The Cambridge Borough Police Station House Diary, 22 March 1837 to 24 May 1838

Introduction To The Diary

Policing in the United Kingdom has always been a localised activity. Today there are 43 police forces in England and Wales. The roots of today's forces can be traced back to many far smaller organisations at parish, borough and county levels and their histories usually include a chronology of amalgamations and expansions.

Of all these organisations, only the Metropolitan Police Service, covering greater London (excluding the square mile of the City of London) has been the subject of any statutory requirement to manage and preserve its records. Metropolitan Police Service records have been managed and appropriate samples preserved in the Public Records Office. Outside London survivals of pre-20th Century police records has been largely a matter of chance. Over the decades, records have had to endure:

• Paper pulping campaigns during the last war
• Physical moves of organisations from building to building as they expand and re-organise
• Pressures on accommodation in an expanding profession
• An officer cadre generally lacking any real interest in the history of their organisations - not helped by the mobility of chief officers between forces in the second half of the 20th Century
• The introduction of "record destruction" rather than "record management" policies to deal with a proliferation of records.

Due to the attention of a small number of interested individuals from its ranks, the Cambridgeshire Constabulary has been more fortunate than some other police organisations in having retained some samples of its 19th Century records, one of the more interesting of which is the 1837/8 Station Diary from the Cambridge Borough Station House. This may be the earliest surviving station diary from an English police station.

Cambridge Borough Police, the body to which this Station Diary or Journal relates, was formed in 1836, and this surviving diary is probably the second such book to be kept at the Station House. Why this particular volume should have survived, rather than the one preceeding it, or the many following it, remains a mystery. An anonymous typescript, probably from the 1940s - 50s, accompanying the journal, suggests that this volume was found in the attic of the second Cambridge Borough Police Station in St Andrews Street, Cambridge. There are occasional pencil drawings in the Journal, obviously the work of a child, suggesting that the volume may, at some stage, have been in private hands, later being returned to the Force. While it is regrettable that some of these provincial police records have been reduced to private ownership as souvenirs or collectors' items, it is not uncommon for such action to lead to the survival of a record or artefact when the police force in question has destroyed all similar material. This may account for the lone survival of this volume from what was obviously one of a series of records, long since lost. We do not know who we have to thank for this period of unofficial custodianship.

The Journal has lost its binding but retains the end papers, suggesting that it was originally some 356 pages in length. Entries are in faded, now sepia, ink in a number of different hands. Only one or two leaves seem to have been lost during its lifetime. The Journal is probably the second Station Diary of a series.

During this period the two principle records of the Station House would have been the charge book and the station diary. The charge book would have been used to record detailed information about prisoners: names, descriptions, reasons for arrest, arresting officers, charges accepted and refused, bail recognizances, case disposals and details of prisoners' property. The Station Diary was used initially to record other occurences, incidents, instructions, comings and goings and administrative matters of note. Later other records would have been introduced to meet growing needs. These included, for example, lost and found property books, personnel records and discipline books, crime complaints registers, records of supervisory visits to different premises, including public houses.

The Diary enables us to get a picture of the day to day activities of the Police of 1837 in the provincial university town of Cambridge.

Piecing together these activities gives a rich picture of how the Force was organised and managed and of the day to day demands on the largely untrained officers of the day, and how they responded to those demands. The activities recorded in the diary help us to see what motivated the Borough Council, the police authority of the day, to fund this relatively expensive new law enforcement body. The diary gives us a flavour of the day-to-day life on the streets of Cambridge from the view of those charged with the upkeep of law and order. We can gain an impression of the levels of crime and disorder in the community. We can lay this record alongside the Cambridge Chronicle, the local newspaper of the day and draw some conclusions about local news reporting of the period. Finally, the diary picks up some of the rubbing points between Town and Gown and their respective enforcement bodies.

Editing the Diary

The Diary has been transcribed with minimal editing. The result includes much of the day to day minutiae of the low life of the Borough. The Editor has left many details of minor breaches of the licencing law and the misdemeanors of the Police Constables and Sergeants as recorded. These serve to illustrate the pace of life in the 1830s and the pressures and problems faced by the force and its managers.

Original spelling, capitalisation, punctuation and contractions have been retained so far as possible. Where there is any doubt about interpretation an explanation is furnished in square brackets.

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