The First English Detectives The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840

by Beattie, J. M.

• ISBN13: 9780199695164
• ISBN10: 0199695164
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This is the first comprehensive study of the 90-year history of the Bow Street Runners, a group of men established in the middle of the eighteenth century by Henry Fielding, with the financial support of the government, to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London.They were developed over the following decades by his half-brother, John Fielding, into what became a well-known and stable group of officers who acquired skill and expertise in investigating crime, tracking and arresting offenders, and in presenting evidence at the Old Bailey, the main criminalcourt in London. They were, Beattie argues, detectives in all but name. Fielding also created a magistrates' court that was open to the public for the first time, at stated times every day. A second, intimately-related theme in the book concerns attitudes and ideas about the policing of London more broadly, particularly from the 1780s, when the detective and prosecutorial work of the runners came to be increasingly opposed by arguments in favour of the prevention of crime bysurveillance and other means. The last three chapters of the book continue to follow the runners' work, but at the same time are concerned with discussions of the larger structure of policing in London - in parliament, in the Home Office, and in the press. These discussions were to intensify after1815, in the face of a sharp increase in criminal prosecutions. They led - in a far from straightforward way - to a fundamental reconstitution of the basis of policing in the capital by Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police act of 1829. The runners were not immediately affected by the creation of theNew Police, but indirectly it led to their disbandment a decade later.

Author Biography

J. M. Beattie was born in England in 1932 and emigrated to the US in 1949. He studied at the University of San Francisco (BA, 1954), the University of California, Berkeley (MA, 1956), and Cambridge (Ph.D, 1963). He taught in the History Department and the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto from 1961 to his retirement in 1997. He has published The English Court in the Reign of George I (1967 and 2008), Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (1986), and Policing and Punishment in London, 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (2001).

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Figures	p. xi
List of Illustrations	p. xii
List of Abbreviations	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Henry Fielding at Bow Street	p. 14
Sir John Fielding and the Making of the Bow Street Runners, 1754-1765	p. 25
The early years of the office: structure, personnel, work	p. 27
"Wartime: policing the poor	p. 42
Postwar: a new plan of police	p. 47
Detection: The Runners at Work, 1765-1792	p. 52
A 'transporting and hanging police'?	p. 52
Detection	p. 60
Apprehension	p. 77
Prosecution: The Runners in Court, 1765-1792	p. 84
Introduction	p. 84
John Fielding and the Bow Street Magistrates' court	p. 87
The Brown Bear	p. 103
The runners in court	p. 107
The runners and defence counsel	p. 125
Conclusion	p. 132
Fielding's Legacy: Police Reform in the 1780s	p. 134
The government and policing in the 1780s	p. 134
The Bow Street patrol	p. 141
The London and Westminster Police Bill, 1785	p. 147
The Middlesex Justices Act, 1792	p. 159
The Runners in a New Age of Policing, 1792-1815	p. 167
Bow Street and the Police Act	p. 167
Crime, the runners, and the patrol, 1792-1815	p. 173
New policing demands	p. 184
National security	p. 185
Royal security	p. 192
Public order	p. 196
The value of office: 'extraordinary' payments	p. 201
Prevention: The Runners in Retreat, 1815-1839	p. 206
London crime in the early nineteenth century	p. 206
The runners and post-war crime	p. 218
The limits of police reform, 1815-1822	p. 225
Sir Robert Peel at the Home Office	p. 235
The Metropolitan Police Act, 1829	p. 242
Bow Street and the Metropolitan Police	p. 253
Epilogue	p. 259
Bibliography of Manuscript Sources	p. 265
Index	p. 267
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