Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  WHY DO NON HOME DEPARTMENT POLICE FORCES GET MISSED WHEN LEGISLATION IS BEING DRAFTED? Note: The Home Department is the traditional name for the Home Office and the Home Secretary is technically the Secretary of State for the Home Department.   In this and other pieces I tend to use the titles interchangeably.   I hope that by confusing my readers I can distract them from the boring nature of the blog itself.   One part of my work lies in the field of research.   This is not well paid and is a somewhat lonely pastime, but I do enjoy the thrill of tracking down information in archives, dusty corners of the internet and guiding people around bits of London. I find that there is often an overlap between the past and present, indeed life is a continuum.    The present is a product of the past.   The influence of what has come before is often apparent in what is done today. Frequently to understand the modern operating context we have to get pa...

I had a chat today about the challenges of managing potential football disorder away from grounds.   As always everybody was keen to remember that more than 99% of people attending football matches are there to enjoy themselves in a way that poses no threats to the King’s peace.    A sense of perspective is important in all public order and crowd management scenarios.   The subject of the history of the issue came up.   The problems of the 1980s and 1970s are still fresh in the mind and the lessons that were learned then are pretty well incorporated into modern practice.   Modern public order (not a phrase I especially like) policing and the co-operation between forces has a lot to recommend it.   Looking to the past the books by Mike Layton on the subject are worth a look.   The particular challenge of policing fans as they travel on the railway network has been a speciality of BTP for the whole of the history of the force.   Time consumin...

Sir Archibald Bodkin KCB By http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw110761/Sir-Archibald-Henry-Bodkin, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33709801 “CRIMES OF VIOLENCE ON THE INCREASE” Such was the headline in The Times on 4 th February 1920.  Sir Archibald Bodkin prosecuting a case at the Old Bailey  told the jury: “The case was another illustration of the violence now employed by persons who were out to commit crimes,  It is impossible to shut one’s eyes to the fact that violence was resorted to far more frequently than it used to be” (1) Bodkin was on the verge of being appointed Director of Public Prosecutions and was a lawyer who was particularly worried about literature which,  in his view, promoted immorality.  But of relevance here is the fact that the case he was prosecuting was one that featured the Midland Railway Police (whose Chief appeared in blog earlier this week). West Ham station must have seemed like a long w...

  The second of my recent purchases is a clipping from Modern Transport Magazine from January 1949.   The article describes the new Railway Police School at Walton on the Hill, Tadworth, Surrey.   It expresses a hope that the opening of the school would bring a consistency to the training of officers from the various railway police forces which had come together as a result of the nationalisation of public transport.   The new force didn’t really have a name (sometimes described as the British Railways Police) at this stage and it took the passage of the British Transport Commission Act later in the year for the BTC Police to emerge in a form that we would still recognise. The article contains some photographs and a description of the tasks facing the railway police in the post war period.   It points out that it was the second largest force in the country with around 4,000 officers.   ‘Tadworth’ as it was universally known became the jewel in the rathe...

  I recently gave way to temptation and bought a couple of cheap historic items on ebay.   The first is a cyclostyled letter from the General Manager’s office of the Midland Railway at Derby dated December 1910.   It advises the recipient that Major J A Henderson had been appointed as Superintendent of Police for the Midland Railway in place of Major L Sandwith.   Clearly the outgoing and incoming Chiefs knew each other – 8 years earlier Major Sandwith had taken over the post held by Henderson in the 8 th Hussars (1).   Henderson had served in the Boar War and had been a career soldier.     Major Sandwith appears to have continued with the Midland Railway in an administrative role after retiring as Chief of Police. Major John Acheson Henderson DSO OBE (always know as J A Henderson) served as Chief of Police for the Midland until 1923.   After the creation of the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) he was, for a short period, in command ...

  Officers from LNER police at Hull forced to retire by a new rule lowering the retirement age from 65 to 60.:  Photo The Hull Daily Mail 17 September 1925 p6 Every day I count myself lucky for my police pension – especially in periods when other work is in short supply.   I worry about the future of serving officers and their reduced pension opportunities and the requirement for everybody to work longer before we receive our state pensions.   My interest in history reminds me that pensions have always been a source of campaigning for the police federations.   From the very beginning, even in the aftermath of the defeats of the 1919 strikes, the police federations have campaigned for a decent pension for their members.   The Railway Police Federation (now the BTP Federation) worked for decades for provision to be made for officers in retirement.   My research into the history of specialist policing reminds me that the pension issue is linked to the que...