Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

Sergeant Phil Longland:  Southampton Docks June 1943  (Photo: British Transport Police History Group) In the National Archives sits a rather tatty file from the Railway Executive Committee (1939-1945).  It is accompanied by a note that says that the conservation department has been advised of its condition and that it will be subject of further evaluation.  The note was added over twenty years ago.  Looking after our national records is a long term process.  The contents of the file shed much light on the under researched subject of the arrangements for policing the railways and docks of the UK during the Second World War. National emergencies create the need for emergency legislation.  This was not an area of government that was particularly well handled in the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic but a war that included a very real risk of invasion meant that the scale of emergency powers granted to government ministers and officials is hard now to imagine.  Not since the days of Charles I has so muc

  Railway, dock and canal police (RDC) and more recently the British Transport Police have always suffered from a ‘legislation gap’. This is a problem shared, in different forms, by other Non Home Department Police Forces (NHDPFs).     By this I mean that the legislation available to these forces regularly inhibits, rather than supports, the proper functions of the constables employed by them (i).   The most obvious example of this is the restricted jurisdiction of BTP on which I have written elsewhere.   It would be tempting to regard all the idiosyncratic aspects of BTP’s legislative status as an historical oddity and it is true to say that the roots of the current position can be traced all the way back to the policy decisions made in the nineteenth century.   However, the government continues to treat BTP (and other NHDPFs) with considerable suspicion.   The history of the law as it touches specialist areas of policing has become a little niche in the study of police history. Som