Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  A friend and ex colleague sent me this picture today after seeing it on display whilst on holiday.   It shows BTP’s Specialist Response Unit (then part of the Counter Terrorism Support Unit - CTSU) during training, using advanced chemical detection equipment and wearing Gas Tight Suits (GTS).   The picture was taken in 2006 in the yard at BTP FHQ at Tavistock Place (1). In the period following the 9/11 attacks in the US, BTP rapidly enhanced its Counter Terrorism capability.   Work on confronting the Chemical, Biological and Nuclear (CBRN) threat had begun in earnest in 1995 in the aftermath of the nerve agent attack on the Tokyo Metro by the Aum Shinrikyo cult (2).       The railways policed by BTP and its predecessors have been targeted since the 1880s by terrorists, so the development of officers trained to handle terrorist incident and threats is no surprise.   Experience of wartime operations also featured in BTP’s corporate memory. ...

  Fig One:  Copy of Letter to the Reading Justices found in the correspondance of the Home Secretary 183 9 Last week I was at the National Archives working on some papers relating to an RAF Bomb Disposal Flight during the Second World War.   Naturally I found myself reading the Home Secretary’s correspondence file for 1839.   These research leaps will be very familiar to those who spend time in archives and libraries.   I have (mostly) given up researching the history of the railway police but it is hard to resist the temptation of surfing a catalogue and ordering a few extra files to pad out the task in hand.   On this occasion I found myself reading letters that had been sent to Lord John Russell (1) and in particular a of a letter sent by the Great Western Railway to the Justices of the Peace in Reading which had been copied to the Home Secretary. Fig Two:  Lord John Russell (1792-1878): later The Earl Russell.  Photo 1861. The early days of ...

  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...