chains and whipping to death as punishments more likely to serve the purposes of deterrence. Others advocated castration and branding.

  The arguments of the reformers, however, gradually began to gain ground. It could not, after all, be denied that the so-called ‘Bloody Code’ was not only bloody but that it did not work, that while men were being publicly hanged for robbery, burglary and housebreaking, these crimes had been increasing for many years, were still increasing and continued to increase.

  In 1819 the House of Commons carried a motion for the appointment of a Committee of Inquiry into the Criminal Laws; and although the practical achievements which followed the committee’s Report were negligible, the long debates served to keep the reform of the criminal law in the public mind and to prepare the way for the work which Robert Peel began soon after his appointment to the Home Secretaryship in 1821. By a series of Acts passed between 1823 and 1827 Peel abolished capital punishment for several offences and made it possible for courts to abstain from pronouncing the death sentence for all convicted persons except murderers. He also abolished Benefit of Clergy and reduced over 300 confused statutes into four intelligible Acts. Gibbeting was abolished in 1834, the pillory in 1837. In 1831 out of 1601 persons sentenced to death, only fifty-two were executed, and three years later the City of London was obliged to dismiss one of its two salaried executioners as there was so little work for him to do.7

  Peel realized, as few other reformers had done, that reform of the criminal law was dependent upon police reform and it was towards the reorganization of the police that he cautiously but surely moved. He had to contend with deeply ingrained prejudices. For generations Englishmen had preferred to rely upon the severity of the criminal law, and the offer of rewards to those who brought criminals to justice, rather than upon a professional police. The very word police – a French word not used in official English until 1714 – was, in its modern sense, unknown. The idea of policemen paid by the government might be all very well for Frenchmen, it was widely held, but such a concept would never do for the freedom-loving island race of Englishmen. Besides, so it was also argued, the cost of a professional police force would be prohibitive. The loss of hundreds and thousands of pounds worth of goods and money stolen each year was more acceptable than the supposedly exorbitant cost of paying enough men to prevent it.

  So the enforcement of law and the maintenance of order were left in the hands of voluntary associations or armed civilians; trained bands of respectable citizens like John Gilpin; military guards; watchmen and constables, often decrepit and sometimes corrupt; thief-takers who were paid for the convictions they were able to contrive; and magistrates and their staffs, very few of whom were as competent as those at Bow Street in the days of Sir Thomas de Veil, Henry Fielding, his blind half-broth
er Sir John, and of the parish constables who were trained there, the prototypes of the celebrated Bow Street Runners. The more successful Sir John Fielding’s men and his horse and foot patrols had become, however, the less the government had been prepared to support him. As soon as crime seemed less prevalent, his allowances had been reduced; and after his death the reputation of the Bow Street Runners began to decline.8

  Occasionally a series of crimes or outbreaks of violence prompted calls for a more efficient system of law enforcement. The Gordon Riots in London had made people aware of the problems presented by a large and unruly underworld, growing year by year and scarcely submerged beneath the level of respectable life; but calls for a professional police, based on the better aspects of the French police, went unheeded. And when in 1811 there were several horrifying murders in Ratcliffe Highway, and the incompetence of justices and parish constables was once more revealed, the Morning Post expressed a common sentiment when it declared that ‘either respectable householders must determine to be their own guardians, or we must have a regularly enlisted armed police under the orders of proper officers’. Yet the panic engendered by the murders soon relapsed into complacency. ‘They have an admirable police at Paris,’ wrote John William Ward, ‘but they pay for it dear enough. I had rather half a dozen people’s throats be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances.’9

  There had been a similar reaction in 1820 after a battalion of the 3rd Foot Guards mutinied during a riot. ‘In my opinion,’ the Duke of Wellington told the Earl of Liverpool, the Prime Minister, ‘the government ought, without the loss of a moment’s time to adopt measures to form either a police [force] in London or a military corps, which should be of a different description from the regular military force, or both.’10

  Yet it was not until 1829, seven years after Lord Liverpool had appointed him Home Secretary, that Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act at last became law. This Act provided for a new force of paid constables commanded by two Justices, later called Commissioners, who were given offices in Whitehall Place, the back of which opened on to a courtyard known as Scotland Yard. When the two Commissioners – a barrister and an army officer – moved to these offices a new era in the history of police had begun.

  Less than three months after its establishment, Wellington wrote to Peel to congratulate him upon ‘the entire success of the London police’. Almost the whole of the metropolis had been divided into police divisions, sections and beats; and constables armed with short wooden batons and wearing top hats and blue tail coats, with the number and letter of their division on their collars, had appeared in the streets. The force had certainly been organized with remarkable speed, but it aroused widespread resentment among the public at large and there was much dissatisfaction among the constables themselves. They were very poorly paid and the commissioners’ difficulties in finding suitable men were reflected in the number of dismissals – nearly 5000 – between 1830 and 1838. In these years there were also more than 6000 resignations, most of them being ‘not altogether voluntary’.11 Superintendents received £200 a year, inspectors £100, sergeants 22s 6d a week and constables (after 2s had been deducted for their uniforms) 19s a week. Their pay remained low throughout the century in the early years of which they supplemented it by asking householders on their beats for a Christmas box.12

  The dislike and distrust of the police extended to almost all classes of people until 1833 when about 500 constables were called out to control a political demonstration in Cold Bath Fields. The mob threw stones at them and three of them were stabbed and one killed. At the subsequent inquest on the dead constable, a prejudiced jury – against all the evidence – brought in a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’, while the government attempted to shuffle responsibility on to the Commissioners. Even the most extreme radicals who had been in the crowd acknowledged that both the jury’s verdict and the government’s behaviour were grossly unfair, and a reaction in favour of the police set in. Former critics of the system found good things to say of the force; parishes outside the Metropolitan district asked to be taken into it; and soon provincial towns were asking for police officers trained in London to come to their help.

