Writing police history: ESC PWG Webinar: What can history tell us about today?

References 

Andrews, T. (2025, in press) The ‘Peelian Principles’: Their historical and contemporary veracity. Policing and Society 

Bland, E. (2025 in press) Colonial Policing Practices in Queensland and their Contemporary Legacies. Policing and Society. 

Brain, T. (2023) A History of Police Reform in England and Wales: 300 Years of Reforming the Police. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

Cox, D. ‘We believe our police are careful not to unduly harass you ladies and gentlemen’ – an examination of the relationship between the police of Cheshire and the motoring public, 1896-1939. Policing and Society. 

Fraser, M. (2025, in press) The role of the police in disaster management. Policing and Society.

Gerschenkron, A. (1962) On the concept of continuity in history. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106(3), 195-209. 

Halkon, R. (2025, in press) Reflecting on the past to transform the future: Exploring the role of history in policing reform. Policing and Society 

Herbert, Steve (2014). “The Policing of Space: New Realities, Old Dilemmas,” In The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing eds. Reisig, M and Kane, R. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 26, pp. 589–605. 

Herbert, Steve, (1996) The geopolitics of the police: Foucault, disciplinary power and the tactics of the Los Angeles Police Department. Political Geography, 15(1) 47-57. 

Jackson, L. (2025, in press) Gender and policing in the UK: historical perspectives on 50 years of equality legislation. Policing and Society 

Neocleous, Mark (2015) The Other Space of Police Power; or, Foucault and the No-Fly Zone. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/9781137385925_6?pdf=chapter+toc

Police history: The Metropolitan Police and the British Film Industry, 1919-1956

 Book review on police history in Cultural and Social History http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2025.2448373

The Metropolitan Police and the British Film Industry, 1919–1956: Public Relations, Collaboration and Control, by Alexander Charles Rock, London, Bloomsbury/British Film Institute, 2023, 278 pp., £76.50 (hardback), ISBN 9781350295087; £26.09 (paperback), ISBN 9781350295124 

This intriguing book details the involvement of the Metropolitan Police in a series of three feature films and two supporting features produced collaboratively with the film industry between 1945 and 1956. It shows the factors and the cumulative and growing influence of the Public Information Officer, Percy Fearnley, a seasoned Fleet Street journalist, in the production of The Blue Lamp (1950); Street Corner (1953), and The Long Arm (1956), with the power relationships involved in the films’ production. We see the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau, headed by Fearnley from 1945, attempting to manipulate the image of the police through the control of these cultural productions. The book starts by showing previous work on the general role of the film producer and how Fearnley developed this role to become the controller of written and visual media for the Metropolitan Police with the filmmakers. His influence ensured the films, made by different film studios and with different film directors, worked as public relations exercises for the Metropolitan Police by providing documentary realism. Although the Met established its Press Bureau in 1919, this book charts Fearnley’s image management from his appointment in November 1945 so that the public saw paternalistic benevolence in all ranks and activity within Scotland Yard, shaping the projects’ propaganda in conjunction with the film studios and to a lesser extent newspapers, to the Met’s advantage, until 1955 when the rise of television heralded a change in cinema. 

Early chapters argue that the development of films about the police was designed to meet the cultural needs and desires of the audience, while acting as propaganda for the police. By analysing files held at the National Archives in London, Rock shows that control of production is vital to an understanding of narratives of law and order at the time. He starts by considering the early role of the Met’s Press Bureau from its establishment in 1919 intended as a conduit between the Met and the press to improve transparency. However, it became a mechanism for control of the written and visual media until the appointment of Fearnley in 1945, which brought a more collaborative, open and successful approach for both the media and the Met. Beforehand, relationships had been fractious and mired in suspicion. The Press Bureau’s approach pre-1945 was largely censorial. 

The development of a more collaborative approach with the media began with four key events starting in 1938 when the Met acknowledged the potential for cinema propaganda: 1. The Ministry of Information commissioned a short film War and Order: 2. The appointment of Percy Fearnley as the first public information officer; 3. The production in mid-1946 of a prestigious documentary This Modern Age: Scotland Yard; and 4. Making the first film collaboratively with an independent producer in mid-1947. 

