Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in Middlesbrough, c. 1840-1914, and: The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829-1914 (review)

During the past twenty years, in part through the endeavours of scholars such as Clive Emsley, David Philips, Robert Storch, and David Taylor, the burgeoning historiography of crime and policing has established the broad picture of police development in modern England and Wales, local variations notwithstanding, and has illustrated the complex relationships binding together criminals, the police, and their wider community. It is in this latter context that Taylor's stimulating and succinct microstudy of the development of policing in Middlesbrough, which usefully complements his earlier studies, The New Police In Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control (1997) and Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914 (1998), should be placed.

Mid-nineteenth-century Middlesbrough exhibited many of the characteristics of a frontier town, with an expanding economy based on the coal export, iron, engineering, and shipbuilding trades and a rapidly increasing, notably youthful, and disproportionately male population packed into overcrowded, unhealthy, and frequently turbulent working-class districts. The town was incorporated in 1853, when a watch committee was established, and by 1856, following the implementation of the County and Borough Police Act, this volatile community was policed by an embryonic force of thirteen men. Thereafter, although some of the problems faced by other provincial authorities in creating efficient police forces during the period were evident in Middlesbrough—including high turnover rates, compounded by dismissals from the force through drunkenness, neglect of duty, insubordination, and immorality—a gradual improvement was effected. Indeed, the force met with some success: by the 1860s there had been a reduction of thirty percent in the serious crime rate (located overwhelmingly in crimes against property, most notably larceny), while the level of petty crime no longer appeared to be a major cause of alarm to the police and the watch committee, for much drunkenness and associated violence was contained geographically within the working- class districts of the old town by a police strategy that combined benign neglect with firm action when matters got out of hand. However, Taylor also shows that the complex and often tense relationship between the police and the public during this early phase of new policing in Middlesbrough, compounded by issues of class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as by instances of overzealous and inefficient policing, is less easy to ascertain; while some sections of the working-class populace, including the relatively large Irish community, resented the police presence (as the level of assaults on the police illustrated), hostility to the police was by no means uniform, and most inhabitants appear to have adopted a pragmatic approach, gradually accepting their presence and assistance, albeit without displaying any great affection for them.

By 1870, when the "frontier" stage in Middlesbrough's development ended, the core of a stable and efficient police force of thirty-nine men was in place. But the force faced acute challenges during the late-Victorian and Edwardian years in a changing demographic, economic, and social environment where, despite improvements in the standard of living for the middle classes and skilled workers, life for the bulk of the town's working classes continued to be characterised by poverty and insecurity in a squalid and brutalising environment rife with intemperance, immorality, and crime. This provided the context for the further augmentation of the force to 134 men by 1911 and, despite the arduous physical demands of the job, an increasing proportion of these recruits, influenced in part by improved wages and conditions of service, regarded policing as a long-term career rather than as a short-term expedient. Moreover, extended service in the force, coupled with...