Section 54 (11) of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 criminalized the act of a common prostitute causing annoyance by soliciting in public.Footnote ² For the police to implement this legislation was no simple matter, as no definition of “prostitute,” or indeed “annoyance,” was scribed in statute law. Although common law aided the interpretation of this offense—the case of Rex v. de Munck (1918): “We are of the opinion that prostitution is proved if it is shown that a woman offers her body commonly for lewdness of payment in return”Footnote ³—in practice, identifying a “common prostitute” and defining “annoyance” was left to the discretion of the individual police officer. Although specific squads were deployed to target streetwalkers in West End police divisions, where the presence of prostitutes was more likely to cause public offense, a “blind eye” was often turned to women soliciting in the less salubrious streets of the metropolis. Local knowledge gained on the beat and the informal advice of colleagues shaped an unofficial police policy of containment and toleration.Footnote ⁴

In short, police officers developed an idea of what a prostitute was and where she could be found.Footnote ⁵ As the following three cases from the late-1920s indicate, however, these apparently “common sense” decisions were open to criticism. Dr Morton (governor of Holloway prison) aired the example of Bessie Moncrieff, charged with soliciting prostitution in July 1927, to the Street Offences Committee. Although Moncrieff possessed a previous conviction for soliciting, at the time of arrest she was 70 years old, and had an abdominal tumor and enlarged liver; hardly conducive to earning a living on the streets.Footnote ⁶ In 1928, Nora O'Malley had a similar case dismissed at Bow Street Police Court: medical evidence produced in court showed that she was virgo intacta.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, on the following July 6, the 21-year-old Helen Adele was arrested for using “insulting words” in public; this vague clause formed section 54 (13) of the Metropolitan Police Act, which empowered officers to arrest women who were not known as prostitutes, for soliciting. At Clerkenwell Police Court, Adele stated on oath that one of the two arresting policemen had “tried to take liberties with her in a cab” and that she had been arrested because of a lack of compliance. She admitted that she was “not pure,” but denied being a prostitute. Her story was corroborated by a cab-washer, which led the presiding magistrate to dismiss the case and advise an internal inquiry into the matter. The two constables were committed to trial at the Old Bailey and were each sentenced to 18 months in prison for perjury.Footnote ⁸

Following a campaign led by the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) to reform the solicitation laws, the Home Office-appointed Street Offences Committee reported on its investigation into prostitution in November 1928.Footnote ⁹ The remit of this departmental Committee was: “To enquire into the law and practice regarding offences against the criminal law in connection with prostitution and solicitation for immoral purposes in streets and public places and other offences against decency and good order, and to report what changes, if any, are in their opinion desirable.”Footnote ¹⁰ The committee recommended the repeal of the prostitution laws and their replacement with two theoretically gender-neutral offences that applied to both sexes: to importune a person of the opposite sex for an immoral purpose and to cause a nuisance leading to complaint by a third party while frequenting a public space for said purpose.Footnote ¹¹ In spite of a high degree of public support for prostitution law reform, however, no new legislation resulted from this inquiry.

Although the AMSH's campaign to reform the solicitation laws has been covered in some detail by a number of historians, their common feminist viewpoint restricts the scope of interpretation. Although Anne Logan and Helen Self conclude that the AMSH, in rejecting the recommendations of the Street Offences Committee, missed out on a liberalizing opportunity for reform, both devote little attention to the machinations of high politics, the functioning of bureaucracy, and the practicalities of policing.Footnote ¹² Julia Laite's study of prostitution law reform is another welcome historiographical intervention; however, her interpretation is limited by an over-reliance on the records of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene. Moreover, Laite skirts the issue of why attempts at law reform failed.Footnote ¹³ As will be seen, contemporary interest in prostitution law reform needs to be interrogated within a broader context of concern about the state of policing in the metropolis.

Utilizing Home Office files, especially the transcripts of evidence submitted to the Street Offences Committee, Metropolitan Police reports, the committee minutes of the AMSH, the private papers of Nancy Astor and Sir William Joynson-Hicks, and a variety of biographical material, this article explores various reasons for the failure of legislative change. The analysis looks particularly at the activities and ideas of extra-parliamentary organizations, the Home Office, stipendiary magistrates, and senior police officers who were involved in discussions about prostitution law reform. As London accounted for fifty-seven percent of arrests for prostitution offenses in England and Wales, this study concentrates on events in the metropolis.Footnote ¹⁴

This article opens with an examination of the AMSH's campaign for prostitution law reform. Although Bridget Pym observes that the dispositions of government and the role of parliamentary sponsors are more decisive than the influence of pressure groups on reform,Footnote ¹⁵ it is clear that the government took public calls for legislative change seriously; the appointment of a committee serves as a means to test an idea in public. This analysis then proceeds to explore the coherence of motives that spurred a coalition of interest groups to reform the solicitation laws. It becomes apparent that the AMSH failed to play its best hand.

The discussion proceeds with an exploration of the views of those concerned with the administration of the law: Home Office officials, stipendiary magistrates, and Metropolitan Police officers. Surprisingly, these institutions have received only limited and specialist study for the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁶ An appreciation of these quasi-autonomous arms of the state is crucial to comprehending attitudes to the formulation of criminal law, because prostitution was one of a number of public order offenses, such as street gambling, which merited contemporary concern. Moreover, public order offenses had to compete with other policing priorities, such as the rising crime rates beginning in 1929.

Stuart Ball reminds the historian that practical politics, rather than the lofty considerations of constitutional theory, lie at the heart of the study of government.Footnote ¹⁷ Therefore, the final two sections examine, in turn, policing issues during the late 1920s and how, despite wide public acceptance of the need for a degree of police reform in the face of adverse public comment, the recommendations of the Street Offences Committee could be ignored. Rather than dismissing bureaucracy as inimical to reform, the Home Office deferred to the police, both because of their expertise and out of a desire not to put themselves in conflict with them as they pursued administrative reforms of the force.

The arguments comprising prostitution law reform serve as a reminder of David Sugarman's acute observation: “Law was not a top-down injunction, but an arena of struggle whose impact was invariably subject to a process of continual negotiation and reconstruction.”Footnote ¹⁸ At face value, the politics of prostitution control may appear trivial next to the more widely documented upheavals of the interwar years.Footnote ¹⁹ A close reading of the issues examined by the Street Offences Committee, however, highlights how, in a new age of mass democracy, the Metropolitan Police remained relatively free from public accountability.

