Leisure: Introduction

The next few days of my blog sketches consider certain aspects of the history of leisure in the nineteenth century.[1] The late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century saw two major modifications in the cultural experience of English society. First, there was erosion of the older popular culture as a result of the withdrawal of patronage by the governing elite, the gradual dismantling of the agrarian social and economic frameworks that gave it justification by widespread industrialisation and the attacks on its public expression by a combination of religious evangelicalism and a secular desire to promote work discipline. By contrast, secondly, a more commercialised culture developed, entrepreneurial, market-led and largely urban and bourgeois. This involved modification of both the content and transmission of high culture and, in the nineteenth century, the promotion of popular cultural products like circuses, prize and cock-fights for profit. Cultural experiences, like economic and social ones, were adaptable.

Attacking cultural experience

The attack on popular culture was part of the assault on the life-styles and recreations of the labouring population that had been gathering impetus since the sixteenth century.[2] It had two interconnected thrusts: a religious belief that popular culture was profane, irreligious and immoral, and a secular concern that it was detrimental to economic efficiency and social order. The desire to turn people into sober, godly citizens motivated by an interest in work and social discipline had considerable political leverage and was a dominant intellectual stance from the early nineteenth century, receiving its fullest, though highly ambiguous, expression in the notion of ‘Victorian values’. Religiosity, sexual repression and patriarchal authoritarianism, in both family and economic life, were its major characteristics. Its motivation was a sense of cultural crisis, a challenge to the hegemony that called for moral regeneration and stricter disciplining of the lives of the labouring population. Attacks on popular culture after 1830 can therefore be seen as a response to pressures on existing forms of social control, of demographic and urban growth and the consequent erosion of paternalism.

Anglican Evangelicalism played a major role in this critique of popular culture. It succeeded in obtaining some agreement across a broad spectrum of the governing elite to its central moral tenets through groups like the Society for the Reformation of Manners and the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Its views had their greatest success with the mercantile, commercial and professional groups, who looked with both economic and social distaste at the irrational and sinful nature of much popular culture and were appalled by the gratuitous cruelty to animals this involved. Methodism had greater impact on the working population and on artisans and small shopkeepers through its incessant attacks on the worldliness and sensuality of popular culture. Distaste for present pleasures was also a characteristics of secular radicalism. For articulate radicals, popular culture was too closely linked to the paternalistic social order. It offended their emphasis on reason and their stress on moral and intellectual self-improvement; books, education and debating rather than bear baiting, races and circuses. Secular radicals, no less than evangelicals, sought to redeem the working population.

This ideological attack was combined with what Thomas Carlyle called an ‘abdication on the part of the governors’ in his essay Chartism published in 1839. The aristocracy and gentry gradually withdrew from participation in popular culture and no longer championed it against reformers. Society was becoming less face-to-face, except on special occasions, with each social group confined to its own cultural world. The layout of country houses and gardens demonstrated a move towards domestic privacy. This was more than just symbolic and reflected a much broader ‘cutting-off’ of the lives of aristocracy and gentry from the lives of the labouring population. Rural sports, customary holidays and apprenticeship rituals came to be seen not as socially desirable but as wasteful distractions from work and threats to social order.

Characterising popular culture in 1830

In 1830 popular culture was public, robust and gregarious, largely masculine and involving spectacle and gambling with an undercurrent of disorder and physical violence. The distinction between high and popular culture, between opera and drama on the one hand and spectacle, circus and showmanship on the other had broken down: Shakespeare, melodrama and performing animals not merely co-existed but intermingled.

Theatre and pantomime

The eighteenth century pleasure fairs had played a major role in this process and many major actors started their careers in their theatrical booths. English theatre and opera was produced not only for the cultivated and informed but for mass audiences for whom melodrama, lavish stage sets and live animals were essential and whom managers and actors bored at their peril. Expanding audiences funded the extensive rebuilding of Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Sadler’s Wells as well as theatres outside the West End and entrepreneurs gave melodrama a legitimate place on the stage as well as developing the modern pantomime. Provincial theatres followed the example of London. By 1830, however, there had been some decline in theatre going among the provincial bourgeoisie, the result as much of the rougher audiences frightening them away as the impact of evangelicalism.

