Metropolitan Police

London - Pax Britannica

1829-1859

Metropolitan Police patrols took to the streets on 29 September 1829, despite resistance from certain elements of the community who saw them to be a threat to civil liberties. The initial force consisted of two Commissioners, eight Superintendents, 20 Inspectors, 88 Sergeants and 895 Constables. Patrolling the streets within a seven-mile (11 km) radius of Charing Cross, in order to prevent crime and pursue offenders. Between 1829 and 1830, 17 local divisions each with a central police station were established, with each division assigned a letter. These divisions were: On its formation in 1829 the Metropolitan Police District (MPD) was split into seventeen territorial Divisions:

• A (Whitehall)
• B (Westminster[a])
• C (St James's)
• D (Marylebone)
• E (Holborn)
• F (Covent Garden)
• G (Finsbury)
• H (Whitechapel)
• K (Stepney[b])
• L (Lambeth)
• M (Southwark)
• N (Islington)
• P (Camberwell)
• R (Greenwich)
• S (Hampstead)
• T (Kensington)
• V (Wandsworth)

On 28 June 1830, Constable Joseph Grantham became the first member of the force to be killed in the line of duty, an incident described by the Coroner's Inquest as "justifiable homicide".[17] Other indications of the Constabulary's unpopularity of the time, were such nicknames as 'Raw Lobsters', 'Blue Devils' and 'Peel's Bloody Gang'. Officers were physically assaulted, others impaled, blinded, and on one occasion held down while a vehicle was driven over them.

One of the Metropolitan Police's priorities from the outset was maintaining public order, particularly the Chartist demonstrations in 1839, 1842 and 1848, a role in which they were supplemented by Special Constables, first introduced by the Special Constables Act 1831, empowering Magistrates to appoint ordinary citizens as temporary police officers in times of emergency. In 1834, the Act was extended to allow citizens appointed as Specials to act outside of their Parish area. They supplemented the regular Metropolitan Police in maintaining public order, particularly against the final Chartist demonstrations in 1848, when 150,000 Specials were sworn in to assist regular officers in preventing Chartists from reaching Kennington and then marching to Westminster. In 1839, the MPD was expanded to a 15 mile radius from Charing Cross and the Bow Street Runners, the Foot Patrol and the Horse Patrol were amalgamated with the Metropolitan Police - that year also saw the City of London Police (COLP), which remained and remains an independent force. The River Police was also merged into the Metropolitan Police that year and renamed Thames Division, expanding from its origins in London's commercial docks to cover the whole section of the River Thames within the MPD - this included the stretch along the south bank of the City of London (since COLP did not maintain its own river police) and originally stretched from Brentford to Blackwall before later being extended eastwards to the Thames-Darent confluence. The Metropolitan Police was formed without detectives since that role had previously been undertaken by the Runners, but in 1842 it formed a new investigative force named the "Detective Branch". It initially consisted of two Inspectors, six Sergeants and a number of Constables.[20] One of its first cases was the Bermondsey Horror of 1849, in which a married couple, Frederick and Marie Manning, murdered Patrick O'Connor and buried his body under the kitchen floor. After going on the run they were tracked down by Detective Sergeants Thornton and Langley and publicly hanged outside Horsemonger Gaol in Southwark.

When Sir Charles Rowan died, another army officer, William Hay, was drafted in to jointly run the force with Mayne. However, tensions between them meant that on Hay's death in 1855 a new system of a single Commissioner and two Assistant Commissioners was established. In 1857 Matne was paid a salary of £1,883 (roughly equivalent to £1.2m in 2009), and his two Assistant Commissioners were paid salaries £800 each, approximately £526,000 in 2009.

1860-1899

In 1860, the Metropolitan Police also took on responsibility for the policing of the Royal Dockyards and other royal naval bases between 1860 until 1934, including Portsmouth, Chatham, Devonport, Royal Naval Air Station Pembroke, and the Royal Woolwich Arsenal. It took some time to establish the standards of discipline expected today from a police force. In 1863, 215 officers were arrested for being intoxicated while on duty, In 1872 there was a police strike, and during 1877 three high ranking detectives were tried for corruption. Due to this latter scandal the Detective Branch was re-organised in 1878 by C. E. Howard Vincent, and renamed the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). This was separated from the uniformed branch, and its head had direct access to the Home Secretary, by-passing the Commissioner.

