Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  Reading through this before posting makes me fear that it is not historical enough for this blog and trespasses into contemporary issues.   So be it.   But I do feel it necessary to remind readers that this blog does NOT represent the view of the BTPHG.   These ramblings are mine alone. It is rarely accurate to say that history repeats itself, but it is true that somethings that we think are settled in the past return to challenge us again. When I was a serving police officer in BTP I saw a steady evolution in the status of the force.   The achievements of officers, particularly in facing the ‘decade of disasters’ (1980s) and the acknowledged expertise of BTP in dealing with certain classes of activity (terrorism, theft person, theft of goods in transit, major incident response, football disorder etc) all led to an increasing recognition that BTP was an equal member of the police family.   In concrete terms this had been marked by the recommendation of the Wright Committee into the

Sir Vernon George Waldegrave Kell KCMG KBE CB 1st Director General Security Service (AKA 'K') It is very easy when researching the past to develop a confidence in the resources available, whatever they are.   It is an easy step from checking everything available to assuming that you know everything about the subject. Historians study what is left behind.   Most of what we have to look at has survived by accident.   We pine for the documents that we know once existed but did not survive the ‘weeding process’, the office move’ or ‘the flood’.   Few of the records we rely on were created with the historian in mind.      Researchers are often left with scraps -mere hints of what happened.   Often material exists in different forms and in different places.   Research is rarely a product of a trip to a single archive or on line repository.   Indeed, the coming of on line access has fostered the view the everything worth knowing can be found with a few clicks of a mouse .   This att