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nprough 22/9/06 10:15 am Page 1
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page i

The New Policing

McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page ii
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page iii

The New Policing

Eugene McLaughlin

SAGE Publications
London ● Thousand Oaks ● New Delhi
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page iv

© Eugene McLaughlin 2007

First published 2007

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research

or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this
publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted
in any form, or by any means, only with the prior
permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of
reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms
of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms
should be sent to the publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd

1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP

SAGE Publications Inc

2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

B-42 Panchsheel Enclave
Post Box 4109
New Delhi 110 017

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library

ISBN 0 8039 8904 0 978 0 8039 8904 7

0 8039 8905 9 978 0 8039 8905 4

Library of Congress control number available

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed on paper from sustainable resources
Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page v

Contents

List of Figures vi

Preface vii

Acknowledgements xiv

1 The cultural construction of the police 1

2 The sociological construction of the police 26

3 Police studies: traditional perspectives 49

4 Police studies: new perspectives 87

5 Policing crime and disorder 115

6 Police culture 143

7 Police governance 172

8 Policing the new terrorism 197

References 221

Index 241
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page vi

List of Figur es

1.1a PC George Dixon: the iconic constable 14

1.1b Tom Riley: from delinquent to ‘cop killer’ 18

2.1 London East End bobby 1950s 35

2.2 New York city cop 1950s 41

5.1 NYPD partol cars, Times Square, New York 123

5.2 Safer neighbourhood policing, London 136

6.1 Positive Action poster: Police Federation 151

6.2 Positive Action poster: Gay Police Association

7.1 Stephen Lawrence memorial banner 179

8.1 Memorial for 7/7 bomb victims 202

8.2 Jean Charles de Menezes shrine 207
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page vii

Preface

There are already many books in circulation that are able to provide readers
with overviews of the core subject matter of police studies, such as the his-
torical origins and development; roles and responsibilities; the legal powers of
police officers; recruitment, socialization and career progression processes; the
occupational dynamics of policework; police-community relations; the organi-
zational structure of control and accountability; the work of specialist units;
and crime control issues facing the police in the twenty-first century. There
are also a multitude of empirical reports that present findings on critical oper-
ational issues confronting contemporary policing. The police remain an
intriguing research site because it is the most visible representation of the
state’s sovereign authority in civil society and police officers are authorized to
use their considerable powers to take action against crime and disorder in a
manner that is both fair and impartial. Sitting alongside this corpus of police-
centred work is a rapidly expanding literature that locates ‘the police’ within
a broader framework of policing, security, regulation and governance. My
intention has not been to replicate these texts but to reconsider some of what
I view to be the defining concerns of traditional police studies and work
within the transformative approaches of the new police studies. The story I tell
is from a British perspective but it also touches upon much broader shifts that
are restructuring the Anglo-American policing model.
This book remains very much a work in progress for the following reasons.
First, it cannot claim to be a comprehensive survey of the bewildering number
of ‘nooks and crannies’ of contemporary policing. Space limitations and analyt-
ical interests have required me to make some difficult choices about what to
include and what to neglect. Second, it is extremely difficult to sift out what is
of long term significance in policing in a moment of contradictory transfor-
mation. During the past decade exceptionally well publicised claims have been
made with regard to numerous state-of-the-art policing policies and tactics. As
demands for punitive ‘law and order’ measures have become an ever more
important feature of the tabloid political culture, there are intense pressures to
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page viii

announce new crime control strategies. The contemporary landscape of policing

is as a consequence littered with various initiatives that have been disposed of
once they fulfilled a particular public relations function. Hence it is increasingly
difficult to distinguish between rhetoric and reality. In addition, there seems to
be an increasing gap between what police scholars and police officers under-
stand to be ‘really’ significant. This is compounded by the sheer organizational
complexity of contemporary police forces, constituted as they are through over-
lapping institutional configurations and networks. Third, I remain ambivalent
about whether we can refine further the conceptual tools necessary to research
this rapidly changing institutional field of study. I have been attempting to
understand policing for many years. My overall analytical understanding of the
state of British policing is constituted through researching those high profile
crisis moments when an aspect of policing has to be examined, explained and
‘resolved’ in the political realm. This includes the Scarman report (1981) into the
riots of 1981; the Sheehy report (1993) into the organizational structure and
rationale of the police; the Macpherson report (1999) into the racist murder of
Stephen Lawrence; the Patten report (1999) into the future of policing in
Northern Ireland and the more recent Independent Police Complaints
Commission examination (2006) of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Such incidents and controversies tend to cast long, unresolvable shadows over
how we understand and evaluate policing.
This approach is supplemented by analysis of various overarching govern-
mental projects to reform police structure, powers and accountability and, at
a more local level, attending public meetings about neighbourhood policing
issues. Some of these are routine and some are organized by single issue cam-
paign groups who have mobilized around a specific cause for concern. It is in
such fora where one can witness the conflicting shifts in policing. It is also
where one learns to interrogate the contradictory multi-tiered realities that are
an inevitable part of contemporary policing. It can also be a deeply depress-
ing experience to hear the latest generation of well-intentioned senior police
officers attempt to explain why something did or did not happen; respond to
public concerns and manage public expectations; or detail the local implica-
tions of the latest round of top down organizational reform and modernization.
A final reason why this is very much a work in progress is that the theoreti-
cal registers that one has to analyse and offer explanation seem to be increas-
ingly inadequate to the task. During the past 30 years our understanding of the
police and policing has undergone major transformations. Re-reading the clas-
sic texts of the Anglo-American sociology of the police one has a sense that
they are both obviously familiar and strangely unfamiliar. Going behind ‘the
blue curtain’ generated a research energy that is, for the most part, difficult
to realize in contemporary police studies. These studies of patrol work as cul-
turally crafted practice are remarkably self-contained with a relatively secure
set of assumptions about ‘the police’, ‘police officers’, ‘police character’, ‘police
work’ and ‘the policed’.

viii THE NEW POLICING

McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page ix

The carefully situated findings of previous generations of researchers are by

no means redundant and future generations of students of policing should be
encouraged to read them in the original. However, an underlying theme of this
book is that the academic context within which contemporary police studies
takes place is radically altered. Now there is an expectation that police schol-
ars can produce work that on the one hand demonstrates theoretical connec-
tions to broader intellectual shifts and on the other meets the policy demands
of professional policework. This ‘disciplining’ has produced a notable schism
within police studies and a re-profiling of police scholarship. There are an
increasing number of contracted researchers and consultants who use man-
agerialist methodologies to evaluate police personnel, practice and procedure
and turn out ‘what works’ reports. The aspiration to move from an ad hoc
administrative police studies to a fully-fledged police management science is
supported by the decisions of funding bodies. There would seem to be less
room for those scholars who wish to work from the outside to interrogate the
state institution that is expected to symbolize and guarantee public safety and
a civil society. And yet it has never been more important to forge a critical
police studies that is capable of conceptualizing policing developments against
socio-cultural, economic and political transformations. It remains the case that
studying the police in the broadest contextual manner is of vital importance
because, as we shall see in the course of this book, postmodernity seems deter-
mined to beat out its particular complex of volatile tensions and anxieties
resultant from everything from consumerization, cultural differentiation,
social fragmentation through to a global war on terror on the ‘police anvil’
with a merciless vengeance.
The structure of this book is relatively straightforward. Each of the chapters
has a distinct focus, namely, popular cultural history, sociological origins, tra-
ditional perspectives, new perspectives, crime control, culture and account-
ability. Chapters 1 to 4 seek to provide readers with a systematic overview of
the origins and development of key theoretical perspectives in police studies.
The origins of chapter 1 lie with my engagement with the work of police his-
torians on the peculiarities of the ‘uniquely mild’ system of English policing.
I did not want to repeat the ‘distant past into the present’ narration of the
parish constable, watchmen and ‘bobbies’. Nor did I wish to recount the influ-
ence played by late eighteenth and early nineteenth century reformers on the
development of the ‘new constabulary’ or arguments between scholars on the
relationship between the police and state (national and colonial) formation.
I decided to locate my historical analysis with the cultural work that went into
producing PC George Dixon, the iconic ‘bobby on the beat’. The complex of
cultural images and associations articulated through this powerful national
popular representation pre-dates sociological interest in the British police and
in unpredictable ways arises like a phoenix from the ashes to insert itself in
contemporary debates. Sooner or later we have to confront and make socio-
logical sense of the interpellative powers of the Dixonian policing imaginary.

PREFACE ix
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page x

This chapter is also intended to strengthen the case for culturally based analysis
of the mass mediated nature of police representations.
Chapter 2 is the result of an increasing concern to locate, remember and
rethink the sociological origins of police studies. The intention is to provide
readers with an in-depth analysis of one of the first sociological analyses of the
police. Along with the seminal research of William Westley, Michael Banton’s,
The Policeman in the Community (1964), represents the breakthrough in post-
war police studies. Both authors presented a convincing case as to why ‘the
police’ should be a legitimate research topic for sociologists. They also demon-
strated what is distinctive and significant about a sociological approach as
opposed to numerous legal-constitutional, public administration and historical
studies. Although their work was inspirational for a generation of Anglo-American
police scholars, both authors have now been reduced to the dust laden status
of the bracketed footnotes (see Westley, 1951; 1953; 1970 and Banton, 1964).
This is remarkable given that they bequeathed a distinctive field of inquiry, a
‘knowledge structure’ replete with key sociological concepts and research
questions and a distinctive methodological approach. They also created two
fundamentally different conceptualizations of policing, one ‘profane’ and one
‘sacred’. William Westley insisted that conflict and violence were intrinsic and
indeed defining aspects of US policework while Michael Banton identified the
conditions that produced consensual, benign policework in Britain. Banton’s
explicitly comparative focus also introduced a vitally important analytical
bridgehead between the UK and US police studies. In more recent times, such
transatlantic ties have been less concerned with comparative academic
research matters than with the introduction of American police discourse and
practice into British policing. As with every other field of public policy, it
seems that Britain is willing to import policing policies from the United States.
Chapters 3 and 4 are intended to provide a tentative framework through
which to organize the key perspectives that constitute both traditional and
new police studies. Although there is of course an arbitrariness about this
framing and there is also the danger of over-simplification, I feel it is impor-
tant to recognize that there are distinctive perspectives influencing police
studies. Chapter 3 outlines the four theoretical perspectives that characterize
traditional police studies: ethnographic; Marxist; administrative and left real-
ist perspectives. Although they work with different domain assumptions,
explanatory concepts, research concerns and methodologies, each has been
influenced by the others. We start with the first wave of eclectic ethnographic
police studies that sought to expand upon the concerns of Westley and Banton.
The aspiration to represent the inner realities of policing meant that the
expressive culture, active agency and organizational identity of the street cop
were the primary focus as was the drama of ‘doing’ policework. These studies
also identified the complexities and contradictions of the police function in
liberal democratic societies. The dominance of ethnographic approaches was
challenged by a Marxist police studies underpinned by the insistence that ‘the

x THE NEW POLICING

McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page xi

police’ be defined, first and foremost, as a political category. This allowed

for the opening out of a structuralist interrogation of the policing of Western
capitalist societies. Analysing how specific class interests are written into
policing broke dramatically with ethnographic studies, centering the experi-
ences of those subjected to policing and constructing a set of politicised
research interests around the question of the true function of the police in a
capitalist society. More recently, administrative and left realist perspectives
have concentrated on identifying the highly localized role police can and
should play in responding to public fears and concerns about crime, disorder
and anti-social behaviour. This chapter stands as a reminder of just how influ-
ential police-based scholarship has also been to a much broader based
criminological conversation. The study of ‘the police’ and ‘policing’ inevitably
touches upon a complicated range of core philosophical, sociological and gov-
ernmental issues. It is hard, for example, to over-estimate the broader impact
of Hall et al’s ‘authoritarian state’ thesis and Wilson and Kelling’s ‘broken
windows’ theory.
In chapter 4 I attempt to pull together and organize a variety of perspectives
that have been generated as a result of a widening of the analytical lens from
state-bounded conceptions of police sovereignty to ‘policing’, ‘security’ and
‘governance’. The mutually conditioning relationship between nation state and
police is under severe strain. This new police studies draws upon broader
debates about the turbo-charged implications of the shift to postmodernity.
This has stimulated ‘thinking at the limits’ consideration about the disaggre-
gated, pluralized, patchworked, ‘pick n’mix’ shape of ‘future policing’ resul-
tant from the impact of (a) pluralization of local policing and security activities
and (b) the de-bordering of national policing, security and intelligence inter-
ests. There is enough evidence to suggest that this expanded conceptual imag-
ination associated with the pluralist and transnational thinking has inaugurated
a fundamental paradigm shift in police studies. I will leave it for readers to
review the different perspectives and to work through the co-existent dislo-
cated futures of policing laid out in this chapter. To further clarify the ‘new-
ness’ of the new police studies, chapter 4 also considers the work of a small
group of scholars who have argued that the transformation of police-media
relations is arguably one of the most important analytical and methodological
challenges currently facing police studies. Because of public obsession with
crime, flashing blue lights and wailing sirens dominate the 24/7 news head-
lines and entertainment media schedules. This allows the media to play a pow-
erful role in shaping public understanding of the ‘spectacle of policing’ and the
criminal justice process. Some writers would go so far as to argue, for exam-
ple, that hard and fast ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ representational regimes are now
so intimately inter-connected and inter-textualized that the borders between
the two have all but collapsed, creating a multitude of synthetic policing imag-
inaries. This is compounded by the fact that realizing ‘instantaneous’ legiti-
mation requires the police to impress themselves increasingly on the public

