This book focuses on the lives of ordinary English constables in the city police forces of Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool from 1900 to 1939. What this book is not is a history of police headquarters, criminal investigation departments, and specialized units, or an exploration of government criminal justice policies and legislation except insofar as any of these affected the ranks. Excellent studies have been published on policing as an institution, yet in most of them the constables walking their beats have remained anonymous. Laws were passed and policemen were meant to enforce them; disturbances erupted and policemen were meant to...

The young men taking the police oath of office typically had no clear idea about what kind of job they were in for. Before joining a police force, most held the common working-class perception that police constables were paid a regular wage for walking around doing little more than keeping their eyes open and collaring drunks. Some even considered that policemen duped local authorities into paying them for ‘soft’ work. Many combined this ‘plodder’ image with impressions from popular stories by Edgar Wallace, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Arthur Morrison with their mostly dull, stupid policemen but also a few cunning...

The daily life of police constables did not consist of walking about doing little, nor were constables the perfect neutral ideal or part of a police thriller. While policemen received public attention for their actions during disturbances and strikes, or for dramatic rescues of people and animals, the vast majority of their work was routine. They walked their beats, checking the security of doors, and talking with neighbours. They directed traffic, stopped runaway horses, and fished people out of rivers and canals. Civilians handed over lost children and property, and stray dogs. The law-breaking they discovered tended to be minor...

The police constable who carried out his duties without question existed only in fiction and police instruction books. Actual constables sidestepped orders to make their jobs less irksome, ignored orders they considered unfair, and made mistakes. Many infractions remained undiscovered or unrecorded; police memoirs usually related at least one instance when a default went unnoticed.² One new constable remembered senior men telling him the locations of safe places to ‘skulk in’ and smoke, of peep shows, and of night watchmen with coal fires. Though taking advantage of this information, he was never caught.³ All constables broke rules at some point...

Police uniforms made the public susceptible to mistaking constables for parts of a monolithic entity. In reality policemen acted out contradictory patterns of internal hostilities and loyalties, both within ranks and up and down the police hierarchy. Constables working street beats and traffic points united in their resentment of policemen who worked as office staff and of the detective branch over the distribution of privileges and recognition. Yet the same men belonged to rival groups organized around patronage networks, regional backgrounds, and religion. Both older and newer constables grumbled about the growing burden of duties but quarrelled with each other...

During the nineteenth century, policing had been ranked as an unskilled working-class job, comparable to unskilled agricultural labourers. Three-quarters of constables left with under five years’ service, and only fifteen per cent made it to retirement age.² Few of the men patrolling the streets qualified as experienced policemen. With the 1890 Police Act and growing police responsibilities, this began to change. In Manchester, of the men joining between 1900 and 1914, only a third left with under four years’ service, and nearly a quarter put in at least twenty-six years of service.³ The numbers remaining in the force might have...

Much of the animosity between policemen and the public displayed itself in ‘incivility’, hurling insults back and forth, but also regularly crossed the line into physical conflicts. Disputes often began in different perceptions of appropriate behaviour. Constables exercised discretion in deciding which laws to enforce, whether to make arrests or issue summonses, and what force was merited. Civilians tended to think that constables were overreacting to minor offences when stopping them, charging them, or arresting them. Conflicts rarely had obvious guilty or innocent parties. Both sides typically made some provocative gesture, and both sides believed that their own actions had...

In the course of their daily lives, constables came into contact with many levels of society, and, as shown in the previous chapter, these meetings could be antagonistic and violent. More often, outside of traffic infractions, encounters were prosaic and civil. Members of the middle and upper classes usually only approached policemen to ask for directions or for minor assistance. Small businessmen were an important exception, tending to exchange greetings with the constables patrolling their streets. Most police contact was with the more numerous working class. Living in crowded cities, they were more likely to be victims of theft and...

As seen in previous chapters, constables had both friendly and acrimonious relationships with civilians, including women, that fit into the larger working-class culture. Police efforts to maintain police neutrality had limited success, and nowhere was discipline more aggravating than when it disrupted men’s contacts with women. Women created a particular strain between the strong male culture fostered in police forces which reinforced working-class male chauvinism and force expectations that men behave with the utmost civility. This culture created a tendency to treat women as subordinate at the same time that it created indignation when senior officers meddled in courtships and...

The domestic lives of constables and their families, the dynamics of their marriages, and their interactions with neighbours followed common working-class patterns. Couples came from similar backgrounds, often from families in similar professions, and tended to be close in age. They met through family and friends, at work and at dances. Most married when they were in their early to mid-twenties and had two or three children. Wives expected their husbands to hand over their wages, and husbands expected their wives to run the household. They fought if expectations were not met, if the husband did not earn enough or...

The preceding chapters have described men entering the police force and living with its conditions and restrictions. Some did not make beyond their probationary year. Quite a few were dismissed or asked to resign for committing defaults, though fewer as force discipline improved after the war. But outside these cases, a significant minority of qualified constables left the police force before reaching retirement age. Some left voluntarily. Their reasons for leaving, and for losing the supposedly irresistible police pension, fell into two basic categories.² First, men in their first years of service discovered that they did not care for or...

In many ways, the prospects of a constable joining in the 1930s had changed considerably from a constable joining in the 1900s. The 1900s recruit had one chance in three that he would take off his uniform within three years, while the 1930s recruit had only one chance in seven. Policemen perceived the 1933 drop in recruits pay to sixty-two shillings¹ as a setback from the 1919 Police Act standard of seventy shillings, even during a period of deflation, but overall pay and conditions were a vast improvement over prewar standards. However, even with better educational standards and recognition as...