Policing Public Transport: A Neglected History

  Chief officers of police like to boast.   They are, generally, proud of their force and can be forgiven for the pleasure they derive from the actions of those they command.   They are at their most boastful when in the company of their peers.   George Stephens, the long serving Chief of the Great Western Railway Police, took the opportunity of a meeting of the Police Chiefs Conference of the Railway Executive (the wartime body that brought together the mainline railways and the London Passenger Transport Board during the Second World War) to tell of the good work of one of his officers. An unnamed special constable had challenged a group of men leaving the dock at Penarth in South Wales.   Three of the suspects stopped but the fourth made off.   The special constable drew his issue revolver and shot the fleeing man, wounding him in the thigh.   Alas there are no details of what happened to the suspects including the one brought down by the officer. ...

                                       Image Reproduced with permission: BTPHG                                                 If there is one thing that makes the UK different from other European countries is the blessed absence in recent centuries of the experience of being invaded and occupied.   It is easy for us to forget that for those who were living through the Second World War the prospect of an invasion was painfully real.   We came very close to sharing the fate of our closest continental neighbours. The risk of invasion created the need for a considerable amount of planning most of which is now public.   Even today emergency planners must consider the prospect of war as a potential civil, as well as mil...

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...

  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 ...

  (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 s...

                                       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...

  Reading through this before posting makes me fear that it is not historical enough for this blog and trespasses into contemporary issues.   So be it.   But I do feel it necessary to remind readers that this blog does NOT represent the view of the BTPHG.   These ramblings are mine alone. It is rarely accurate to say that history repeats itself, but it is true that somethings that we think are settled in the past return to challenge us again. When I was a serving police officer in BTP I saw a steady evolution in the status of the force.   The achievements of officers, particularly in facing the ‘decade of disasters’ (1980s) and the acknowledged expertise of BTP in dealing with certain classes of activity (terrorism, theft person, theft of goods in transit, major incident response, football disorder etc) all led to an increasing recognition that BTP was an equal member of the police family.   In concrete terms this had been marked by the recommendation of ...