PREFACE xi
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page xii

imagination through a range of pro-active communication, public relations and

image manipulation strategies. Finally, as shall be noted in several chapters,
the newsmedia can also provide an invaluable, if unpredictable, form of pub-
lic scrutiny in controversial policing incidents. The political ramifications of
the wrap-around prime timing presence of the 24/7 global media on policing
and the disintegration of the representational regime of policing requires
much more detailed consideration than is currently given.
A central intention of chapter 4 is to suggest that no single theorization is
capable of dominating our understanding of contemporary developments in
policing. And to a considerable degree, this is little more than a reflection of
the dislocated condition of a core state institution that is being compelled to
re-imagine itself on the sharpest edges of radical transformation. This is the
basis for the much more grounded and specific discussion that takes place in
chapters 5 to 8. The British police have never looked more professional,
techno-rational, outward looking and progressive in thinking and opera-
tionally transparent and police performance is now measured and evaluated
to an unprecedented degree. And yet there is a sense in which wave after wave
of reforms have produced a hollowed out shell of a distinctive policing model
that once was and could have been. Living as it is within the wreckage of
futures that might have been, might explain why the British police seems to
be incapable of generating a persuasive, legitimating, and durable ‘home
grown’ philosophy of policing. Such a philosophical vacuum means that it is
extremely susceptible to being hegemonized further by US policing discourses
and ideas of ‘how to police’ crime. In chapters 5 to 7, I use a case study
approach to examine three critical issues confronting the British police in
more depth. My empirical reference point, for the most part, is the
Metropolitan Police, the British police force with the most complex, pressur-
ized, multiply symbolized working environment. In recent years it has found
itself under relentless pressure to fast-forward strategies to demonstrate that
it can: re-police crime, disorder, incivility and anti-social behaviour (Chapter 5);
re-culture the organization so that it reflects the multi-cultural global city it is
responsible for (Chapter 6); and re-structure modes of accountability so that
they are capable of connecting with the security needs of myriad neighbour-
hoods and communities (Chapter 7). In the competitive globalized market
place of policing, securitization and crime control, the Metropolitan Police
must contend not just with the private sector but being increasingly evaluated
against the aggressively branded NYPD’s ‘zero tolerance’/‘quality of life’ polic-
ing model and the Chicago Police Department’s community oriented policing
model.
The concluding chapter addresses concerns that even the new police studies
will become analytically redundant as a result of the fallout from the mass
casualty terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001.
Britain’s integral partnership with the US in the global ‘long war’ – unlimited
in time and space – against Islamic terrorism has unknown implications for

xii THE NEW POLICING

McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page xiii

internal policing and security. Initially, those concerned with civil liberties and
human rights in Britain managed to rein in demands for new police powers and
counter-terrorism methodologies that were deemed to be vital to deal with the
increased threat of mass casualty violence. They did so by reference to the
Northern Ireland experience and claiming that the terrorist threat was being
overstated by authoritarians wishing to manipulate public fears and insecuri-
ties. However, the political and newsmedia terms of the policing debate
changed dramatically in July 2005 with the no-warning suicide bomb attacks
on London’s transport system, the subsequent failed attacks and the fatal shoot-
ing of Jean Charles de Menezes by Metropolitan Police officers. This chapter is
anchored by Sir Ian Blair’s high-profile November 2005 BBC Dimbleby
Lecture. This touchstone – ‘What kind of police service do we want?’ – lecture
reflected on some of the key issues and debates raised in Chapters 4 to 7. Long
term, we now have to give sustained attention to the construction of a critical
police studies that is capable of engaging analytically and politically with the
multi-tiered national security policing modality that seems likely to emerge
during the next decade.

PREFACE xiii
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page xiv

Acknowledgements

In writing this book I have been fortunate to have had the encouragement and
support of a number of colleagues and friends. A particular debt of gratitude and
friendship is owed to John Muncie and Karim Murji. Over the time this work has
been developing John and I have concluded many criminological publishing pro-
jects with Sage. Throughout he always reminded me that at some time I would
have to settle my account with police studies and move on. For many years Karim
and I produced numerous papers about the impossibilities and refusals of polic-
ing and some of the core chapters in this book could not have been completed
otherwise. Gordon Hughes and Sarah Neal have helped to work through differ-
ent futures of policing, community safety and crime prevention and governance.
Many of the arguments that are central to the book reflect engagement with the
work of: Michael Banton, Maureen Cain, John Clarke, Adam Crawford, Adam
Edwards, Clive Emsley, Stuart Hall, Frances Heidensohn, Paddy Hillyard, Simon
Holdaway, Gordon Hughes, Tony Jefferson, Anja Johansen, Les Johnston, Michael
Keith, Ian Loader, Barry Loveday, Agon Mulcahy, Pat O’Malley, Tim Newburn,
Maurice Punch, Robert Reiner, Phil Scraton, Jim Sheptycki, Joe Sim, Betsy
Stanko, Kevin Stenson, ‘Tank’ Waddington, Louise Westmarland and Lucia
Zedner. I am indebted to Pat O’Malley, Robert Reiner, Betsy Stanko and Tank
Waddington for reviewing the manuscript. The usual qualification applies of
course: any errors of fact or analysis remain my responsibility. I would also like
to thank colleagues at the Open University and City University who have
required me to think beyond police studies. Alison Wakefield kept reminding me
of the limitations of a state centred conception of policing, whilst Chris Greer has
been instrumental in making me think seriously about the under-researched rela-
tionship between the police and the 24/7 information age. At a key moment,
Winifred Power deployed her incisive editorial skills to help me make sense of
police theory.
I wish to also express my sincere gratitude to Caroline Porter, Miranda
Nunhofer, Louise Skelding, Ian Antcliff and the editorial team at Sage for their
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Prelims.qxd 10/26/2006 12:15 PM Page xv

unfailing patience, general support and advice at key moments. This includes
clearing the permission to reproduce in chapter 1 some of the material that
appeared originally in ‘From Reel to Ideal: the ‘Blue Lamp’ and the cultural
construction of PC George Dixon’, Crime, Media and Culture: an International
Journal, 2005, 1 (1): 1–32. I would like to acknowledge Canal Plus Image UK
and Getty Images for permission to use the photographic images used in
Chapters 1 and 2 and the Police Federation and the Gay Police Association for
providing the images used in Chapter 6. Finally I would like to thank Kate
Lowe. Needless to say, without her continuing support and friendship The New
Policing would not have been possible.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv
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McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Ch-01.qxd 10/26/2006 12:19 PM Page 1

The Cultural Constr uction

of the Police 1

This chapter considers how a very particular cultural representation of the

British police was established prior to and in many respects anticipated socio-
logical analysis of policing. Today, the police constable, or ‘bobby on the beat’
can be found in virtually every tourist gift shop in London in a bewildering
number of formats: postcards, key rings, puppets, dolls, teddy bears, coffee
mugs, T-shirts all carry this instantly recognizable image of the English police.
An avuncular ‘bobby’ has even featured on the front page of brochures for hol-
idays in London. No other European capital carries such an array of police-
based tourist trinkets. We must look to North America for comparable
merchandising of the police officer. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
registered its initials as a trademark in August 1998 in an attempt to halt
the proliferation of cheap ‘tacky’ imitations of the force’s badge and other
symbols that the Commissioner of the LAPD believed created confusion and
threatened ‘to dilute the authority of LAPD officers’ (Guardian, 6 August
1998). In 1997 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took similar action in
relation to ‘Mountie’ merchandise proclaiming that every souvenir company
wishing to use the instantly recognizable ‘redcoat’ image would have to clear
copyright approval with a special licensing body. The Canadian government
supported fully the new regulatory framework on the grounds that the
‘Mountie’ was not just an important police image but in certain respects the
most expressive self-image of the Canadian nation. The process of public rela-
tions management was completed with the Disney Corporation acquisition of
the licensing rights to all products bearing the image of the ‘Mountie’
(Gittings, 1998), generating accusations that the Canadian government was
supporting the ‘Disney-fication’ of policing. And post 9/11, the image of the
NYPD has been culturally and commercially revalued as illustrated by a new
McLaughlin (Policing)-3469-Ch-01.qxd 10/26/2006 12:19 PM Page 2

wave of heroic representations on sale. A general point to note, therefore, is

that, within certain societies, the police officer can acquire a representative
status that stands at the very centre of the popular cultural imagination (Ericson,
1989; Loader and Mulcahy, 2003).
What is truly significant is that the English ‘bobby’ has been culturally con-
stituted through a set of popular cultural storylines which underscore his
essential ‘difference’ from the police officers of other countries (McLaughlin
and Murji, 1998). Numerous publications continue to assert that he is the
finest police officer in the world: a faithful, incorruptible public servant who
is unwavering in his commitment to the community; part of the ‘thin blue
line’ that marks out an orderly society from a disorderly one; unarmed
because he works with broad-based public consent and respect but ‘armed’
with prestige and street wisdom rather than power (Radzinowicz, 1955;
Critchley, 1967; Ascoli, 1979). This ‘exceptionalist’ discourse has also exer-
cised a powerful hold over police scholarship.
As we shall see in later chapters, sociological interest in the UK police force
in its own right was to come later. For now, we need to look at how the police
were depicted in contemporary press, fiction, film and TV in order to throw
light on how the ‘bobby’ came to be such an important icon of ‘Englishness’.
To date most discussion of the origins of the positive image of the English
‘bobby’ reproduces the discourse of the ‘native genius’ of far-sighted reform-
ers who created him and the unique constitutional settlement and bureau-
cratic processes that legitimated the police mandate in England. According to
this perspective, the English not only laid down a unique policing model but
devised a constitutional framework within which policing, civil liberties and
social order could not just be reconciled but interwoven as an exemplary form
of liberal democratic citizenship. This chapter seeks to complement and com-
plicate this ‘national feeling for policing’ perspective by focusing on the inter-
secting popular cultural practices that re-imagined the police constable from
being the most un-English of ideas into a multi-dimensional icon of English
national identity.
This chapter does not propose to re-tell and re-argue the history of the
British police. Suffice to say that a considerable amount of political work had
to take place in order for ‘the police’ (this most ‘un-English’) of institutions to
be first of all sheltered from popular resentment and hostility and gradually
transformed into one which could be ideologically celebrated as the epitome
of Englishness (Critchley, 1967; Ascoli, 1979; Gatrell, 1990; Emsley, 1991;
Reynolds, 1998). Newman (1987) argues that in the course of the nineteenth
and early twentieth century we witness systematic efforts to constitute a
mythological ‘Englishness’. The quintessential characteristics and values of
‘Englishness’ materialized in a variety of political, cultural and institutional
settings. The English character was seen to be marked by robust common
sense; a sense of fair play and humour; decency; self-restraint; pragmatism;
a sense of duty; chivalry; an individualism bordering on eccentricity;

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under-statement; and team spirit. Moreover, the English were seen as patriots
rather than nationalists – patriotism being defined as an unconscious individ-
ual predilection and nationalism a consciously expressed collective sentiment
(Colls and Dodd, 1986). What is interesting is that Hobsbawm and Ranger
(1983) have detailed how quintessential markers of ‘Englishness’ were initially
denounced and rejected as unacceptable departures from ‘English’ practice
and custom. The police provide us with one of the most striking examples of
this process of cultural metamorphosis. As we shall see, initial public responses
to the ‘bobby’ did not envisage him as a defining representation of the English
character.

The cultural constr uction of the English police constable

It is hard to convey the depth of resistance to the idea of ‘police’ in late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Available evidence suggests
that, because of public sensitivities, considerable attention was paid to the
image and styling, demeanour and status of the new police before they finally
joined the parish watch (the ‘Charlies’) on the streets of central London at
6 p.m. Tuesday, 29 September 1829 (Lyman, 1964; Miller, 1977; Palmer, 1988;
Hay and Snyder, 1989; Reynolds, 1989; Beattie, 2002; Harris, 2004). As Clive
Emsley notes because of the English antipathy to a standing army quartered
at home, Metropolitan Police constables did not, in any way, look continental
or military. They were dressed in:

top hats, uniforms of blue, swallow-tail coats with the minimum of decoration, in
contrast to the short scarlet tunics with colour facings and piping of the British
infantry; the constable’s weaponry was limited to a wooden truncheon, though
cutlasses were available for emergencies and for patrolling dangerous beats,
and inspectors and above could carry pocket pistols. (Emsley, 1991, p. 25)

The new force’s officially defined mandate was crime prevention, and consta-
bles were given written instructions stressing the need to be civil and obliging
to people of every rank, and to respect private property at all times. The force
was headed not by a government minister but by two independent commis-
sioners. Even though the ‘new police’ were drawn from the ‘ordinary classes’,
they faced considerable derision, public hostility and violent resistance to this
most ‘un-English’ of innovations from many different sectors. Well-attended
public meetings, placards, posters and petitions demanded the abolition of
the ‘robin redbreasts’, ‘crushers’, ‘bluebottles’, ‘bobbies’, ‘coppers’, ‘raw lobsters’
and ‘Peelers’. The middle classes protested against having to pay for a public
service that both lowered the tone of their neighbourhoods and they did not
believe would succeed. The working class objected to the clampdown on
leisure pursuits and the unprecedented regulation of public space. London
parishes took issue with central government control while police magistrates

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complained about their loss of power. Political radicals and nascent trade
unions objected to the introduction of an ‘alien’ force of gendarmerie, spies and
uniformed troublemakers (see Storch, 1975; Reynolds, 1998). The press, both
popular and otherwise, highlighted controversial police actions, with The
Times commenting that the new police was an instrument ‘for the purposes of
the arbitrary aggression upon the liberties of the people’ (The Times, 10
January 1842).
Indeed, such was the depth of public animosity that at the conclusion of the
inquest into the murder of PC Robert Culley during a political riot in
Clerkenwell on 12 May 1833, the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of ‘justi-
fiable homicide’ (see Thurston, 1967). The jurors concluded ‘that no Riot Act
was read nor any proclamation advising the people to disperse; that the
Government did not take proper precautions to prevent the meeting assem-
bling; and that the conduct of the Police was ferocious, brutal and unprovoked
by the people’ (quoted in Gould and Waldren, 1986, p. 14). The jurors were
feted as public heroes – indeed, a coin was minted to commemorate ‘this glo-
rious victory for English liberty’.
There was further public outcry when the police began to expand: for
instance, when the Metropolitan Police established a detective department in
1842 and when new police were introduced into other cities in the course of
the nineteenth century. In certain parts of the country the new police were
forced physically from the streets (see Storch, 1975, 1976; Philips and Storch,
1999).

‘One of us’: popular cultural r epresentations

of the new police
The foregoing is not meant to serve as a definitive survey of the public con-
troversy surrounding the introduction of the new police. However, it does sug-
gest that a considerable amount of very basic cultural as well as political work
would have to take place in order for this most ‘un-English’ of institutions to
be first of all sheltered from popular resentment and gradually transformed
into one which could be celebrated as ‘a very English institution … and the
envy of less fortunate people – a reassuring symbol of all being well and tran-
quil in the world’ (Ascoli, 1979, p. 3). Three key measures were needed in
order to achieve this.
First, the new police required sustained political patronage and judicial pro-
tection. A pattern was established where the authorities refused to investigate
allegations of police violence, corruption or malpractice or established com-
missions and inquiries which either supported the police version of reality or
opted for a ‘rotten apple’ theory to explain acts of deviance and asserted on
every possible occasion that the English police was the finest in the world. The
judiciary passed exemplary sentences on those who dared to attack or obstruct
a constable carrying out his duty.

