My current research project looks at the role of non-violent crimes, such as the buying and selling of stolen goods, within working-class homes and family life. Working-class memoirs and forms of life writing are a rich and revealing source for this project and have helped me think differently about the role of offending within urban neighbourhoods. As historians of crime have noted, working-class neighbourhoods were more heavily patrolled and subjected to greater police surveillance than other parts of cities.[1] When the Second World War ended, there were great concerns about crime levels and especially around the problem of juvenile crime. Significant increases in juvenile crime were recorded in Manchester and Salford during the War and working-class parents, especially mothers, were blamed for this increased criminality.[2] For example, in 1941, a report by the Manchester City Police Lads’ Club claimed that ‘lack of proper parental control is undoubtedly one of the main reasons for so much misbehaviour by juveniles.’[3] The response was to pose greater intervention and surveillance within homes in working-class areas and to pay greater attention to the (mis)behaviour of working-class youths.

Read more: Policing and the Post-War City

Police with children, 1969 via Getty Images: Interactions with the police loom large in memoirs by those who grew up in urban working-class communities

Unsurprisingly therefore, the police appear frequently in working-class memoirs of those who grew up during the 1950s and 1960s. Although my own research does not focus on Glasgow, I found the memoirs of Colin MacFarlane to be particularly helpful in understanding the often contradictory influence and impact of police presence in working-class districts. Colin MacFarlane was born in the Gorbals in the 1950s and his memoir depicts his childhood prior to the programmes of regeneration that changed the area so dramatically from the 1960s, which was itself partly a response to concerns about crime and social disorder. MacFarlane described how the police were over enthusiastic in the Gorbals and were especially harsh towards children playing games ‘It caused a lot of resentment and the children grew up detesting the police, a feeling that stayed with them all their lives. Twenty of us were booked one day for playing a game near Lawmoor Street.’[4] On the one hand, this portrayal emphasises the vulnerability of working-class youths to the power of the police. Arrest and prosecution not only led to punishment and a criminal record but risked unwelcome state intervention into the home and the very real risk that children would be removed from familial care. However, MacFarlane also notes that his neighbours were often not afraid to take a stand against the police and he recounted how, during the mass arrest on Lawmoor Street, ‘Somebody’s mother, who was leaning out of the window, shouted to the two officious policemen, “Why don’t ye leave the weans alone and catch some real criminals like bank robbers or murderers? Ye should be ashamed of yirsels picking on weans like that.” Seeing the big red-faced woman in action made the policeman look embarrassed and they both made off rather sheepishly. We cheered the woman on.’[5] This childhood memory of the mother admonishing the policeman is portrayed as a real moment of bravery when the powerless stood up to the powerful but, it helps us think about how those with less formal agency and authority were able to rise up in powerful moments and redress the very unequal power relationships between the police and the neighbourhoods they patrolled.

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Gorbals Scene, 1948 via Getty Images. The Gorbals were tenements built in the 1840s for the working classes and were subjected to clearance and regeneration in the late 1950s/1960s.

Related to this, one theme that emerges in such memoirs is the ways in which children were discouraged from talking to the police as part of a ‘us Vs them’ mentality, alongside the real concerns that engaging with the state would have unwelcome implications for family life. The comedienne Crissy Rock was born in 1958 and grew up in Liverpool’s Windsor Garden tenements. Her memoir notes that ‘the police always had a weird relationship with the Liverpool public, especially around the inner-city areas, where there were housing estates, clubs and a multi-cultural community.’ Rock explains how when living in Windsor Gardens, they had to pass her Auntie Winnie’s flat to get to main stairwell: ‘but my mam didn’t want us passing by Winnie’s because her husband was a policeman and, according to Mam, if you had a husband who was a policeman then you were a snitch, a rat, a grass! … Mam said if Winnie found something out about someone then it was bound to come out some time in conversation, and even if the conversation wasn’t with her husband, he would probably be listening in by the door, like the police do.’[6] These tightly-knit bonds were important and give some sense of these neighbourly bonds were important to inhabitants and a source of support, they could also be restrictive and problematic for those who were seen to have transcended the boundaries of belonging. Auntie Winnie’s great transgression – marrying a policeman – saw her marginalised from her family as there was a wide belief that she couldn’t be trusted to keep information to herself.

Liverpool Policeman, 1941 via Getty images. Police were very visible, and often feared, in urban working-class neighbourhoods.

