ABSTRACT
This chapter is designed to show the pattern of recruitment to one Midlands police force in the year of its creation, that of Buckinghamshire in 1857. Comparisons are made with another constabulary, that of Staffordshire, which was 17 years old in 1857, in order to show how national and local changes in political and economic circumstances influenced both recruitment and a man’s decision to become a policeman. Other more general contemporary evidence on these questions shows that the pattern discernible in these two counties holds substantially true for other areas, both rural and urban, in the 1860s and 1870s.
