Cold Open

It’s just before 6:00 P.M. on September 29th, 1829, in London, England.

Inside a new police station on Little Vine Street, William Atkinson pulls at the rigid leather collar of his dark blue tailcoat, trying unsuccessfully to make himself more comfortable. All around him, a dozen other men shift anxiously in their own crisp, unfamiliar uniforms.

They’re all fresh recruits in the newly formed Metropolitan Police force, and today is their very first shift.

William pulls on the tall top hat that completes his uniform.

Then, quickly checking that none of his superiors are looking, he pulls out a hip flask and takes a quick gulp to steady his nerves.

Then, he stuffs it back into his pocket as the station clock chimes the hour, and the men prepare to head out. As twilight settles over the largest city in the world, William and his fellow officers march out into the crowded, smog-choked streets of London.

But the locals’ reaction is far from positive. Hostile Londoners mock the new policemen as they pass. Some even hurl stones and garbage at them.

Steeling himself against this abuse, William parts from the group to begin his solo patrol.

Gaslight flickers weakly over his path as he slowly walks his assigned streets and alleys. He only has a baton to protect himself, a rattle to summon help—and his hip flask if he needs more courage.

William Atkinson quickly discovers that policing is thirsty work. By ten o’clock, his flask is empty, and William is drunk. A superior officer discovers him stumbling along the cobblestones, his face flushed. So after only four hours on duty, William is fired from the Metropolitan Police.

His time in uniform may have been brief, but the appearance of blue-coated police officers in London marks a permanent break with the city’s past. A new order has been established by the first patrols of the Metropolitan Police—which set out into the cobbled streets of the British capital on September 29th, 1829.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is September 29th, 1829: London’s New Police Force.

Act One: Out of Control

It’s April 15th, 1829, in London, England—five and a half months before the Metropolitan Police take to the streets for the first time.

Standing in the crowded House of Commons, Robert Peel strains his voice to be heard over a barrage of jeers.

Peel has been a Member of Parliament since his early twenties. Now, at the age of 41, Peel has risen to the post of Home Secretary, the minister in charge of domestic law, prisons, and policing. As a reformer and a modernist, he values administrative efficiency over ancient traditions, and he has championed a new bill to create London’s first citywide professional police force. But some of his colleagues in the House of Commons are labeling his plans a tyrannical plot to destroy English liberty.

So, the mood in the chamber is tense. Across the floor, an irate MP leaps to his feet, barking accusations that Peel is attempting to bring French-style military despotism to the streets of Britain. Forcing himself to appear unflustered, Peel stands his ground and responds with the most powerful weapon at his disposal: cold, hard facts.

He tells the House of Commons that crime in London is soaring out of control. A population boom and rapid industrialization have flooded the capital with desperate, unemployed people. And there, economic misery has triggered an unprecedented wave of burglaries, pickpocketing, and violent street robberies. Gangs now rule the slums, exploiting the chaos of a city that has completely outgrown its ancient social order. In response to this growing crisis, Peel has already reformed England's criminal legislation and streamlined the penal code. Now, he believes the time has come to transform policing as well.

His conviction is born from hard experience. Back in 1814, he was the cabinet minister responsible for governing Ireland. And after watching the collapse of the old provincial Irish authorities, he helped create a professional, centralized police force from scratch. And looking at the statistics from London, he knows the capital is in dire need of the same medicine.

London currently relies on a fragmented, chaotic patchwork of separate watches, each operating under its own local rules. These watchmen are derisively called “Charlies” by the public. They are caricatured as elderly, infirm, underpaid men, who spend their shifts either asleep or drinking at their posts. Robert Peel wants to replace this system with professional guards tasked with securing the entire city under a single administration. Their job won’t be simply to arrest criminals—it will also be to deter them from committing crimes in the first place.

So defending this blueprint in the Commons, Peel explains that his new force will be strictly civilian. Unlike Britain’s red-coated soldiers, the officers of the new police force will be dressed in blue and wear top hats, not helmets. They also won’t be armed with guns and instead carry only a short wooden baton and a rattle for summoning help. To eliminate corruption, they will receive a good, steady wage and be bound by strict rules of conduct, including a ban on drinking on duty.

