ABSTRACT
The author’s father joined the Lancashire force as soon as it was established and the son was a member of the same force by the mid-lSSOs. In his memoirs, published shortly after his retirement, he presented himself as a tough, efficient and officious police officer. He notes that old police officers could be ‘the greatest of all pessimists’, an interesting insight, and it is certainly true that police officers’ frequent exposure to the more turbulent side of working-class culture led some to sweeping, and harsh, generalization. Many drew on their daily exposure to working-class life to develop a pragmatic, realistic and often sympathetic view of some elements of the poor. Noteworthy is not his maintenance of the customary argument that the poor drink and this leads them to crime, but rather his argument that it was the degenerating properties of slum life, rather than a deficit of moral fibre, which made the poor unable to resist the temptation of drink.
