Policing the Factory: Theft, Private Policing and the Law in Modern England by Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox (review)

One of the steps taken in forging the modern workplace, according to Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox, was the transformation of customary job-related perquisites into criminal infractions. Long present in domestic textile processing, “workplace appropriation,” or theft from the job site, was one such perquisite (3). In Policing the Factory: Theft, Private Policing and the Law in Modern England, Godfrey and Cox analyze workplace appropriation in the nineteenth century. They explore whether the centralization of work processes within the factory caused thefts to decrease, investigate the controls that employers imposed on their workforces, and determine the extent to which factory security mechanisms interacted with public policing.

The worsted industry is a natural subject for such a focus, since textile processing was in the vanguard of industrialization and because the industry was covered by legislation that criminalized the appropriation of work materials. The 1749 Worsted Act enabled authorities to search workers’ homes for materials that had been given out for finishing at home but never returned. Later acts expanded this regime, putting the burden of proof of innocence on the worker. Employers could decide on a case-by-case basis whether to prosecute an employee summarily under the Worsted Acts or to do so at quarter sessions before a jury.

Policing the Factory functions best as a social history of the workplace. In worsted factories nothing was off limits from worker appropriation: drive belts, brass bolts, ends of cloth, pieces of waste warp, oil, charcoal, and soap were all purloined. Workers hid goods in factory yards or in outhouses for others to pick up later, stuffed them into their clothing, or carried them away in baskets. Foremen and warehousemen took advantage of the belief that social position connoted good character in order to doctor books and steal finished goods. Once in the possession of stolen goods, workplace thieves benefited from an enormous market for scrap and waste goods. Alternatively, they used pawnshops or publicans who refrained from asking questions to fence their wares.

One of the most interesting sections of the book details the methods by which factory owners regulated their workforces. Most workers lacked written contracts. Rules, however, were posted and read to new employees. The point person in factory discipline was the foreman or overseer, who was responsible for combating employees’ theft of time on the job and for preventing workers’ attempts to steal goods. Foremen used a combination of negotiation, threats of prosecution, and, with female and young workers, violence or threats of violence, to maintain productivity. Even the architecture of the factory could contribute to worker discipline, with approved routes for walking around the factory and, increasingly, walls that prevented workers from passing goods to people on the outside.

In addition, the worsted industry maintained its own private police force. The Worsted Committee, established by statute in 1777 and composed of twenty-seven northern worsted manufacturers, employed their own inspectors, who deployed detective skills to catch offenders. The Committee was funded by a tax on soap. Men transitioned from the worsted inspectorate into public police forces and vice versa; the two forces complemented each other, with public police forces gladly leaving the worsted inspectorate to patrol factories and pursue factory crime. In 1853 Gladstonian budget cuts forced the Worsted Committee to gut its inspectorate until the 1870s, when a downturn in the industry forced manufacturers to hire inspectors again to protect their interests. Aside from this brief period, Godfrey and Cox argue, the Worsted Inspectorate performed its job well for two hundred years, demonstrating that public policing was not the only viable option.

One frustrating aspect of this book is the authors’ tendency to speculate in the absence of evidence: the conjectural “may have” becomes an authorial tic. Workers may have appropriated goods in order to supplement their incomes...