LONDON POLICE FORCE CELEBRATES CENTENARY.

Shannon News, 9 August 1929, Page 4

LONDON POLICE FORCE CELEBRATES CENTENARY.

The London policeman is the most popular of public officials, the guardian of civilisation, and the mainstay of comic papers. Even the most extreme of .Radicals who desire to reduce the sphere of government to its absolute minimum, would still keep, in a phrase chat has become classical, the “policeman at the corner.” So difficult is it to realise how society would get along without him that the centenary celebration held recently in Hyde Park, when some 12,000 members of the metropolitan force paraded- before the Prince of Wales and a large crowd, comes as a surprise when its lcmindci that until 1829 England had no organised police to maintain law, to outwit the criminal, and to direct the country visitor along the streets of London.. Yet such is the case. In the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, the borough of Kensington, with an area of fifteen square miles, had to rely upon three constables and three headboroughs for the preservation of order, and a similar or worse state of affairs prevailed throughout the country. It is no wonder that, with so pitifully inadequate a force, public disorder was rampant. It was estimated that 5 per cent, of the population habitually broke the law. The reader of Feilding’s novels would gather the impression that a man could count on very little safety if he kept to the high road and the main streets jf the cities, and on none at all if he deviated from them by half a dozen yards; and a glance at the files of the Gentleman’s Magazine for the period shows .that this impression is correct. Those are the conditions with which Sir Robert Peel dealt in 1829, when he appointpd the metropolitan police force of 3,000 constables (now increased to 20,000), whose centenary has recently bc-en celebrated; and the striking contrast which they afford to the orderliness of to-day amply justifies the gratitude that all England feels toward the police. Yet upon their institution they were denounced as part of a scheme to oppress the people by arbitrary and tyrannical methods, and they aroused as much opposition as the standing army had done 140 years earlier. But this opposition was broken down in a remarkably short time, and when in 1865 the county police wore compulsorily established all over England, the force has already laid the foundations of a popularity that has been constantly and deservedly increasing ever since until the blue uniform of the policeman has now become the effective symbol of the protection and order which it is the, end? of society to maintain.