Not So New Scotland Yard

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30454, 30 May 1964, Page 4

Not So New Scotland Yard

[A Fourth Leader tn “The Times"]

Once upon a time the choicest spot in all Scotland Yard was an old public house. There, in a dark wainscoted room cheered by the glow of a mighty fire, sat lusty coalheavers drinking large draughts, puffing volumes of smoke, and telling old legends of what the Thames had been like when the Patent Shot Manufactory was not built and Waterloo Bridge had never been thought of. They would shake their heads with portentous looks, to the deep edification of the rising generation of heavers, who crowded round them, and wondered where all this would end. So the young Dickens, sketching as Boz, described a territory which he said was first accidentally discovered by a country gentleman who lost his way in the Strand. Dickensian coalheavers, apprehensive for the future of their little nook of London, must have disgusted the ghosts of the kings and queens of Scotland whose “parcel of land” in the English capital they had usurped. Banished in their turn, as they had foreseen, the coalheavers may have enjoyed some hearty laughs as they haunted the Yard after it had been taken over by the Force. This, it is sometimes said, happened only in 1842, when the detective branch was established in a separate building. But the police office set up in 1829 at a private house in Whitehall Place was entered from Scotland Yard, and these two now magic words occur in official documents as early as that date. It is true

that the move to New Scotland Yard took place only in 1890. Still, one way and another, the link in fact and fiction is a long one. We may be sure that the Home Secretary’s statement that the Yard is to be exiled down Victoria Street way will cause at least two indignant ghosts to walk. They make dramatically contrasting figures. The one is a “little, sallow, rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow” and the other “tall, white-faced, flax-en-haired, with a notebook in his hand.” Watson knew them —G. Lestrade and Tobias Gregson—as recipients of that grudging accolade from Holmes: “the pick of a bad lot.”

It is unfair to all the generations of flesh and blood detectives who have gone out from the Yard and brought so many murderers and criminals to justice that their fictitious colleagues should be remembered before them. But they take a professional pride in being unobtrusive and they must long since have got used to finding the detective the Aunt Sally of a crime story. Some of them may like the idea of moving into a skyscraper. But the prospect of their old pitch being used by civil servants who have to face nothing more dangerous than a file should bring all the ghosts together.