Content area
Full Text
Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in Middlesbrough, c. 1840-1914, by David Taylor; pp. xv + 237. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002, £47.50, $65.00.
The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829-1914, by Haia Shpayer-Makov; pp. viii + 293. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002, £45.00, $79.95.
During the past twenty years, in part through the endeavours of scholars such as Clive Emsley, David Philips, Robert Storch, and David Taylor, the burgeoning historiography of crime and policing has established the broad picture of police development in modern England and Wales, local variations notwithstanding, and has illustrated the complex relationships binding together criminals, the police, and their wider community. It is in this latter context that Taylor's stimulating and succinct microstudy of the development of policing in Middlesbrough, which usefully complements his earlier studies, The Neiu Police In Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control (1997) and Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914 (1998), should be placed.
Mid-ninetcenth-cciiLuiy Middlesbrough exhibited many of die characteristics of a frontier town, with an expanding economy based on the coal export, iron, engineering, and shipbuilding trades and a rapidly increasing, notably youthful, and disproportionately male population packed into overcrowded, unhealthy, and frequently turbulent working-class districts. The town was incorporated in 1853, when a watch committee was established, and by 1856, following the implementation of the County and Borough Police Act, this volatile community was policed by an embryonic force of thirteen men. Thereafter, although some of the problems faced by other provincial authorities in creating efficient police forces during the period were evident in Middlesbrough -including high turnover rates, compounded by dismissals from the force through drunkenness, neglect of duty, insubordination, and immorality-a gradual improvement was effected. Indeed, the force met with some success: by the 6 16 86Os there had been a reduction of thirty percent in the serious crime rate (located overwhelmingly in crimes against property, most notably larceny), while the level of petty crime no longer appeared to be a major cause of alarm to the police and the watch committee, for much drunkenness and associated violence was contained geographically within the workingclass districts of the old town by a police strategy that combined...