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Compulsory Retirement at Hull 1925

  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 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 question of the age of retirem
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Law and History: 7: Jurisdiction Yet Again. 'Matters Affecting the Board'

  Research can be boring.   Not always of course.   Most of the time there is nothing better than wading through stacks of documents looking for the needle that provokes joy on discovery.   However researching legislation is particularly challenging and can be both tedious and difficult.   However there is no way around it.   Either we just tell stories about our history and in doing so reinforce the many myths of police history or we slog away.   I paint this rather glum picture because I have spent the last few weeks (in between more exciting activities and trying to earn a living) wading through the legislation that touches the jurisdiction of the British Transport Police.   In particular I have been trying to find the point when jurisdiction was expanded to cover places beyond the premises of the ‘Boards’   (ie railways, docks canals etc) in matter ‘affecting the Board’.   Why is this important?   Well it isn’t, this is niche history after all.   Why am I interested?   Because qu
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Pioneers: Ancient and Modern

  There are people that try and tell me that the police service is now dominated by political correctness and that minority groups and women are prioritised over white men.   This is just not true.   People who say this are reacting to the attempts to level the playing field.   Sometimes these attempts don’t quite work, sometimes there are unintended consequences.   Tokenism can arise and occasionally the best efforts backfire.   These are the inevitable consequences of trying to right wrongs.   These mistakes are small things in number and consequence and yet some people like to focus on them and avoid the real issues of the lingering racism, misogyny and homophobia that can be found in the service.   No sane person would suggest that the majority of police officers display these manifestations of misconduct.   But where they still do exist the consequences are huge, painful and long lasting.   But what about those outside the service?   Can policing run ahead of popular culture? I
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Of Epidemics and Pandemics

 Amateur historians are not very good at contemporary history.  By this I mean that we stand on the sidelines urging organisations to preserve their current stories for the future but, largely,  we are powerless to capture the present.  Of all the things that have occurred in the last decade the Sars-Cov 2 pandemic had a massive impact on policing (as it did on all aspects of life and death).  We really could do with a project to record the stories and challenges of those involved in trying to police under dreadful circumstances.  Are individual force history groups/societies working on this?  I must find out.  I don't think that anything is being done in respect of the British Transport Police. The Influenza epidemic that hit the so hard just after the Great War made policing very difficult - but how difficult and how the issue was managed is not that well documented.  There appears to be little about the impact on the railway police and passing references to other forces can be f
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FIRST WORLD WAR 3: From the Railway Police to the RAF

    An RAF Sopwith Dolphin 1918.  This was one of the aircraft flown by 13 Sqn (Picture:  RAF Museum) The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the oldest independent air force in the world.   It was founded on 1 st April 1918 on the merger of the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) and the Royal Flying Corps (RFC).   One of the officers that transferred from the RFC was temporary second lieutenant James Seymour STRINGER, he was 25 years of age (1) (2). STRINGER was no stranger to life in uniform.   At the outbreak of the war he was a constable in the Hull and Barnsley Railway Police.   We know very little of his time with the force except that it was very short. At the age of 14 STRINGER joined the East Yorkshire Regiment at Beverley giving his previous occupation as clerk.   He was 5 feet 2 and "a quarter" inches tall and weighed about 7 stone.   In 1910 he became a Drummer and served in India.   His service record tells us that he contracted malaria, injured his ankle playing football
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Give me a firm place to stand.........

  Is policing better today than it was 50 years ago?   Is this even a valid question?   My answer to both is   straightforward: ‘I don’t know’.   I suspect that most things are better and some things have declined but generally it is the sort of question that can take up a lot of time and enough hot air to power a dirigible.   I really DON’T want to start a debate on this because what concerns me most is my own shifting perspective.   As a grumpy git I find the sight of scruffy police officers looking bored and staring at their telephones really annoying.   I don’t understand why wearing a traditional helmet is so difficult and I don’t like the rather lightweight approach to discipline.   On the other hand my professional dealings with police officers show me that modern officers are bright, caring, thoughtful and determined to do the right thing.   As events demonstrate there is no shortage of brave people in today’s service. The horrors of racism and misogyny still haunt the service
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Nicely Decorated

  It appear that Horwood's decorations ended up in a sale in the USA in 2018 - this image (Copyright owner unknown) is from a set of images posted on line by the purchaser together with pictures of Horwood's  sword and original army commission.   Note this image will be removed at the request of the copyright owner. We are used to seeing senior officers bearing a few medals and decorations but none in living memory have been in the same league as the most famous railway police chief. By the time of the First World War the North Eastern Railway Police were among the best organised in the country.   At   start of war the Chief,   Captain William T F HORWOOD, was soon back in the army and rose quickly through the ranks ending up as Provost Marshall with the rank of Brigadier General.   His swift upward progress during the war is frequently mentioned in the newspapers.   The NER kept his job open until the end of the war but he was headhunted into a post at New Scotland Yard as a
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