Constituting the Street Offences Committee

The campaign to reform the solicitation laws formed part of a broader feminist movement. From the early twentieth century, female suffrage was seen as a means for women to curb the sexual excesses of men; one professed aim of female suffrage was to bring political and moral benefits to the nation.Footnote ²⁰ Therefore, the campaign to reform the solicitation laws was a continuation of the nineteenth-century struggle to abolish the double standard between men and women in matters of sexual morality.Footnote ²¹ Although the 1920s has been described as a period when feminist groups were small and often acted separately from each other,Footnote ²² subsequent research highlights the diversity, dynamism, and cooperation of different groups within the women's movement.Footnote ²³ The action of the AMSH in fostering cooperation to reform the solicitation laws confirms this historiographical shift.

After World War I, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) changed its name to the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC). Martin Pugh notes that its aim was to “obtain all reforms, economic, legislative and social as are necessary to secure a real equality of liberties, status and opportunities between men and women.”Footnote ²⁴ The granting of partial suffrage had given women the impetus to push for such changes, predicated on the idea of an equal moral standard. A key means of achieving reform was to change the perceived male bias within the justice system.Footnote ²⁵ The laws relating to prostitution were seen as an example of such bias. NUSEC appointed a special committee to press for the abolition of the solicitation laws in 1919, and the AMSH affiliated with the group later on that year.Footnote ²⁶ In June 1922, following a pattern pursued by other groups within the women's movement,Footnote ²⁷ the AMSH spearheaded a campaign for the repeal of the solicitation laws; this aimed at finding sympathetic members of Parliament (MPs) to introduce a bill along such lines into the House of Commons.Footnote ²⁸ The parliamentary figurehead for this campaign was Nancy Astor.

Astor appears initially as the ideal candidate to lead the cause. In March 1921, she reorganized the Consultative Committee of Women's Organizations (formed by the NUWSS in 1916) in an attempt to provide a single voice for women and lead the fight for moral and social reform.Footnote ²⁹ Women of Astor's background were crucial, because the financially precarious postwar years had witnessed a fall in contributions to voluntary groups; the women's movement was increasingly dependent on the donations of wealthy upper- and middle-class women.Footnote ³⁰ Furthermore, Astor was in close contact with the AMSH during debates over criminal law reform, whereas Alison Neilans (AMSH secretary) helped Astor during her election campaigns.Footnote ³¹ Finally, Astor could hardly be accused of harboring “dangerous” liberal attitudes toward sex. She once stated: “I can't even tolerate seeing two birds mating without wanting to separate them.”Footnote ³² But for all the positive aspects of Astor's candidacy, there were problems.

As a committed Christian Scientist Astor pursued a puritanical domestic routine taking cold baths in the morning. She was also idiosyncratic. In old age she began to drink in small quantities, though still maintaining that alcohol was the scourge of the earth. On the left wing of the Tory party and a consistent welfare feminist, she was very much an outsider, attempting to place herself above party politics. She made enemies, as her biographer observes, “largely because she was outspoken, tactless and sometimes muddled.”Footnote ³³ She was not a skilled parliamentary advocate, although she made the largest contribution of any of the women MPs to parliamentary debates.Footnote ³⁴ Brian Harrison notes: “she calls to mind Pankhurst's eager pursuit of publicity rather than Fawcett's solid rationality.”Footnote ³⁵ By the late 1920s, when attempts were made to draw up a bill to reform the solicitation laws, Astor's career had begun to wane, as another biographer explains: “partly because she was being overshadowed by other women who possessed greater intellect or who were simply more loyal to their party.”Footnote ³⁶ Perhaps Astor was not the ideal choice for an attempt to steer a controversial measure through Parliament.

This campaign to reform the solicitation laws was given a fillip by the arrest of Sir Almeric Fitzroy, clerk to the Privy Council, for annoying women in Hyde Park. His conviction, which was overturned on appeal, brought the issue of uncorroborated police evidence to a wider public.Footnote ³⁷ The AMSH utilized the furor over the Fitzroy case to highlight similar injustices, based on the uncorroborated word of a police officer exercising his discretionary power, faced by street prostitutes.Footnote ³⁸ By 1924, the campaign to abolish the solicitation laws received the support of 119 MPs.Footnote ³⁹ Reformers were anxious, however, not to have their campaign dismissed as a “women's issue,” hence the name of the AMSH's bill was altered from the “Equality of the Sexes” to the “Public Places (Order) Bill.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Following moves by the AMSH and MPs to rally political support, Nancy Astor introduced the AMSH prepared Public Places (Order) Bill into the House of Commons on July 8, 1925.Footnote ⁴¹ The Bill contained three clauses: to repeal all statutory legislation relating to the “common prostitute;” to penalize all who caused annoyance in public; and to prosecute only as a result of a complaint from the said “annoyed” person. The AMSH was aware that rescue societies were generally opposed to this bill; nevertheless, Astor's prime motive in introducing the bill was to facilitate the creation of a Joint Select Committee to inquire into reforming the prostitution laws.Footnote ⁴² The government was keen to minimize publicity around the bill. Accordingly, government whips blocked the progression of the bill in the House of Commons.Footnote ⁴³ When the bill was reintroduced during the next parliamentary session, a similar tactic was adopted.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Conservative government, however, was not, in principle, opposed to the establishment of a committee to enquire into prostitution law reform.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, various bodies such as the British Social Hygiene Council, the Visiting Justices' Committee, the Young Women's Christian Association,Footnote ⁴⁶ the National Council of Women,Footnote ⁴⁷ and the Magistrates' Association,Footnote ⁴⁸ as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, supported an inquiry.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is necessary to examine why the government did not announce its intention to establish a committee until February 1927.Footnote ⁵⁰

Anne Logan writes that “the government dragged its metaphorical feet” over the issue of reform; however, it would be unfair to ignore that senior politicians were preoccupied with other matters.Footnote ⁵¹ During 1925 and 1926, the Home Office was too concerned with declining industrial relations and the General Strike to devote much attention to the subject.Footnote ⁵² More importantly, the Home Office wished for a departmental committee to preside over the hearings, as the home secretary controlled the personnel of the panel. Some believed that the committee's composition was a deliberate Home Office ruse to ensure the findings that it wanted. The biographer of Margery Fry, principal of Somerville College and an AMSH nominee serving on the Committee, viewed her colleagues as a “collection of hard-faced reactionaries”; she was indeed especially ill disposed toward Hensley Henson, the Bishop of Durham. A more benign attitude was held of Lady Joynson-Hicks, wife of the home secretary, who was “evidently very stupid but not too wicked.”Footnote ⁵³ In a similar vein, the Daily Herald observed conspiratorially: “The Home Secretary is almost as notorious for his procrastinations as he is for his general garrulousness, and even if he were more reliable than he is, the fact would remain that Tory and Liberal statesmen in the past have found the report of a Committee a convenient medium for shelving legislation.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In view of the broad base of public support for some degree of reform, Sir William Joynson-Hicks (the home secretary) reserved two committee appointments for the AMSH, allowing Astor to submit four nominations.Footnote ⁵⁵ The two AMSH supporters who sat on the Committee were Margery Fry and the Rev. R.C. Gillie, minister of Marylebone Presbyterian Church and representative of the Christian Churches.Footnote ⁵⁶ Prospects for prostitution law reform were at an all-time high; however, Home Office reticence toward this issue may be inferred from the fact that it was not until the quashing of the convictions for two men in 1927, who had been arrested on uncorroborated police evidence, that the home secretary decided to institute proceedings to establish the committee.Footnote ⁵⁷

A Coherent Case for Law Reform?

