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The Bow Street Runners
Browsing through the shelves of one of our local English-language bookshops a few weeks ago, I came across "The Last Days of Newgate" by Andrew Pepper, a ripping yarn about crime and detection in the days just before the Metropolitan Police were set up. The hero of the novel, Pyke, is a Bow Street Runner – though by all accounts he's something of a poacher-turned-gamekeeper-turned-poacher-again. Anyway, the portrayal of the Bow Street Runners in the book intrigued me enough for me to try to find out more about them. Apparently they were an executive branch of the Bow Street Magistrates' Court, set up by Henry Fielding (the novelist who wrote "Tom Jones") during his magistracy – he became a Justice of the Peace in 1748. Initially there were only eight Runners! Their duties were to serve writs and apprehend criminals on the orders of the magistrates; they didn't carry out patrols. This wasn't so very different from "thieftakers" elsewhere – there were plenty of people who caught criminals for the courts for a living – except that the Runners were formally attached to the Bow Street Court and paid out of central government funds, rather than by the victim of the crime or through a bounty offered by the local court. The funding was sporadic, but Fielding's half-brother John, who succeeded him as Bow Street's Chief Magistrate, was nevertheless able to shape the Runners into an effective policing force by the time of his retirement in 1780 (earning himself a knighthood along the way, in 1761). In 1792 an Act of Parliament added another eight similar offices, and in 1805 a mounted force was added, the Bow Street Horse Patrol. It's a fairly commonly-held belief that the Bow Street Runners evolved into the Metropolitan Police and thus became the world's first police force. In fact, it did neither. The Met wasn't even the first police force in the UK – that was the City of Glasgow Police, set up by Act of Parliament in 1800 – and in fact the concept of a police force had been taken much further in France and Germany; Louis XIV had appointed a Lieutenant General of Police in 1667 to maintain order and catch villains, and the Paris police claim to be the first uniformed force in the world. And the Met was set up separately from the Runners, in 1829, by Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (hence the nicknames "bobby" and "peeler", and possibly "rozzer" as well). This wasn't a universally popular move by any means, as street patrols to prevent crime were seen by many as a step towards a repressive regime similar to those established on the Continent by less democratic nations. (Habitual criminals probably weren't ecstatic about it either.) Nevertheless, by 1839 the Runners had been absorbed into the Met, along with all the other magistrates' constabularies in London. Perhaps the strangest thing to modern observers about the Runners was their entitlement to receive payments direct from the victims of the thefts or assaults they were investigating. This was probably necessary when the government weren't willing to stump up the funding for them (and John Harding certainly had to keep asking them often enough). But the consequence – perhaps not surprisingly – was that many of them ran a profitable sideline in arranging robberies themselves, then "recovering" the property (or most of it) and claiming a reward. This happened even though originally the Runners were each asked for £50 (enough to keep a person comfortably for a year!) as security for good behaviour. Still, perhaps we shouldn't judge them too harshly. After all, police corruption isn't exactly a thing of the past, even in the supposedly law-abiding societies of Western Europe and North America. And there's no doubt that law enforcement in London improved generally as a result of the Runners' efforts.
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Contributor's Note
This Intel is an extract from one of our opt-in email newsletters. In addition to the usual expat-related topics, each newsletter covers a subject of wider interest - something different each time.
http://www.britishexpat.com/lists/index.php?p=subscribe&id=1
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History of the Metroploitan Police
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