Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  For me history is a nice and safe hobby.   Sitting in warm archives wading through documents is a good way a, mostly, unemployed person can keep out of the way.   It helps that my areas of interest are niche and largely unimportant to most people.   But, history has a habit of invading the present and, moreover, what is history to some people is unfinished business to others.   To understand the past one sometimes has to step into the present day. I have written several times about the case of Derek RIDGEWELL.   He was, as most people now know, a corrupt British Transport Police officer who died in prison in 1982.   He was imprisoned for theft and associated offences from the Bricklayers Arms goods depot in south London.   He was associated with organised crime and, throughout the 1970s, regularly targeted innocent men and ‘fitted them up’ for offences of which they were entirely innocent.   RIDGEWELL was a racist, a thug and a perjurer.   Not all of his victims were black but he w

  At a hearing of the North London Juvenile Court in early 1939 the Chairman told the court that “railway police evidence is proverbially unreliable”.   The case involved two boys charged with causing damage to property belonging to the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS).   We do not know the outcome of the case or the details of alleged offence.   The comments from the bench caused outrage.   Police Review ran a piece by Jack Hayes, their Parliamentary Correspondent, which decried the comments and suggested that they …”make an invidious distinction between the railway police and the regular police”.   He describes the difficult duties that fall to the railway police and ends by saying:   “I have always found the railway police good fellows, courteous and obliging, attentive to their duties, and with these qualities they are as good as anyone else as witnesses in a court of law”. Fifty years later I recall a BTP officer making an application for a warrant at the Guildhall Ju

  The new road named after Lord Hamilton of the Great Eastern Railway The newish road outside Hertford East railway Station is named after a former chairman of the Great Eastern Railway; Claud HAMILTON.   I recall that there was a large building at Liverpool Street Station (demolished in the 1980s) that was also named after him.   His reputation looms large in railway history.   He was also a Member of Parliament and a peer.   When I see the new road sign I think not of Hamilton himself but of his role in a sorry tale that led to a well respected railway policeman losing his job. We often celebrate the coming of the police federation in general and the railway police federation in particular.   The early pioneers of representation faced many challenges but were only allowed to exist because of the chaos brought about by agitation in the police service after the First World War.   The idea that police officers could be members of trades unions seems alien to us now.   But the low paid

  The attitude of local forces to BTP and its predecessor forces has always been rather mixed.   In recent years I rarely have cause to tell groups I work with that I once served in BTP.   As they are mostly police officers I am speaking to their reaction to mention of the railway police (current and historic) is often negative.   I have always found the Police History Society rather sniffy about the history of the railway and dock police.   Somehow in the minds of many the sacrifice of railway, dock and canal police does quite score so highly as that to be found in other forces.   In one respect geographic forces were (and perhaps still are) united.   That is in opposing any extension of the powers of RDC officers. The fact that officers from other geographic forces have powers in their area does not seem to offer any threat but the prospect of RDC officers exercising the power of constable on their patch might bring about the end of civilisation.   Of course even now local officers

The GER Memorial at Liverpool Street in its current location.  William Henry WILSON is recorded in the main list of names.  The Memorial was opened by Field Marshal Sir Henry WILSON (no relation) in 1922.  He was murdered by the IRA on the same day and a separate plaque to him can be seen on the bottom right of the photograph. The huge cyber attack on the British Library has brought a halt to my slow trawl through Police Review but I have been able to find a couple of volumes from 1914 and 1915. The impact of the declaration of war in August 1914 on the police forces of the United Kingdon was immediate and massive.  Large number of police officers who were reservists left their jobs to re-join the armed forces.  They were replaced by hastily attested Special Constables.  This was true of the railway police forces as it was for the county, metropolitan and borough constabularies. Inevitably it wasn’t long before Police Review is full of reports of police officers in the army and navy, c