Introduction

Abstract

Despite the continuing interest in the inter-war years and the recent rapid development of police history there has been surprisingly little research on the general development of policing in the 1920s and 1930s. Further, much of what has been written paints a negative picture of policing in the period. However, it is our contention that the inter-war years witnessed the start of certain fundamental changes in policing that laid the foundations of later, and more publicised, developments that took place, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus of the book will be on two complex but important drivers of change. The first encompasses concerns about police organisation and politicisation in the immediate aftermath of the Great War with wider concerns about the growth of extremist ideologies, their infiltration into British society and their impact on public order. This resulted in a drive to professionalise the police through better pay and conditions, better training and greater use of science and technology but also involved a change in the relationships between individual police forces, their local authorities and the Home Office. The second set of influences relate to the impact of the advent of a motorised society, which set in motion changes that altered basic policing practices, encouraging specialisation and moving (some) policemen off their feet and onto their seats and that also recast the wider relationship between police and public.¹ This is not to suggest that there were not other important developments. Clearly there were; and some, for example, the emergence of women police, have been analysed elsewhere.² Nor is it to deny that there were important elements of continuity in policing that ran through the first half of the twentieth century. Equally clearly there were; but such continuity is but one part of a more complex story and one that has been allowed to overshadow important changes that first emerged between the wars.