ABSTRACT
Maintaining public order was a police priority and the chief purpose of the uniform pcs, around which their daily routine was organized.1 It provided the rationale for the high visibility of the many uniformed officers pounding the beat in cities, towns and villages throughout the country, and gave purpose and meaning to the lives of men who spent their time doing little else. As the eyes and ears of the community, dedicated to upholding the moral order and restoring harmony when it fractured, their remit extended over a much wider field than simply those who broke the law. But the boundaries of their authority remained extremely hazy. Initially imposed on a reluctant or hostile population, by the turn of the twentieth century police surveillance of the whole of daily public life had acquired the impregnability of custom. It took a world war, a post-war shortage of recruits, and a social shift in public attitudes to alter the parameters and priorities of this policing policy. Present day attempts to retrieve the situation and return to this style of policing for the good order it was able to maintain seem doomed to failure in the highly fragmented society of today, since the degree to which it was effective depended to a large extent on a more acquiescent attitude to authority, a more fatalistic acceptance of the existing distribution of power, and a less contested, more unitary and thus more hegemonic value system.2
