ABSTRACT
A continuing variety of models As the 1840s dawned there was no single model of policing dominant in England. The Metropolitan Police continued to have a significant influence. This influence grew when, while the other capitals of Europe were rocked by the revolutions of 1848, London saw Chartism contained with relatively little disorder and violence; and when, in 1851, tens of thousands of visitors poured into London to visit the Great Exhibition and were supervised by the new police, without disorder and without serious crime being committed.1 Provincial forces often looked to the Metropolitan Police for advice and for senior officers, but the London model was not suited to everyone: as the Earl of Chichester explained to the East Sussex Bench in October 1850, even Colonel Rowan, who had emphasised the importance of prevention to the Metropolitan constables when they began to walk their beats in 1829, considered that 'a rural police was rather to prevent crime by detecting offenders than to prevent it by their actual presence in every village'. 2
Most of the boroughs had implemented the policing requirements of the Municipal Corporations Act by the end of the 1830s, but as late as 1856 there were at least six, and possibly as many as 23, recalcitrants.3 Even where men were recruited from the Metropolitan Police, the tasks of the new municipal constables included
many of those previously undertaken by functionaries of the old unreformed boroughs and had little to do with the prevention of crime. When, for example, in 1841 Robert Chalk left London to become Superintendent of the York City Force, he found that he was also required to serve as Inspector of Nuisances, a position which involved attending meetings of the local Board of Health and implementing public health regulations, inspecting some 300 lodging houses, and supervising the city's scavengers and the sale of manure.4 Town councils and their watch committees considered the police to be their servants who could be used at their discretion, and not simply for the prevention of crime. The town councils' dependence on the ratepayers who elected them ensured the optimum use of policemen and not necessarily for tasks wholly related to the preservation of law and order; while the strength and the wages of the police were maintained as far as possible at an assessment of what the electors would countenance in their rate bills.