Sport

Developments in sport showed the same commercialism and capacity to survive in the face of the hostility of authority. Shooting and hunting were the only sports to remain exclusively elitist. Until 1831 shooting was legally restricted to owners of land worth more than £100 and the Games Laws ensured that poaching was severely punished. While shooting demonstrated a horizontal cleavage in rural society, foxhunting had a far greater community interest. Though dominated by the landed aristocracy and country gentlemen, it was open to urban gentry and professionals and the poorer sections of the community followed the spectacle on foot. Some hunts were the property of single great landowners but were expensive to maintain and subscription hunts became more common: there were 69 packs of hounds in Britain in 1812, 91 by 1825.[3]

Horse racing was the sport of both the rich and poor. It could not maintain its exclusiveness though different prices charged for the stands, the paddocks and the ordinary enclosures were as much an expression of social hierarchy as different class of railway travel. Horse racing combined two obsessions: the love of horses and gambling. Professional bookmakers appeared around 1800; by 1815, the ‘classic’ races, the Derby, the Oaks, the One Thousand and Two Thousand Guineas, the St Leger and the Ascot Gold Cup, were all established and by 1837 there were 150 places in Britain where race meetings were held. By 1850, off-course betting had been established, further broadening participation.

Pugilism or prize fighting began as a sport of the labouring population and attracted aristocratic patronage by 1800. Like horse racing it was increasingly commercialised and its champions -- Tom Spring, Tom Crib and Dutch Sam -- were full-time professionals. Both flourished as industries with their own specialist newspapers yet they were also evocative of an older, perhaps imaginary, culture where sporting squires and labourers rubbed shoulders in a common appreciation of animals and physical prowess. Upper-class support for prize fighting waned after 1830 but it retained its popularity among the working population and its real decline did not occur until after 1860. Other sports like cricket, rowing and pedestrianism, had similar characteristics to horse-racing and prize fighting. They became more organised and professional, more dependent on attracting spectators and accompanied by extensive gambling. Cricket originated as an activity of the labouring population in southern England and was then take up by the aristocratic elite. Pedestrianism and rowing also began as popular sports before moving up the social scale late in the nineteenth century.

Continuities in cultural experience

Many traditional customs continued until well after 1850. There is evidence for the large unchanged New Year mumming festivals in northern England until the 1870s. Guy Fawkes’ Night was still celebrated despite attempts by various authorities to suppress bonfires and the burning of effigies. Changes to traditional customs were not easily enforced even in areas, like Lancashire, where factory discipline was most firmly established. The Lancashire Wakes Weeks, traditionally the most important event of the recreational year, were forced on millowners rather than freely given. It was not simply employers who attacked wakes and fairs. Moral reformers, the magistracy, and later the police recognised that these acted as a focus for criminal activity, could potentially lead to violence, and threatened public order. That they continued until the late nineteenth century was due not to lack of opposition to them but to disagreement about what action to take.

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[1] S. Easton, A. Howkins, S. Laing, L. Merrick and H. Walker Disorder and Discipline: Popular Culture from 1550 to the Present, Temple Smith, 1988 is a good general survey. J.M. Golby and A.W. Purdue The Civilization of the Crowd, Batsford, 1984, R.W. Malcolmson Popular Recreation in English Society 1700-1850, CUP, 1973, H. Cunningham Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, Allen and Unwin, 1980 provide different perspectives on the issue of custom and leisure.  P. Bailey Leisure and Class in Victorian England: rational recreation and the contest for control 1830-1885, Routledge, 1978 and J. Walvin Leisure and Society 1830-1950, Longman, 1979 take the arguments forward into the late nineteenth century. R. Holt Sport and the British: A Modern History, OUP, 1989 is the best introduction to this area of leisure.

[2] Richard Brown Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850, Routledge, 1991, pp. 435-440.

[3] On this issue see Raymond Carr English Fox Hunting: A History, Weidenfeld, 1976, revised edition, 1986.

The policeman state: attitudes and stereotypes

The strength and cost of the policeman-state has risen continuously. In 1861 there was one police man to every 937 people in England and Wales, by 1891 one for every 731 and by 1951 one for every 661. Costs rose from £1.5 million in 1861 to over £3.5 million in 1891 and £7.0 million in 1914. The rising cost of theft justified this. Great robberies have been as infrequent as great murders and it comes as a shock to realise that when the cost of reported theft is compared with the mounting cost of the policeman state, it has always been small. According to Metropolitan Police statistics in 1848, reported break-ins and robberies in London cost a mere £2,507 and all felonies against property £44,666. Even in 1899, when reporting was more reliable and extensive, burglary cost Londoners only £88,406 or 3d per head of the metropolitan population. Several points emerge from this:

1. The costs of theft and of violence would have been far higher had there been no police and it can be argued that these figures demonstrate a degree of successful deterrence.
2. Historians who try to give the criminal a niche in the pantheon of major historical agents have to be of a romantic disposition. Most reported crimes were small-scale, distressing though they certainly were for their immediate victims.
3. Still less have criminals had a major effect on the established order of things, other than intensifying the authoritarian instincts of their enemies. Britain's working class thieves tended to steal from the working class rather than among the middle and upper classes.

