The police came from the same class and neighbourhoods as the policed; they were in that sense considered to be attempting to control and to arrest their own people. Like the “runner” before them they were also open to the charges of drunkenness and immorality. But such offences were punished with summary dismissal, with the result that, according to the London Encyclopaedia, “within four years fewer than one sixth of the original 3000 remained.” Those who survived were known as “crushers” or “coppers,” with the less vivid terms of “peelers” and “bobbies” coming from their association with Robert Peel. Those terms have been transmogrified into the modern “old Bill” which in turn seems to share some of the derogatory tone of the previous “Charleys.” There is in fact a continuity in these forms of address. In the middle of the twentieth century a policeman was often known as a “bluebottle” which is precisely the term that Doll Tearsheet hurls at a beadle in the second part of Henry IV-“I will have you as soundly swindg’d for this, you blew bottle Rogue.” Over more recent years they have also been known as “bogeys” or “rozzers,” “slops” or “narks,” “fuzz” or “pigs,” “creepers” or “flatties.” Yet historians of the London police have noted that within two or three decades Robert Peel’s force had acquired some degree of authority, and success, in its pursuit of crime.
Allusions to the demeanour and appearance of the individual police officer are often made in this context. “The habitual state of mind towards the police of those who live by crime is not so much dislike as unmitigated slavish terror,” one observer wrote. It was a way of suggesting that the darkness of London had been effectively dispelled by the “bull’s-eye” lamp of the constables on the beat. In 1853 a foreign traveller, Ventura de la Vega, noted their quasi-military uniform, with their blue coats “closed in the front with a straight collar on which a white number is embroidered” and their hats lined with steel. When necessary, he goes on, “they take from the back pocket of their coat a stick a half a yard long in the shape of a scepter, which has an iron ball on the tip.” It is never used, however, since “on hearing a policeman’s voice nobody answers and everybody obeys like a lamb.” So against the records of the violence and energy of the London crowd, we must place this evidence of almost instinctive obedience. Of course this is not to claim that every costermonger or street trader cowered in fright at the advancing uniform. The statistics of attacks upon the police, then and now, are testimony to that. But the observers are correct in one general respect. There does seem to be a critical point or mass at which the city somehow calms itself down and does not consume itself in general riot or insurrection. A level of instability is reached, only to retreat.
Other shapes emerge to touch upon the very nature of London even in the twenty-first century. It might be suggested, for example, that the “Fenian” explosion at Clerkenwell prison in 1867 was part of a pattern which manifested itself at the Canary Wharf explosion by the IRA in 1996. The Trafalgar Square riots of 1887 occupied the same space as the poll tax riots of March 1990. Complaints about police incompetence and corruption are as old as the police force itself. In 1998 an official investigation into the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, revealed many instances of bad judgement and mismanagement; it also suggested implicit racial prejudice within the police force which has indeed been bedevilled by that charge for fifty years. Ever since the first “peeler” put on his blue “swallow-tail” coat, the London police have been the object of derision and suspicion. Yet those officers lingering outside the Covent Garden watch house would no doubt have been surprised to learn that their arm of investigation would be extended to almost eight hundred square miles with the number of offences, according to the latest statistical survey, rising to over 800,000. They would not have been quite so surprised to learn, however, that the “clear-up” rate was only 25 per cent.
CHAPTER 31
Thereby Hangs a Tale
There can be no calculation of the numbers of burnings and stonings, beheadings and drownings, hangings and crucifixions practised in Roman and Saxon times. But by the fourteenth century we have written reports of a condemned man wearing “a striped coat and white shoes, his head covered with a hood” and pinioned to a horse; the hangman rode behind him, the rope in his hand, while his “torturers” rode beside him mocking him all the way from Cheapside to Smithfield. This was a very public, and formalised, ritual of death making its way through the streets of London. Contrition and penance, however, were as important as any severity of punishment. The penalty for one convicted of insulting an alderman was to walk with bare feet, from the Guildhall into Cheapside and through Fleet Street, carrying a three-pound candle in the hands. This carrying of a lighted candle was a common punishment for assaults upon the authority of civic leaders or the Church, and it suggests an atonement to London itself.
The preferred punishment for false trading was the pillory. There the shopkeeper came literally face to face with those whom he had deceived. The convicted man was drawn upon a horse, facing the tail, and wore a fool’s cap; he might be preceded by a band of pipers and trumpeters. On arrival at the pillory-there was one in Cheapside and another in Cornhill- the goods deceitfully sold were burned before his face. If he had committed fraud, false coins or dice were suspended about his neck. If he had been found guilty of lying, a whetstone was hung around him, as if representing a sharpened tongue. The time of the punishment in the pillory was exactly measured. For spreading lying reports that foreign merchants were to be allowed the same rights as freemen-one hour. For selling cups of base metal rather than silver-two hours. For selling stale slices of cooked conger-one hour. Yet the timing was only one measure of pain and humiliation. To be identified and paraded in front of neighbours and fellow tradesmen was, for any citizen of London, the cause of extreme embarrassment and shame. It could also be perilous. Some were plied with rotten fruit, fish and excrement, but the most unpopular or unprincipled offenders were in danger of being pelted to death with sticks and stones. It is a measure of London’s conservatism, or strictness, that the pillory was not abolished until the summer of 1837.
Among the other sights of the city were the impaled heads of traitors. Above the main gateway of London Bridge rose iron spikes upon which the remnants of condemned men were fixed; in most illustrations five or six of these mementoes are generally depicted, although it is not clear if demand outstripped supply. In 1661 a German traveller counted nineteen or twenty, which suggests that the civil conflicts of that unhappy period were fruitful in at least one respect.
In the following century the heads migrated to Temple Bar, “where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look”; they were also visible from a telescope set up in Leicester Fields, which suggests that heads were a city attraction. Certainly the citizens seem to have become inured to these solemn spectacles of punishment except, according to “Aleph,” “when there had been a recent sufferer; the curious would then stop to ask ‘What new head is that?’”