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Second, as historians have established, the police had no choice but to

negotiate often ‘unspoken’ contracts with various social groups. For example,
police constables learned to ‘turn a blind eye’, as far as possible, to middle-
class indiscretions and to respond as quickly as possible to their demands. In
turn, the urban middle classes began to see the advantages of a routinized and
predictable police presence. Political commentators noted with barely dis-
guised relief how the Metropolitan Police handled the great Chartist demon-
stration in London 1848 and compared this with the mob violence that had
engulfed other European capitals (Emsley, 1991). The new police were also
forced, because of lack of organizational resources, to reach settlements with
elements of the working class. Critical concessions included institutionalizing
contacts with informal social control systems and leaving working-class neigh-
bourhoods to police and order themselves (Storch, 1975; Humphries, 1981;
White 1986). In certain parts of London, for example, there was virtually no
police presence. The real site of struggle was control of movement of the dis-
reputable working class on the main thoroughfares and public squares. The
working class also came to realize that not only were the police not going
to be abolished but that their presence could be useful in ‘sorting out’ local
disputes. Evidence of this gradual transformation in attitudes can be found in
the murder of PC Frederick Atkins on 22 September 1881, which resulted in
unprecedented positive press coverage and public sympathy for the police
(Gould and Waldren, 1986).
Third, and equally important I would argue to the stabilization of the new
institution, was the rapid incorporation of the police constable into Victorian
popular culture where he became a normalized presence. Popular cultural rep-
resentations personalized the general and the abstract, concentrating not on
the organization but on the character of the individual constable (Kift, 1986).
The formal establishment of the Metropolitan Police detective department in
1842 attracted widespread attention in the popular press and was crucial to
both the development of the English detective novel and eventually the myth
of Scotland Yard. Prior to this, as Julian Symons has pointed out, crime stories
had tended to bestow criminals (operating outside the law and on their own
terms) with heroic status. Charles Dickens’ public support for the new detec-
tive force is very significant – extolling its worth stood in contrast with his
barely hidden disdain for virtually every other public official (Collins, 1964;
Welsh, 1971; Ousby, 1976; Haining, 1996). The ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and ‘Yellow
Back’ novels also provided Victorian readers, of all classes, with exciting sto-
ries which foregrounded the deeds of fictional Scotland Yard detectives. The
detective novels barely mentioned the uniformed police constable. Even then,
the detective is not portrayed as ‘all powerful’ and needs a cast of other char-
acters to help him do his job (Symons, 1992).
Dickens’ Inspector Bucket of Bleak House (1853) was the first fictional
English police detective and was based on Inspector Fielding of Scotland Yard.
There was also the Night Inspector in Our Mutual Friend and his detective

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stories in Household Words. Dickens left an unfinished detective novel The

Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). For him, the exploits of the new detectives and
their villainous foes and rivals were the repository of the most exciting tales
of the city. The detectives also provided the author with safe passage when he
wanted to visit London’s notorious rookeries. Not surprisingly, the reader’s
understanding of the criminal underworld and police work was constructed
through Dickens’ detective based perspective.
The first full-length English language detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The
Moonstone (1868), introduced Victorian England to Sergeant Cuff, who was
based on the Scotland Yard detective Jonathan Whicher. In the introduction to
a 1998 reprint of The Moonstone, Trodd argues that Sergeant Cuff’s presence
‘has all the social and moral ambiguity surrounding the new detective force
appearing to those around him as thief taker, spy, domestic servant and public
guardian’. Indeed, Collins positioned his detective very carefully: Sergeant Cuff
is neither the main protagonist nor the narrator. He is professionally competent
but socially unacceptable to the novel’s upper class characters. The local police
are represented as socially acceptable but incompetent. The author’s intention
may have been to accommodate middle-class fears of creating a too effective
police force that does not know ‘its place’. Sergeant Cuff is also bestowed with
an eccentricity that is intended to emphasize that he is not just a crime fighter
but quintessentially English. He has an interest in gardens and is an ardent
admirer of the virtues of the English rose. Importantly, Sergeant Cuff does not
solve the crime, thus reassuring readers that the new detective police were
fallible and needed to rely on the help of others (Ashley, 1951).
Marginalization of the public detective took place during the golden age of
‘cluedo’ detective novels. The police detective and uniformed officer are, for
example, quite clearly subordinate to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s amateur but
master sleuth Sherlock Holmes, the most enduring representations of ‘English’
detective genius (see Miller, 1981; Kayman, 1992).
However, the constable had also acquired his own cultural patrons. Punch
magazine, established in 1841, was resolutely pro-police and can be seen to
have played a pivotal role in popularizing and traditionalizing ‘the bobby’. This
was done by smothering him in representations of ‘Englishness’ and constitut-
ing him as the embodiment of the national temperament, periodically remind-
ing readers that his creator, Robert Peel, was the epitome of English genius.1 By
1925, a commentator on police affairs could note: ‘if fear of the police is, in
England, less acute than it might be and there is culpability in the matter,
Mr Punch’s artists are to blame … since the days of Leech, whose policemen
wore top hats, Punch has been busy in delineating the Force with kindliness …
geniality and tolerance’ (Pulling, 1964).
Crucially, Punch took the uniformed constable out of his urban origins and
imagined him quintessentially as the avuncular ‘village bobby’, comparing
him favourably with his continental counterparts. Punch even managed the
tricky public transition when it was decided to replace the constable’s top hat

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with a Prussian style helmet in the late nineteenth century. Emsley (1992) has
documented how in this time period popular ballads, street songs and later
music hall routines poked fun at the constable and highlighted his liking for
tea, beer, cozy resting places, and kitchen maids. And of course Gilbert and
Sullivan produced a comic portrayal of the constable in the Pirates of Penzance
and provided popular culture with the instantly recognizable refrain: ‘A
Policeman’s Lot is not a Happy One’ (see Disher, 1955).
The serious press in this period also published editorials which began to
extol the unique virtues of the English police. It is also worth noting that the
first official history of the organization, written by Lee in 1901, celebrated the
uniqueness of a very English institution, tracing the lineage of the constable
back to Anglo-Saxon concepts of mutual pledging, collective security and com-
mon law (Lee, 1901). The book extolled the genius of Sir Robert Peel and the
first two commissioners and exaggerated the faults of the old system. It was
stressed that the police of England, unlike other police forces, were of the peo-
ple and supported by the people. Lee also emphasized the unique orderly nature
of English society that made the success of the new police a foregone conclu-
sion, completely ignoring the extent and nature of local hostility and opposi-
tion. This text is significant because subsequent popular studies of the police
uncritically reproduced Lee’s Whiggish version of history.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that popular resentment of the
police endured well into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ford and
Harrison (1983) unearthed a remarkable photograph of the effigy of a much-
disliked village policeman, PC Rover, about to be burnt at the Stebbing, Essex
‘Guy Fox’ bonfire of 1880. The front-line public order role played by the police
in the social and economic conflict which characterized 1918–1940 de-stabilized
their relations with virtually all sections of the working class. During the
1930s, violent confrontations with the police were endemic in certain parts of
the country. Moreover, revelations of police corruption, public scandals over the
use of ‘stop-and-search’ powers and the police role in the enforcement of the
new Road Traffic Act of 1930 threatened to rupture carefully cultivated rela-
tionships with the middle classes.
There were also forces intensifying the by now ‘traditional’ representation
of the English ‘bobby’. Unqualified political support was forthcoming from the
governments of the day and the police also found new political backers in the
form of the parliamentary Labour party who were desperate to prove their
acceptability and credibility. Virtually all shades of upper- and middle-class
opinion mobilized behind the police in the aftermath of the shoot-out with
anarchists in Tottenham in January 1909 and the Sidney Street Seige, Stepney
in 1911 (Rumbelow, 1988), with many joining the special constabulary during
the 1926 General Strike. BBC radio broadcasts and cinema newsreels edited
incidents of police violence heavily and went to remarkable lengths to cast
the police as ‘the thin blue line’ or caught in the middle of extremists. During
the General Strike the media were responsible for disseminating one of the

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defining images of a benign police force – police officers playing football with
strikers (see Emsley, 1991, p. 169)
By now the police were also in a position to produce and disseminate their
own self-authenticating narratives:

1 Ex-police officers wrote a series of autobiographies/memoirs and popular histo-

ries which were overwhelmingly positive in orientation (see, for example, Dilnot,
1930; Adam 1931; Cornish 1935; Tomlin, 1936; Gollomb, 1938). Each publica-
tion built uncritically upon the previous one and effectively reproduced the same
Whiggish storylines, all of which steeped ‘the bobby’ in ‘Englishness’. They asserted
that the English had found the secret to effective law enforcement because
England was governed through ‘common law’ rather than the Napoleonic Code.
Indeed, some of the more extreme narratives attributed the success of the British
police to the racial characteristics of the Anglo-Saxons: the English had a ‘flair’
for law and order in the same way as the French had a natural flair for criminality
and cooking! Police officers also gave advice to the generation of authors respon-
sible for the ‘golden age’ of detective novels.
2 The formation of the Police Federation in 1919 as the negotiating body for rank
and file officers was also significant. From the outset, the Federation concerned
itself with policing its past and projecting a particular representation of the English
police officer. In doing this, the Federation constructed an historical narrative that
idealized the identity of constable by reproducing the ‘best’ of the popular cultural
representations, available histories, and political statements which emphasized
that England had the finest police force in the world.
3 The centenary anniversary of the founding of the Metropolitan Police was marked
by the publication of its first official history (Moylan, 1929) and numerous
newspaper articles detailing the origins and uniqueness of ‘the bobby’. Official
acknowledgement of the event was forthcoming in the form of an inspection by
the Prince of Wales in Hyde Park. This was vital in the further traditionalizing of
the force and the inception of organizational traditions.
4 In 1929 Scotland Yard appointed a full-time press office to brief crime reporters
and Home Affairs correspondents. In the same year, in an unprecedented move,
PC Harry Daley gave a series of talks on the radio on the life of an ‘ordinary cop-
per’ (Emsley, 1991). This was reinforced by the emergence of what became
known as a Reithian conception of the historical uniqueness of the British polic-
ing system (see Reith, 1938; 1943):

The new cinema was, not surprisingly, a key site of struggle in representations
of the police. The forces of law and order undoubtedly benefited from the
hand-in-glove relationship between the British film industry and national insti-
tutions and the fact that strict censorship ‘ensured that British crime films
kept a respectable distance from the sordid realities of the underworld. No
reference to drugs or prostitution was permitted, scenes inside prison were

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forbidden, depiction of criminals carrying out crime in a realistic way was dis-
couraged’ (Richards, 2001). Nonetheless, there were unflattering depictions. In
2005 the BBC broadcast restored versions of films made by Sagar Mitchell and
James Keynon, the pioneers of British commercial cinema. The reels included
incredible documentary footage of late Victorian and early Edwardian Manchester
police officers and comedies which featured constables being made fun of by
youths. To the annoyance of some police officers, American Mack Sennett’s
ever popular slapstick Keystone Kops was joined by English films such as Blue
Bottles (1928), Ask a Policeman (1939) and It’s That Man Again (1942) which
continued to reproduce the ‘good-hearted-but-dim-witted’ comic celluloid
representations of ‘the bobby’:

Although the old type of policeman has gone, the public are not allowed to
believe it, because in the most recent films, in stage plays, and more espe-
cially on the radio, the policeman is always portrayed as a kind of ‘country
yokel’, with no brains, a Somerset accent, and a most horrible lack of manner
or common sense. In the modern detective novels and plays the private detec-
tive always clears up the crime in less time than a ‘copper’ can fill his pipe.
There are frequently unjust and mean jibes at the police, but no retaliatory
measures are taken … the policemen get far too much criticism and too little
praise. (Aytee, 1942)

As a result, between 1829 and 1939, on the various stages of popular culture
the uniformed English police constable was actualized via a whole series of
characteristics, many of which were unflattering. As was noted previously,
popular culture portrayed ‘the bobby’ as an incompetent, harmless, benign,
good natured, deferential individual, partial to a drink and a pretty girl’s smile.
His counterpart – the village constable – was illustrated in even less flattering
terms. However, in the long run, as Emsley argues, these ‘indulgent’ popular
cultural representations humanized and individualized officers and one sus-
pects went a considerable way to deflating popular suspicion and resentment.
They also reaffirmed that the English could laugh at themselves, would not
stand for pomposity in its public officials and had nothing to fear from a police
officer.
The second part of this chapter will analyse how the Ealing Studio film The
Blue Lamp, ruptured pre-war representations and re-assembled, in the form of
PC George Dixon, the iconic depiction of the English ‘bobby’ on the beat. This
film would have an immense impact on popular perceptions of the police
giving rise to the spin off BBC television series Dixon of Dock Green which con-
solidated the representation of the ‘Iconic PC’ that would become a enduring
part of English culture. And as we shall see in the next chapter, this represen-
tation would also provide the crucially important context for the first socio-
logical studies of the British police.

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The iconic police constable: the cultural constr uction

of PC Geor ge Dixon
In the immediate post-war period, English national identity underwent
an unprecedented crisis, lurching between a sense of embittered anti-climax
because daily life was burdened by rationing, austerity and bureaucratic red
tape; a sense of deep loss, yearning for the past and fear of the future; and self-
deception and illusions of grandeur in the form of dream-like forecasts of the
coming of a ‘New Jerusalem’ (Hopkins, 1964).
Nothing exemplified the national identity crisis more than the output of the
English film studios. During the Second World War, they had played a crucial
role in defining and communicating the essential characteristics of the ‘English’
way of life that people were being asked to defend (Furhammer and Isaksson,
1971; Hodgkinson and Sheratsky, 1982; Richards and Aldgate, 1983; Hurd,
1984; Taylor, 1987; Coultras, 1989; Landy, 1991; Chapman, 1998). In the
decade after the war, many of the studios, in an attempt to hold the national
audience that had flocked in their millions to the cinema during the war years,
produced self-authenticating celebrations of ‘the people as collective hero’ as
well as broadening connotations of national identity (Richards, 1997). A ‘tra-
ditional’ look was adopted in order to make a spate of post-war films resem-
ble those made during the war years, ‘deliberately obscuring the passage of
time, and continuing to visually merge the documentary and fictional tradi-
tions that was a notable feature of 1939–1945’ (Ramsden, 1987). The nostalgia
present in some of these films is heart-rendering with pre-war ‘England’
becoming an ‘imagined community’ of long, hot summer days, village greens,
quiet meadows and cricket matches.
In the same historical moment, English society felt itself under siege from a
violent crime wave and unchecked juvenile delinquency (Mannheim, 1946;
Taylor, 1981; Morris, 1989; Thomas, 2003). Mark Benney, the Daily Mirror’s
crime reporter, captured the unfolding crime crisis in the following terms:

The crime wave for which the police have been preparing ever since the end of
hostilities is breaking upon us. Armed robberies of the most violent and
vicious kind feature daily in the newspapers. Even the pettiest crimes are, it
seems, conducted with a loaded revolver to hand. And well-planned robberies,
reminiscent of the heyday of Chicago gangsterdom, have relieved Londoners
of £60,000 worth of jewellery in the past week alone. Holdups of cinemas,
post offices and railway booking offices have already become so commonplace
that the newspapers scarcely bother to report them. To deal with the situation
the police are being forced to adopt methods more akin to riot breaking than
crime detection. (Quoted in Murphy, 1993, p. 89)

The consensus was that the war had created the conditions in which crimi-
nality could flourish. There was also a very real concern that post-war young-
sters would be much more prone to delinquency and anti-social behaviour

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than previous generations (Hodgkin, 1948; Smithies, 1982; Hebdige, 1988).

