The police popular journal "The Police Review and Parade Gossip"

@drmaryfraser

Popular journals are a good way to understand their target audience. In the case of The Police Review and Parade Gossip, it helps us to understand the work and lives of the policeman on the beat and his family. It was started in 1893 by the philanthropist and temperance campaigner John Kempster who invested his £500 savings because he saw a need for policemen on the beat to have a voice and to improve their standard of education and training. It became the most widely read weekly police journal during the First World War and was referred to by government for the views of policemen generally. Files in the National Archives at Kew have cuttings taken from the journal pasted in to letters and correspondence between ministers and civil servants about topical police matters.
Widely read and influential journals are important sources for historical research as they have to reflect the views of their readers, or they lose their target audience; they also help to form opinions through the articles they produce - so that they become a reflector and arbiter of opinions. No journal can afford to be out of step with its readers.
Researchers on police history have called the journal's editor enthusiastic and forceful, with the journal being a mouthpiece for the respectable, educated working man who served as a policeman and also had rights as a citizen. It encouraged the moral values of stability, self-improvement, thrift and sobriety and showed the policeman as respectable, self-disciplined and self-taught, which was close to the values the police as an organisation promoted. It also campaigned for better conditions of service for the policeman, such as the successful campaign for the weekly rest day, which became enshrined in legislation in the Police (Weekly Rest Day) Bill of 1910.
Below is the front cover of the journal, from the first publication after the Armistice in November 1918. Sadly it ceased publication in 2011 after over 110 years in print.
Further reading:
Fraser, M. (2019) Policing the Home Front 1914-1018: The control of the British population at war. Abingdon: Routledge, First World War History Series.
Clapson, M. & Emsley, C. (2011) Street, beat and respectability: The culture and self-image of the late Victorian and Edwardian urban policeman. In Williams, C. A. (ed.) Police and Policing in the Twentieth Century. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Chapter 14, pp. 293-317.

@drmaryfraser