  For in the provinces, where the old parochial system still prevailed, crime was rising fast as criminals, driven out of London by the new force, began to operate there. The proportion of known bad characters to the general population had risen, so it was calculated in 1837, to one in forty-five in Liverpool, to one in thirty-one in Bristol and as high as one in twenty-seven in Newcastle-on-Tyne.13 Two years later an Act was passed permitting counties to raise and equip paid police forces. Essex was the first county to take advantage of this Act and the results were so immediately favourable that the adjoining counties of Suffolk, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire were encouraged to follow Essex’s example. Other counties, some of them in the face of strong opposition, did the same. By May 1853, however, there were still twenty-two counties completely without a professional police force, and in these counties those who had been robbed were liable to be presented with a bill similar to that presented to a poor man in Wiltshire whose boots were stolen by a thief. He chased the man and, having caught him, handed him over to a constable who eventually presented him with an account for a sum far in excess of the value of his boots:

  £ s d

  To apprehending prisoner 2 6

  To maintaining prisoner

  (2 days) 3 0

  To guard watching (one night) 2 6

  Conveyance of prisoner at 9d

  a mile and allowance to

  constable at 8d a mile

  2 15 5

  3 days’ loss of time 15 0

  Hire of conveyance, coach

  and other fares 1 1 2

  * * *

  4 19 714

  * * *

  The man to whom this bill was presented might have been considered lucky to find a constable willing to help him at all, for many could not. One constable, in a far from exceptional instance, apologized for not being able to come out to quell a riot but he ‘sent his staff by bearer’.15 Men understandably felt that they must continue to protect their houses from burglars with spring guns and man-traps – although these had been declared illegal in 1827 – and in Cambridgeshire they chased thieves with bloodhounds.16 This unsatisfactory state of affairs was brought to an end at last in 1856 when a Police Act made it obligatory for all counties to raise and maintain a professional constabulary.

  The prisons to which sentenced malefactors were committed were still under local control. A hundred years before about half of them were privately owned and conditions in them had been appalling. As John Howard, author of The State of Prisons in England and Wales, had discovered, they were generally so disgusting that more people died in them of that ‘putrid, contagious and very pestilential’ disease known as gaol fever than were executed. Prisoners were starved and beaten, chained to stone floors and forced to pay for ‘easement of irons’ by gaolers who made large sums by selling gin to those who could afford it. The overcrowding in prisons had been alleviated by the transportation of criminals at first to America and then to Australia and – when these convenient dumping grounds for the unwanted had to be abandoned – by the incarceration of men in the now idle convict ships. But, if less crowded, prisons were no less unpleasant; and two Inspectors of Prisons appointed in 1835 found that in many conditions had scarcely improved in 100 years. In Newgate, for example – although, thanks to the unremitting efforts of Elizabeth Fry, ‘more system and a greater semblance of decorum was maintained’ in the female side – the main part of the prison was a disgrace to humanity. Men convicted of homosexual offences were shut up in the same wards as young boys awaiting trial and slept on the same rope mats with them; minor offenders were put with hardened criminals awaiting transportation; lunatics with those who were pretending to be mad. The ward which a newcomer entered was settled by priso
ners, known as wardsmen, to whom the governor assigned this duty and to whom bribes were openly paid. Most of the prisoners were in rags; food was served out by the wardsmen who made as much money out of this duty as they could.

  The days were passed in idleness, debauchery, riotous quarreling, immoral conversation, gambling, instruction in all nefarious processes, lively discourse upon past criminal exploits, elaborate discussion of others to be perpetrated after release. No provision whatever was made for the employment of prisoners. Drink, in more or less unlimited quantities, was still to be had … Women saw men if they merely pretended to be wives … Perhaps the worst feature of the visiting system was the permission accorded to male prisoners to have access to the female side.17

  Newgate, which covered a site upon which a prison had stood since the twelfth century, had been rebuilt in 1780–83 after its destruction in the Gordon Riots. Since then other modern prisons had appeared in London. In 1821 Millbank Penitentiary had been completed on lines suggested by Jeremy Bentham’s The Panopticon or Inspection House. In the shape of a six-pointed star, it was a gloomy place on marshy ground by the banks of the river where the Tate Gallery now stands. It sprawled over seven acres, and one warder after several years of service still had to mark the walls with chalk so that he did not lose his way in the three miles of labyrinthine passages and winding staircases. Prisoners were confined to separate cells, where they made shoes and stitched mailbags, and were forbidden to communicate with each other during the first half of their sentences. Both the locality and the diet were extremely unhealthy and in 1822–3 epidemics of scurvy and cholera swept through the prison, killing thirty inmates. The male survivors were removed to hulks while the building was being fumigated, the women being pardoned, as this was felt to be the only way of restoring their health.