Particular attention was paid to the supposedly corrupting influence of a spate
of popular Hollywood gangster and homemade ‘Spiv movies’ which flourished
between 1945 and 1950. The former were a cause for concern because of their
heightened ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ realism and the blurring of the bound-
aries between villain and hero (Doherty, 1988; Clay, 1998; Arthur, 2001; Spicer,
2002). Low-budget, commercially viable British ‘riff-raff realist’ movies were
also criticized for their representation of that most transgressive of characters,
the Spiv:

… the grinning ‘Spivs’, the ‘wide boys’, the barrow boys and the ‘wheelers’
gradually endeared themselves to the general public. The archetypal ‘Spiv’
wore yellow shoes, a wide lapelled suit and a wide tie, and sported a shifty lit-
tle trilby pulled rakishly over the forehead. He symbolised a flashy flaunting of
authority and petty regulations – especially towards the end of the war when
people were long tired of self-denial and the many wartime restrictions …
(Minns, 1980, p. 160; see also Sarto, 1949; Deacon, 1980; Hughes, 1986;
Clay, 1998; Wollen, 1998)

Film critics and social commentators condemned Spiv films for the casting of
charismatic actors as violent, ‘Americanized’ hero-villains; the glamorizing of
sordid, petty criminal lifestyles and the depiction of the police not just as
comic but as cynical and corrupt. Alongside moves to censor the Spiv film
were demands that British film studios redress the balance by producing
socially responsible and morally uplifting films which would condemn crimi-
nality and delinquency, project positive role models for the nation’s youth and
mobilise public support for the forces of law and order (Murphy, 1999). It was
in the context of an intensifying moral panic about the wave of real and cel-
luloid ‘gangsterism’ and delinquency supposedly sweeping the country that
Ealing Studios began work on The Blue Lamp. It is not surprising that the film
would relate in complex ways to both the stylistic shifts in the crime film
genre and the social turmoil of the immediate post-war era.
All those involved in the production of The Blue Lamp were conscious of
their social responsibilities. Only Ealing Studios was capable of realizing such
a cultural project. The studio’s instantly recognizable ‘national narrative’ style,
which finally came together during the 1940s and first half of the 1950s, com-
bined conventional cinematic structures with 1930s’ documentary realism.
Ealing’s high-quality films had good entertainment value, included a degree of
escapism and, despite the fact that the studio operated under the control of the
Ministry of Information, ‘softened’ the visually and emotionally excessive pro-
pagandistic elements. However, there could be no doubt that the films pro-
duced by Ealing Studios were ‘rooted in the soil’ and sensibilities of the nation
(Balcon, 1969; see also Kardish, 1984; Harper, 1994; Richards, 1997; Drazin,
1998; BBC, 2002).

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The inspiration for the film lay with the murder of Police Constable
Nathaniel Edgar on 13 February 1948. He was the first Metropolitan Police offi-
cer to be murdered after the war and the hunt for his killer and the funeral
dominated the front pages of the popular newspapers. An army deserter, Donald
George Thomas, aged 22, was found guilty of the murder but because the death
penalty had been suspended was committed to penal servitude for life
(Christoph, 1962). Sydney Box, a Gainsborough film producer, assigned Jan
Read, Gainsborough’s script editor, and Ted Willis to work up a script specifi-
cally recounted from the point of view of police officers (Aldgate and Richards,
1999). As part of his initial research Willis immersed himself in the everyday
routines of police work, thus anticipating the methodology that sociologists of
the police would use. Willis spent a considerable amount of time in the com-
pany of an Inspector Mott, an ‘old time copper’ who became the inspiration for
the central police character of the proposed screenplay. Scotland Yard was
assured that Ealing Studios’ heroic dramatization of the English police consta-
ble would shatter the one-dimensional comic depictions of the constable preva-
lent in pre-war films. Willis noted that he was only too aware that:

Up to that time the British policeman had usually been portrayed as a bum-
bling simpleton who habitually licked the stub of a pencil, was respectful to the
Squire and left the investigation and solution of serious crime to brilliant edu-
cated amateurs like Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey. (1991, p. 70)

Completion of the screenplay coincided with the unexpected closure of

Gainsborough Studios. Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios picked up
the script and to the disappointment of Read and Willis it was handed on to
T.E.B Clarke for refinement. The choice of Clarke, Ealing’s most influential
post-war script writer, to work on the film was significant because it ‘suggests
the importance attached to finding a screenwriter who was politically reliable.
As an ex-War Reserve Constable, Clarke fitted the bill admirably’ (Chibnall,
1997). Clarke’s inside knowledge of the police meant that his re-drafting of the
script deepened the already police-centred perspective. The producer–director
team was Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, whose films consistently tried ‘to
grasp the totality of England as a unity, a family structure: local solidarity and
mutual responsibility writ large’ (Barr, 1980, p. 83).
Careful attention was paid to choosing a cast that would be instantly recog-
nizable to the film-going public. Jack Warner, the former East End vaudeville
star, was the obvious choice to play PC George Dixon since he had appeared
as the personification of working-class paternal values in several films. It was
assumed that audiences would instantly side with ‘his warm, natural humour
and common sense’ (Clarke, 1974, p. 158). Another music hall star, Gladys
Hensen, was cast to play his wife. Jimmy Hanley, who played the typical boy
next door or friend to the hero in a series of films, was cast as the new recruit
PC Andy Mitchell. Dirk Bogarde, hitherto a romantic lead, was given his first
‘heavy’ role as Tom Riley, the embodiment of a new generation of reckless

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young criminals threatening the nation. Basil Dearden was in no doubt about
Bogarde’s role telling the actor that he need ‘a weedy type’ to play ‘the sniv-
elling little killer. Neurotic, conceited, gets the rope in the end.’ (Bogarde, 1978,
p. 128). In its narrative construction, particularly after the British Board of
Film Censors had finished editing the script, the role of hero would be shifted
from the ‘Spiv’ to the police constable (Robertson, 1985; Aldgate, 1992).
During shooting, the film-makers were provided with unparalleled Metropolitan
Police co-operation, advice and facilities. In fact, the actors were tutored by
senior Scotland Yard detectives and police officers also appeared as extras.
Jack Warner notes how there were probably more real policemen than actors
in The Blue Lamp. In addition, the production crew was provided with unique
day and night access to locations across London and to the inside of police
stations. The hard-edged streets of Paddington, Ladbroke Grove, Maida Vale
and White City provided a suitably urban backdrop.
Ealing’s publicity campaign for the film even used noir style posters and
realist straplines to suggest that The Blue Lamp was a frenetic crime thriller
movie: ‘The battle with the post-war gun man blazes to life on the British
screen for the first time’; ‘The unending battle of the city streets’; ‘Scotland
Yard in action as death stalks the streets’; ‘The street is their ‘no-man’s’ land’;
‘Scotland Yard at grips with post-war crime’; ‘The greatest murder hunt the
screen has ever shown’; ‘Secrets of Scotland Yard on the screens for the first
time’; ‘999- and the hunt is on’; ‘Through fear he shot a policeman. Through
fear he was betrayed’; ‘The inside story of Britain’s crime wave’.
An action-packed opening sequence does not disappoint viewers. It starts
with the police pursuing criminals in a high-speed car chase through the
bomb-damaged streets of London. The car driven by the hoodlums crashes
and they shoot an innocent shopkeeper as they attempt to flee the crime scene.
Aldgate and Richards (1999) argue that audiences would have been immedi-
ately reminded of the gunning-down of a passer-by in central London while
he was trying to stop a burglary on the Tottenham Court Road in 1947. The
urgent realism is heightened by the flashing of ‘crime wave’ newspaper head-
lines across the screen: ‘Murder in the streets; father of six killed by gunman’;
‘70mph police chase ends in crash’; ‘Stolen car strikes woman in West End
crash’; ‘2 women fight bandits in London street’; ‘Bank gunman found dying’;
‘Double murder tests by CID’; ‘Gunman holds up shop girl’.
The narrator informs the viewer that:

To this man until today, the crime wave was nothing but a newspaper headline.
What stands between the ordinary public and this outbreak of crime? What
protection has the man in the street against this armed threat to life and prop-
erty? At the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Fidmore in passing sentence for a crime of
robbery with violence gave this plain answer: ‘This is perhaps another illus-
tration of the disaster caused by insufficient numbers of police. I have no
doubt that one of the best preventives of crime is the regular uniformed police
officer on the beat’.

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Figure 1.1a PC Geor ge Dixon: the iconic constable

The voiceover continues: ‘Veterans like George Dixon with 25 years service
and now PC693 attached to Paddington Green and young men like Andy
Mitchell who has just completed his training’.

PC Geor ge Dixon of Dock Gr een

Moving on from pre-war representations, a range of meaning is constructed
around the figure of PC George Dixon. He is portrayed as an uncomplicated,
down to earth, seen-it-all London ‘bobby’ who knows his ‘manor’ inside out
and who is called upon to police the everyday rather than serious crime.
Because of his devotion to ‘the job’ he enjoys the respect of senior officers and
all sections of the locality, including the petty criminal elements. The film’s
press book explains that:

He is representative of all policemen throughout the country, steady going, tol-

erant, unarmed, carrying out a multitude of duties. He directs traffic, helps kid-
dies across the road, moves on the barrow boys, keeps an eye on property.

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When crimes take place his investigations are soon taken over by Scotland
Yard, but there is always the danger of armed thugs, planned hold-ups, smash
and grab raids.

As one of his last responsibilities before retirement, a reluctant PC Dixon is

given the role of ‘puppy walking’ Probationary Constable 814D Andy Mitchell
and familiarizing him with the manor in which he will be working. We see
them intersecting and interacting with a complex range of human behaviour
and predicaments. Drama is clearly not the stuff of ‘welfare policing’. The
many supporting characters who populate the film are used to show that the
white working class community’s attitude to the police ranges from respect
through to wariness and resentment. Dixon gradually takes a protective inter-
est in the young constable and their relationship unfolds as a model of
father–son closeness. The audience is familiarized with not just the day and
night routines of working the street and the ebb and flow of local crime
and disorder but also with the informal ‘canteen culture’ and the warm and
humorous home life of George Dixon. The basis of the relationship between
him and ‘Ma’ Dixon is companionship and the shared experience of public ser-
vice and the war. His off-duty character is fleshed out via his devotional tend-
ing to his plants and flowers, which of course is reminiscent of Sergeant Cuff.
The probationary constable, who is not a Londoner, is offered lodgings and he
quickly becomes a replacement son. As Barr notes:

What Mitchell has been absorbed into is a family. First a literal one: he finds
lodgings with Dixon and his wife, and comes to fill the place of their son of the
same age who has been killed in the war. Second, a professional family: the
close community of the police station in Paddington, characterised by convivial
institutions; canteen, darts team, choir; and by bantering but loyal relation-
ships within a hierarchy. Third, the nation as a family, which may have its ten-
sions and rows but whose members share common standards and loyalties;
in a crisis, the police can call upon a general respect and will to co-operate.
This sense of national family … is built very profoundly into the structure of
the film. (1980, p. 84)

In time-honoured Ealing fashion, The Blue Lamp’s many sub-plots present the
audience with the world of ordinary people in the neighbourhood, workplace
and the family. As various commentators have noted, the film spells out the
moral basis of this imaginary community: restraint, self-sacrifice and emo-
tional understatement. Social stability is reproduced through a web of inti-
mate, differentiated relationships generated by the bonding routines of work,
family and communal off-duty activities. This critical context highlights the
need for young men to be absorbed into traditional work relationships where
they can learn to understand the importance of duty, obligation and responsi-
bility. This commendable ‘in-built’ world of the cultural values and ‘structures
of feeling’ of ‘old’ London is contrasted starkly with the representation of

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young children running wild in bomb-scarred neighbourhoods, over-crowded,

dilapidated tenement blocks and gangs of youths congregating in the garish
‘wild’ West End. The narrative repeatedly invokes newspaper discourses about
dangerous young tearaways and violent criminals on the road to ruin, a police
force stretched to the limits, fractured post-war communities and the influ-
ence of London’s ‘square mile of vice’ (see Tietjen, 1956; Kohn, 1992).

The criminal threat

Dirk Bogarde’s character, Tom Riley and his sidekick ‘Spud’ are constructed
to exemplify a very different youthful masculinity to that of the respectable
PC Mitchell. The voiceover tells us that:

These restless and ill-adjusted youngsters have produced a type of delinquent

partly responsible for the post-war increase in crime. Some are content with
pilfering and petty theft, others with more bravado graduate to more serious
offences.

We then get the first glimpse of the Spiv-like Riley and Spud lighting cigarettes
in Piccadilly Circus before making their way to a dimly lit snooker hall to seek
the support of the local crime boss. The voiceover informs us that they are:

Youths with brain enough to plan and organise criminal adventures but who
lack the code, experience and self-discipline of the professional thief, which
sets them as ‘a class apart’. All the more dangerous because of their imma-
turity. Young men such as these two present a new problem to the police. Men,
as yet, without records or whose natural cunning or ruthless use of violence
has so far kept them out of trouble.

As the film progresses, the characters of Tom Riley, Spud and Riley’s girl-
friend, Diana Lewis, offer the audience a view of what happens when tradi-
tional forms of informal social control break down and repressed desires are
allowed to play out in an unregulated manner. The film implies that the excess
of individualism and hedonism of these wayward youths is threatening the
very fabric of the fabled Ealing Studio’s version of the community and indeed
the nation. The criminal machinations of Riley and Spud and the suggested
sexual relationship between Riley and Lewis in their dingy bedsit magnify the
permissiveness threat they represent to the social order.
Tom Riley is portrayed as a threatening, immature young man (with no sta-
ble family home or settled class or community context) acting out scenes from
his favourite gangster movies. He is also outside London’s ordinary, decent
professional criminal community whose ethos is depicted as ‘dishonest but
decent, shady but entirely predictable. They stick to their accepted territory:
the billiard hall, the dog track, like a stamp to a letter, adopting a deferential
manner to the police, and even assisting them when mutual codes are

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violated’ (Chibnall, 1997, p. 140). In one scene, Mr Randall, the crime boss,
rejects Riley’s attempt to involve them in their plans: ‘What happens if you get
done? You little layabouts are all the same. You’d scream your ‘ead off. Then
the bogeys get on to me. Stick to gas meters sonny’.
All Tom Riley has to depend on is a ‘flashy’ materially oriented West End
emergent youth subculture that despises broader communal bonds and looks
on the code of London’s traditional criminal fraternity and the police with dis-
dain. The relationship between the conscience-free, arrogant Riley and the
‘hysterical’ peroxide blonde Diana Lewis is tension ridden with an ever-present
petulance and petty jealousies. When the camera first alights on 17-year-old
Diana she is walking through a crowded neon-lit London street, jazz playing
in the background. The voiceover tells the audience that she is ‘a young girl
showing the effects of a childhood spent in a broken home and demoralised
by war’. Her desire for self-esteem and a more exciting life leads her to declare
to a female police officer that she would kill herself rather than go back to the
dismal, brutal home environment that she has run away from. As the film pro-
gresses, we see that Diana Lewis is obsessively attracted to the good looks and
edgy attitude of Riley and the bright lights of the West End.

