ABSTRACT
In January 1857 the first compulsory police act came into force. 2 Buckinghamshire magistrates, sitting in quarter sessions, were obliged, like the 13 other administrative counties which had not formed constabularies under earlier, permissive legislation, to establish a paid professional police force for the first time. John Pearman, travelling to Aylesbury in March 1857, not only found his way into a new administrative hierarchy, but was himself representative of a much wider dislocation of place and circumstance than followed on the end of the Crimean War. In this year of formation, Buckinghamshire Constabulary took on 153 men (more than it was to recruit in the next five years put together) and 19 of these men had just been discharged from the Crimean regiments.