Rock’s recollections also exposes the challenges faced by the police, especially the wall of silence that they were confronted with in many working-class neighbourhoods: ‘The police weren’t well liked in our household or anywhere in the area either. They were the enemy.’[7] This is also reiterated in MacFarlane’s memoir, which noted that ‘There was a general contempt for the police. Even when I was a young lad, people were always telling me things like, “Never talk tae the polis, they’re a right waste o’ time.’ When I was aged ten, one of my older relatives sat me down one night and told me this advice: “Don’t tell the polis anything… The polis are a shower of bastards but unfortunately we need them noo an’ again.” He said the local police were “as bent as the people they’re arrestin’.”[8] Distrust towards the police reflected the unequal power relationships between the poor and the state and especially amongst the most marginalised in post-War British society. Rock recalled that her friends who were Black were ‘getting a lot more attention’ from the police when she was a teen and explains how this led to racial tensions in the city.[9] This issue is something I am keen to explore further in my project. Certainly the memoirs I have read so far, such as actor Paul Barber (whose father was from Sierra Leone) Rosie Childs (whose father was Chilean), shows the racist abuse and discrimination they experienced growing up in institutions and the stigma they suffered as the children borne of relationships between white women and non-British seamen during the 1950s and 1960s.

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A confrontation between a policeman and an African man in London’s Notting Hill Gate, c. 1958, via Getty Images. Memoirs point to racial tensions and the racism experienced by Black youths.

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The heavy scrutiny and invasive policing of working-class neighbourhoods did not necessary prevent crime from occurring however, and I am interested in the ways in which offending could be a way to resist the intensive surveillance and challenge social inequities these communities experienced. MacFarlane noted how pleased many were in his neighbourhood when they felt that a ‘just’ crime had not been thwarted by the police.  His memoir includes a story about the time he and his friends were walking near the Thistle Street tenements where they bumped into a local thief they knew well, who was carrying large bags of cash into his house. They later found out that it had been big bank robbery but when the police arrested him, they were unable to find anything: ‘But his young daughter told us in the street, in broad daylight, that he had hidden some of the money, packed in a plastic carrier bag, in the lavatory cistern and the police had failed to find it. “The polis thought they had ma da bang tae rights,” she said, ” but they wurnae fly enough tae search the ootside lavvy.”‘[10] For MacFarlane, getting one over the police through crimes such as theft represented a broader tactic of using crime to redress the broader inequalities that urban working-class communities experienced. This attitude was certainly also prevalent in mid-twentieth century Liverpool and memoirs often note the childhood excitement of helping those in the process of committing non-violent offences to escape.

Historian of policing, Joanne Klein, has focused her analysis on Liverpool, Birmingham, and Manchester and has shown how complex the relationship between policemen – often working-class themselves – and those they policed could be and, as these examples support, their interactions could be characterised both by hostility and antagonism or support and cooperation.[11] I have found that memoirs by women are more likely to recall their interactions with police as children with greater affection than autobiographies by men. Rosie Childs described walking home from school at lunchtime as a young girl, when she was tempted to write ‘fuk off’ on a wall after seeing paint and a paintbrush ling around. However, a policeman had watched her and followed her home: ‘I looked at the policeman towering above me in his black uniform with shiny buttons and was overwhelmed with fear. I thought he would probably take me away and lock me up.’ Yet, to her surprise, the policeman merely told her not to write on walls again, ‘He sounded stern but not angry…. I couldn’t believe I’d got away with it, but I remembered his kindness. My mother never did find out what I’d done so I avoided a beating.’[12] I think this is a useful example of how the policing of working-class neighbourhoods meant that police had a good understanding of the kinds of environment that some children experienced and could respond proportionately. It also stands out in Rosie Childs’ memoir as a rare moment of a positive interaction and kindness shown to her from a representative of the state. Taken together, we can see how the presence and influence of the police in working-class areas was key to how inhabitants experienced the state, in both positive and negative ways, which explains why encounters with the police loom large in working-class memoirs by those who were children during the post Second World War period.

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[1] Peter Adey, David J. Cox and Barry Godfrey, Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz: Protecting the Population of Bombed Cities (London, 2016), 99.

[2] ‘Juvenile Crime,’ Manchester Guardian, 2 June 1941, 3; ‘Juvenile Crime,’ Manchester Guardian, 19 Jan 1942, 2. 

[3] ‘Slack Parents,’ Manchester Guardian, 31 May 1941, 5.

[4] Colin MacFarlane, The Real Gorbals Story: True Tales from Glasgow’s Meanest Streets (Mainstream Digital, 2011), 64.

[5] MacFarlane, The Real Gorbals Story, 64.

[6] Crissy Rock, Scouse, Choppers and Space Hoppers: Happy Days and Hard Times in Sixties and Seventies Liverpool, (John Blake: London, 2018), 204.

[7] Rock, Scouse, Choppers and Space Hoppers, 205.

[8] MacFarlane, The Real Gorbals Story, 132-3.

[9] Rock, Scouse, Choppers and Space Hoppers, 205.

[10] MacFarlane, The Real Gorbals Story, 150.

[11]Joanne Klein, Invisible Men: The Secret Lives of Police Constables in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, 1900-1939 (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2010), 167-221.

[12] Rosie Childs, Catch Me before I fall (Virgin Nooks: London, 2006), 45-6.