Eloise Moss

The Scrapbooking Detective: Frederick Porter Wensley and the Limits of 'Celebrity' and 'Authority' in Inter-War Britain

Frederick Porter Wensley was one of Scotland Yards ‘Big Four’ detectives, head of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department and responsible for establishing the Flying Squad. On his retirement in 1929, he used the two bound scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs he had collated to document his personal life and career to inform his 1931 autobiography Detective Days and serialized press articles. Through examining the interaction of material between scrapbooks and autobiographical writings, this article explores how Wensley constructed his post-retirement persona as ‘celebrity detective’ from a canny understanding of what had made him a commercial subject for the press. It argues that Wensley recast his life to promote his own successes at the expense of a narrative of police unity, providing a vehicle for him to suggest further changes to the structure of the police force without official sanction. By juxtaposing this against tightening legislation on police communication with journalists during the inter-war period under the Official Secrets Acts, this article demonstrates how the ‘celebrity’ that Wensley sought to occupy was increasingly regarded as irreconcilable with police ability to effect ‘impartial’ regulation, anticipating the concerns raised by the 2012 Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. The article thus charts a turning point in defining the relationship between police and press.

Rethinking Child Welfare and Emigration Institutions, 1870-1914

Abstract This article challenges the entrenched image of child emigration as a failure in child welfare. By moving the analytical focus away from large, and at times corrupt, institutions, our analysis focuses on the emigration and rescue work undertaken by charities in Liverpool and Manchester. We argue that the image of the uncaring and emotionally distant institution does not reflect the ideology and practice of these societies. It shows we need to focus on the different institutional, religious and regional approaches to child emigration in order to understand fully ideas about institutional childhood and contemporary conceptions of child welfare.

London’s criminal underworlds, c. 1720–c.1930: a social and cultural history

Towards the end of this fascinating study, Heather Shore reflects on the difficulty of ‘trying to uncover or reconstruct something that does not exist in a concrete form’ (p. 192). For Shore, the ‘underworld’ is a ‘cipher’, through which the press, the police, the government, and the wider society represents, and tries to understand, crime as a social problem. It is not that criminals themselves have no role to play in this process, but that their activities are interpreted through the distorting lens of a particular discourse. While historians have tended to see forms of criminal organisation as culturally constructed, and sensationalist popular ‘true crime’ histories depict gangs as entirely real, Shore follows the lead of modern criminologists and sociologists and approaches the topic from a combined socio-cultural perspective.