SCOTLAND YARD

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 124, 21 November 1935, Page 25

SCOTLAND YARD

HOW IT GREW DIFFICULT EARLY DAYS POLICEMEN MISTRUSTED It is a far cry from the London watchmen of the seventeenth century, with their rattles, staves, and lanterns, and their incurable instinct for sleeping on duty, to the modern Flying Squad of the Metropolitan Police, armed with swift motor-cars and wireless telephony. The story of the development of the twentieth-century policeman.covers a period of 250 years, and it is the theme of Sir Basil Thompson's book, "The Story of Scotland Yard," says a writer in "John o' London's Weekly." There are two outstanding dates in this long history, and each is closely associated with the name of a famous man. The first is 1748, the year in which Sir Henry Fielding, impecunious author, playwright, journalist, and barrister, was appointed Magistrate at Bow Street at a salary which was supposed to amount to £IOOO a year, but which did not actually reach that figure. The streets of London at that time were in a deplorable state of anarchy. Single-handed crime, organised gangsterdom, and mass disorders were every-day events. Gin drinking, unemployment, and appalling overcrowding in dismal and insanitary slums were the three great recruiting sergeants for the army of the underworld, and the unfortunate watchmen were far more likely to be savagely assaulted than to make an arrest. Yielding saw at once that a body of regularly enlisted and regularly paid police was an absolute essential to the security of life and property in London, and it was a memoraote day when he founded such a body. As Sir Basil Thompson points out, "Fielding was in fact the. instrument out of which grew the institution of the Metropolitan, Police in 1829, for very early in his service he found it necessary to institute a body of paid police who came to be known as the Bow Street Hunners." .

This famous Institution was a great advance on the, previous anarchy, but it could only touch a small fringe of the trouble. London was steadily increasing in size. The Napoleonic wars were throwing up a new type of desperado. The rising tide of industrialism was attracting more and more tough characters into the slums of the cities, and the hideous penalties for the most trivial crimes made every criminal into a potential murderer. To be convicted of stealing a watch meant execution, so the watch-stealer was inclined to remove at least' one material witness by murdering the owner of the watch at the same time. By 1820 certain clear-sighted men had been convinced, partly by common sense and partly by such sensational events as the murders in the Ratcliff Highway and the Cato Street conspiracy, that the Bow Street Runners had outrun their usefulness and that a regular Metropolitan Police Force was essential. STRONG OPPOSITION. The leader of these men was, of course, Sir Robert Peel, who became Home Secretary in 1822 and at once appointed a committee under his own chairmanship to consider the matter. Opposition was strong and vocal. The committee sat for three months, and, despite his advocacy of a police force directly under the control of the Gov-

erhment, it reported that it was impossible "to reconcile any effective system of police with that. perfect freedom of action and exemption from interference which was one of the great privileges and blessings of society in this country." Undaunted, Peel concentrated for a time upon reform of the criminal law and especially attacked the "old obsessesion that severity of punishment was the best preventive of crime," and then got a second committee appointed which recommended what he had at heart. In 1829 he introduced his Metropolitan Police Bill, and secured its passage in the face of vehement opposition from John Bright. That year was the second vital date in the history of Scotland Yard.

FIRST INSTRUCTIONS. It is a notable thing that the first general instructions to the new body laid down principles that have stood the test of time ever since:— "The primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime; the next that of detection and punishment. The protection of life and property, the preservation of public tranquillity, and the absence of crime will alone prove whether those efforts have been successful and whether the objects for which the police were appointed have been attained." The early days were difficult. Many people were distrustful of the men in tall hats and blue uniforms. Petitions were presented for the repeal of the Act. And the agitation for the Eeform Bill had thrown the whole country into a menacing state of unrest in which any clash between rioters and police could easily be represented by agitators as another savage blow at the masses by the classes. But the police on the whole kept their heads and steadily gained ground in the esteem of the citizenry, particularly for their tactful manner of handling mobs. The mob has been, presumably since the earliest days of mankind, a terrifying thing. Sir Basil quotes an American writer as saying that any mass of human beings, gathered together for no. definite object, acts normally up to a point, when entirely hew forces begin to act. When this moment arrives, all self-control is repudiated; decent and orderly men become desperadoes; cowards are inspired by a senseless bravado; the calm reason of common sense gives place to the insanity of licence. THE C.I.D. FOUNDED.

The first two Commissioners, by their wise methods, neither ignoring mobs nor trampling them down with horsemen, laid the foundation of the extraordinary skill in the v handling of crowds which is one of the chief merits of the London Police today. The next step was the foundation, in 1842, of the C.1.D.; and there was plenty of work for the new branch, what with the outbreak of garrotting and the forging activities of Jtm the Penman and the poisoning activities of Palmer of Rugeley. In 1864 took place the first train murder and the plainclothes officers caught their man. By this time the Metropolitan Police was firmly established, although its personnel was by no means as well chosen or well organised as it might have been. THE YOUNG BARRISTER.

Once again there was a wave of disorder, in the seventies and eighties. The Fenians were active with their dynamite; ticket-of-leave men without supervision roamed like beasts of prey in their old haunts; the garrotte was busy. Public unrest was rising, when a briefless young barrister named, Howard Vincent saw his chance. He rushed to Paris, studied French methods, and returned with a report on police work which got him the post of Director of Criminal Investiga-

tion at Scotland Yard. He was the first man to organise the C.I.D. on really sound principles. He was no detective himself, but he arranged matters so as to give the greatest possible assistance to his skilled detectives. Things were not very easy in those days. It must be remembered that when Howard Vincent took office there was no training school for detectives; no finger-print identification; no crime index; no proper filing of photographs; no indexing of the methods practised by criminals. All these improvements came after his time. It is indeed surprising that when there was so little mechanical aid to detection the early detectives did so well.

THE LAST LINK. But the beginnings were well and truly made, and the organisation improved year by year. The finger-print system, the card index, the wireless, the Flying Squad, all these are details on the main structure started by Fielding and continued by Peel. Sir Basil brings his story down to the present day, and mentions the last link in the chain up to date—the foundation of the Police College at Hendon. He also discusses a number of famous crimes in which Scotland Yard men have been involved. Curiously enough, he is much less happy in his narrative of these than in his historical chapters. His description of the oft-told tale of the Brides in the Bath case si long and dull, and in the Sidney Street affair he misses all the really dramatic moments. And I am astonished that he makes no reference at all to the redoubtable Charles Peace, whose great series of singlehanded burglaries in South London must have caused a vast deal of worry to the police. Then, too, surely no history of Scotland Yard can be really complete without some record of the truly prodigious efforts made to solve the case known as Trunk Murder Number One. Probably team-work in the art of detection has never been carried to such a pitch. Nevertheless, his book is readable and interesting.