LGBT History Month

As LGBT History Month comes to a close, I am pleased to have seen the material put out by many police forces on the subject.  I learn a lot from sources such as these but, despite the efforts of many, this is still an area of police history that is under researched.  It is an area where academic work continues but where the police history community has been quieter.  It is an area of great relevance to  the history of railway, dock and canal policing.

I used to think that the whole question of LGBT+ history was a modern trend and nothing really to do with the history of policing.  As a straight man it always seemed a little niche.  Then one day about twenty years ago a colleague challenged me and said ‘do you think there were no Gay police officers in the past’?  I thought about this and of course we all knew officers who were Gay but who had learned to keep their sexuality hidden for fear of professional and social condemnation, discrimination and, in some cases, violence.  The language used to describe Gay men and women in the early part of my service was universally mocking or derogatory.   Like members of the armed forces it is probably safe to assume that police officers took even greater steps to avoid ‘detection’ in the more distant past.  The occasional scandal where an officer was arrested off duty or otherwise ‘outed’ nearly always resulted in personal ruin.  Officers of the RDC forces, including BTP, lost their jobs for offences that no longer exist.

I remember reading with we some amazement the book, This Small Cloud, by Harry Daley.  It is, a now famous, memoir by a Gay Met officer working in the 1930s.  He became well known for his association with the Bloomsbury Set, but it his descriptions of everyday life as a police officer that makes it an important book. To Daley his sexuality was nothing but a ‘small cloud’ over his wider life.  I recommend it to all students of police history. 

The history of policing is not just about the police themselves.  The police must enforce the law as it is.  But in enforcing the law on sexual offences there was, on occasion, a moral zeal that accompanied the prosecution of consenting adult males.  This zeal was possessed by only a minority of police officers,  but the effect on those subject to the full force of the law was often disproportionate to the offences committed,  as the well known tragic story of Alan Turing well illustrates.   Most officers were motivated by genuine concerns for public decency according to the mores of the time, but as we look back we can see other issues in play here: the aforementioned zeal of a few, the pursuit of easy ‘figures’,  the basic dehumanising of a minority group.  I was once told that a Gents toilet at a mainline station accounted for over 20% of all prosecutions s for importuning for an immoral purpose in England and Wales .  I have not been able to check the accuracy of this statement but I do remember the large number of men appearing at the local magistrates court, many of them terrified.  Police officers found themselves, as they often do, in a difficult situation.  The police have to respond to public complaints, and there were complaints about that location (although such complaints did not form the basis of any prosecutions).  Offences were being committed, albeit late at night.  The ‘problem’ was not solved by police action, but by a simple rebuilding of the premises.  The retrospective granting of pardons for such offences will have come too late for those whose lives were ruined and had to live with the shame of a conviction.

A few years ago, whilst researching policing in wartime,  I read a book by a London Police Surgeon.  The cases he describes are interesting to the historian and reflect the attitudes of the day on issues such as domestic violence, alcohol and drugs etc.  But even in the context of eighty years ago some of the conclusions are disturbing.  He describes an incident of a brutal abduction and rape of a woman by two military personnel.  A case shocking for its violence and the effect on the victim.   The offenders were sentenced to five years imprisonment.  In the same chapter he tells of another case heard in court on the same day  This concerned two consenting adult males found by police to be committing an act of gross indecency. The sentence in this case was four years for a first offence.    The author justifies the similar sentences on the basis that the rape, awful though it was, was motivated by natural urges and the indecency represented a threat to the social fabric of society.

As a society we have moved on.   There is no point in condemning officers for doing what their duty required of them and what society expected of them. But history is about exploring the past and understanding what happened and why.  It is also about understanding the long shadow cast by history and how the things that happened in the past have consequences for the present and the future.

LGBT+ history is not just a matter for LGBT+ historians.  It is a subject for all historians of policing.

 

February 2022