Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  The Birth Certificate of the Railways? This month saw the 200 th anniversary of the operation of the railways in the UK.   Am I alone in thinking that this celebration of human ingenuity has been a little under egged? There are parts of our history that leave me feeling rather uncomfortable but the amazing achievement that was the ‘invention’ of powered railways is something which we can all be proud of.   What a gift to the world and to the future!   200 hundred years of railways and many exciting things still to come.   A form of transport that is green, effective and capable of endless improvement. I am not a train spotter (insert some less pejorative phrase if preferred) but I have worked in close partnership with the railway industry for most of my life and have come to admire the individuals who really understand the system and who put safety before profit and the needs of the public before the corporate imperative.    I would have thought...

  The second of my recent purchases is a clipping from Modern Transport Magazine from January 1949.   The article describes the new Railway Police School at Walton on the Hill, Tadworth, Surrey.   It expresses a hope that the opening of the school would bring a consistency to the training of officers from the various railway police forces which had come together as a result of the nationalisation of public transport.   The new force didn’t really have a name (sometimes described as the British Railways Police) at this stage and it took the passage of the British Transport Commission Act later in the year for the BTC Police to emerge in a form that we would still recognise. The article contains some photographs and a description of the tasks facing the railway police in the post war period.   It points out that it was the second largest force in the country with around 4,000 officers.   ‘Tadworth’ as it was universally known became the jewel in the rathe...

  Research can be boring.   Not always of course.   Most of the time there is nothing better than wading through stacks of documents looking for the needle that provokes joy on discovery.   However researching legislation is particularly challenging and can be both tedious and difficult.   However there is no way around it.   Either we just tell stories about our history and in doing so reinforce the many myths of police history or we slog away.   I paint this rather glum picture because I have spent the last few weeks (in between more exciting activities and trying to earn a living) wading through the legislation that touches the jurisdiction of the British Transport Police.   In particular I have been trying to find the point when jurisdiction was expanded to cover places beyond the premises of the ‘Boards’   (ie railways, docks canals etc) in matter ‘affecting the Board’.   Why is this important?   Well it isn’t, this is niche ...