The Street Offences Committee recommended repealing the prostitution laws, and creating a single offense of importuning that applied to both sexes. Furthermore, it was proposed that it would be illegal for any person to cause a nuisance by frequenting a public place for the purposes of prostitution or solicitation. Crucially, the evidence of an aggrieved party would be necessary to pursue a prosecution. A fine of 40 shillings remained the penalty for such crimes. However, provisions were included allowing the tariff to rise incrementally with the possibility of prison for repeat offenders.Footnote ⁵⁸

In general, the press reacted favorably to the Committee's findings. This is no surprise, because Adrian Bingham has demonstrated with alacrity that the press was by no means hostile to feminist concerns. For example, there was bipartisan support from the press to equalize the divorce laws.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the context of the conclusions of the Street Offences Committee, the Daily Herald remarked it was “a long overdue step in the direction of the equality of the sexes,” while the Daily Chronicle noted “it would be disastrous, if a document in some ways so damning were merely pigeon-holed.”Footnote ⁶⁰ An official Home Office minute from 1929 recognized this state of affairs: “The outlook of society has changed and it may be politically impossible to do nothing. The attitude indicated and approved by the late Home Secretary, was therefore that a Bill should be outlined and, when ready for introduction, put forward as an attempt without prejudice to found action upon the advice tended by the Committee to the late Government.”Footnote ⁶¹

Helen Ware notes that whereas a consensus existed over the need for reform, lobbying potential was hampered by a lack of agreement over the content of any legislation.Footnote ⁶² The AMSH was aware that rescue societies were generally opposed to the Public Places (Order) Bill, which stipulated the abolition of provisions referring to “common prostitutes,” those being replaced by a sweeping category of “annoyance,” whereby a prosecution could follow only from a complaint by an aggrieved party.Footnote ⁶³ The differences among reform groups harked back to the dissolution of repeal groups following the successful 16-year campaign to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDAs).Footnote ⁶⁴ In the words of Frank Mort, feminists “carried with them the legacy of two competing strands of Victorian reform: the anti-statist tradition of individual and personal rights and a much more coercive emphasis on the use of the criminal law to improve and educate public morals and to safeguard women and children.”Footnote ⁶⁵

For example, Archibald Allen of the Associated Societies for the Care and Protection of Women and Children agreed with the AMSH that the laws were archaic; he felt, however, that reform along the lines of the AMSH proposals would lead to a rise in aggressive soliciting.Footnote ⁶⁶ The British Social Hygiene Council concurred.Footnote ⁶⁷ Fearing increased difficulties in the quest for reform, the Jewish Association for the Protection of Women and Girls chimed in with the general opposition to the AMSH measures.Footnote ⁶⁸ The British Medical Association was opposed to the bill, as it believed that it would lead to a rise in the incidence of venereal diseases.Footnote ⁶⁹ Furthermore, the National Vigilance Association (NVA) was also opposed to the bill, and to the proposals of the Committee, as it felt that its findings, if converted into law, would be unenforceable.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, from the early twentieth century, the NVA wished to abolish the need to prove “annoyance.” This policy was pursued in the name of liberty to make the streets safe for women: free from molestation by men, and fear from false accusation of being labeled a prostitute. Lucy Bland, in her assessment of Victorian feminism, comments:

This tension within feminism and between liberty and the wider community lay at the heart of finding a solution to prostitution law reform. To the NVA, the rights of prostitutes to practice their trade in the streets were subservient to those of the public to be free from the “annoyance” of prostitutes.Footnote ⁷²

There is no doubt, however, that the AMSH had a broad base of support in its campaign to push for an equal moral standard. For example, the representatives of fifty-six organizations constituting a membership of roughly 2,000,000 people attended an AMSH protest meeting at the House of Commons in June 1918. In turn, this meeting sparked a further fifty protests across the United Kingdom.Footnote ⁷³ However, although not wishing to detract from its achievements, the AMSH must share some responsibility for the petering out of the reform movement. It was high minded to the point of stubbornness in its resolute opposition to any recommendations that did not coincide with its viewpoint.Footnote ⁷⁴ Evidence for the AMSH's obstinacy abounds. Mrs Hubback of the NUSEC could not understand why the AMSH did not accept the Report of the Street Offences Committee in good faith, because it at least marked a partial triumph in advocating the abolition of the term “common prostitute,” and applying an importuning offence to both sexes.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hubback's comment is not surprising. Pat Thane notes “The NUSEC was too realistic politically to expect to achieve its complete objectives, believing rather in gradualism and in securing the best achievable installment of reform. It recognized the inevitability of compromise.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Therefore there was no consensus as to what reform should entail or as to how it should be pursued.Footnote ⁷⁷

It is also clear that the actions of the AMSH did not endear all to its cause, although a brief examination of the AMSH's past helps to explain its dogmatism. The AMSH's most trenchant advocate, Alison Neilans, was a principled and resolute feminist and libertarian.Footnote ⁷⁸ As a leader of the Women's Freedom League, she was arrested for pouring liquid into ballot boxes during the 1909 Bermondsey by-election, and subsequently force-fed while on hunger strike during her 3-month prison sentence.Footnote ⁷⁹ Her personality left its imprint on the rest of the group, because its members believed that: “The Association is perhaps the one society which can say with authority that the way to fight prostitution and venereal disease is by moral and non-coercive methods.”Footnote ⁸⁰

This determined and inflexible approach may be explained with reference to the experience of the AMSH in its former incarnation as the Ladies National Association (LNA). Prior to the repeal of the CDAs, it was evident that Josephine Butler, who headed an alliance of feminists, working-class radicals, and middle-class evangelicals in opposition to the operation of the CDAs, was losing control of the reform movement; the LNA became one of the few “purity” groups not to advocate a non-repressive attitude to tackling prostitution.Footnote ⁸¹ The LNA, like the AMSH, was not fond of compromises. When a royal commission was established to examine the operation of the CDAs, the LNA refused to cooperate. Judith Walkowitz observes: “It [the LNA] did not desire to perfect the working of the acts; it wished them abolished.”Footnote ⁸² Herein lies the problem with the AMSH's approach: Brian Harrison notes that they approached law from an elevated point of principle, whereas the Home Office and police were concerned with the maintenance of public order.Footnote ⁸³