The 1860s also saw the decommissioning of the flintlock pistols purchased in 1829. They were superseded by 622 Beaumont–Adams revolvers firing the .450 cartridge, which were loaned to the police by the Army after the Clerkenwell bombing. In 1883, officers were surveyed as to whether they wished to be armed. 4,430 out of 6,325 officers serving on outer divisions requested to the issue revolvers. The now obsolete Beaumont-Adams revolver was returned to stores for emergencies, and the Bulldog 'Metropolitan Police' revolver was issued to officers on the outer districts who felt the need to be armed. In 1865 three more divisions were created: W (Clapham), X (Willesden), and Y (Highgate). F Division was abolished by the late 1860s and its territory merged into E Division. From 1869 onwards the Met's Divisions were grouped as Districts, each initially headed by a District Superintendent:

• No. 1 District - G, H, K, N, and Thames Divisions
• No. 2 District - D, E, S, X, and Y Divisions
• No. 3 District - A, B, C, T, and V Divisions
• No. 4 District - L, M, P, R, and W Divisions

In March 1883, the MPS formed the Special Irish Branch to combat the threat of Irish terrorism. The "Irish" sobriquet was dropped in 1888 as the department remit was extended to cover other threats, and became known simply as Special Branch. In 1884, the MPS replaced the hand rattles used by officers to signal for assistance since 1829 with "police whistles". J.Hudson & Company of Birmingham supplied 7,175 whistles at the price of 11d each.

At the same time, the MPS also replaced its police truncheons. In 1886, in quelling a riot between warring working parties in Hyde Park, many truncheons were damaged or broken. Ross & Company supplied the MPS with lignum vitae truncheons. Samples were sent off to be tested by the Royal Army Clothing Department, at a cost of 16 shillings per day. The lignum vitae truncheons were found unsuitable. So in October 1886, the MPS purchased GBP900 worth of lancewood and cocuswood for new truncheons.

1886 also saw the creation of a new J (Bethnal Green) and F (Paddington) Divisions. On the night of 18 February 1887, PC 52206 Henry Owen became the first Metropolitan Police officer to fire a revolver while on duty, doing so after he was unable to alert the owners of premises on fire. The Metropolitan Police also continued policing demonstrations such as that by the unemployed in Trafalgar Square in 1887 which came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Important criminal investigations of the period included the Whitechapel murders (1888) and the Cleveland Street scandal (1889).

20th century

1900-1918

By 1900, the force had grown to nearly 16,000 officers, organised into 21 divisions, responsible for law enforcement within an area of nearly 700 square miles. Detection of crimes was much improved when Sir Edward Henry, the Commissioner from 1903–18, set up a Fingerprint Bureau at Scotland Yard in 1901, building on Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose's work with him in India. A landmark case for the Met in forensic investigation was the Stratton Brothers case of 1905, concerning a double murder in Deptford, committed by Alfred and Albert Stratton, the first murder conviction in the UK secured by fingerprint evidence. Another important investigation of this period was that into the murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen in 1910.

Two robberies by Latvian anarchists reopened the debate over arming the Metropolitan and City police forces. The first in 1909 led to the pursuit known as the Tottenham Outrage, in which officers borrowed bystanders' guns and one officer was fatally shot by the robbers. The second in Houndsditch on 16 December 1910 led to the murder of three City of London Police constables and the Siege of Sidney Street by the Metropolitan and City police forces. In this siege the two forces were supplemented by a detachment of Scots Guards from the Tower of London, authorised by Home Secretary Winston Churchill who had come to see the siege in person. The gang members were killed on 2 January 1911 and in the wake of the incident one thousand self-loading Webley & Scott pistols were purchased by the Metropolitan Police. In 1914 the Bulldogs were withdrawn from service after thirty-one years' service and returned to stores. The Specials were also reorganised in 1912, scrapping the old system of anyone being liable to be appointed, instead they had to volunteer. During World War One the Women's Police Service (WPS) and National Union of Women Workers (NUWW) ran voluntary patrols to assist county and city police forces such as the Metropolitan Police, though they were not formally parts of these forces and had no power of arrest.[33] Policing of Rosyth Dockyard was added to the Metropolitan Police's remit in 1916, a role they held until 1926. Concerns over worsening pay and conditions led almost all Met officers to join a strike in 1918 and 1156 officers to join another in August the following year.