Clive Emsley

The English Police: A Political and Social History

Today in England the police are almost permanently under the spotlight, with investigations into complaints against different forces and inquiries into their activities. This work studies police history and the development of the institution and the job.

Violent crime in England in 1919: post-war anxieties and press narratives

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War a variety of commentators in England expressed concern that men returning from the war had become so brutalized and inured to violence that their behaviour would continue to be violent at home. But, while the stage was set for a ‘moral panic’ with the brutalized veteran as the new folk devil, no such panic materialized. This essay makes a detailed study of two contrasting newspapers to assess how violent crime was assessed and interpreted after the war. It notes an increase in the use of the concept of the ‘unwritten law’ (the traditional ‘right’ claimed by many men to chastise a disrespectful wife or a man that despoiled or dishonoured a wife) in the courts and the press, probably as an element in re-establishing pre-war gender roles. It also describes how the idea of shell-shock was deployed as a defence in criminal cases, something that probably contributed to a popular recognition that men might suffer mental breakdowns as easily as women. In conclusion, it suggests some of the factors that may have inhibited the press in identifying the violent veteran as a new folk devil.

The Policeman as worker: a comparative survey c. 1800-1940

In the exciting new social history of the 1960s the concept of class struggle tended to underpin much of the work on the working class in general, and on various labour groups in particular. Historians sought to find faces in crowds and to rescue others from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. The police, however, when they appeared in this history, were usually as nameless and faceless as the crowds had been previously. They were also commonly portrayed as oppressors, and even in the more perceptive and ground-breaking attempts to explore the police themselves, they were seen through the refracted lens of their working-class critics as “blue locusts” and as a bourgeois instrument for controlling a new society. Parallel research conducted at roughly the same time by sociologists, social psychologists and others developed theoretical perspectives based on two assumptions: first, that certain kinds of authoritarian personality were attracted to police careers, and second, that policing roles had predictable effects on the behaviour and personality of policemen. Subsequent research has suggested these assumptions to be largely unfounded, yet in this respect also, historical explorations of policemen as workers remain few.

Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914

This is the first attempt to assess the scale of offending by British service personnel during the twentieth century. The main focus of the book is on the two world wars but, given the concerns about the numbers of ex-service personnel in prison at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the book concludes with a brief discussion of the Gulf wars and Afghanistan. The main concerns are not war crimes, but the range of offending from murder to petty theft, from rape to fraud. The book strikes a balance between military history and criminal justice history and is based on primary source material ranging from official documentation to newspapers and personal recollections.

Recruiting the English policeman C. 1840–1940

This paper gives a broad picture of the origins of English policemen for the period 1840–1940. It draws primarily on a computerised database constructed from the recruitment, discipline and/or warrant books of a number of rural and urban forces. The evidence shows that, as initially intended, police recruits came mainly from the unskilled and semi skilled working class. However, it reveals rather fewer recruits who can legitimately be described as agricultural labourers’ than the traditional picture suggests. At the same time it points to a much larger number of men with previous military service than is usually supposed. Locally born recruits were more common in rural than urban forces. Irish born recruits came forward in disproportionately large numbers in those cities with significant Irish immigrant populations. The appeal of both locally born men and of former soldiers appears to have varied from force to force, and warns against too much generalisation from a single local experience.