This great photo (“1920s London in colour.”) was tweeted earlier today by @oldpicsarchive. It is a still taken from Friese-Greene’s travelogue “The Open Road”; http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/bfi-archive-footage-1920s-london-goes-viral

The picture serves to illustrate an important change in policing in the 20th century. Motor traffic meant a significant change in the nature of the policeman’s job. More and more of his time was taken up with tedious traffic control: parking, speeding, and point duty. This last, as shown here, was simply regulating traffic flow, doing the job done today by traffic lights and round-abouts.

This new role drained police time. The first motor accident I found recorded in Cumbrian police records was in 1899, when a car crashed near the Devil’s Bridge at Kirkby Lonsdale. This incident caused no injuries, and the only damage was to the motor itself, but it was deemed sufficiently important to be reported at length in the Kirkby Lonsdale Police Occurrence Book. A few years later, such an incident would have been ignored by the police, who by 1920 were far too busy with other road traffic problems. Dealing with motor traffic may well have resulted in the rapid fall in levels of convictions for street offences such as drunkenness and prostitution in the twentieth century. The policeman stuck on a busy intersection like this could not stop to deal with minor infractions of the law.

Moreover, dealing with traffic brought the PC into conflict with a new type of offender, the ‘respectable’ middle class driver, many of whom felt affronted when a mere constable dared to challenge their driving or parking. The police were still working on the streets of our towns and cities, but they were increasingly concerned with the behaviour of the middle classes on the carriage way, rather than the working classes on the pavements.

Motor vehicles changed the way criminals operated, and the police quickly took up the use of motor vehicles. For example, in 1920 Percy Toplis, the so-called ‘monocled mutineer’, escaped by car, as well as bicycle and train, and was cornered in Cumbria by motor-bike and car. In 1927, a moral panic ensued when ‘motor bandits’ shot and killed PC Gutteridge in Essex. The press were keen to elaborate a narrative of a ‘new’ and more deadly type of criminal. The Metropolitan Police already had a response, the Flying Squad, established with 40 officers in 1920.

A Flying Squad Bentley, circa 1930.

http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/features/oi_son_you_re_nicked_1_812653

The motor car certainly revolutionised both criminality and policing in the twentieth century.

Recommended further reading:

Clive Emsley, ‘Mother, What Did Policemen Do When There Weren’t Any Motors?’ The Law, the Police and the Regulation of Motor Traffic in England, 1900-1939. The Historical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Jun., 1993), pp. 357-381

Pamela Donovan and Paul Lawrence, (2008). Road traffic offending and an inner-London magistrates’ court (1913-1963).Crime, History and Societies, 12(2) pp. 119–140. Chris A. Williams, (2014) Police control systems in Britain, 1775-1975. Manchester University Press.e Jo Chipperfield, (2011) ‘Can they bear the name Englishmen?’ The celebrity of motor-bandits as a ‘new breed of villain’ in the 1920s; downloaded at https://www.academia.edu/1669713/_Can_they_bear_the_name_Englishmen_The_celebrity_of_motor-bandits_as_a_new_breed_of_villain_in_the_1920s, 9 Feb 2015.