I SPY BLUE: The Police and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria

by Donald Rumbelow ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 1972

London rogues and malefactors from the 16th through the 19th centuries paraded from the pillory to the Newgate gallows by Rumbelow, a London bobby, writing the checkered history of the force. Before 1829 and the advent of ""Peel's Bloody Gang"" they were certainly not London's finest; often ""it was very difficult to distinguish the thief from the policeman"" and particularly during the 18th century when one Jonathan Wild, ""Thief-Taker General of Great Britain,"" ruled the London underworld employing thousands of crooks (including constables) to stock his ""Lost Property Office"" -- an operation that makes John Gay's Mac Heath look like a bumbling amateur. Though nominally out to write the convoluted (and incredibly corrupt) administrative history of the force within that one square mile of central London known as ""the City,"" Rumbelow in fact does a good deal more: via police dossiers he reconstructs the brutalized lives of the substratum of beggars, pickpockets, ladies of the evening, ""shofulmen"" and ""swell mobsters"" who overran the inner city. The frustration of police reform and resistance to the professionalization of the constabulary are scrutinized in detail as an expression of the Englishman's traditional mistrust of centralized police authority. Abetted by patronage, venality, and jealously guarded civic liberties, the pre-Peelite cops were ineffectual, underpaid, and despised -- how they made ends meet by consorting with their adversary/allies, the offenders, makes stimulating if not exactly edifying reading. A must for social historians; nefarious hijinks for others.

Pub Date: March 6, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION