An occasional blog on the history of policing the railway and other transport undertakings.

As an amateur historian of transport policing I often come across snippets of information that I think are worth sharing. I am an active member of the British Transport Police History Group (BTPHG) but this is NOT an official product of that Group. BTPHG's website: www.btphg.org.uk is full of useful information and links and I recommend that anybody with an interest in the subject visits it regularly. I also intend to use this blog to give my own views on related subjects. The study of police history is not without controversy and it may be that I will sometimes touch on areas where there is not a general consensus. So be it, but I will always seek to avoid offence and I will be interested in hearing alternative views.

The railways and docks of Great Britain have played, and continue to play, an important role in society. It is rather surprising therefore that the policing of these locations is somehow seen as secondary to the history of crime and policing in the towns through which railways pass and docks serve. It could be said that this is a product of the fact that the police that operated on railways and docks weren't (or aren't) 'real'. I once heard a magistrate tell a defendant that he might not think that the police officer who arrested him wasn't real and, if it helped, he could pretend that the prison he was about to go to wasn't real either. He gave him six months to consider whether he should adopt the philosophical stance of Bishop Berkeley or that of Dr Johnson. The defendant's response employed a number of phrases that might have been familiar to our Anglo Saxon forebears.

95% of the history and experience of policing is the same, whether it takes place on the street or on a railway platform. For the purposes of this blog I am interested in the 5%.

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Why Do Non Home Department Police Forces Get Missed When Legislation is Being Drafted

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...

GWR Police and the Local Magistrates 1839

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 ...

The Oldest Railway Policeman?

Photograph: Police Review and Parade Gossip 03 Sep 1897 In 1898 Superintendent James WRIGHT, Chief of the Great Central Railway Police, died. He was 77 years old, (but see below). At the time of his death the newspapers proclaimed that he was the oldest serving railway policemen in the country. It’s a well know fact that Superintendents have an easy life but 77 is a bit much, especially in a time when the average life expectancy for a male infant aged one year was 46. Of course, life expectancy figures are skewed by high rates of infant mortality. At birth James WRIGHT had a life expectancy of just 41 years. The railway police were not covered by the pension provisions of the Police Act 1890 and instead each railway company made its own arrangements with special benevolent funds bei...

Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

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