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

Armstrong, C. (2015) Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the Great War. Barnsley: Pen and Sword.

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

Board of Agriculture and Fisheries (1919) Report of the Food Production Department for the year 1918. TNA MAF 42/8

Brown, N.F. (2015) 'Fall in the children': a regional study of the mobilisation of the children of the 42nd regimental area during the great war. PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Dundee.

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.

Crookes, W. (1917) The wheat problem. London: Longman

Cultivation of Lands Order, 1917. TNA MAF 48/221.

Davis, B.J. (2000) Home fires burning: food, politics, and everyday life in World War 1 Berlin. The University of North Carolina Press.

Dearle, N.B. (1929) Economic Chronicle of the Great War for Great Britain and Ireland. Oxford University Press

Defence of the Realm Act https://archive.org/details/defenceofrealmma00grearich/page/54) 

DeGroot, G.J. (1996) Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War. London: Longman. 

Desborough, Lord. (1919) Report of the Committee on the Police Service in England, Wales and Scotland. 

Devine, T.M. (ed.) (1984) 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.E. (1988) Nutrition and living standards in wartime Britain. In The upheaval of war: family, work and welfare in Europe, 1914-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Dunning, Lord (1916) HM Inspector of Constabulary Report for 1915. TNA HO 287

Dunning, Lord. (1918) HM Inspector of Constabulary Report for 1917. TNA HO 287

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

Emsley, C. (2009) The great British bobby: A history of British policing from the eighteenth century to the present. London: Quercus.

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

Fraser, M. (2019) Policing the Home Front, 1914-1918: The control of the British population at war. London: Routledge. 

Fellowes, A. (1919) Wages and conditions in agriculture. Parliamentary papers Cmd. 24 Vol IX 

Ferguson, M. (1920) The diets of labouring class families during the course of the war. Journal of Hygiene 18, 409-16.

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

Holmes, H. (2016) A neglected innovation: the double-furrow plough in Scotland, its early adoption and use, 1867 to 1880. Agricultural History Review 64(1) 54-80

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

Lloyd George, D. (1934) War memoirs of David Lloyd George 1916-1917. Boston: Little Brown.

Martin, J. (2019) Saving the nation from starvation: the heroic age of food control, June 1917 to July 1918. Rural History, 30, 181-196

Marwick, A. (2006) The Deluge: British Society and the First World War. 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Milner, A. (1915) Department (Milner) Committee on Home Food Production. TNA MAF 42/9

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.J. (1970) Working-class diets in late nineteenth-century Britain. Economic History Review. 23, 314-23. 

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.

Prothero, R.E. (1917) Home Grown food Supply. TNA MAF 53/6

Prothero, R. (1961) English Farming Past and Present. 6th edition. London: Heinemann

Rawlings, P. (2012) Policing: A short history. Taylor & Francis.

Rew, H. (1918) Agricultural statistics, 1918. Annual return in Acreage and Livestock Returns of England and Wales. Board of Agriculture and Fisheries. Volume LII, Part 1. London. 20th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (Proquest)

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

Salter, J.A. (1921) Allied Shipping Control: An experiment in international administration. Economic and social history of the world war. Carnegie Endowment for international peace. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Waites, B. (1987) A class society at war, 1914-1918. Berg

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

Woolfe, H. (1923) Labour supply and regulations. Oxford: The Clarendon 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.

Newspapers and journals

The Berwickshire News
The Bournemouth Guardian
Birmingham Daily Post
The Birmingham Daily Mail
Birmingham Gazette
Journal of the Board of Agriculture
The Board of Trade Labour Gazette
Chelmsford Chronicle
Cheshire Observer
Chester Chronicle
The Daily Mail
The Daily News
Derby Daily Telegraph
The Diss Express, and Norfolk and Suffolk Journal
The Dundee Courier
Dundee Evening Telegraph and Post
The Economic Journal
Essex Newsman
The Evening Times
The Glasgow Herald
The Hawick Express and Advertiser
The Jedburgh Gazette
Kilmarnock Herald and North Ayrshire Gazette
Lancashire Daily Post
Leeds Mercury
Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury
Liverpool Echo
Manchester Evening News
Manchester Guardian
Montrose Standard and Angus and Mearns Register
The Newcastle Daily Journal
Norfolk Chronicle
The North Wales Weekly
Pall Mall Gazette
The Police Review and Parade Gossip
The Scottish Farmer
The Scotsman
Skyrack Courier
The Southern Reporter
The Stonehaven Journal
The Sunday Post
The Times
The Weekly Bulletin 
The Westminster Gazette
Yorkshire Evening Post
Yorkshire Telegraph and Star 

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.

