Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  (Photo:  BTPHG) Yesterday I overheard a couple of police officers discussing their entitlements to leave and pay in respect of the Coronation of TMS The King and Queen.    By co-incidence an hour later I later came across this memorandum from the Chief of the North Eastern Railway Police to his Inspectors on exactly the same subject, although he was writing about the Coronation of 1911.  By the standards of the time the leave or pay arrangement was generous. The Chief in question was the famous Captain (later Bgdr General) HORWOOD.  Known for the reforms he introduced into the railway police, he later went on to be the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis (1920-1928).  Nicknamed the ‘chocolate soldier’ in the Met after an attempt to assassinate him using arsenic laden Walnut Whips. The Coronation 2023 will see a large police operation.  I have no doubt that HORWOOD would be proud of both the Metropolitan and British Transport Police (as successors to the railway police) contri

                                       LNER Police Dog Handlers Carrying Revolvers at Hull 1941 (Photo BTPHG) Stories get passed down from generation to generation and often get changed on the way.   Often though, when the evidence is examined, our valued stories are found to be gross distortions of what actually happened.   I was therefore rather pleased recently to have one of these tales of Railway, Dock and Canal (RDC) policing to be fully based in fact. In 2011/12 I led   the project to re-introduce armed policing to BTP.   It was a challenging task that required attention to lots of different issues – not least the need to get the law changed to allow BTP officers to have firearms at all.   The project left me with an interest into the history of armed policing and in the legal position of the RDC police forces. There was one story I had first heard in the early 90s about the LNER police withdrawal of weapons during the war.   This, the story goes, resulted in a period when