Policing the Victorian Community by CAROLYN STEEDMAN

Author:CAROLYN STEEDMAN [STEEDMAN, CAROLYN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Social History, Law, Criminal Law, Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781317372578
Google: n9FzCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-08-27T01:25:33+00:00

Source: Annual Reports of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary, PP series, 1857–80.

County forces offered less than the boroughs as a recruiting wage: 17s. in 1857, 19s. in 1867 and 20s. in 1877. They too had classes below the third, and they served to provide a probationary period for new recruits. Such classes were also seen as a means of paying lower wages than those laid down in the Home Office pay scales to men not yet part of the police hierarchy proper. It was the large, old, professional county forces (like those of Lancashire and County Durham) that first established this ladder of grades in the 1850s, and the practice extended to the Midlands and the south over the next fifteen years. Men in these low ranks were often employed – in the knowledge that they would soon be likely to leave – in order to make up the numbers of personnel on which the government grant ultimately depended. The qualification of literacy was not always demanded of these men.

Nineteenth-century policemen’s own evidence was that joining a police force was a response to an immediate situation rather than a calculation of future benefits. Police authorities knew this: no man ‘of 20 or 21 thinks about superannuation,’ said the chairman of Bristol watch committee; ‘when he gets a family and when he reaches forty years [he does] …’ (12) To the shoemaker and the tailor joining was an escape from poorly paid and uncertain work to a poor, but regular, wage. It was regularity of payment that police authorities believed attracted men who in better times were used to higher wages than police wages. In the case of the former farm worker, fairly substantive comparisons can be made between his income from the land, and his wage as policeman.

Table 5.2 Weekly earnings, after payment of rent, of farm labourers and county police recruits in four counties, 1861 and 1868 (shillings)

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