However, it is apparent also that the AMSH did not play its best hand. The behavior of its leaders reveals a blend of tenacity, poor organization, flawed judgment, and ignorance; not even all members of the AMSH's executive committee were agreed on how to reform the solicitation laws. The contents of the Public Places (Order) Bill gained executive approval only when its author, a Mr. Johnson, threatened to withdraw his work and offer it to another society if the AMSH failed to concur with his conclusions.Footnote ⁸⁴

When the home secretary received an AMSH-led deputation on the solicitation laws on November 13, 1925, Mrs. Hunter (an NVA representative from Scotland) wrote to complain: “obviously the Home Secretary ‘was irritated by the irrelevance, discursiveness and mistakes of the speakers.’” A Mrs. Potts from the Birmingham National Council of Women wrote demanding to know who had chosen the speakers. Neilans admitted that: “it was rather generally felt by members of the deputation that the speakers had not put the case very convincingly and a good deal of dissatisfaction had been expressed with the result.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The society was flawed in its choice of champions of the cause. The problems with Nancy Astor have already been highlighted. Lord Meston was originally chosen to introduce the Bill into the House of Lords, as Lord Astor was unable to do so. However, when pressed as to when he intended to attempt legislative action, he failed to respond.Footnote ⁸⁶ Lord Balfour of Burleigh eventually introduced the Public Places (Order) Bill into the upper house. But Neilans was not keen for him to serve on the Committee as she “was rather unhappy even the other day by his method of referring to the treatment of prostitutes as ‘those theoretical injustices.’”Footnote ⁸⁷

The biggest problem, however, was that this society displayed an insufficient understanding of legal matters. If, as the AMSH wished, all references to morality were to be removed from the solicitation laws, the problem still remained as to what constituted “annoyance.” For example, Hugh Macmillan (chairman of the Street Offences Committee) pointed out to Neilans that the AMSH-sponsored bill suggested, for example, that a woman who tickled a man's face with a feather could be arrested for annoyance.Footnote ⁸⁸ Even the AMSH was aware that its aims lacked clarity, precision, and practical execution. The logical flaw in its bill was demonstrated when Neilans admitted that she wanted the law neither to sanction prostitution, nor to make it a criminal offense. W.A. Jowitt, K.C., serving on the Committee, quipped: “That seems to be mere words.”Footnote ⁸⁹

It is not unreasonable to conclude that such displays of ignorance by the AMSH witnesses, when pitted against some of the most senior legal figures in the country, irritated the Committee members. Mr. Roberts (AMSH chairman) believed that the prostitution laws were anomalous, as it was necessary to infer intention to solicit. His ignorance was illustrated when Macmillan pointed out that the essence in proving a charge of murder is based upon intent.Footnote ⁹⁰ Indeed, the views of the AMSH caused such irritation that Sir Chartres Biron (chief metropolitan magistrate and committee member) concluded his cross-examination of Roberts: “Some of the members of some of the Societies whose statements or propaganda I have been reading have some very singular ideas of what constitutes proof.”Footnote ⁹¹ The sharp reaction of seasoned legal minds to the evidence of AMSH members may stem from a suspicion that the latter wished the law altered for expressive matters as much as, if not more than, practical reasons.

Therefore, there is no one reason why the repeal campaign failed; however, the poor tactics of the AMSH and a lack of consensus of as to the object of reform among voluntary interest groups meant that it proved impossible to build upon the broad base of support for prostitution law revision. This, however, is only a partial telling of this tale. It remains to examine the role of the state bodies most heavily involved in managing prostitution, namely, the Home Office, magistrates, and the police.

Views from Above

The first witness called to offer evidence to the Street Offences Committee was Sir Ernley Blackwell, a Home Office legal expert holding the senior rank of assistant undersecretary. As Frank Mort observes in his study of the cultural production of knowledge, the advantage of the appointment of a departmental inquiry over a royal commission was that the former was believed to be “more amenable to control by ministers and civil servants.”Footnote ⁹² A civil service bias towards “expert opinion” meant that individuals viewed with the most respect, deference, and seriousness were listened to first.Footnote ⁹³ Following on from Blackwell's testimony, magistrates and then (with the exception of a probation officer) senior police officers were invited to offer evidence. Examining the workings of these quasi-autonomous apparatus of the state is integral to an analysis of the failure of the reform campaign.

In her study of the Home Office from 1848 to 1914, Jill Pellew comments that it functioned as “almost a persona—over and above those individuals who constitute its personnel at any given moment.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Collective behavior, however, is difficult to discern. Therefore, attention is paid, in the vein of Lewis Namier, to the influence of individual action on bureaucratic decision making.Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, the working of the parliamentary process demands such a view, for as Rodney Lowe and Richard Roberts note:

Although there was a tendency within the Home Office to back the status quo, there was also a realization that the law needed clarification. Sir Ernley Blackwell admitted that section 54 (13) of the Metropolitan Police Act (1839), which was used to arrest non-prostitutes for soliciting for demonstrating “insulting words and behavior,” strained the interpretation of the law.Footnote ⁹⁷ Blackwell was not happy with the overall legislative code that applied to prostitution offenses.Footnote ⁹⁸ He did not wish, however, the phrase “common prostitute” to be omitted from the statute book, as he believed that such action would render the task of policing street prostitution almost impossible.Footnote ⁹⁹ It is important to note that Blackwell was the sole figure in the Home Office who was on intimate terms with the permanent undersecretary, Sir John Anderson; and the latter treated the former almost as an equal.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Bureaucratic aversion to reform was obscured in the language of contemporary legal discourse, which stressed the cleavage between law and morality.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For example, when the battle to reform the solicitation laws gained momentum during the mid 1920s, an official minuted: “The law does not prohibit prostitution—It is only when prostitutes make themselves a public nuisance that they come within the criminal law. There are some people who wld like prostitutes to be prohibited all together from plying their trade in public, but any amendment of the law in this sense wld have little sup-port in Parl + failing this the present state of the law seems to me very reasonable. [sic]Footnote ¹⁰²

The official line was that men should be left alone, as they did not pursue a business of accosting women.Footnote ¹⁰³ Prostitutes were subject to the law not for their immorality, but because their solicitous behavior violated notions of public order. Macmillan agreed with this sentiment at the Committee hearings. In response to a suggestion from Mr. Roberts (AMSH chairman) that men who purchased sex should be deemed guilty of an offense, the former argued that the man “is in a different position. He is not offering himself in the streets. He may be morally just as guilty and possibly guiltier, but we have to look at this as a matter of public administration.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In short, the Home Office viewed managing prostitution as a matter of maintaining public order.