The technicalities of fraud might be beyond the ability of the ordinary policeman but what was not beyond his comprehension was the behaviour encountered daily in the streets, where poorer people conducted a good deal of their business and often behaved illegally. They were constrained largely to police the streets and, as a result, confirmed the premise that the bottom third or quarter of the urban population was indeed the most criminal. The early constables were usually recruited from the agricultural labour force or from the army, were paid low wages and were often quick to leave the force.

Police culture

In the larger forces, by 1850, a more stable career structure and command hierarchy was already beginning to enclose lesser officers within an occupation sub-culture with its own values and standards. Sustained by this, the Victorian policeman undertook the task of patrolling the poor with the unselfconscious alacrity their twentieth century successors brought to the task of patrolling aliens and blacks.

1. Isolated by uniform, discipline and function from the working class communities and upholding 'order' in the face of chronic hostility and abuse from their targets, the career policeman made sense of this situation by internalising authoritarian values and deferring to conventional standards of respectability. Yet, the police generated their own operational standards on the streets, passed on via 'apprenticeship' from officer to officer, that were often less respectable and at odds with those of the rulebooks and the letter of the law.
2. Some degree of tension between the command structure and the ordinary station-men was endemic in British policing. It stemmed from grievances about working conditions leading to abortive Metropolitan Police strikes in 1879 and 1890 and to the 1918-19 police strike. In addition there was the remoteness of commissioners and chief constables, often trained in the military or colonial services, from the lower-rank notions of 'good policing' that focused on detection rather than deterrence, action rather than service, physical engagement rather than administration.
3. The pressure on the men to fulfil their service roles was unrelenting and sporadic campaigns against their corruption and malpractice spatter the pages of police history. These usually surfaced only in circuitous ways: through public interest in the trials of 1877 or of Inspector White in 1880, or in the public disquiet that resulted in the issuing of Judges' Rules on interrogation and arrest procedures in 1912. The 1906-1908 Royal Commission was initiated over the alleged wrongful arrest of Mme D'Angely, a lady of dubious reputation but a lady nonetheless. In this case, and in the 1928-9 commission, the police made the mistake of doing tactless things to articulate people who could fight back.
4. The 1906-1908 Commission found that only nineteen of the complaints it invited were worth examining, and only a few proven satisfactorily. The impoverished public that did not matter but might have known better about police malpractice did not speak out; when it did, hostile questioning discredited it.

What is clear from the evidence of the Royal Commission is the long-standing system of wheeling and dealing between police and underworld that had its own unwritten rules and at which command officers had no choice but to connive. Blind eyes were turned, favours exacted and reciprocated, informers employed, bribes exchanges and some brutality was standard practice. Relations between police and law-breakers were necessarily close and it would be surprising then as now, if they were not also contaminating. Witnesses before the 1878 confidential detective committee drew a thin veil over the implications of detectives 'using' a certain class of people among the criminal class from whom to get information by small payments or other means. Officials recurrently compromised in their efforts to police the streets.

The poor and the police

The poor expected little sympathy from the police. Attempts, like that of Commissioner Warren after criticism of police conduct in the 1887 unemployment riots, at public relations were treated with scepticism by the working classes. Broadly their instinct was sound. In 1904 metropolitan divisional officers reported confidentially to Scotland Yard on the extent of hardship in the course of that bitter winter. These reports demonstrate a remarkable uniformity of tone, not only out of sympathy with their primary targets but also ideologically at one with itself:

• 'The so-called unemployed ...has.... the appearance of habitual loafers rather than unemployed workmen.'
• 'The poor and distressed appearance of numbers of persons met in the East End is due more to thriftlessness and intemperate habits than to absolute poverty.'
• 'Poverty is brought about by a want of thrift.'
• 'The so-called 'unemployed' could not be in the starving condition they profess for they travelled at a pace that required considerable endurance.'
• 'No politician will tell the working man that he is mainly responsible for his own condition, nor have the courage to point out how industry is everywhere being ruined by the despotic power of Trade Unionism.'

Reflexes of this kind were not peculiar to policemen. The poor had always been the targets of the law, and systematic urban policing could only underline this bias. Their own prejudices apart, they had no choice, operationally, but to be highly selective in their attacks on the nation's illegalities. They had to concentrate on the regulation of public space and public order and this brought them into more direct contact with the poor, who conducted most of their lives in this space.