The Sacriligious act: the murder of PC Dixon

Tom Riley’s do-whatever-it-takes-to-prove-yourself graduation from petty
crime to armed robbery and murder develops its own terrible momentum. His
willingness to use violence is made clear early on in the film when he ‘coshes’
a police officer who has disturbed their first big robbery. The emotionally
charged ‘moment of truth’ in The Blue Lamp originates roughly halfway
through the film when PC George Dixon confronts Tom Riley as he attempts
to flee from the scene of an armed robbery of the Coliseum picture house that
has gone dreadfully wrong. This pivotal scene is stretched out to make sure
the audience witnesses just how vulnerable the unarmed police officer is
when faced with this new generation of gun-toting young criminals. Dixon
tells Riley not to be a fool and to drop the revolver.

Tom Riley: Get back!

PC Dixon: Drop that and don’t be a fool. Drop it, I say!
Riley: I’ll drop you!

Dixon walks forward despite Riley’s panic.

Tom Riley: Get back! This thing works. Get back! Get back, I say! Get back!

Then, in an unprecedented moment in English cinema, the masked teenage

gunman panics and fires two shots at point-blank range into PC Dixon. For
the first time an audience has been allowed to bear witness to a close-up
cold-blooded shooting of a uniformed police officer. The drama of this violent

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Figure 1.1b Tom Riley confr onting Dixon: fr om delinquent to ‘cop killer’

interruption contrasts sharply with the banality of the setting: PC Dixon on his
night beat just after informing his colleagues that he has decided to postpone
his retirement and a couple squabbling in the foyer of the Coliseum picture
house. The audience is forced at this moment to recognize that this film, in
line with the conventions of film noir, is not going to have a conventional
happy ending. Dixon will not survive the operation to save his life. Riley’s
desperate eyes convey a terrible truth: his cowardly act has shattered the
hopes of a consensual post-war social democratic order and generational rela-
tionships. Jack Warner was clearly aware of the potential impact this dramatic
moment of self-sacrifice would have on audiences: ‘I realized that the murder
of the policeman, far from eliminating him, really gave him a martyr’s crown
as a man never to be forgotten and that any audience would readily under-
stand the spirit of the film and the message it conveyed’ (Warner, 1975, p. 54:
Warner, 1979).
One of the most poignant moments in the film comes when PC Andy
Mitchell has to tell ‘Ma’ Dixon that her husband has died in the hospital. She
is getting ready to go the hospital with a bunch of George Dixon’s flowers
from the garden when she realizes ‘he’s dead’. She puts the flowers in water
before breaking down and crying on Mitchell’s shoulder. PC Mitchell swears
to her that they will apprehend the killer. Her dignified response allows the
audience to understand the enormity of the crime of murdering an unarmed
bobby on the beat.

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The restoration of social order

The gunning-down of PC Dixon transforms the film into a classic ‘police hunt
down violent criminals’ crime movie. We witness the behind-the-scene assem-
bling of the Scotland Yard operation to catch ‘the bastard that shot George
Dixon’. There will be no escape for the juvenile Spiv-turned-cop killer. Justice
will prevail because Scotland Yard CID – the world’s most professional crime-
fighting machine – has been mobilized. In addition, even the most anti-police
sections of the community are shocked by the murder of a ‘copper’. A street
trader who we have already seen Dixon moving along declares to PC Mitchell
that although he does not have much time for ‘coppers’ he does not approve
of shooting them. This theme is exemplified by the detectives’ encounter with
Queenie, the tough little street urchin who has found the murder weapon.
Initially she refuses to co-operate telling them that her dad has warned her
against talking to ‘coppers’. The conversation gradually moves to a more
focused question:

Detective: Do you know what a murderer is?

Queenie: Someone who gets hanged.
Detective: That’s it. We think you can help us catch one. We want you to
show us where you found that revolver. Will you take us there?

After Queenie shows them the canal where she found the revolver she asks
‘will you be able to hang him now?’ The detective quietly replies ‘We’ll see
Queenie. We’ll see’.
His growing realization that the police are closing in leads Tom Riley to go
voluntarily to the police station in an attempt to clear his name. However, his
over-confident attitude and contradictory answers arouse the suspicions of the
detectives who interview him. He survives a hastily convened ID parade but
is tailed. He finds Diana in Spud’s lodgings and when she refuses to accom-
pany him Riley tries to strangle her. A detective bursts through the door with
Diana screaming ‘He shot that copper. He was the one that killed him. Tom
Riley killed him’. He steals a car, and in an extended car chase, that echoes the
films opening scenes radio-controlled squad cars block every possible escape
route. Eventually the stolen Buick crashes, Spud is badly injured or dead and
Riley flees on foot across the railway tracks with PC Mitchell in pursuit.
In a remarkable sequence filmed at London’s White City greyhound sta-
dium, a desperate Riley thinks he has found anonymity and safety among
30,000 milling race fans. However, he is isolated and captured as a result of
the co-operation between the stadium management, the gangsters (who con-
trol the betting) and the police. The cornered cop killer pulls a gun on advanc-
ing police officers but is pushed to the ground as the crowd rushes to leave the
stadium. PC Mitchell removes the revolver from Riley. The film does not tell
the audience what happens to Riley after his capture. For Medhurst (1986,

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p. 300), it may seem odd that a film so concerned with criminal justice fails to
include a concluding trial scene with Riley being sentenced to death, ‘but the
punishment has already been dealt out, in far more iconographically powerful
terms, as the stadium crowd close in on the individual transgressor’. In classic
Durkheimian terms, the film thus re-creates the fabled moral boundaries of
the communal order. The penultimate scene shows footage of Andy Mitchell,
now a veteran police officer, walking George Dixon’s old beat giving advice to
a member of the public. The film closes with a shot of the ‘the blue lamp’, the
symbol of law and order, hanging outside Paddington police station. The final
message would seem to be that you can murder a human being but not a
sacred social institution.

Critical perspectives on the The Blue Lamp

Precise audience reception of The Blue Lamp is impossible to measure in any
systematic manner, not least because it is now difficult to separate the film from
its own mythology and because we do not have available evidence. We do know
that the film was a box office success, and won the Best British Film of the Year
award, with Motion Picture Herald voting Jack Warner Top British Male Actor for
1950. However, we do not have evidence of how younger members of the audi-
ence responded to what was in effect a film that had been scripted to exploit the
public fears and anxieties about materialistic, sexually active juvenile delin-
quents. Certain film historians cannot believe that Ealing Studios expected the
nation’s youth to side with the ‘drab, bland and neutered’ character of PC Andy
Mitchell over the ‘compelling, thrilling and above all erotic’ character of Tom
Riley, played by Dirk Bogarde (Medhurst, 1986, p. 347).
We need to keep in mind that Bogarde was at the forefront of redefining
English male roles in the post-war British cinema and his star quality and good
looks gave him ‘heart throb’ status in the 1950s (Coldstream, 2004). Despite
the best efforts of the Ealing Studios, the Metropolitan Police and the British
Board of Film Censors, Bogarde’s dramatization of Riley’s pent-up rage and
murderous desires renders him a much more noirish, glamorous villain than
may have been intended. Morley (1999, p. 40) comments that his cocky per-
formance destabilizes the heroic centre of the film because he manages to
communicate ‘the sexiness of evil’. An extended scene in which Riley shows a
very frightened Diana Lewis how he is going to use the newly acquired
revolver he is playing with to get what he wants intimates the link between
sexuality and the thrill of violence.

Diana Lewis: Do you ever get scared?

Tom Riley: Yeah, course I do. It’s a kind of excitement.
Diana Lewis: You mean you like it?
Tom Riley: It makes you think quicker. You’re all keyed up and afterwards
you feel terrific like …

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The scene ends with the one wildly passionate embrace in the film. Bogarde
was in effect allowed by Ealing Studios for box office reasons to play one of
the first British examples of the street-smart, violent young criminal already
on view in Hollywood. And of course in his attitude he anticipates the Teddy
Boys, the first fully-fledged English youth subculture of the post war period
(Rock and Cohen, 1976).
Police reaction to the film was positive. Sir Harold Scott, then Commissioner
of the Metropolitan Police, approved of the final product, describing it as ‘a
faithful picture of the policeman’s life and work … [and] a valuable means
of spreading a knowledge of the efficiency and high traditions of the
Metropolitan Police’ (Scott, 1957, p. 100). Indeed, after the film’s premier, the
Metropolitan Police presented Jack Warner with a casket and scroll.
Across a broad range of political leanings, the press (though not all as we
shall see below) responded well to the film – it was welcomed by The Star ‘as
an overdue apology for that flat-footed squad of “What’s all this ‘ere?” semi-
comic policemen who have plodded through so many British films’ (Star, 20
January 1950). The Times (20 January 1950) congratulated the film-makers on
their ‘sincerity’ and ‘realism’: ‘it is not only foreigners who find the English
policeman wonderful, and in composing this tribute to him, the Ealing Studio
are giving conscious expression to a general sentiment. The tribute is a hand-
some one’. The Daily Worker (21 January 1950) informed its readers that ‘We
have been told so often that our policemen are wonderful that it is not sur-
prising that someone should have made a film to prove it once and for all’. Cine
Weekly (12 January 1950) lauded the film as a ‘gripping and intensely human
“crime does not pay” melodrama’ which is ‘a worthy and eloquent tribute to
our policemen’. On the other side of the Atlantic, The New York Times
(9 January 1951) described it as ‘a warm and affectionate tribute’.
However, some contemporary reviews winced at the one-sidedness of the
film and criticized the sentimental representation of the police and its overall
nostalgic orientation. The Spectator (20 January 1950), for example, described
the film as a ‘sincere if slightly sentimental’ homage to ‘that portion of our
police force which wears a helmet, tells us the time, and accuses us of being
an obstruction: the constable, in fact ... the production encourages us in our
belief that all policemen are courteous, incorruptible nannies’. Some film crit-
ics argued that the film’s limitations were symptomatic of the failure of British
films to get to grips with their subjects. The Times (20 January 1950) film
reviewer noted that:

When the camera shifts to the persons of Police Constable Dixon and Police
Constable Mitchell there is no longer the certainty of reality accurately observed
and accurately presented. There is the indefinable feel of the theatrical back-
cloth behind their words and actions. Mr Jack Warner and Mr Jimmy Hanley do
all that can be done, but the sense that the policemen they are acting are
not policemen as they really are but policemen as an indulgent tradition has
chosen to think they are will not be banished

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Film Monthly (Jan/Feb 1950) and Sight and Sound (Enley, 1950) were scathing
in their views on the tired, hackneyed nature of the Warner/Hanley partnership.
Reviewers also noted that the film’s ideological celebration of the Metropolitan
Police compromised the very possibility of realism as did the lament for the
national unity and community spirit exhibited during the Second World War.

Conclusion: the long shadow of the iconic

police constable
This chapter has analysed the many ingredients that went into the popular cul-
tural making and remaking of the English ‘bobby’, and he was ideologically
nurtured with great care. The on-screen murder of PC George Dixon repre-
sented the final step in the English ‘bobby’s’ transformation into an idealized
representation of Englishness. The cultural project inaugurated by the Ealing
Studios was concluded on 9 July 1955 when 58-year-old Jack Warner was
miraculously resurrected as PC George Dixon in the BBC TV series Dixon of
Dock Green. Ted Willis and Jan Read had retained the stage rights for the film
script and a version of the film was subsequently staged at theatres in Oxford
and Blackpool before playing at the London Hippodrome between November
1952 and March 1953. Willis took responsibility for scripting an initial six-
episode television series that would afford audiences the happy ending that
he had deprived them of in The Blue Lamp. The new police drama was com-
missioned to replace Fabian of Scotland Yard. Every Saturday evening the
programme opened with the theme music and PC Dixon’s warm-hearted
‘Evening, all’. The nation was presented with an overwhelmingly benign view
of police work and police–community relations in ‘Dock Green’. The early
shows ended with Dixon walking down the steps of the fictional East End
police station – ‘within earshot of Bow Bells and hard by Old Father Thames’ –
summing up the solved case under the ‘blue lamp’. He would salute the audi-
ence and stroll out of shot whistling the old music hall song ‘Maybe it’s
because I’m a Londoner’. Because Jack Warner felt that PC Dixon should be
representative of ‘the bobby’ on the beat of any English town or city, rather
than the nation’s capital, the theme tune was subsequently changed to ‘An
ordinary copper’, one of the BBC’s classic evocative tunes (see Clarke, 1983;
Sydney-Smith, 2002; Cooke, 2003; BBC, 2006)
Certain television critics and social commentators were shocked that the
BBC could have chosen to revive what one described as the sentimental ‘reas-
suring, never, never, world of “hearts of gold” coppers and “cor blimey crooks” ’
(see Vahimaji, 1994, p. 48). However, the comforting representations and reas-
suring moral epilogues established an intimate rapport between viewers at a
time when television was still something of a novelty. In 1961 it was the second
most popular programme on television with an audience of almost 14 million
viewers (Willis, 1964). By this time viewers could also purchase Dixon of Dock
Green: My Life by George Dixon which provided background information on his