Conservatism on behalf of the Home Office cannot simply be attributed to narrow-mindedness or inbuilt reactionary tendencies. A crucial consideration of civil service attitudes toward legislative programs was that parliamentary bills conformed to an ethos of efficient public administration. Understanding the day-to-day running of the Home Office merits a closer look at the department's permanent undersecretary, Sir John Anderson.

According to Peter Hennessey, Anderson “ran the Home Office almost as a personal fiefdom.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The deputy cabinet secretary, Tom Jones, noted that Anderson had “the manner of a Lord Chief Justice and when he likes can make ministers feel like criminals in the dock.” Jones valued the former as the ablest civil servant.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Anderson had no particular interest within the Home Office except its broad responsibility for law and order; his concerns were administration as opposed to a particular subject of administration. His biographer remarked in this context: “he had […] no personal enthusiasm for penal reform. His inclination was to administer efficiently and smoothly within the limits of existing policy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This made Anderson ideally qualified for the post. The head of the civil service between 1919 and 1939 was Sir Warren Fisher “High Priest of ‘the cult of the generalist.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Fisher's exemplary permanent undersecretary was not an expert, but a general manager.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Anderson's opinions on the operation of the solicitation laws are not known in detail, because he rarely wrote or commented on minutes.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Evidence of Anderson's disdain for the issue of street prostitution, however, exists in a letter to Hugh Macmillan: “I daresay you thought—and with good reason—that when you signed a certain Report a few weeks ago you had turned your back on an unsavoury subject and a tiresome Committee.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Such a view may also stem from the Home Office view that these matters were best left in the hands of the “experts”: the police.

Magistrates followed next in the pecking order of “expert opinion.” Jennifer Davis demonstrates that during the nineteenth century, magistrates were aware that the legitimacy of the courts depended upon “their willingness to dispense justice in terms defined by their working-class clientele,”Footnote ¹¹² even if this resulted in conflict with the police. Although Davis suggests that this popularity did not endure into the twentieth century, as contact with the law was increasingly perceived as deviant and undesirable,Footnote ¹¹³ the testimonies of individual magistrates indicates that they still continued to eulogize and romanticize the “traditional” popular judicial raison d'être of their office. Henry Cancellor, among others, stressed this in his (posthumously published) autobiography as a “London beak.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The continuing role of popular legitimacy has been confirmed by the recent research of George Behlmer, where he shows: “Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, courts of summary jurisdiction became more than ‘the visible representative of “justice”’ that common people heard about in speeches and sermons.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

The magistrates tended to differ in their opinions as to the question of street prostitution. Some adopted a lenient attitude. For example, Cecil Chapman (ex-magistrate at Westminster Police Court) was an advocate of women's suffrage from his days at Balliol College (Oxford) and countenanced the repeal of legislation that he perceived as being flawed by double standards.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Another magistrate sympathetic to prostitution law reform, who was in communication with Astor over the issue, was the recently retired Edward Lankester. The latter's obituarist remarked that Lankester's career received little public attention, “with the exception of occasional reports of caustic sayings, not infrequently at the expense of the police.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In contrast to Chapman, who was opposed to the AMSH Bill, Lankester thought that the problems regarding the solicitation laws were of an administrative rather than a legal nature.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Most magistrates, however, were not particularly liberal, although not many appeared to adhere to Frederick Mead's Augustinian view of the public virtue of private vice:Footnote ¹¹⁹ “Remove prostitutes from human affairs and you would pollute the world with lust.” What has been described as the “public benefit of private vices” was an argument used by those seeking to defend the existence of prostitution.Footnote ¹²⁰ Naturally, Mead, based at Marlborough Street Police Court, wished for the phrase “common prostitute” to remain on the statute book.Footnote ¹²¹ Another magistrate, Mr Graham-Campbell (this time from Bow Street Police Court) favored proposals criminalizing men who solicited, providing that provisions existed to deal with prostitutes as a class.Footnote ¹²² The opinions of these two magistrates are important, because Bow Street and Marlborough Street police courts, both in the West End, dealt with the majority of cases of London's streetwalkers.

Magistrates distinguished strictly between law and morality: in their view the law was not aimed at penalizing prostitutes, their concern was the maintenance of public order. There was no intention to criminalize solicitation.Footnote ¹²³ The broad principle underlying the law was expressed clearly by one of the pioneer criminal justice historians, Sir Leon Radzinowicz: “It was the duty of the State to sustain rights, not to assess the moral depravity of the criminal. Thus punishment should, ideally, be proportionate to the importance of the right violated rather than moral guilt.”Footnote ¹²⁴ This distinction underpinned the conclusions of the Report of the Street Offences Committee, although the committee admitted that the division between the two concepts was extremely vague:

Most senior police officers did not advocate the abolition of the term “common prostitute.” The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, feared that such a move would lead to an increase in the arrest of “innocents”; what he termed “women of an adventurous disposition.”Footnote ¹²⁶ However, in a memorandum of evidence submitted to the Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure, Horwood conceded that he had no objection to a law being framed and applied to both sexes, on condition that the “annoyance” clause was abolished or defined clearly.Footnote ¹²⁷

Although Frank Mort claims that the Wolfenden committee sought to “redefine prostitution as a public order offence in the 1950s,” it becomes apparent that such a view was prevalent in official circles by the late 1920s.Footnote ¹²⁸ The magistracy differed from the Metropolitan Police, for whereas they wished to replace the term “annoyance,” the latter had no objection in making solicitation in itself illegal.Footnote ¹²⁹ Overall, the views of the police did not differ greatly from those of the Home Office. However, although Sir Ernley Blackwell at the Home Office had no objection to omitting the phrase “to the annoyance of passengers,” he harbored reservations regarding the corroboration of evidence. For example, would two police officers be needed to make an arrest and insist that the person solicited should deliver evidence in court?Footnote ¹³⁰ The issue of corroboration was the catalyst that led to the establishment of the Street Offences Committee in the first place. Moreover, to fully understand why the proposed prostitution law reforms were not implemented, it is necessary to examine issues connected with street offenses within the broader context of concern with crime and policing.

