@drmaryfraser
When
Britain went to war in 1914, policemen throughout Great Britain
confronted a range of new challenges. With the onset of the war the
government turned to the police as agents of wartime authority and
assigned to them an ever-increasing number of new duties that reflected
the expanding power of the British state. Yet at the same time the
police found their ability to perform their roles constrained by wartime
pressures on both their professional and personal lives. Mary Fraser’s
book offers the first examination of the role of the police in Great
Britain during the First World War, one that describes both the
conflict’s demands upon them and how they sought to meet them.
As
Fraser explains, the police were strained by contrasting pressures from
the moment Britain entered the war. Once Britain joined the conflict
many policemen quit in order to enlist in the armed forces. At the same
time, the government expanded police responsibilities by requiring the
police to monitor the wives of the men who enlisted to confirm their
eligibility for the Wartime Separation Allowances that were provided to
them. This foreshadowed a recurrent theme of the role of the police in
the war, as many in the government and in society wanted the police to
provide the sort of family supervision that the men now serving at the
front traditionally provided. To do so, the police turned to “special
constables” (many of whom were men avoiding military service) and even
employed women in policing roles for the first time.
Unlike the
male police officers who came primarily from the working classes, the
women who served as constables were mainly from the middle class, and
personified the increasing imposition of middle-class standards of
morality on the broader population. Nowhere was this better reflected
than in the efforts to control drunkenness and the “khaki fever” of
young women, both of which remained persistent concerns throughout the
war. Another area of worry was the growth in youth crime, which resulted
in surveys of both the offenders and their families in an effort to
better understand both the root causes and how to address them. Here
again the police were tasked with performing roles previously regarded
as those of the male heads of household, which meant an expansion of the
role of the state in the lives of ordinary British citizens.
The
pressures on the police were not limited to their hours on duty,
either. Soaring food prices strained household budgets of police
families as much as they did those of everyone else on the home front,
yet unlike other women the wives of policemen were deterred from seeking
employment outside the home. The food crisis later in the war impacted
policemen in another way as well, as many of them were ordered to work
on farms to compensate for the agricultural labor shortage and help
cultivate desperately needed crops. Arguably this was relevant to their
responsibility to maintain social order, as food riots in Glasgow and
elsewhere demonstrated the growing strains created by food shortages.
Though the Ministry of Food expanded the regulation of foodstuffs, it
fell again to the police to turn their directives into reality. With
their expanded duties and low pay, it was little wonder that by the
summer of 1918 many police went out on strike, presaging the social
stress Britain would face after the end of the war.
Though the
role of the British police in the First World War has long been
neglected, Fraser’s book goes far towards filling this gap in our
historical understanding. By drawing upon official documents,
contemporary professional journals, and the secondary source literature
on the home front, she succeeds in reconstructing both the role of the
police during the war and the unique pressures their members faced both
at work and at home. While the price of the book is daunting, no one
interested in the British home front during the war can afford to
neglect this ground-breaking study.
@drmaryfraser