Police discretion

Several statutory weapons put poor people centre-stage on law enforcement. The Vagrancy Act 1824, the Metropolitan Police Act 1839, police acts and bye-laws, the Habitual Criminals legislation of 1869-71 combined to give police immense discretionary powers of arrest on suspicion of intent to commit a felony. The police had equal discretionary powers of defining obstruction, breach of the peace, and drunkenness. They could decide whether or not to arrest, whether to bring charges and what charges. Against these powers the poorer people had little defence.

1. This discretion was group-specific in application. Early police orders told constables not to interfere with 'respectable' working people. Stop-and-search powers resulted in the arrest of vagrants, suspicious people and, with luck, some actual criminals.
2. This resulted in vulnerable and accessible people being driven into courts. Magistrates convicted or committed them for trial on very little evidence, often, other than police testimony as to character. These then became the 'criminal class' and ideological stereotypes were thus fuelled and self-confirming.
3. The police came to be convinced that the class they had a decisive hand in making was the group among whom crime was most prevalent and hence in need of surveillance.

The scale of this should not be underestimated. In the nineteenth century, very many more people had a direct experience of the disciplinary and coercive effects of policing and the law than is widely believed. When statistics are looked at not in terms of convictions but of arrests or summonses in any one-year, the results are even more startling. In 1861 1 in 29 of the male and 1 in 120 of the female population were either arrested or summonsed. By 1901 the figures respectively were 1 in 24 and 1 in 123. Summary prosecutions rose by 73 per cent between 1861 and 1901. So even if the incidence of serious crime declined, the likelihood of being subjected to legal discipline by arrest or summons actually worsened considerably. The immediate threat that the police offered to the social life of the poor had greatly increased in those decades when the policeman state was making its major bureaucratic advances. The Edwardian working classes were in this sense more closely regulated and supervised than their parents and grandparents. Resentment at this was inevitable. Robert Roberts wrote of Salford in the first quarter of the twentieth century in these terms[1]: 'Nobody in our Northern slums every spoke in fond regard of the policeman as 'social worker' and 'handyman of the streets'. The poor in general looked upon him with fear and dislike...The 'public' (meaning the middle and upper classes).... held their 'bobby' in patronising affection and esteem, that he repaid with due respectfulness; but these sentiments were never shared by the undermass, nor in fact by the working class generally.'

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, anti-police riots had expressed this frame of mind forcefully. These confrontations did decline after 1850 but the significance of this can be misconstrued. It indicated less the growing acquiescence of an incorporated working class than the isolation, marginalisation and defeat of its poorest and most turbulent sectors: of those 40 per cent of adult males who were excluded from the franchise until 1918 and who were barely unionised, if at all. The decline of their collective opposition to police reflected in good measure the growing effectiveness of crowd control by the police and the obligation imposed on an increasingly marginalised residuum to come to terms with the permanence of the social order, even when they benefited little from it.

Resistance and respectability

There was widespread, and sometimes violent, resistance to the introduction of professional policing. Many radicals regarded the police, as agents of a repressive government and union organisers feared that the police would prove a strikebreaking force. Even those unaffected by those concerns resented the introduction of a body that would enforce the law in hitherto unregulated areas of everyday life. It was this regulatory and intrusive character of the police that probably led to more hostility than almost everything else.

1. The most serious disturbances occurred in Colne during 1840. The creation of a police force for the town in April led to attempts to keep the streets clear for 'respectable' inhabitants by 'moving-on' the crowds of onlookers who were accustomed to congregate in the town centre. The situation was complicated by the fact that the constables were not from the area, many being Scots, and the pro-Chartist nature of the community. Riots began on 24 April and were eventually quelled by the arrival of troops. More riots occurred in August that again resulted in military intervention.
2. Similar resentment of a police presence was shown at the Lancaster races in July 1840 when a force of Lancashire county police was attacked without any real provocation. A party of Leeds Corporation police was attacked in June 1844 after arresting some soldiers accused of beating a man up.
3. Major risings against the police were concentrated between 1839 and 1844 when forces were introduced into areas for the first time. Their most important element seems to have been attempts by local communities to resist the intrusion of professional police who were seen as an imposition from 'outside'.

Major disturbances may have died out in the late 1840s but levels of violence against policemen throughout this period indicate that resistance to undo intrusion was evident. As an instrument of social control the 'new' police were highly successful, at least on the surface.

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[1] R. Roberts The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, Manchester, 1971, page 77.