The State of the Police

Following the furor of the Fitzroy case, the exercise of police powers remained a matter of public concern throughout the 1920s. A degree of tension was experienced between the police and the magistracy. It is important to consider that the police did not have carte blanche to deal with prostitutes. Statutory instruments used traditionally to tackle the “problem” of prostitution, such as sections 3–5 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 could no longer be used to arrest common prostitutes behaving in a “riotous or indecent manner.”Footnote ¹³¹ Commissioner Horwood complained:

Sir Chartres Biron believed, however, that Horwood's concerns were composed from a less than coherent understanding of the law. The issue was not that of corroborating evidence, the crux was that the evidence itself was not forthcoming. For example, that a man appeared to be annoyed did not equal annoyance; therefore, it did not constitute an offense.Footnote ¹³³ Furthermore, magistrates were less inclined to grant a conviction if a prostitute was charged under Section 54 (13) of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839. This clause was a “catch all” public order offense, used to charge women not known as “common prostitutes” with soliciting.Footnote ¹³⁴

Relations between the police and the bench were so bad by the mid 1920s, that senior officers at Scotland Yard compiled a list of magistrates and their attitudes toward police evidence in court.Footnote ¹³⁵ Such criticism was not new, but Jonathan Lopian believes that the number of cases of prostitutes in court having their cases dismissed was unprecedented.Footnote ¹³⁶ However, it would be a mistake to exaggerate such tensions. At the hearings of the Street Offences Committee, Biron agreed with Horwood that officers usually only arrested prostitutes if they had a previous conviction or solicited flagrantly.Footnote ¹³⁷ Subsequent research suggests that whereas individual officers may have abused their position of power with streetwalkers, most policemen harbored a degree of sympathy for the prostitute; a consideration of a variety of source material provides no evidence for the notion that the police pursued a more repressive policy against prostitutes during the 1920s. For most prostitutes, the police were the least of their worries.Footnote ¹³⁸

Public concern with the abuse of police powers, however, exploded during the late 1920s following the outcry over the arrest and subsequent treatment of Irene Savidge, and the Helen Adele case in 1928, and the conviction of Sergeant Goddard (a West End police officer) for corruption in January 1929 was the brandy served with the coffee.Footnote ¹³⁹ The lofty considerations of morality, as exemplified by the AMSH, were drowned out in the flood of concern over the state of the police. That a Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure was appointed in 1929, a mere generation after an earlier royal commission investigated police practices in 1906–1908, underscores the poor relations between police and public.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Exploring further the police point of view next to an examination of the relationship between the Home Office and Metropolitan Police demonstrates why reform was pushed off the political agenda.

This is not to argue that senior figures at the Home Office and Scotland Yard were oblivious to the need for reforming the Metropolitan Police. On the contrary, following Horwood's resignation in 1928, his replacement by the prestigious Viscount Byng of Vimy confirmed press suspicions that all was not well with the police.Footnote ¹⁴¹ To Byng's credit, during his tenure he relieved inefficient officers and ushered in a system of promotion based upon merit, improved discipline, abolished rigidly timed (and monitored) beats, expanded the use of police cars, and introduced police telephone boxes.Footnote ¹⁴² Byng harbored reservations, however, about the efficiency of bureaucracy in his quest for reform. He wrote to a former home secretary in 1930: “I think the policeman is happy—but I sometimes wish I could get the Senior Officials to see something beyond what is exactly under their noses.”Footnote ¹⁴³ It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the new broom of Byng symbolized a break with former police practices. Following yet another example of police corruption in 1929, his lordship rebuked the press:

No lessons had been learned. The first draft of this note—omitted from the final version—contained the sentence: “we did not wish to give this information to the Press because we still prefer to deal with our own domestic troubles in our own domestic ways.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

When Lord Trenchard was appointed Metropolitan Police commissioner in 1931, he was aghast at the level of corruption within the force.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Hamilton Howgrave-Graham, secretary to the Metropolitan Police, believed corruption permeated all levels of the police: “There were, it is true, a certain number of ‘bad men’ in senior positions – not at the very top but just below it.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Sir Herbert Samuel recalled his appointment as home secretary for the national government in 1931: “A matter which I found on taking office urgently needed attention was the condition of the Metropolitan Police. […] Its reputation with the public had begun to suffer, and the facts were worse than we even suspected.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Sir Chartres Biron, a leading magistrate, supported such suspicions: “Corruption was widespread. The danger was not merely that individuals in high positions in the force were venal, but that this was generally known in the force, and their subordinates would have found their position intolerable if they had not shut their eyes to what so generally or actively helped.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

However, from the perspective of bureaucracy, the Home Office busied itself with administrative matters. The actions of the Home Office and Scotland Yard within this period may be interpreted as part of a broader concern to modernize the police and the subsequent concentration on indictable offences.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ During 1929, former Home Office permanent undersecretary Sir Edward Troup was asked to write an essay on behalf of the London School of Economics about the state of crime in London.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Despite recorded crime having fallen by seventeen percent between 1920 and 1928, Troup was unsure as to whether the statistics could be trusted.Footnote ¹⁵² Home Office official Arthur Locke was appointed to chair an investigation into the discrepancies in crime recording procedures between provincial constabularies and the Metropolitan Police, and differences between and within individual Metropolitan operational divisions.Footnote ¹⁵³ This administrative matter was a pressing concern, because as Locke wrote to Troup:

The nub of the problem was that not all crimes reported to the police were recorded in the official statistics. When a crime was reported to the police, it was recorded in what was known colloquially as the Felony Book. If doubt existed as to whether a crime took place, the alleged crime would be recorded in the Suspected Stolen Register. Deciding what counted as a crime and what could be written off in the suspected stolen book was shaped by cultural practice. If a car was reported stolen, but found intact within 24 hours, the offense would remain in the suspected stolen book, because magistrates insisted that “felonious intent” was nigh on impossible to prove in those circumstances, hence a charge of larceny could not be preferred.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ If a lady reported that some jewelry had been stolen from her clothing from her room in a hotel, and no corroboration was received of her statement, the crime was recorded in the suspected stolen book. Petty larcenies also featured strongly. For example, if a shopkeeper reported some items stolen from the front of his premises, but no culprit could be traced, the offense would be recorded in the suspected stolen book.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ No comprehensive figures have been to date found to examine the proportion of offenses written off as “suspected stolen;” however, a police return detailing the number of suspected stolen write-offs in November 1931 meant that the 2,735 crimes recorded officially during that month accounted for only 28.6 percent of crimes known to the police.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Although crime was not an electoral issue during these fraught times, the research of John Carter Wood illustrates that policing was a matter of cross-party political and public concern during the late 1920s.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Despite John Stevenson's bizarre claim that the economic depression of 1929–1932 appeared “not to have had a decisive impact on total criminal activity,” recorded crime within the Metropolitan Police District increased by nearly forty-six percent between 1929 and 1931.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Between these years, housebreakings rose by forty-nine percent, robberies by over seventy-one percent, larcenies from a house up to the value of ₤5 by ninety-six percent and simple larcenies by sixty-one percent. In the case of burglaries, recorded incidents rose by thirty-three percent between 1929 and 1930 alone. Naturally, these figures cannot be interpreted at face value. For example, crime rose by ten percent in 1929 when unemployment was still relatively low in the capital; however, this rise resulted from the police tightening their recording procedures.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Notwithstanding such administrative caveats, it remains feasible that these figures underestimate the increase in crime during the Great Slump, because during the dark depths of the economic depression approximately 350,000 people were unemployed in Greater London, which was nearly one third as high as the number out of work in Wales.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Moreover, as reported crime increased along with the deteriorating economic situation, it is not beyond the bounds of probability to speculate that the proportion of petty crimes written off as “suspected stolen” intensified, offsetting the bureaucratic ratchet noted for 1929. In turn, the rise in crime caused by unemployment was further sharpened by the increase in population in the outlying police divisions of London. Although a slight augmentation in the number of officers and a redistribution of manpower to these outer districts helped check the rise in crime, the police were still worried that the force would not increase enough to combat the potential for increased crime caused by suburbanization.Footnote ¹⁶²