Still, it takes some political pragmatism for Peel to get the legislation through Parliament. He faces especially strong objections from representatives of the “Square Mile”—the self-governing financial center of London. Peel knows that challenging its fiercely guarded privileges will likely doom the bill, so he promises that his new police force won’t operate there. And with this political compromise, Peel successfully guides the historic act through Parliament.

But that’s the easy part.

Peel still has to address how the new force will be funded and exactly how it might operate. He appoints two commissioners to lead the implementation. But they are soon buried in paperwork and administrative squabbles with local authorities. At the same time, they must establish the new force’s regulations, its dress code, and its command structure. And they personally spend hours assessing the hundreds of applicants who come forward for jobs as police officers.

Every detail must be perfect. So, it’s not until late September that the operational plans are complete, and Robert Peel’s new police force is ready to take to the streets.

But as the final deployment orders await his signature, an immense question hangs over Peel. He has successfully shepherded the bill through Parliament, and his commissioners have now recruited over 800 men as police officers.

But there’s one thing Peel won’t be able to control—how the public will react when the Metropolitan Police takes to the street for the first time and tries to wrest back control of the capital from the criminals running amok.

Act Two: An Organized Force

It’s around 3 A.M. on March 27th, 1831, in Hoxton in East London—eighteen months after Robert Peel’s new police force first patrolled the streets of the capital.

In a gloomy apartment, 28-year-old Thomas Burton stares into the dying embers of the fireplace as he listens with dread to the heavy thump of leather boots coming up the stairs.

Thomas is in trouble. He spent the previous evening with this apartment’s tenant, a woman named Sarah Bottley. After they drank some brandy and gin, Thomas offered four half-crowns to spend the night with her, and Sarah accepted. But after she fell asleep, Thomas slipped out from under the sheets and rifled through her belongings. Finding a purse, he stole twelve shillings and sixpence and stashed it in the lining of his pants.

He then tried to slip away unnoticed into the early morning mist. But an alert housemaid had heard him creeping about in the dark. So before Thomas could make his escape, the maid woke Sarah. She quickly discovered that her purse was empty and sent her servant out to fetch a policeman. Now, an officer is at the door to Sarah’s apartment—and Thomas is cornered.

When questioned by the policeman, Thomas repeatedly denies doing anything wrong. When Sarah points out that she’s missing twelve shillings, he tries to blame the maid, saying that she is the real thief. But then comes the inevitable frisk. The missing money is found in Thomas's pants, and he is placed under arrest.

As he is led out of the house, a small crowd gathers in the narrow lane outside. More than a year has passed since the introduction of the Metropolitan Police. But there’s still resentment among London’s population. Many of those outside jeer at the officer leading Thomas out, mockingly calling him a “Peeler”—after the police force’s founder, Home Secretary Robert Peel. But whether Londoners like it or not, the Peelers are here to stay. The city has been carved up into different districts, and within each of those, almost every street and alley is patrolled by a dedicated police officer.

These synchronized, looping patrols close down escape routes used by criminals and begin bringing some semblance of order to even the most lawless slums. And the patrols' regularity means that victims of crime, like Sarah Bottley and her maid, know they don’t have to go far to get help.

Less than two weeks later, Thomas Burton faces the consequences of his theft at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court. Prosecutions still depend heavily on victims and other private witnesses. So Sarah Bottley and her maid both appear in court. But Thomas insists that Sarah was drunk and that he didn’t steal from her. The decisive witness is the arresting police officer, who tells the court that the victim was sober and backs up her story. As in many other cases, the testimony of a professional and seemingly honest police officer makes all the difference, and Thomas is quickly convicted of larceny and sentenced to seven years in the penal colonies of Australia.

