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Policing the frontier: Middlesbrough c.1830s to 1860s |
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Policing was far from easy as mid-nineteenth century Middlesbrough had a very real crime problem. The incidence of indictable offences, dominated by offences against property, was above the national average; of petty offences, quantitatively much more important than indictable offences, even more so. Around 1861 the pro rata incidence of drunkenness in the town was five times the national average, of assaults in general three times that average and of assaults on the police five times. As Saggerson noted such assaults arose ‘out of opposition to the Constables when endeavouring in the execution of their duty to check disorderly conduct and preserve the peace’.
First Middlesbrough lock-up for prisoners, opp. Commercial Street
© Courtesy of Middlesbrough Reference Library |
The police were unpopular with much of working-class Middlesbrough but nowhere more so than among the Irish for whom ‘a policeman [was] the peregrinating embodiment of tyranny and oppression’ (Middlesbrough Weekly News). The local press carried several reports of large-scale assaults by the Irish on members of the town’s police force. In 1864, when Patrick Evans was apprehended by PC Wilkinson, ‘the prisoner commenced to kick the officer who was presently surrounded by a crowd of 500 to 600 people’ who prevented the arrest from taking place. While the attempted arrest of Thomas Lougheran by PC Stainsby led to ‘four or five men…committing a most brutal assault. The officer was knocked down, and the men attacked him in the most savage manner, kicking him with their feet, striking him with their sticks, which they carried with them, and biting him.’ Indeed, such was the scale of the problem that in 1864 the Middlesbrough Weekly News bemoaned the fact that ‘assaults on the police, attempts to rescue prisoners, and other similar interferences placed in the way of the due execution of the law are so frequently taking place that they almost cease to be matters for comment.’
Criticism was not confined to the working classes who experienced policing most directly; some middle-class critics were concerned with police over-exuberance. In 1859, the local paper, deploring the drunkenness and violence in the streets of the town, pointed out that trouble-makers were ‘very frequently abetted in their demoralizing practices by the aid of the persons who ought to be conservators of the peace [i.e. the police who] exult in what they are pleased to term “a good stand-up fight”’. Other critics were worried by police dishonesty and collusion with certain criminals that bordered on the outright corrupt but the most common concern from this quarter was the failure of the police to clear the streets of beggars, gamblers, prostitutes and other ‘undesirable elements’.
Words: David Taylor
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