Further development of a collaborative approach to produce film projects also coincided with the appointment of Harold Scott as Commissioner of the Met in 1945. His appointment heralded increased openness towards written and visual media and signalled the appointment of Percy Fearnley as Public Information Officer, with the remit of putting police-press relationships on a satisfactory footing and to control the depiction of the police in popular culture, hidden under the guise of transparency and accountability. Despite Fearnley’s failed attempts to control press coverage of crime scenes, he was more successful in controlling films from as early as a month following his appointment. The important collaborative agreement with the film industry to shoot films within the surroundings of Scotland Yard allowed film makers to claim to show the real Scotland Yard at a time when the market was saturated with many B feature films of the police, with nothing new to offer. 

We see the detail of the process of film production, from the initial outlines and treatments to shooting the script and developing the voiceover commentary. Fearnley developed and established his role as Public Information Officer both within the Met and also with the film industry through the film The Modern Age: Scotland Yard, where he became more confident and in control of this film about black market racketeering, following an initial contact from the filmmaker in December 1945. The year preceding the release of the film in September 1946 involved struggles and controversy by Fearnley to develop his role as gatekeeper of publicity and press relations. Harold Scott gave him almost complete freedom to coordinate this public relations exercise. The film The Girl from Scotland Yard followed speedily, not only by granting permission for access but also to provide cast and uniforms, involving the Superintendent of Women Police, Elizabeth Bather, who drastically rewrote much of the initial scrips. The film was to become a recruiting tool for women police, and The Girl from Scotland Yard was released in September 1948. It led to Fearnley and the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau being recognised as the producer of subsequent films, The Blue Lamp (1950); Street Corner (1953), and The Long Arm (1956). 

This book is ideal for students and researchers into the history of film as propaganda.

Police History. Bibliography for "The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917-1918"

I have been asked to provide a bibliography for my recent book on police history, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-58743-6    so I'm including it below: 

Armstrong, A. 1988. Farmworkers: A social and economic history 1770-1980. London: B.T. Batsford.

Barnett, M. L. 1985. British Food Policy During the First World War Boston: George Allen and Unwin

Beveridge, W.H. 1928. British Food Control, London: Oxford University Press.

Chance, W. 1917. Industrial Unrest: The Reports of the Commissioners (July 1917) Collated and Epitomised. Published for the British Constitutional Association, London https://archive.org/details/industrialunrest00chanrich (accessed 12/9/2024)

Conacher, H.M. 1926. Increased Food Production. Chapter IX. In Jones, et. al. Rural Scotland During the War. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press. pp. 122-86.

Devine, T.M. (ed.) Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland 1770-1914. Edinburgh: John Donaldson

Dewey, P. E. 1975. Agricultural Labour Supply in England and Wales during the First World War. Economic History Review February 28(1) 100-12.

Dewey, P. 2000. Chapter 12 Farm labour. In E.J.T. Collins, ed. The Agrarian History of England and Wales. VII (Part 1) 1850-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Dewey, P. E. 2014. British Agriculture in the First World War. London: Routledge. 2^nd edition

Emsley, C. 1996. The English Police: A political and Social History 2^nd Edition, London: Longman

Ernle, Lord. n.d. The Land and its People; Chapters in Rural Life and History. London: Hutchinson,

Gregory, A. 2008. The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grieves, K. 1988. The Politics of Manpower, 1914-18. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Jones, D. T. et al. 1926. Rural Scotland during the war. London: Humphrey Milford.

McDermott, J. 2011. British Military Tribunals, 1916-1918: A very much abused body of men. Manchester University Press, https://academic.oup.com/manchester-scholarship-online/book/13569  (accessed 12/9/2024)

Middleton, T. H. 1923. Food Production in War. Oxford: The Clarendon Press

Montgomery, J. K. 1922. The maintenance of the agricultural labour supply in England and Wales during the war. Rome: The International Institute of Agriculture

Oddy, D. and Miller, D. eds. 1976. The Making of the Modern British Diet. London: Croom Helm

Offer, A. 1989. The First World War: An agrarian interpretation. Clarendon Press

Prest, A.R. 1954. Consumers’ Expenditure in the United Kingdom, 1900-1919. Studies in the national income and expenditure of the United Kingdom No. 3. Cambridge University Press.

