Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  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...

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...

                                       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. T...