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East End childhood and why he joined the police (Willis and Graham, 1964;
also Edwards, 1974). Dixon, who was finally promoted to sergeant in 1964,
policed his ‘Dock Green’ manor until May 1976 and ‘Evening, all’ had become
a national catchphrase. The success of the new breed of ‘realist’ police officers
in Z Cars, Softly, Softly, The Sweeney and the first wave of US cop shows did
force the programme makers to update the programme’s storylines and char-
acters. And, as we shall see in Chapter 4, subsequent film-makers and televi-
sion companies would use frantic, restless camera work to present ‘celluloid
cops’ in deconstructed forms and expressions that were a far cry from The Blue
Lamp and Dixon of Dock Green.
Ealing Studios and the BBC produced, in the form of PC George Dixon, the
authoritative black-and-white image of the ‘bobby on the beat’, providing the
cultural parameters within which post-war English policing would be under-
stood and debated. In June 1981 14 officers from the Metropolitan Police and
Kent constabulary formed a guard of honour at Jack Warner’s funeral with
Assistant Deputy Commissioner George Rushbank noting that the force had a
‘warm affection’ for the actor immortalized as Dixon of Dock Green: ‘he was
our kind of policeman’. A wreath in the shape of a ‘Blue Lamp’ had been
placed on top of the coffin. The BBC broadcast an episode of Dixon of Dock
Green as a tribute. Nonetheless, in that same year television cameras were
transmitting images of London police officers using dustbin lids and milk
crates to shield themselves from rioters hurling stones and petrol bombs and
police vehicles speeding through burning neighbourhoods. How policing had
moved ‘from Dixon to Brixton’ was the pressing question that a bewildered
British establishment had to face.
The Dixonian myth continues to haunt contemporary debates about polic-
ing. As we shall see in later chapters, calls for the modernisation of policing to
meet the challenges of twenty-first-century global criminality are routinely
accompanied by the declaration that it is time to exorcise once and for all the
‘once upon a time’ – Dixonian policing model. In 1997, for example, a Police
Review article – ‘Dispelling the Dixon myth’ – concluded that ‘as we head
towards a new century, we owe it to the old boy to cut him adrift and consign
him to his place in history’ (Hicks, 1977). However, when politicians and com-
mentators seek to summon forth a lost ‘golden age’ of ‘Englishness’ marked by
national unity, cultural cohesion, neighbourliness and law and order they now
reach – intuitively it seems – for pre-1960s images’ of county cricket grounds,
village greens, red telephone boxes, rose-trellised gardens, warm beer and of
course PC George Dixon pounding his beat. ‘Dixonian’ is now routinely evoked
as a form of shorthand to define the traditional values of English policing and
society.
And what is truly remarkable is that we continue to hear calls to bring back
Dixon of Dock Green. In 1999, Malcolm McLaren, the Svengali of contempo-
rary British youth culture, promised voters that if he was elected Lord Mayor
of London, a hologram of a digitalized PC George Dixon would flash over the

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city to reassure law-abiding Londoners and criminal elements that they were
being watched over! Sir John Stevens, the then Metropolitan Police
Commissioner, conceded in February 2003 that the force had made a terrible
mistake in removing bobbies from the beat. Newspapers carried the story
under ‘It’s time to bring back Dixon’ headlines with the obligatory photograph
of PC George Dixon. In June 2005, 50 years after BBC television launched
Dixon of Dock Green and 55 years after The Blue Lamp PC George Dixon
was back in a series of Radio 4 plays based on the original TV scripts.
Newspapers enthusiastically greeted the news with ‘Dixon returns to Dock
Green’ type headlines. Later in the year, a news item on Paddington Green
police station produced the following letter in ‘The Job’, the staff newspaper
of the Metropolitan Police:

I was very pleased to read the article about the Blue Lamp at Paddington
Green police station. It brought back memories of my first station, the old
Paddington Green. I must have gone under the lamp many times. In 1947 I
was posted there as a probationer. During the making of The Blue Lamp, we
were told to co-operate with the film company as the Commissioner thought
the film would be good propaganda for the service. I do not agree with the
comment that the film showed an idealistic view of British policing. Maybe I
look back through rose tinted glasses, but I saw it as a true reflection of the
situation at Paddington, maybe with a few embellishments for entertainment
purposes.
On my first two days out on the street, I was shown around the ground by a PC
with about 20 years service. Like several other senior PCs at the station he
could have been Dixon. Everyone had great respect for him, even the villains,
and he knew all of them in the area … . He was a marvellous policeman and
taught me how to be a practical policeman. I know the enthusiasm, cama-
raderie and team spirit at this busy station kept me in the job in those early
days. May the lamp continue to shine for the next 140 years as a symbol of
law and order. Yours sincerely, John Solway.

Hence, despite all attempts to modernize and professionalize policing, the core
British police identity remains profoundly dependent on a fictional image of
the ‘bobby on the beat’ projected by Ealing Studios in 1950. In Chapter 2 we
will see how the first British sociological study of the police by Michael
Banton reinforced the idealistic cultural image of the ‘bobby’ by defining the
British police as a sacred national institution.
Finally, a reflection within a reflection about the transformations engulfing
English society between the making of The Blue Lamp and the screening of
Dixon of Dock Green. By 1952, according to contemporary newspapers, ‘young
toughs’ and ‘cosh boys’ were stalking London’s streets and alleyways. A cli-
max was reached on the evening of 2 November 1952 when PC Sidney George
Miles was killed during an exchange of gun fire between Metropolitan Police
officers and one of the two young burglars who were attempting to break into

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a warehouse. The youths were Christopher Craig aged 16 (who was armed
with a revolver) and Derek Bentley aged 19. Sensationalist headlines in the
next morning’s newspapers declared that a Chicago-style gun battle had raged
on the streets of south London. As with PC Edgar’s murder four years earlier,
this shooting stoked public anxiety about the threat posed by violent crime to
British society (Selwyn, 1988). Craig, because he was under the legal age for
hanging, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The jury added a plea for judi-
cial mercy. The mentally subnormal Derek Bentley was executed on 28
January 1953 for inciting Craig to free the fatal shot by shouting ‘Let him have
it, Chris’. Yallop noted at the time that this expediently demonstrated the gov-
ernment’s ‘termination to solve the problem of juvenile crime, particularly
crimes of violence, once and for all. The Executive felt that Bentley’s death
would encourage the youth of this country to think twice before they went out
armed with revolvers, knuckle dusters, coshs, knives, razors and chains … His
death in fact, was a categorical statement of intent to all delinquents, ‘if this
death does not encourage you to mend your ways, then take care; you may be
next to hang’ (Yallop, 1971, p. 96). Derek Bentley had become the scapegoat
for a whole generation. The Bentley family campaigned relentlessly to have
this miscarriage of justice acknowledged by the British authorities and the
case played a pivotal role in moves to put an end to capital punishment.
Finally, in July 1998, the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction on the
basis that Lord Chief Justice Goddard had denied Derek Bentley the possibil-
ity of a fair trail. Bentley was also granted a full posthumous pardon. A memo-
rial service at Southward Cathedral on 28 January 1999 was attended by
approximately 250 people. It took place the day after the Home Secretary
signed the sixth protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights which
formally abolished the death penalty in the United Kingdom. The simple
inscription on Bentley gravestone reads: Here lies Derek William Bentley: a
Victim of British Justice.

Note
1. It is wor th noting that the constable had alr eady been constr ucted as a comic character by William
Shakespear e. W e have Anthony Dull in Love Labour’s Lost ; Elbow in Measure for Measur e and most
famous of all Dogber ry in Much Ado About Nothing (see Rober ts, 1974).

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The Sociological
Construction of the Police 2

In his essay ‘Why read the classics?’ Italo Calvino (2001) defines classics as
books that ‘are treasured by those who have read and lived them’, ‘exert a
peculiar influence’ and have ‘never finished saying what they have to say’.
They simply ‘refuse to be eradicated from the mind and conceal themselves
in the fold of memory camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual
unconscious’. J.M. Coetze (1993, p. 13) notes that ‘the classic defines itself by
surviving. Therefore, the re-examination of the classic, no matter how critical,
is part of its history ‘inevitable and even to be welcomed. … rather than being
the foe of the classic, criticism and indeed criticism of the most sceptical kind,
may be what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival’.
Though Calvino and Coetze are writing about literary works, certain socio-
logical texts are also adjudged to be classics. Academic conventions mean that
such texts are more likely to be valued for their ground-breaking analysis and
methodological approach, rather than according to literary style and cultural
significance. Nevertheless, in terms of influence and approach, particular texts
and authors gain canonical status. In Britain, at least, the study of policing that
has come closest to being bestowed with classic status is Michael Banton‘s
(1964a) The Policeman in the Community. How and why this came about and
what role Banton’s book had in the formation of the distinctive academic sub-
field of police studies are the subject of this chapter.
What makes The Policeman in the Community a classic? As we saw in Chapter 1,
until the 1950s police officers in the UK were not the subjects of social
scientific research. Historians, constitutional lawyers, former police officers, jour-
nalists and novelists wrote about policing but not social scientists (Brett, 1979).
Many of these texts reproduced the idea of the British police as exemplifying a
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narrative of national progress, stability and order. However, contemporary

newspaper reports on the abuse of police powers, unnecessary force, corrup-
tion and controversial incidents began to shine a spotlight on policing on both
sides of the Atlantic, triggering government commissions and inquiries and
reform programmes. Intensifying official acknowledgement of the social prob-
lems and tensions associated with policing created the justification for the first
sociological studies of the police in both jurisdictions.
Michael Banton’s The Policeman in the Community, sitting alongside American
sociologist, William Westley’s, doctoral thesis, can be seen as the first socio-
logical studies of Anglo-American policing. These pre-dated the flurry of soci-
ological research on the police that would take place in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Policeman in the Community was a pioneering sociological understanding
of the policeman’s occupation which was grounded in its social context. When
the book was first published, it garnered extensive reviews because it was not
just one of the first qualitative studies of the police officer but one of the first
comparative sociological studies of the police.
Reiner (1995) notes that it was a ‘pathbreaking study [which] was responsi-
ble for many ideas and approaches which have been repeatedly returned to’,
and Holdaway (1983) comments that, with the publication of the book, ‘one of
the foundation stones of the sociology of the police was set in place’; it was
‘the first sociological study of the English police. Many features of police work
that have been the subject of continuing research were identified in it’ (see
also Holdaway 1995). The book had three key premises. First, Banton recog-
nized that the police are just one small element of a complex system for
maintaining public order and regulating deviant behaviour. Second, he demon-
strated that uniformed officers could be seen not as crime fighters or law
enforcers but as multi-tasked ‘peace officers’ intimately connected to and depen-
dent on informal social controls. Third, he showed that an ongoing transatlantic
conversation would be necessary if researchers were to find a comparative
filter through which to make sense of policing philosophies, practices and
innovations (see Manning, 2005).
Through Banton’s qualitative fieldwork data and the first comparative
analysis of the emergent US literature on issues such as police discretion and
police–community relations, he demonstrated why sociologists should study
the police. As will be discussed more fully in the concluding section of this
chapter, he provided a knowledge structure for future sociological investiga-
tions. He handed down a naturalistic methodological approach – rather than
using just surveys or interviews, and he focused on the officer ‘working the
beat’. Banton also bequeathed an ethical stance for future generations of police
researchers: instead of making sensationalist claims or seeking (in the manner
of the investigative journalist, to ‘blow the whistle’ on misdemeanours and
malpractice), he emphasized that the professional sociologist should be a
neutral chronicler who studiously avoids taking sides.

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As we will discuss in the next chapter, a generation of sociologists would test

and develop Banton’s ideas by collecting observational data on:

• what police officers actually do when they are on duty;

• how patrol officers make sense of their work;
• the formal and informal sources of the police officer’s authority;
• how, why and with what effect officers use their discretionary powers;
• how officer/citizen interactions produce and shape policework;
• the defining features of the working personality of the police officer; and
• the characteristics and function of the rank and file occupational culture.

I have been fortunate in researching this chapter to be able to draw upon

unpublished information supplied by Michael Banton as well as his answers
by email and in person to many questions (see also Banton, 2005).

Michael Banton: the making of a sociologist of the police

Michael Banton is probably best known for his extensive writings in the field of
ethnic and racial studies. Indeed, those most familiar with this body of work
might even be surprised to find that he has also published so extensively on
policing. Before looking at The Policeman in the Community in detail, there are
some aspects of Michael Banton’s intellectual formation that are useful in set-
ting the book and his approach in context. After serving in the Royal Navy,
Michael Banton enrolled at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1947,
intending to study economics. Banton notes that it was his ‘great good fortune’
in his first year to have as his tutor the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils, who
had joined the LSE the previous year to help ‘bridge the gap of eight years dur-
ing which there had been practically no communication between Europe and
America in the field of sociological studies’ (Shils, 1949, p. 1). For Banton (1964a,
p. 104), Shils ‘played the part of the outsider in challenging scholarly conven-
tions. He taught us that sociology as a subject was still in the making and that
we could help shape it (see also Rumney, 1945; Sprott, 1957; Kent, 1981; Abrow,
1989; Halsey, 1997; Kumar, 2001).
Shils had a significant influence on The Policeman in the Community and
subsequent sociological research of the police. First, he emphasized the
importance of theory informed empirical research. Second, he insisted that
sociological research was a living practice. Third, he encouraged the first gen-
eration of professional sociologists to concentrate their research on their own
society. Fourth, it was through Shils that Michael Banton became familiar with
the concept of ‘sacredness’. Shils and Young (1953) had used the Durkheimian
concepts of ‘ceremony’ and ‘ritual’ to argue that the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II in June 1953 was an act of ‘national communion’ that had ‘touched
the sense of the sacred’ in the people, heightened a sense of solidarity and
affirmed common moral values. Shils and Young made the important point
that ‘authority which is charged with obligations to provide for and to protect

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the community in its fundamental constitution is always rooted in the sacred’.

Finally, Shils, as an outsider, emphasized the uniquely consensual nature of
British society. The successful integration of the working class into the ‘moral
consensus’ of British society had transformed the country from being one of
the most disorderly and violent into one of the most orderly and law-abiding
(Shils and Young, 1953, p. 76).
In October 1950, Banton was appointed to the Department of Social
Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, and quickly established a reputa-
tion in the field of race relations. He was also at the forefront of ‘the new tradi-
tion of sociological research’ that favoured working with social anthropological
methods that allowed researchers to get close to subjects in order to analyse
interpersonal relations. His first book, The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in
an English City (1955), was based on pioneering ethnographic doctoral research
he had carried out on the impact of Commonwealth immigration in Stepney in
the East End of London. As I shall show below, the urban ethnographic skills
he gained in his research in the East End were to prove useful for the work he
needed to carry out for The Policeman in the Community. Banton’s next book, The
West African City: A study of Tribal Life in Freetown (1957) looked at migration
from the interior to, and the social life of migrants in, the capital city of Freetown,
Sierra Leone. He subsequently undertook and published on research on race
relations in Britain publishing White and Coloured; the behaviour of British people
towards Coloured Immigrants in 1959. For family reasons Banton could not pur-
sue further field research in Africa and he felt that research on race relations in
Britain was difficult to conduct from Edinburgh. This led him to embark on the
first sociological study of the British police.

