Knox the boy that buys the beef.
* * *
The crimes of Burke and Hare had convulsed the entire country. Other stories were more local, but in retrospect may have had more importance. Such a one was the killing of John Peacock Wood in 1833.
For decades, policing had been endlessly discussed. Originally, the term ‘police’ had merely meant the administration of a city, and the civic well-being that followed (the word derives from the same source as ‘policy’); but during the French Revolution ‘police’ in France began to mean the men who were charged with maintaining ‘public order, liberty, property, individual safety’; in Britain, nothing like it existed. Even a century earlier, a French visitor had been amazed: ‘Good Lord!’ he cried, ‘how can one expect order among these people, who have no such word as Police in their Language.’ The government regularly called out the army to control mobs and quell uprisings, but there was no civil force whose job included the prevention and detection of crime. This lack was considered a virtue: Fouché’s police force was regarded as nothing but a nest of paid governmental spies.
Before 1829, changes to the parish and watch systems had been blocked by a coalition of right-wing ‘county’ elements joined by their opposite numbers, the political Radicals. Both groups feared, for different reasons, that a professional force would destroy civil liberties, bring in a system of secret-service spying to consolidate political power and introduce what was, in effect, a standing army. In short, they believed the new police would be ‘expensive, tyrannical, and foreign’, and most people felt they would ‘rather be robb’d. by wretches of desperate fortune than by ministers’. Nonetheless, the Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, a political operator of brilliance, persuaded many that the rise in crime made some sort of solution imperative. There probably was no such rise – there was a rise in prosecutions, the consequence of a change in social expectations, and a growing intolerance of disorder; there were also more governmental surveys and early attempts at statistical analysis of crime figures. Together these created an appearance of increasing crime. Peel may or may not have understood that this was a difference in perception, not reality; in either case he used this perception to promote his end.*
For the most part, over the previous two decades high-profile stranger-murders requiring this new type of policing had been rare: the Ratcliffe Highway murders, the death of Spencer Perceval, and Burke and Hare. The other cases that had attracted attention were domestic, and were easily dealt with by older methods – Corder, Fenning (pp.183–200), Scanlan (pp.130–39), even Thurtell had killed an acquaintance. But the times were uneasy, people apprehensive. The end of the French wars had seen the return of large numbers of suddenly unemployed men inured to violent death; high food prices and chronic unemployment were producing ever more incidents of civic unrest, from machine-breaking to the Corn Bill Riots, the Spa Field Riots, bread and wage riots and Peterloo. Now the police were presented as agents who would prevent civic disorder.
Thus on 29 September 1829, parishes within twelve miles of Charing Cross saw the first ‘new police’ on the streets: five divisions, with 144 Metropolitan Police constables apiece. Within eight months there were 3,200 men, all dressed in blue. The Bow Street Runners had worn red waistcoats, but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. The new police’s uniforms had been carefully chosen to indicate their professionalism, while at the same time the colour had been selected to reassure the population that, unlike the red-coated army, this was a civil, not a military force. (Not that the new colour choice made much difference: the police were quickly dubbed ‘raw lobsters’ or ‘the unboiled’. An unboiled lobster is blue; when it is put in hot water it turns red. Thus a policeman was only ‘hot water’ away from being a soldier.) The uniform was also protective: the stock at the neck was leather, not linen, and the rabbit-skin top hat had a reinforced leather top and bracing; according to one policeman’s memoir, it weighed eighteen ounces. (In 1864 it was replaced by the ‘Roman’ helmet that is still worn.) The only weapon carried was a baton, with a rattle (replaced by a whistle in 1884) to summon aid.
Peel’s instructions for the new police stressed that constables ‘will be civil and obliging to all people’, while being ‘particularly cautious not to interfere idly or unnecessarily in order to make a display of his authority’. ‘The object to be attained is the prevention of crime,’ yet the police also had what today would be called ‘caring’ roles in their communities: looking after ‘insane persons and children’, ensuring that street nuisances (rubbish, waste, building materials) were removed, enforcing Sunday trading laws and preserving public order. The middle classes quickly came to accept this ideal as the reality, while the working classes were less persuaded, frequently with good reason. The early recruits were not exactly the crème de la crème, and of the initial intake of 2,800 men, 2,238 were swiftly dismissed, 1,790 for drunkenness.
This distrust came to a head in three separate incidents in 1833. The first was what became known as the Cold Bath Field riot. In May a group of workers calling themselves the National Political Union organized a rally in London. Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, ruled it an unlawful assembly, and flyers were posted warning the population not to participate. On the morning of 13 May about seventy-five constables were stationed near Cold Bath Field, the planned rallying point, with reinforcements backing them up – altogether, about 450 men were on call. When the workers arrived, the police superintendent moved his men in. Bricks were thrown, baton charges were led, many were injured, three constables were stabbed and one died. The policeman in command, Superintendent Mays, claimed he and his men had marched slowly down the street towards the speakers’ platform, planning to arrest the leaders and give the crowds time to leave under their own steam. They only charged, he said, when bricks and stones were thrown; he also claimed that the rioters had guns (although everyone agreed that no shot had been fired). On the other side, eye-witnesses reported that the police had charged immediately, indiscriminately attacking men, women and children, many of whom had nothing to do with the rally, but were simply passers-by. The officers made no attempts to rein in their men, and the crowd response was purely self-defence. The jury at the inquest on PC Robert Culley reached a verdict of justifiable homicide, noting that the Riot Act had not been read, which made the police charge illegal.*This verdict was quashed on appeal, and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry found that the police had not used excessive force. This was decidedly not the public’s view. The caricaturist Robert Cruikshank wrote a savage attack on the authorities, inflating the number of police to eight hundred, and suggesting that Culley had probably been stabbed by another policeman. He ended by parodying Peel’s instructions with a set of his own ‘Necessary Qualifications’ for policemen: ‘He must be utterly destitute of all feelings of humanity … He must qualify himself for action, by knocking down, every half hour, all the poor fruit-women he can find and other peaceable hardworking people, who endeavor [sic] to get an honest livelihood to support their large families. If able to perjure himself with a clear conscience he may depend upon speedy promotion.’
While the inquest and inquiry were continuing, public outrage was exacerbated by the ongoing case of Popay, known generally as ‘the police spy’. William Popay was a police sergeant sent to infiltrate the National Political Union. He pretended to be an artist and attended meetings in ‘coloured clothes’ (plainclothes), acting as an agent provocateur, inciting his supposed fellow workers to illegal actions. When he was unmasked, earlier fears about the true nature of the police force seemed to be justified. It was, said the Radicals, nothing but a government-sanctioned spy network, paid for, to add insult to injury, out of working men’s taxes. Another select committee was set up, but before it could deliver its report the death of John Peacock Wood suddenly assumed significance.
Wood should have had no fame at all. He was a waterside character in Wapping, by the London docks, an amiable drunk, a man of no trade or settled way of life. But he was harmless. On the night before his death he was drinking at the White Hart tavern with a friend, his wife and the landlady. According to witnesses at the inquest, a squabble arose over who was to pay for a pint, and this attracted the attention of a policeman, who ‘laid hold of the deceased, and shoved him “right