Rew, R. Henry. January 1918. The prospects of the World’s Food Supplies after the War. Paper read to the Royal Statistical Society December 18, 1917, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 81(1) 41-74

Whetham, E. H. 1978. The Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume VIII 1914-39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ziemann, B. 2014. Agrarian society. In Jay Winter ed. The Cambridge History of the First World War. Volume II The State. Cambridge University Press, Chapter 15, pp. 382-407.

Police history: The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917-1918

 My latest book The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917-1918 is published by Palgrave Macmillan at  https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-58743-6. 

 It contains chapters on:

• The developing food crisis in the First World War. Why Britain experienced a food crisis and how it compared with other combatant nations.
• Help for farmers; no stone left unturned to help them. How the British government nationalised farming and provided large amounts of help from a wide variety of groups, some of which were inexperienced in farming and of little help initially.
• Horse and mechanical help for farmers. How manual ploughing with horses was the most widely used method, although steam ploughing was the most efficient. The introduction of petrol-driven tractors and the problems of the many types with their untested nature on different types of soil resulted in frequent breakdowns.
• The importance of increased crop production to feed the nation. The diets of the majority of the population and why an increase in crop production was more important than rearing cattle on pastureland.
• Policemen in England helped farmers from March 1917 to the end of the war. Giving the locations and numbers of policemen released.
• Policemen in Scotland helped farmers from March 1917 to the end of the war. Giving the locations and numbers of policemen released. 
• Release of policemen in Birmingham and Glasgow: 2 case studies. These examples show the tensions surrounding the release of policemen into agriculture to feed the nation; and
• The outcomes for Britain of the food shortages of 1917. Why it helped the police to release their men into a protected industry and the results of the food production campaign.

Police history: Locations where policemen were released into agriculture in Britain 1917

The locations where policemen (and they were only men) were released into agriculture in March/April 1917 are shown in the Table below, along with their approximate numbers. Most were released from their police duties full-time for around 6 weeks, but some were allowed to help farmers part-time in the threatened disaster of food shortages in Spring 1917. Food shortages lasted until the end of the war, although rationing in early 1918 helped to equalize the supply of different types of food across the nation.

These locations and numbers can be checked out in copies of The Police Review and Parade Gossip or in local newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive for the period March to April 1917.

Police history: Police as Ploughmen in 1917-18, seminar 31st May 2023

I'm delighted to let you know that I've been invited to give a seminar at the Institute for Historical Research on Police as Ploughmen, a subject I've been studying for the last 3 years. 

The seminar is on 31st May this year and you can find the link here https://www.history.ac.uk/events/police-ploughmen-191718-how-britains-policemen-helped-local-populations-temporary-release

Attendance is either in person or online and is free. Those wishing to attend will need to register on this IHR webpage.

You can see the seminar presentation here: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/Mgw3jIJvGgQ8B3_dlqzuiH_sN3V0u-8aqt5emM7zUGH1TSHYddR3emtevbwdPH6A.pn7UcGgz5k_lSOCq Passcode: +x%kw2aU

Police as Ploughmen in 1917/18: How Britain’s Policemen Helped Local Populations by Temporary Release into Agriculture

Event type

Seminar

Series

War, Society and Culture

Address

Hybrid | Online-via Zoom & IHR Pollard Seminar Room, N301, Third Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Speakers

Mary Fraser (University of Glasgow)

Event dates

31 May 2023, 5:30PM - 7:00PM
Add to calendar

Contact

ihr.events@sas.ac.uk
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Police History

It was a real pleasure to talk with the 50+ participants on the College of Policing, Strategic Demand Course at the Police College last Wednesday. It was the first time a section on police history had been included in this course. The course is for those working in the police service who have been identified as potential for promotion to senior roles, so a challenging group. 

The picture shows (from left to right) Ruth Halkon from the Police Foundation, who Chaired our session; Paul Lawrence from the Open University; David Churchill from the University of Leeds; and me.