Researching The Policeman in the Community

Banton’s work on race relations had led him to conclude that British people
could be both deeply prejudiced or very tolerant. Thus, for him, the interest-
ing sociological questions were: ‘in what situations were they one rather than
the other? What factors in these various situations called forth the different
kinds of behaviour’ (1964a, p. viii). He detected signs of a similar difference
of opinion about the state of police–public relations developing in Britain in
the period leading up to appointment of the Willink Royal Commission in
January 1960. There had been ‘some much publicised stories of police brutal-
ity (one concerning a man called Podola and the other a civil servant) while on
the other there had been much publicity about low levels of police pay. I
thought it might be interesting to try to find out how different definitions of
situations evoked different kinds of police conduct and the effect of this on
police-public relations’ (personal communication).
Banton was critical of the Royal Commission’s reading of a social survey of
the state of police–community relations in Britain which had, in his view,
rushed to ‘simple judgement about a complex and only partially analysed

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phenomenon’ (Banton, 1964a, p. ix). The survey had made unverifiable claims
about the British police being ‘the best in the world’. He felt there was a press-
ing need to develop a sociological understanding of police–community rela-
tionships. In order to do so he would first of all have to learn more about ‘the
nature of the policeman’s job and the pressures that bear upon him (Banton,
1964a, p. x). He also justified his research intervention on the grounds that:
‘police officers have been too busy getting on with their job to philosophise about
it at any length. I am going to try and do it for them’ (1964a, p. 8). This pro-
vided him with the justification for initiating a discussion about what the
policeman’s role in society is and ought to be. His specific focus would be uni-
formed officers and their routine dealings with the ordinary public rather than
the specialized work of detectives or the bureaucratic work of supervisors and
senior officers.
Not surprisingly given his anthropological background, Banton’s working
premise was that policing was intimately connected to the quality of the order
and density and texture of social relations that comprise a given social system.
He wanted to pinpoint the sociological preconditions for what might com-
monly be described as ‘organic policing’. He felt it was vital for the sociologist
to analyse the police officer’s role and status in a homogeneous society, in
which the ‘incidence of crime, social conflict and maladjustment’ was low in
order to ‘see what happens when homogeneity gives way to heterogeneity and
situations of tension’ (1963a, p. 8). From the outset, Banton worked from a
sociological truth ‘that the police are only one among many agencies of social
control’ (1964a, p. 1). Law enforcement agencies, important though they are,
‘appear puny compared with the extensiveness and intricacy of these other
[informal] modes of regulating informal behaviour’ (1964a, p. 2).
Research for the book began in Scotland in 1960 and was completed during
1963. Banton’s stated aim was to collect basic descriptive information on the
most visible and accessible parts of the police force to clarify what uniformed
officers did most of the time and how they did it. Because patrol work was the
principal activity of most police forces it was ‘the problems of this kind of
work and the attitudes to which it gives rise that most characterise the culture
of policework as an occupation’ (Banton, 1964a, p. 27). Banton’s research would
also produce one of the first sustained comparative sociological studies of UK
and US policing. Indeed, he acknowledges that the book was only made pos-
sible because of the US research – the comparison allowed him to ‘see Scottish
police work in a new light’ and highlight problems that were ‘likely to grow
in Britain if present trends continue’ (1964a, p. 224).

The USA as an empirical r eference point

There was a distinctive body of US literature that Banton was able to draw upon
in formulating his research project. In addition to numerous histories of local US

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police departments, there was a rapidly developing administratively oriented

police studies represented most obviously by O.W. Wilson’s Police Administration.
The first socio-legal articles on police discretion had also appeared in the US by
the time Banton began his research, so he was able to pick up on the empirical
significance of this issue (e.g., Goldstein, 1960; LaFave, 1962; Goldstein, 1963).
Sociological studies were few and far between (Whyte, 1943). There was of
course the pioneering sociological work of William Westley (1951, 1953), which
Banton says, ‘told me that you could do research on the police’ (personal inter-
view). In 1951 Westley had completed the first full-length sociological study of
the police as a University of Chicago sociology doctoral student under the guid-
ance of Joseph Lohman and Everett Hughes. Westley’s controversial thesis did
not appear in book form until 1970.
For Westley, the extremely influential police administration literature pro-
vided little in the way of information concerning the ‘social characteristics,
personal attitudes and community function’ of the police (Westley, 1951,
p. 7). His working hypothesis was that the police as an occupational group pos-
sessed distinctive group customs, attitudes and values and modes of socializa-
tion that influenced an officer’s actions in a given situation. This was reflected
in his methods. Similar to Banton’s own in The Coloured Quarter (and later for
The Policeman in the Community), he wanted to familiarize himself with the
everyday realities of US policing. In the autumn of 1949 he started his
research with intensive unstructured interviewing in the Chicago Police
Department. He continued the bulk of his research in Gary, Indiana, a small
Midwestern industrial city ‘which had a very large slum area, a large Negro
population with a history of friction with the population, a high crime rate, an
organised political machine, and extensive vice and gambling [and] severe
traffic problems’ (1951, p. 26). Over four months he observed all types of
police activities while ‘walking the beat’, cruising with officers, and observing
raids, interrogations and training. He followed this with a further six months
of intensive interviewing with over half of the police department and addi-
tional observation. Westley’s study was extremely controversial because of his
bleak rendition of police officers world view:

The policeman’s world is spawned of degradation, corruption and insecurity.

He sees man as ill-willed, exploitative, mean and dirty; himself a victim of
injustice, misunderstood and defiled. (Westley, 1951, p. ii).
He tends to meet those portions of the public which are acting contrary to the
law or using the law to further their own ends. He is exposed to public immoral-
ity. He becomes cynical. His is a society emphasizing the crooked, the weak
and the unscrupulous. Accordingly his morality is one of expediency and his
self conception one of a martyr. (Westley, 1951, p. 239)

And of course Westley argued that violence was a central part of routine police
work. This underpinned his definition of the police as ‘the portion of the state

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apparatus that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence’

(1951, p. 5). Westley’s was a remarkable study because it identified many
of the key issues and dilemmas that would preoccupy Michael Banton and
future generations of US sociologists researching the police. Banton felt that
Westley’s research findings could not stand as representative, being too
extreme and pessimistic in terms of the politically corrupt policing environ-
ment he encountered and the brutal, cynical, lawless behaviour of the police
officers (personal communication).

Accessing the police

In an initial conversation with the Chief Constable in charge of Edinburgh, the
Chief Constable had asked Banton, ‘Why do you want to study us? What are
we doing wrong?’. In fact, despite (or perhaps because of) reading Wesley’s
work, Banton’s research was premised on a very different view of the police.
He explains this in the preface to the book:

The tradition of research into social problems is now so firmly established that
the public takes it for granted that sociologists study social institutions that
are not working satisfactorily. The idea that it can be instructive to analyse insti-
tutions that are working well in order to see if anything can be learned from their
success has not yet taken hold [italics added]. Yet obviously the science of
social relations cannot be advanced very far unless people study all sorts of
institutions to see how they function. (Banton, 1964a p. vii)

From his previous research experience in London, Banton was aware that
access was likely to be the key issue in researching the police. His position as
a member of staff at the University of Edinburgh obviously helped because of
the proximity to Scottish policy makers. In 1958, he sought the advice of
the relevant official at the Scottish Home Department, W. Kerr Fraser, after-
wards permanent secretary, and subsequently principal of the University of
Glasgow. Kerr Fraser was ‘moderately encouraging and told me I would first
need the consent of the three police associations: the chief officers, the super-
intendents, and the Federation’ (personal communication). Kerr Fraser sug-
gested to Banton that he begin by contacting the Scottish Police College in
Kincardineshire. However, when he arrived for his meeting with the Chief
Constable of Edinburgh, he was bemused by the reaction he received. Initially,
he got the impression the Chief Constable was busy and that he might not
allow Banton long. Banton notes that ‘The prospects of his agreeing did not
seem good’. However,

To my surprise he spent half-an-hour explaining to me why I could not do such

research; then a second half-hour telling me how interesting was the police-
man’s job; followed by a further twenty to twenty-five minutes saying what a

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good job it was that I was going to do this research. It seemed as if the more
he thought about it the more he came to think the idea was harmless. (Ben
Whitaker, who started work in London on a book about the police a little later,
told me that when he went to see Sir Joseph Simpson, the Metropolitan
Commissioner, he had a similar reception.) At one stage it was suggested that
I might have to agree to be sworn in as a special constable; as my father had
been a ‘special’, the idea did not alarm me but it seemed quite unnecessary
and it was just as well that nothing came of this (Personal communication).

When Banton offered ‘not to publish any information gained as a result of

their support, that had not been first agreed with them, they gave me every
assistance’ (1964a, p. x). Banton comments that, when the book was eventu-
ally published, Kerr Fraser ‘thought its content was less an achievement than
my having succeeded in carrying out the research in the first place’ (personal
communication).
Banton was not able to use his ethnographic skills to the full in his study of
the Scottish police. In 1960 he was authorized to conduct eight group discus-
sions with sergeants at the Scottish Police College to explore the differences
between policemen working in country districts and the city and to see what
effect these differences had upon their job satisfaction. Shedding light on this
problem was something that his police contacts indicated would be of interest
to them. Later in the year, he interviewed police recruits to get an insight into
what they expected of the job.
In early 1961, he began the final stage of the Scottish research. Officers of
‘C’ division of Edinburgh City Police agreed to keep a diary of two days’ worth
of activities. In addition, Banton spent roughly 30 hours in total walking with
officers on the beat. This provided him with baseline descriptive information
about ‘the great variety of tasks performed by policemen’ as well as the orga-
nization and functioning of a police division and the bureaucratic rules and
regulations. He carried out no formal interviews with individual police offi-
cers either in Scotland (or indeed in the USA).
Banton extended his research to the USA after accepting an invitation
to take up a visiting post in African Studies at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The final and most substantial phase of the research took place
during 1962 with the study of one urban northern police department and two
urban southern American police departments. He also paid brief visits to sev-
eral other police departments in the United States and Sweden. The Boston
Police Department would not give him permission to accompany officers on
patrol as they did see how it could benefit the department. The chair of the
political science section at MIT had thought it ‘extraordinary that anyone from
Britain should have thought of possibly studying Boston’s Irish Police
Department’. Everett Hughes helped Banton access the Massachusetts police
department. He found it difficult to get funding for extending his US research.
When he spoke to the research director of the International Association of

THE SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE POLICE 33

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
 Re-enter Wells, L.

WELLS.
Miss Bethune.
[Exit Wells, L.

Enter Enid.

ENID.
How are you, dear? [Kisses Margery.] Victoria!
[Goes to Victoria, who presents her cheek.

SYLVESTER [to Margery].

Now you have company, I’ll say good-day. I’ve waited for my wife
quite long enough!

MARGERY [with outstretched hand].

But you will come and see me again soon?
[Enid and Victoria exchange glances.

SYLVESTER [holding her hand, and in a lower voice].

Shall you be in to-morrow?

MARGERY [frankly].
Yes. [Sylvester smiles and presses her hand; she sees her
mistake.] If Gerald is.
[Enid and Victoria are exchanging whispers.

SYLVESTER [drops her hand; aside].

Women are like Bradshaw—a guide and a puzzle!
[Exit, L.

ENID.
Does Captain Sylvester often call, my dear?
 MARGERY.
He has done lately.

ENID.
Quite a change for him! He must occasionally meet his wife!

VICTORIA [who has gone to the mantelpiece for a match].

Now that that man has gone——
[Lights another cigarette.

ENID.
Victoria!

VICTORIA [offering case to Margery].

Can’t I prevail on you?

MARGERY [takes one].

Well, I don’t mind trying.
[Lights hers from Victoria’s, Victoria putting the
case on the table.

ENID.
How can you, Margery? I call it shocking! To take a nasty, evil-
smelling thing like this [taking a cigarette out of Victoria’s case]—and
put it to your lips—brrh! [Shudders, but puts it in her mouth. Margery
presses her burning cigarette against it till it is alight.] Don’t,
Margery, don’t! I call it horrid—most unladylike!

MARGERY.
Now puff!
[All three sit and puff vigorously. Margery perched
on table.
 VICTORIA.
Well, dear, and how are you getting on?

MARGERY.
Oh, famously!

ENID.
I hope you’ve taken my advice to heart!

VICTORIA.
And mine! Have you a latch-key yet?

MARGERY.
Oh, yes!

ENID.
Margery, you shock me!

MARGERY.
Well, you’re easily shocked!

VICTORIA.
You have a latch-key?
[Triumphantly.

MARGERY [simply].
Yes, we have a latch-key!

BOTH [in different tones].

We?

MARGERY.
What would Gerald do without one?
 VICTORIA [with contempt].
Gerald!

MARGERY.
When he comes home late.

ENID.
Does he come home late?

VICTORIA.
All men do!

ENID.
Before marriage. Would that were all they did. [Mysteriously.]
Has he told you everything?

MARGERY.
He’s told me everything I’ve asked him.

VICTORIA [with curiosity, putting down cigarette].

What have you asked him?

MARGERY.
Nothing!

ENID.
Margery! [rises] it’s such women as you on whom men prey!
[Turns off.

VICTORIA [rises].
And it’s such men as him that women marry!
[Turns off.
 MARGERY.
When they get the chance! [Grimace at audience.
Re-enter Wells, L.

WELLS.
Colonel Cazenove.
[Enid hides her cigarette behind her back; Margery
flings hers away, jumps down and runs to meet
him. Exit Wells, L.

Enter Colonel.

MARGERY.
Uncle!
[Flings her arms round his neck, and gives him
three smacking kisses. Colonel smiles all over
his face. Enid and Victoria exchange shrugs.

COLONEL.
Bless me! what a smell of tobacco! [Looks about, sniffing, sees
Victoria.] Ah, the foolish—beg pardon!—Miss Vivash! [Bow.] Dear
me, something burning!
[Sniffs. Victoria sits again.

ENID [confused].
Yes, Mr. Cazenove—the next room

COLONEL [seeing her].

Man the Be—— Miss Bethune, I think?

[Holds out his hand. Enid has to change the

cigarette into her left hand behind her back;
shakes hands, then turns to wipe the nicotine
from her lips, unconsciously presenting the
 turning cigarette to Colonel’s eyeglass. Margery
laughs. Colonel grins at audience.

COLONEL.
I thought something was burning. [Enid throws cigarette into the
grate, and covers her face. Colonel lifts his finger.] And you said Mr.
Cazenove!

ENID.
Well, it wasn’t a story. He is in the next room.

COLONEL.
So man has not a monopoly of the vices!

ENID.
We’re none of us perfect!

COLONEL.
No, [rubbing his hands] thank Heaven! It’s the spice of the old
Adam that makes life endurable!

MARGERY [again embracing him].

Oh, I’m so happy, uncle!

ENID [aside].
Wish she wouldn’t do that!

MARGERY.
Oh, so happy!

COLONEL.
So am I, Margery. What did I always say? Caroline’s a heart of
gold. I knew she would come round. I always said I’d stand by you
and Gerald.
 MARGERY.
Uncle!

COLONEL.
I always said so!

MARGERY.
You ran away!