He’s far from the only criminal swept up by the efforts of the new police force. The number of suspects caught and charged increases significantly. And as the decade progresses, the experiment in policing expands far beyond the streets of central London. New legislation creates similar police forces in other towns and rural counties across the country. And in 1839, the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police is doubled, pushing its outer perimeter to a fifteen-mile radius around the heart of London. New powers also allow officers to aggressively clear the streets of everyday nuisances, clamp down on vagrancy, and tightly control pubs. Under this relentless pressure, street crime in the capital drops significantly. And the initial sense of furious public opposition settles into a resigned, everyday familiarity. The hostile slur of “Peelers” fades away and is replaced by the almost amicable “Bobbies.” By its tenth year of operation, the force has successfully established itself as a permanent fixture of law and order.

But crime hasn’t vanished from London entirely. While regular uniform patrols suppress opportunists like Thomas Burton, they also drive professional thieves to evolve. This more calculating class of offender moves into the shadows and begins using more sophisticated techniques. Pickpocketing rings start using strategic lookouts. Lone predators learn the predictable routines of patrolling officers and how to exploit them. The underworld will trade random chaos for stealth. And this quiet shift will unleash a new wave of terrifying violence.

Act Three: Combined Crackdown

It’s late on July 14th, 1862, in London’s West End—33 years after the establishment of the Metropolitan Police.

47-year-old barrister Edward Hawkins strides along Piccadilly, one of the brightly lit main thoroughfares of the city. Even though it’s approaching midnight, the street is still busy with late-night revelers enjoying the warm summer evening.

Reaching Bond Street, Edward turns, passing a man leaning against a building, smoking a pipe, who gives him a friendly nod and then starts whistling a popular music hall tune.

Edward thinks nothing of it until he’s a little farther along the street, when another man suddenly looms out in front of him.

Edward tries to step around him, but the man blocks his way. Then, before Edward can even shout out in alarm, he hears quick footsteps behind him. A cord is thrown around his neck and pulled tight. Choking, Edward’s knees buckle, and he slumps to the ground. Barely conscious, he can feel hands grabbing at him and his jacket tearing as his gold pocket watch is snatched away.

Edward has fallen victim to London's most terrifying new street crime—garroting. To avoid the police, criminals have developed a precise system. A “front-stall” blocks the victim’s path, a “back-stall”—in this case the man leaning against the lamp post—watches for the law, and a “nasty-man” delivers the choke from behind.

Edward isn’t the only victim that night. Just streets away, a Member of Parliament is ambushed in the exact same manner. And the attacks on such prominent, respectable gentlemen provoke an immediate public outcry. Newspapers seize on every report of violent robbery, warning that gangs of garrotters are stalking the capital. Frightened Londoners begin carrying weapons and buying specially reinforced collars designed to protect their throats.

So in response, the Metropolitan Police increases its patrols and deploys officers in plain clothes to watch suspected thieves. But the authorities also turn to harsher punishment to deal with the crisis. In 1863, Parliament passes a law allowing men convicted of violent robbery to be flogged.

By then, though, the panic is already beginning to fade. Newspaper coverage moves on, and many supposed garrotings prove to be exaggerated, misreported, or entirely invented. Still, the scare has exposed a genuine limitation of policing by uniformed patrol alone. An officer walking his beat might deter an opportunistic thief. But catching experienced criminals after they strike requires a different kind of police work.

And while the Metropolitan Police already has a small Detective Branch. They realize the need for expansion, with plainclothes officers working to identify suspects, trace stolen property, and gather evidence linking criminals to their crimes. So eventually, in 1878, the Detective Branch is reorganized as the Criminal Investigation Department—or CID.

In the decades that follow, the Metropolitan Police will continue adapting as London, and the threats to it, change—from the murderous rampage of Jack the Ripper, to the organized crime networks of the 20th century, and modern international terrorism. The Police force’s history will also be marked by corruption, discrimination, and repeated failures of public trust. But at its heart, today’s tech-driven bureaucracy of over 30,000 officers is still propelled by the same principles that guided Robert Peel’s unarmed “bobbies” when they first appeared on the streets of London on September 29th, 1829.

Outro

Next on History Daily. September 30th, 1791. Mozart’s final opera, The Magic Flute, is performed for the first time.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Bill Holland.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.