Not only did crime rise during this period, a further examination of offenses for the New Survey of London Life Labour, conducted in conjunction with the Home Office and Metropolitan Police, found that the number of persons per 100,000 of the population proceeded against for indictable offences rose by thirty-one percent 1927–1932.Footnote ¹⁶³ Over the same period, the number of first-time male offenders rose by twenty percent, whereas the number of people found guilty of registrable offenses (including some non-indictable crimes that warranted the accused having his or her fingerprints recorded) rose by nearly thirty-four percent.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ That younger people were taking to crime with increased frequency is borne out by the same figures. The author of this study, S.K. Ruck, felt concerned to write:

This shift was noted by others. Noting the impact of the economic slump on crime, C.G. Ammon, a magistrate sitting at London Quarter Sessions, observed in 1933:

A modest five percent increase in the crime rate during 1932 indicates a leveling off in offending, as the slump eased in its intensity. However, the police estimated that breakings (discounting the effect of the abolition of the Suspected Stolen Book) rose twelve percent 1931–1932.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Given the sharp rise in recorded crime that occurred during the Great Slump, it appears doubtful that the Home Office would have countenanced any perceived dilution of police powers. Following the publication of the Royal Commission on Police Powers, sections of the right-wing press and back bench Conservative MPs suggested repeatedly that the findings of this report hampered the solving of crimes.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Hence, although senior police officers were aware that all was not well with the state of policing and crime, Scotland Yard was governed more by the day-to-day practicalities of maintaining order and fighting crime than by the concerns voiced by parliamentarians and press editorials. This autonomy of action was shaped by Scotland Yard's relationship with the Home Office.

Home Office Maneuvers

With Sir William Joynson-Hicks at the helm of the Home Office, the police could not fail to find a more sympathetic champion of their cause. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, satirized not so affectionately as “Jix,” brandished an “excessive” enthusiasm for the police.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ A contemporary captured this cartoon figure beautifully: “A Socrates as Home Secretary would hesitate to define morality in terms of Police action. Not so Jix. In the mind of this essentially simple character, the problems of morality, which have exercised the profoundest philosophical minds of all ages, are solved and even acted upon without the hesitation which would have been natural to a more tutored intellect.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Although Jix did not attend university, he starred as the inspiration for the custom's officer searching the protagonist's books in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Jix's appointment to the government as first financial secretary to the Treasury in 1923 was based on Prime Minister Baldwin's view of him as someone to be trusted.Footnote ¹⁷² A strange man, he took the pledge at 14 years of age—and never wavered; most of his senior colleagues thought he was something of a joke. A hint of Jix's unwitting capacity for self-caricature lies in his autobiographical fragments:

Jix's personal views on prostitution law reform are difficult to discern, for little lies within his personal papers as to his impact upon law and order.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ However, when he discharged the duties of secretary of state, Ronald Blythe observed tartly:

With a figure such as Jix leading the Home Office, we can see why the Home Office operated a relatively free hand in its dealing with the police. The findings of the Street Offences Committee failed to concern themselves with the central objectives of the Home Office; smooth public administration and the maintenance of public order.

That the authors of the Report of the Street Offences Committee were themselves divided over reform aided the Home Office case for maintaining the status quo. Although it is impossible to discern Chairman Macmillan's personal opinion, he described his experience at the chair as “singularly unsavoury.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ It is significant that his biographer notes: “his essentially apolitical nature led him to stand increasingly for the status quo.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Macmillan did not seem surprised that the recommendations were, in practice, difficult to administer. He observed: “Compromises lacking in logic + unanimity may be purchased too dearly.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ This was evident from the fact that six memoranda were appended at the end of the Report. For example, Sir Leonard Dunning, inspector of the constabulary, regretted the omission of the phrase “common prostitute” from the recommendations.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Attempts were made to resolve those discrepancies. Macmillan and Blackwell agreed a compromise whereby, after a complaint for frequenting a public space for an immoral purpose, he or she would be warned; however, the problem still remained. Blackwell could not “see how frequenting for such purposes can ever be proved against a woman except by proof that she is a common prostitute + has been convicted of importuning—and I doubt whether it would be ever possible to convict a man of frequenting etc.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ This opinion was not just an official view. For example, the NVA believed that the reforms would amount to a dead letter: “Is the complainant to pick out an individual for prosecution or is the choice to be made by a police constable?”Footnote ¹⁸¹ As Helen Self demonstrates in her analysis of the committee's findings, eight out of the fifteen committee members voiced reservations on paper. And although the committee attempted “to distinguish between real annoyance in the form of molestation and a more harmless offence of ‘frequenting’ a public place for the purpose of prostitution,” hence the need of a complaint from an aggrieved party, the issue of “morality” remained problematic. The report made over thirty references to morality despite the official stress on public order.Footnote ¹⁸²

In view of these differences of opinion, officials opposed drafting legislation.Footnote ¹⁸³ This outlook chimed with the cherished civil service corporate code: “That it is impossible to foresee the full costs of any considerable decision leads to the conviction that in the long run the only sound course is to stick to principle even at the cost of immediate expediency. They know that they will have to cope with the same long-distance effects of the decision now taken.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ However, it would be unjust to assume that there was a conspiracy against reform. The parliamentary process necessitated the idea of a departmental policy:

The Home Office's second concern lay with maintaining public order and in line with Home Office respect and deference toward “expert opinion,” “best practice” was a matter for the police. In the words of Sir Edward Troup: “if the final decision rests with the Home Secretary, he is never likely to dispute the Commissioner's knowledge of what his constables can do and how they can best do it.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ This doctrine followed the lines of Sir William Harcourt: “It is a matter entirely at the discretion of the Secretary of State how far the principle of responsible authority shall interfere with executive action, and the less interference happens the better.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷

Sir John Anderson authorized a private conference for February 5, 1929 to examine the practicality of the proposed reforms; only the police were invited.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ The general view of the police was that arrests for prostitution offenses would decline dramatically as officers would be relieved of their discretion in assessing as to whether an offense had occurred. Opposition was hardened further by the Committee's proposal to criminalize frequenting a public space for an “immoral” purpose, because prosecution would depend upon the evidence of an aggrieved party; an unlikely occurrence where vigilance societies were not active.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Such an arbitrary proposal was unthinkable, because the issue of “arbitrary policing” lay at the heart of the explosive police–public debates. The committee was supposed to rationalize and universalize the application of the law; however, this clause proposed transferring the discretion to prosecute from the perceived expert policeman to that unknown quantity, a member of the public. As controversial political scientist James Q. Wilson recognized, public order policing is not easily reconcilable with “due process” and “universal rules.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰

The formulators of practical policy at the Home Office and their executors at Scotland Yard had their own agenda for reform, and for this they needed the cooperation of the police on the streets. Both these bodies were aware that policemen possessed the ability to influence bureaucratic action. This was especially true during a period when the police was plagued by weak leadership. Its commissioner, Sir William Horwood, failed to achieve any reforms necessary to strengthening and improving the police in an organizational and technological manner.Footnote ¹⁹¹ A sympathetic chronicler of the police observed acidly: “The social revolution of the 1920s would have taxed the abilities of a far wiser and stronger man than General Horwood; and he was neither wise nor strong. […] In the force, he was known as ‘the Chocolate Soldier,’ and this is sufficient comment.”Footnote ¹⁹²

There was nothing new about the police pursuing its own agenda. Alison Neilans alleged that during the 1870s, the Metropolitan Police was anxious to extend the CDAs to London. In view of the vigorous campaign to abolish the CDAs, Neilans claimed that the police allowed prostitutes to solicit with impunity without fear of arrest; it was hoped that these more brazen displays of disorderly behavior would draw public attention to the “problem of prostitution.Footnote ¹⁹³ Thirty years later, an intense police crackdown on prostitution between 1901 and 1906 was interrupted following the furor over the mistaken arrest of Madame D'Angely, a known prostitute, for soliciting in 1906.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Prosecutions for soliciting plummeted by nearly fifty percent between 1906 and 1907 rising back to “natural” Edwardian rates from 1909. Some magistrates suggested that a similar policy of police inertia toward prostitutes was adopted in the aftermath of the Fitzroy case.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Subsequent research suggests that the police adopted a “go-slow” toward the targeting of prostitutes in 1923, leading them to pursue, in line with their new attitude toward street betting, a policy of containment.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

Police labor unrest would have been unthinkable during the period of economic instability beginning in 1930, with memories of the police strikes of 1918 and 1919—whereby the loyalty of officers was ostensibly bought by higher pay— still fresh.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Enid Huws Jones attributed the rise attributed the fall in prosecution for prostitution offences in 1929 to the findings of the Street Offences Committee when the number of trials fell by 70.5 per cent.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ It is important, however, not to view prostitution in isolation; between 1928 and 1929 the number of trials for all non-indictable offences fell by 9.9 percent rising by 8.5 percent in 1930. Evidence for police disquiet, de facto industrial action, may be garnered from an examination of select trials with the following public order offenses following a not dissimilar trend over the same period: assaulting a police officer (−5.8%, +23.8%), drunk and disorderly (−15%, +6.7%), infractions against police regulations (−21.3%, +24.6%), and begging (−31.5%, +24.6%).

Further evidence of police industrial action may be seen 2 years later. In the summer of 1931, one inspector and twenty-six constables at Great Marlborough Street police station (“C” Division) were dismissed for receiving money corruptly from street bookmakers and tradesmen; a further one inspector and twenty-three constables were transferred to other divisions. Those involved in this case of corruption amounted to nearly one third of the station and on tenth of the divisional strength.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The arrest ratio for betting and gaming offences fell 71 percent between 1931 and 1932, rising by 137.5 percent from 1932 to 1933. The arrest ratio in the Metropolitan Police District for 1931–1933, however, follows a similar pattern: a fourteen percent fall followed by a thirteen percent rise. The trend was similar in the case of assaulting a police officer (−20.5%, +28%), drunkenness (−29%, +18%), sleeping out (−9%, +8%), and infractions against police regulations (−16.5%, +18%). This period also witnessed the formalizing and tightening of police operations and procedures in an attempt to stem public and official concern about discretionary police powers, which would reduce the number of offenders registering official recognition.Footnote ²⁰⁰

A consideration of grass roots evidence of street level policing, however, provides a further factor for the collapse of arrests in 1932. The police faced a pay cut of ten percent during the early 1930s in an attempt to avert further financial crisis.Footnote ²⁰¹ Former Metropolitan Police officer Charles Hanslow recalled:

The passage of time no doubt clouded Hanslow's memory, because the original cut recommended was 12.5 percent; the eventual 10 percent reduction in pay, spread over 2 years, was the compromise figure.Footnote ²⁰³ To date, no other evidence has been found to corroborate the suggestion that the police “worked to rule,” although it is clear that contemporaries were concerned about the impact of financial cuts on policing and crime. During a parliamentary debate on the National Economy Bill in September 1931 William Lunn, labor member of Parliament for Rothwell (West Yorkshire), remarked to the House: “They [the government] ought to retain a comfortable, satisfied and diligent police force, and they are creating a disgruntled police force. I am confident that one of the things that will come out of this is an indifference to crime, and an addition to crime, as the result of what is being done, and we shall see that before very long.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ In December 1931, 2 months after the first half of the cuts were imposed, 12,000 police officers from across the country attended a meeting at the Albert Hall in London where a resolution was passed protesting against these economies. Such was the level of official anxiety over the reaction of the police to the imminent second round of wage reductions, the government appointed a committee to inquire into this matter.Footnote ²⁰⁵ While the government refused to back down, this issue generated press attention until at least the end of the year. The Daily Express noted that “Resentment is rising in the Metropolitan Police Force, not only in regard to pay cuts, but also to the employment of ‘specials’ and the ban on ‘open meetings’ of the police, which have been permitted during the past twelve years.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ Demonstrating the level of tension between the police and the government, the Daily Mail commented:

Given the Home Office's preoccupation with the twin concerns of efficient public administration and public order, the divisions over reform held by the authors of the Report of the Street Offences Committee and opposition to these findings by senior officers at Scotland Yard, it comes as no surprise that Macmillan's recommendations never reached the statute book.