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A really good review published in the journal Labour History: A journal of Labour and Social History, Number 129, November 2025 pages 241-242 by Mark Briskey: see https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976122. 

Mary Fraser, The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917–19 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). pp. xvii + 222. €139.99 hardcover. 

    Dr Mary Fraser is a social scientist who works on the modern history of police and an academic at the University of Glasgow. Since 2018 she has been an associate at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, and in 2023 she was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Historical Society. Fraser is also a founding member of the Police History Society. 

    The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917–1919 is a meticulously researched and prodigiously referenced book containing graphs, tables, and images that assist in understanding the immensity and problematic nature of the task of feeding Britain during World War I. Fraser commences with a succinct statement of the book’s objectives: “introduce[ing] the social and political background to the release of British policemen from their everyday police duties to help agriculture during the last two years of the Great War. It was a time of national crisis not least of which was potential population starvation” (1). 

    Fraser emphasises the grave situation Britain found itself in, and investigates some of the causes – including the impact of unlimited German submarine warfare on British shipping and poor seasonal harvests (105). Food shortages during wartime are not unusual. There has been much written on governmental responses to agricultural production during wartime, including the role of the UK’s women’s land army during World War I. Similarly, the role of prisoners of war in different conflicts, including over 12,000 Italian POWs during World War II undertaking agricultural labour in Australia, South Africa, and other locations, has been written on. 

    What makes Fraser’s book particularly valuable is her examination of British policy that led to several police services in England and Scotland providing personnel to boost the farming effort and food production. The police, already suffering drastically low personnel levels due to wartime enlistment, provided men with some familiarity of farm work to undertake various essential rural labour tasks, including the ploughing, planting, and harvesting of food crops. Fraser’s book adds much-needed scholarship on this relatively under-reported element of emergency wartime labour. 

    Over the book’s nine individually referenced chapters, Fraser provides background to the early days of the war, noting the policy decisions of successive British governments, eventually leading to the British state taking control of agriculture in 1917 (59). In chapter 5, Fraser notes the efforts to increase arable land for crop production: government campaigns praised crop production as being “patriotic,” while “bad farming” or using arable land for such “unnecessary activities” as playing sport was distinctly “unpatriotic.” Golf was singled out as being particularly wasteful in its extravagant use of arable land on which to hit a little ball around (72). These campaigns resulted in great extensions to arable land and food production. Over 3,000,000 acres were added. 

    In chapter 4, Fraser explores additional measures to increase crop production through the use of tractors and other mechanical aids. Even spiritual resources were included in the national effort, with the limiting of religious services on Sundays being approved by clergy so there would be less praying and more farming (95). Fraser’s inclusion of quantitative evidence adds to the wealth of sources she draws upon. This includes charts and lists of the locations of police stations and the numbers of officers who were released to farming service in England and Scotland (122). Fraser also includes copies or written artefacts from the Police Review, newspapers, and other sources, including the following:                     'POLICEMEN FOR THE PLOUGH. Details were given to the West Sussex Farmers’ Union last week … Policemen who had experience as ploughmen were to be sent with the horses, to be in charge of them and to plough with them. The first horses were to be sent to the Horsham district – 40 horses, with 16 policemen in charge of them.' (146) 

    I would recommend this book as an invaluable reference for scholars of policing as well as criminologists, and those interested in labour history, emergency powers, and how, during times of crisis, conflict, and disorder the police have been drawn upon to contribute to societal welfare. In Fraser’s book we see the police responding to a national crisis and contributing their labour to plough, plant, and produce food for a population perilously close to starvation and at risk of food riots. These risks were very real. Fraser notes the impact of starvation in wartime Germany, which resulted in deaths and pitched battles between farmers and roving gangs of starving citizens in many rural and urban areas including Munich (103). Arguably a modern analogy of this World War I response to a national crisis when police were released to plough the fields in the food shortages of 1917 occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, when police in many countries including the UK (215) were called upon to vigorously police the health regulations in our public spaces and respond to a different national crisis. 

MARK BRISKEY: Murdoch University

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.