Introduction

This book deals with the creation of English police forces as part of a system of local government in the years between 1856 and 1880. The police history that has been produced for a century now by policemen and ex-officials of the Home Office (1) has had a profound effect not only on policemen’s understanding of their role in past and present communities, but also on the administrative historians who have produced a police history for academic consumption. This book is intended as a corrective to those accounts that see the formation of police forces as the product of the application of an urban — specifically a Metropolitan — model in the provinces. (2) In fact, provincial watch committees and rural magistrates developed coherent theories of local government and policing during this period. It was their understanding of social discipline and community order that provided the background to the development of mid-nineteenth-century police forces. The first part of this book deals with this background. But within this context it was the working-class men who became provincial policemen, who out of their understanding of these administrative circumstances, shaped recognisably modern police forces. The second part of this book deals with this development, and those men.