ABSTRACT
The second part of this book has dealt with the movement of people from one situation to another, and with the changes involved in the making of policemen out of working men. We do not know, and possibly will never be able to discover how mid-nineteenth-century rural workers understood their situation, and it is for this reason that the evidence of those who left, escaped, and who were made vocal by the pressure of new circumstances is important. The words of policemen, puzzled by their new situation and made aware of the possibilities of written communication by the demands of their new job, have been used in these pages partly to reveal an understanding of a situation wider than the job of policing. The working-class men who became nineteenth-century policemen had a value placed on their past experience by a governing class that was rare in the mid-Victorian years. They were recruited from rural areas not only because they would — at least for a while — accept low wages, but because their experience, and the social beliefs wrought by that experience, could be made good use of. But how that rural labourer saw the land, the landscape, the fields and woods and hamlets, is a harder matter to discuss. There are centuries of people whose ways of seeing we do not know. (1) Become policeman, the rural worker had to watch the landscape still. Detection, as police work, was an art confined to a few urban centres; in the counties, long-term, responsible constables were put into disguise and sent out to the pubs and fairs to find out what they could. John Pearman was sent out several times in his first years of service; he saw it as a reward for good work and a stage in his upward climb to promotion: ‘I dressed ragged and had a small Parcel of writing Paper to sell and some times I beg (sic.) but was 3 weeks before I could get a Clew (sic.) . . . .’ (2) Understood in its modern sense, detective work could not become a widely used police method until some primitive forensic science established itself, and the novelty of taking plaster casts of burglar’s footprints became dispersed throughout general police work. The detective policeman of the mid-nineteenth century operated by talking and listening, and by acting on information received. City streets, public houses, the broken stair of the common lodging house, offered opportunity for the pursuit and 158capture of sudden offence. (3) Yet still the pattern of most police work was watching. By walking around and watching, policemen saw not only changes in the rural landscape, but also in the landscape of the city street. Watching, they observed the stranger’s face, the familiar meeting at the unfamiliar time of day, the break in the pattern. With permission received, the cause of the anomaly might be investigated. Watching for change, the break in the pattern, may have been the rural labourer’s way of seeing, and it may be that this attribute was used, though unknowingly, by police authorities.
