ABSTRACT
The 'ploughman turned policeman' was a popular ideal in the early years of police recruitment: workers on the land were thought to demonstrate the requisite endurance, obedience, health, strength and stature, and selection policies were influenced by a belief in the moral and physical decline of city dwellers. Officers spent long hours on duty, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and although holiday entitlement, rest periods and better pay were introduced towards the end of the century, leisure in the Victorian middle-class sense of the word was not generally a part of the policeman's lived experience. This investigation of musical activity in the Victorian police focuses on the Metropolitan Police, which was the largest, most developed and well established of the nation's police forces. The Metropolitan Police Minstrels were a blackface minstrel troupe made up of serving police officers.
