Carlisle Police has the honour of being the first ‘proper’ police force in Engoand and Wales. The reason why is something to be less proud of!

Sir Robert Peel

Sir Robert Peel (pictured) is synonymous with British policing. ‘Peelers’, they used to call police constables, before settling on ‘Bobbies’.

Sir Robert was appointed Home Secretary in 1822, determined to introduce a professional police force.

And in 1829, he established the first full-time, professional and centrally-organised police force in England and Wales. Covering the Greater London area, it was called the Metropolitan Police.

Except… Carlisle Police beat London to it by two years.

Why Carlisle Police was needed

Carlisle in 1827 was a rough place to live. 

Until the mid-18th Century, Carlisle was never much more than a fortified market town, with a population in four figures. But while the Industrial Revolution didn’t (due to its location and transport limitations) didn’t have the massive impact seen in other cities, it did see Carlisle’s population more than double by the turn of the new century.

And by 1826, it had nearly 20,000 inhabitants – and a lot of crime.

What it didn’t have was a police force to tackle it.

Policing before 1827

The old system, which had run since the Middle Ages, saw the Crown appoint magistrates, who in turn appointed constables (who had no uniform or weapons).

There might also be a local Night Watch, organised through the local council and consisting of unpaid or poorly paid men.

Meanwhile, victims of crime could appeal to magistrates to act

In the winter of 1825-26, Carlisle did not have a Night Watch. It did have police constables – all two of them.

Police Constables John Barnes and John Lowry Mullender did their best, but:

‘not a single week passes over in which the Carlisle papers do not announce fresh instances of burglary, shop-lifting, or theft; and, comparatively speaking, how few of the culprits are brought to justice’.

Carlisle Patriot, 18/2/1826

The 1826 riots

The two constables were faced in June that year with a riot when, before the election of Sir Philip Musgrave, he was forced to flee a bunch of angry weavers in Shaddongate. Clearly two men wasn’t enough, so the mayor called in soldiers from the castle garrison.

Pelted with stones by the crowd, and with several people now hiding in houses for safety, the soldiers fired on the crowd. There was a similar riot on polling day a few days later, and again the military were called on to try to restore some peace.

In November 1826, the Patriot reported that: 

‘During the past ten or twelve days, an incredible number of burlaries and robberies have taken place in the city and vicinity’.

And by the first week of 1827:

‘here is a pretty general feeling both in the city, and beyond it, that ‘something’ as the term is, has to be done’.

The report includes a list of the latest crimes, including sheep stealing, poultry theft, and attempted burglaries. Two shops were burgled in Annewell Street. There were footpads on the Grindale Road, so people were afraid to return from market unless in groups of eight or more. A woman walking home to Newtown from Rickergate was robbed of all her money, her cloak and her shoes by three villains.  A weaver’s wife was robbed of 4d by four men who knocked her down..

Taking the law into their own hands

In several cases, local folk/household servants fired upon the offenders. 

In Dalston, armed locals had set up their own nightly watch. A gang throwing stones at windows of houses in Caldewgate were sent running by small shot from a fowling piece.

(The rider of the Wigton horse post, William Burgess, claimed he had fired his gun after four or five men accosted him near Nealhouse (one had grabbed the bridle of his horse and told him to surrender. However this was later found to be a ‘gross fabriction’ and Burgess was sacked).

On January 27, the Patriot reported another lengthy list of thefts, burglaries, assaults and criminal damage. A Caldewgate shopkeeper had managed to catch two boys who’d earlier broken his window and stolen some cheese. But he was followed to the mayor’s house by ‘a crowd of men and boys’ who rescued the ‘two delinquents’, and then took over Castle Street and part of English Street, pelting people with snowballs.

The Dalston watch, meanwhile, was able to take three ‘very suspicious characters’ to a magistrate, who committed them to jail. 

These three claimed to be shipwrecked sailors. Sailors, and unemployed or poorly paid weavers, were widely suspected of being behind much of the crimewave.

Desperate people

Weaving had, for a while, been a prosperous occupation. There were a few mills in/around Carlisle, but much of it was ‘work from home’ – people had hand looms in their houses and deliver their completed work to Dixons, the mill owners.

But the trade was always subject to highs and lows. And by 1826, a succession of world events had really knocked the stuffing out of the market. 

William Farish, newspaper columnist and the author of “The Struggles of a Hand-loom Weaver,” was born in 1818. His parents were both hand-loom weavers and he recalled:

‘It was no uncommon thing for our house to be without bread for weeks together: and I cannot remember to have ever seen, in my very early years, a joint of meat of any kind on my father’s table; oatmeal porridge and potatoes, with an occasional taste of bacon, being our principal food. Once, for six long and weary weeks at a spell, no bread entered the door; that extreme restraint being needed to enable my father to pay a few shillings of rent in arrears.’

Farish also wrote:

‘The winter following the hot summer of 1826 was a terrible one for the working people everywhere, and the hardships fell with unwonted severity upon the North-country weavers. The benevolence of the gentry was taxed to the uttermost to preserve their poorer neighbours from actual starvation.’

This poverty was behind much of the crimewave in Carlisle. But while starving people stealing food is understandable, shopkeepers and other innocent citizens also suffered greatly from those thefts and robberies. 

It couldn’t continue – and a local minister led a campaign to resolve it. 

What happened next (including the Shaddongate riot and the Carlisle Police Bill) will be covered in the next post.