COLONEL.
Yes, but I said so. Then you have got her card?

MARGERY [nodding her head].

Yes!
[Jumps up and gives him another kiss.

ENID [aside, jealously].

I do wish she wouldn’t!

COLONEL.
My doing, Margery—my doing!

ENID.
I have a card as well!

COLONEL.
My doing, Miss Bethune!

ENID.
I’ve just been ordering my gown!

COLONEL [gallantly].
I trust it will be worthy of the wearer.
[Bows. Enid smiles.
 MARGERY.
Have you a card, Miss Vivash?

VICTORIA [who has sat very quietly, now rises].

If you’ll excuse me, dear, I’ll say good-morning!

MARGERY [shakes hands].

Must you go?
[Exit Victoria, L.

MARGERY.
Excuse me, uncle. Gerald doesn’t know you’re here!
[Exit, R.

COLONEL.
Miss Vivash?

ENID.
Don’t trouble, Colonel! She resents an escort. I have no patience
with Victoria. Trying to be a man!

COLONEL.
And making only a succès d’estime!

ENID.
I like a woman to be womanly!

COLONEL [aside].
The best of ’em.

ENID.
I don’t mean weak—like Agnes. She goes to the other extreme.
Do you know, I’m getting very anxious about Agnes!
 COLONEL.
Mrs. Sylvester?

ENID.
Haven’t you noticed anything? Of course not! You men never do!

COLONEL.
I am afraid I must plead guilty!

ENID.
Haven’t you observed how much she and your nephew are
together?

COLONEL.
But they’re collaborating.

ENID.
Ah, Colonel, when a man collaborates with a woman, a third
person ought always to be present.

COLONEL.
To protect the man?

ENID [tapping him, playfully].

You are incorrigible!

COLONEL [cheerfully].
I always was, and at my age reformation is out of the question!

ENID.
Oh, you are not so old as all that!

COLONEL.
Guess.
 ENID.
Fifty!

COLONEL [pleased].
Add six to it!

ENID.
Six!

COLONEL [aside].
She might add eight.

ENID.
I don’t believe it, Colonel.

COLONEL [aside].
Quite the best of ’em! [Sits.] So you have appointed yourself the
third person?

ENID.
It’s time someone did.

COLONEL.
A sort of Vigilance Committee, eh?

ENID.
I simply take the interest of a friend in Agnes.

COLONEL.
And what is the result of your observations?

ENID.
I have come to a terrible conclusion.
 COLONEL.
You alarm me!

ENID.
That she is a poor, tempted creature.

COLONEL.
Bless me! I never regarded her in that light before. I thought the
boot was on the other leg. [Corrects himself hurriedly.] Foot!—foot!
[Indicating Enid’s, which she is carefully showing; aside.] Very neat
foot she has!

ENID.
Men always stand by one another, so should women. Agnes must
be protected against herself!

COLONEL.
Then it’s herself, after all? I thought you meant my nephew.

ENID.
So I do. She is the moth—he is the candle.

COLONEL.
Really!——

ENID.
Oh, you men, you men! You’re all alike—at least, I won’t say all!

COLONEL.
Say all, say all! It really doesn’t matter!

ENID.
No, no, I won’t say all!
 COLONEL.
You say so in your book!

ENID [pleased].
You’ve read my book?

COLONEL [evading the question].

“Man, the Betrayer?”

ENID.
Well, you know, Colonel, one has to paint with a broad brush.
[Pantomime.

COLONEL.
Yes, when one paints with tar! [Aside.] Very nice arm, too!
[Aloud.] Look at your title!

ENID.
“Man, the Betrayer!”

COLONEL [aside].
Don’t know any more!

ENID.
A mere figure of speech!

COLONEL [admiring her].

Figure?

ENID.
Mere figure!

COLONEL.
Damned fine figure, too!
 [To himself, but aloud.

ENID.
Colonel!

COLONEL.
Ten thousand pardons! I was thinking of something else. Pray
forgive my bad language!

ENID.
Oh, I’m used to it! Victoria’s is much worse!

COLONEL.
Miss Vivash!

ENID.
Vulgar-minded thing! Learned French on purpose to read Zola’s
novels. I don’t suppose that even you have read them.

COLONEL.
Oh, haven’t I? Every one!

ENID.
I don’t believe it, Colonel!

COLONEL.
I’m a shocking old sinner! I never professed to be anything else!

ENID.
I simply don’t believe it! You men exaggerate so! You make
yourselves out to be so much worse than you are. Whereas we
women pretend to be so much better. That’s the worst of us! We are
such hypocrites! Oh, if you knew as much about women as I do——
 COLONEL [aside, much interested].
Now I’m going to hear something. [Meanwhile Margery has crept
in, R., behind them. She flings her handkerchief over the Colonel’s
eyes, and ties it in a knot behind his head, then skips away from
him. Rising.] You rascal! It’s that Margery! I know it is! Where are
you? [Groping about, Margery evading him, and in shrieks of
laughter.] Margery, if I catch you!

MARGERY.
But you can’t!
[Enid has risen to evade the Colonel, who is
groping all over the room—a sort of blind man’s
buff—all laughing.

COLONEL [seizing Enid].

I’ve got you!
[Kisses her. Enid shrieks. Margery roars. Colonel
tears off the handkerchief and stands aghast.

Re-enter Wells, L.

WELLS.
Lady Wargrave.
[Sudden silence. Exit Colonel, R. Enid runs out, C.,
in confusion.

Enter Lady Wargrave, L., and comes down.

[Exit Wells, L. Enid re-appears C., and runs across
stage behind Lady Wargrave, and off, L. Margery
stands confused, not knowing how to greet Lady
Wargrave.

LADY WARGRAVE [putting out both hands].

Margery! [Holding both Margery’s hands].
 MARGERY.
Oh, Lady Wargrave!

LADY WARGRAVE.
Aunt. I’ve called to make amends to you.

MARGERY.
Amends?

LADY WARGRAVE.
For my neglect. [Kisses her.] Forgive me, Margery, but your
marriage was a shock to me. However, I’ve got over it. Perhaps,
after all, Gerald has chosen wisely!

MARGERY.
Thank you for your kind words. I knew you had got over it.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Of course! you had my card.

MARGERY.
I knew from uncle, too. How good of him to bring it all about!

LADY WARGRAVE.
Theodore!

MARGERY.
I mean, to reconcile you!

LADY WARGRAVE.
My dear Margery, your uncle has never presumed to mention the
subject?

MARGERY.
Oh, what a story he has told us! he said it was his doing.
 LADY WARGRAVE.
No doubt. When you know Theodore as well as I do, you will
have learnt what value to attach to his observations!

MARGERY.
Won’t I pay him out?
[Shaking her fist.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Never mind your uncle. Tell me about yourself—and about
Gerald. I hope your marriage has turned out a happy one.

MARGERY.
Yes—we’re as happy as the day is long.

LADY WARGRAVE.
That is good news. Then you haven’t found your new position
difficult?

MARGERY.
Oh, I’m quite used to it! I’m not a bit shy now. Of course I put
my foot in it—I make mistakes sometimes; but even born ladies
sometimes make mistakes.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Yes, Margery. [Bending her head slightly.] And Gerald?

MARGERY.
Is the best husband in the world to me. Of course, he’s very busy
——

LADY WARGRAVE.
Busy?
 MARGERY.
With his book; and sometimes I can’t help annoying him. That’s
nothing. We haven’t had a real cross word yet.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Does he write very much?

MARGERY.
Oh, morning, noon, and night. He’s always got a pen in his hand.
I often say I wonder he doesn’t wear the ceiling out with looking at
it.
[Laughs.

LADY WARGRAVE.
That isn’t writing, Margery.

MARGERY.
No, but it’s thinking—and he’s always thinking.
[Falls into a reverie.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Do you go out much?

MARGERY.
We went out a good deal at first, but we got tired of it. I like
home best; at any rate, Gerald does. I rather liked going out. Oh,
I’m quite a success in society.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Indeed?

MARGERY.
Of course, aunt, I’m not clever; but I suppose I’m witty without
knowing it!
 LADY WARGRAVE.
Witty?

MARGERY.
At any rate, I make the people laugh. Isn’t that being witty? Then
I laugh as well, although I don’t know what I’m laughing at, I’m
sure! [Laughs.] Oh, everybody laughs at me—but Gerald. And he’s
thinking of his book!

LADY WARGRAVE.
Do you have many visitors?

MARGERY.
Oh, yes! Miss Vivash—Miss Bethune—Dr. Mary—Mrs. Sylvester—
and uncle. They’re often coming. As for Mrs. Sylvester, she almost
lives here!—oh, and Captain Sylvester, he’s taken to calling lately!

LADY WARGRAVE.
In future, dear, you’ll have another visitor. I see I have neglected
you too long. And you must come and see me. We’ll go out together.

MARGERY.
Oh, that will be nice! Then you have quite forgiven me?

LADY WARGRAVE.
But not myself!

MARGERY [embracing her].

Oh, why is everyone so good to me?
Re-enter Gerald, R., followed by Colonel.

GERALD.
Aunt, this is kind of you! but you were always kind.
 LADY WARGRAVE.
Not always. I ought to have paid this visit earlier. I made a
mistake, Gerald, and I have come to acknowledge it.

COLONEL [laying his hand on Lady Wargrave’s shoulder in an

access of enthusiasm].
Caroline, you’re a trump!

LADY WARGRAVE.
Theodore!

COLONEL.
No other word for it! I always said you’d come round!

LADY WARGRAVE.
Never!

COLONEL.
Always!

LADY WARGRAVE.
Theodore, you never said so!

COLONEL.
To myself.
[Turns off.

GERALD.
Better late than never, aunt. And thank you for the card for your
At Home.
[Talks to Lady Wargrave.

MARGERY.
Oh, uncle, you’re a shocking old story, aren’t you?
 COLONEL.
What have I been saying now?

MARGERY.
You said it was your doing!

COLONEL.
So it was!

MARGERY.
Aunt vows you’d nothing to do with it at all!

COLONEL [taking Margery aside].

Caroline’s a heart of gold; but your aunt must be managing! So I
let her manage, and I manage her.

MARGERY.
You?
[Smiling.

COLONEL.
But I do it quietly. I influence her, without her knowing it. Sheer
force of character. Chut! not a word! [Backing away from her,
signalling silence; backs into Lady Wargrave.] Ten thousand pardons!
[Bows profusely.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Really, Theodore!
[Margery goes up, stifling her laughter; he shakes
his handkerchief at her.

Re-enter Wells, L.

WELLS.
Mrs. Sylvester!
 Enter Mrs. Sylvester; she hesitates, on seeing Lady Wargrave.
Exit Wells, L.

GERALD.
Pray come in, Mrs. Sylvester. You know my aunt.

MRS. SYLVESTER.
I think we’ve met before.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Yes, at my nephew’s chambers. I remember perfectly. You were
engaged upon some work or other.

GERALD.
It’s not finished yet. I am so interrupted!
[Glancing at Margery who has crept down behind
Colonel.

MARGERY [whispering in Colonel’s ear].

Who kissed Miss Bethune?
[Colonel starts guiltily; Margery roars.

GERALD [angrily].
Margery!
[Margery runs out, L.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Not finished yet!

MRS. SYLVESTER.
But we have made great progress.

LADY WARGRAVE.
And are you satisfied with what you have done?
 GERALD.
It is certainly interesting.

LADY WARGRAVE.
It is not enough for me that a work of my nephew’s should be
interesting! Tell me, as far as you have gone, do you think it is
worthy of a Cazenove?

GERALD.
It is the work of my life.

MRS. SYLVESTER.
And of mine!

LADY WARGRAVE.
As far as you have gone. But what is to be the end of it?

GERALD.
Ah, we’ve not got there yet.

LADY WARGRAVE.
Would you admit a third collaborateur?

MRS. SYLVESTER [alarmed].

Who?

LADY WARGRAVE.
An old woman.

GERALD.
Lady Wargrave’s joking!

LADY WARGRAVE.
Oh, I could put an end to it, I think!
 MRS. SYLVESTER.
We don’t know what the end will be ourselves.

LADY WARGRAVE.
There I have the advantage. If I can help in any way, my
experience is always at your service. Meanwhile, I fear I am another
interruption. Theodore, your arm!

GERALD [follows them to door, L.].

Thank you so much for coming.
[Holding his hand out.

LADY WARGRAVE [taking it].

And for going?
[Exit with Colonel, L.

MRS. SYLVESTER.
What does she mean?

GERALD.
Thank her for going?

MRS. SYLVESTER.
And the end of it?

GERALD.
Aunt always talks in riddles!

MRS. SYLVESTER.
Is it a riddle?

GERALD [avoids her eyes].

Come, let us get to work. I’ve done hardly anything today. It’s
first one interruption, then another.
 [Sits.

MRS. SYLVESTER.
We should be quieter at our house.

GERALD.
There’s your husband!

MRS. SYLVESTER.
Always a husband!

GERALD.
Or a wife. Ah, me!
[Sits with his head between his hands, staring at
vacancy; Mrs. Sylvester watching him
sympathetically.

MRS. SYLVESTER [comes and kneels by him].

Gerald! [He starts slightly.] You are not happy. You have realized
the truth.

GERALD.
What truth?

MRS. SYLVESTER.
Your marriage was a mistake from the beginning.

GERALD.
Not from the beginning. It started right enough, but somehow it
has taken the wrong turn.

MRS. SYLVESTER.
It was wrong from the first. Mine was the true ideal. The thing
that you thought love was a mere passion—an intoxication. Now you
have come back to your better self you feel the need of sympathy.
 GERALD.
No, no; my love was real enough, and I love Margery still; but
love doesn’t seem to bear the wear and tear of marriage—the hourly
friction—the continual jar.

MRS. SYLVESTER.
There is no friction in true marriage, Gerald. You say you love
your wife, and it is good and loyal of you to deceive yourself; but
you can’t deceive me. Haven’t I made the same mistake myself? I
was a thoughtless, inexperienced girl, Jack was a handsome, easy-
going man. We married, and for a year or two we jogged along. But
I grew up—the girl became a woman. I read, I thought, I felt; my
life enlarged. Jack never reads, never thinks—he is just the same.
[Rising.] I am not unhappy, but my soul is starved—[goes to
mantelpiece and stands looking at him]—as yours is!
[Pause. Margery’s face appears between the
curtains at the back, wearing a broad smile. She
grimaces at them, unobserved, and remains
there; then looks at Gerald with a long face of
mock sympathy.

GERALD.
Well, we must make the best of it!

MRS. SYLVESTER.
Yes, but what is the best? [Margery grimaces at her.] Is our
mistake so hopeless, irremediable? After all, is not true loyalty loyalty
to oneself?

GERALD [looks at her].

You think so?

MRS. SYLVESTER.
Or what becomes of our philosophy?
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