ABSTRACT
This chapter involves a discussion of the identity that was adopted by policemen, by officers but more particularly by the rank and file, in their local search for improved pay and conditions of work. It is divided into three parts, the first dealing with two periods of police strike activity, one in the early 1850s, the other in the early 1870s. The second part deals with the growing sense of corporate identity among policemen that the 1870s witnessed. This had much to do with a conscious rejection of militarism and the development of the idea of police work as a kind of trade. The third part, ‘Good and Faithful Servants’, is a discussion of the emotional impact of an intitutional ideology on individual men.
