‘peculiarity of method’, according to the 1920 Parliamentary Report, gave the policemen their clues to solving crime. ‘The leading feature of the Wakefield system which is proving its value against the modern travelling thief and swindler, is the investigation of crime through its methods. In the past, knowledge of this sort has remained far too much in the possession of this or that policeman or this or that police force … the clearing house is the machinery for the detection of crime.’ This prescient observation came to have real force more than sixty years later during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. The keeping of records, and how and where they were administered, was a key feature unrecognized during the prolonged murder hunt, and it had the most tragic results.
Of all the great institutions in Britain, the police service has been among the slowest to bring about radical reform. The prime reason has been the jealously guarded principle that police forces should be subject to control by local communities through watch committees. The argument raged for more than a hundred years. Bradford and Leeds successfully stayed out of the great amalgamation in 1968, only to be absorbed into the West Yorkshire force six years later. Historically, British police forces have been fiercely independent, even leading to arguments over whether the ‘office of constable’ was one subject to local or central control under the British constitution. Towns and boroughs fought to achieve the right to choose their own chief constable rather than have one imposed on them by government. Legislation to bring about reform was seen as interfering with their independent control over the organization and expenditure of the police force in their area.
When amalgamations were proposed, they often met with fierce resistance – not least in Yorkshire. The city of York mounted vigorous opposition to legislation which would have amalgamated forces in the 1850s, provided money from the Treasury for efficient forces, and set up a system of inspections. York also opposed Palmerston’s Police Bill, fearing ‘the police would become a standing army entrusted with powers unheard of in the darkest ages of tyranny’. The York Herald proclaimed: ‘To surrender up the control of the police to the executive government would be an act of folly which every lover of constitutional liberty ought to do all in his power to prevent.’ County magistrates and local watch committees would become mere puppets: ‘Local control of policing which allowed local communities to decide which form of policing best suited them would disappear.’
In 1920 Parliament heard arguments pleading for police forces to be banded together if they were to become more efficient. Forty-eight police forces had less than twenty-five men in their ranks and forty forces had less than fifty officers. The boroughs of Louth and Tiverton consisted of a chief constable, two sergeants and eight constables; total strength: eleven men. Bigger forces meant better administration, training and the chance for individual officers to gain wider experience.
Amalgamations were still high on the agenda when the Royal Commission on the Police reported in 1962. So was the question of the educational standards of men being recruited into the police service. The 1920 Parliamentary Committee had found the system lacking in this respect; so did the Report of the Royal Commission. ‘We have come across no recent instance of a university graduate entering the service, only about 1 per cent of recruits have two or more GCE A levels, a further 10 per cent have five subjects or more at O level and an additional 20 per cent have one to four O levels.’ The report strongly criticized the police service for failing to recruit anything like its proper share of able, well-educated young men. The commissioners’ principal concern was being able to attract sufficient recruits who would make good chief constables fifteen or twenty years hence. This without question remained a problem for the British police force for generations. ‘They preferred to educate the recruited rather than recruit the educated,’ said one senior detective, closely involved in the Yorkshire Ripper case, who had himself given up a university place to get married and join the police force.
Absence of a grammar school or university education had not proved a barrier to men like Hoban, who had left school aged fourteen with no qualifications, joined the Leeds City Police aged twenty-one, and in 1960 become the force’s youngest detective inspector. He achieved promotion on grounds of merit and consistent hard work. The police force in Leeds which Dennis Hoban joined in 1947 after wartime service in the Royal Navy aboard motor torpedo boats had hardly changed in technological terms since Edwardian times. They still carried whistles to draw attention. It was only in 1930 that the city police got its own motor patrol section and even then it consisted of one motor car, one three-wheeled vehicle, two motorcycle combinations and a solo motorcycle. For years bicycles provided the extra mobility for the forces of law and order in their everyday fight against crime.
Leeds got its first police boxes containing a telephone in 1931, and these were the mainstay of communication with officers on the beat until the 1950s, when they were replaced by telephones in pillars. Communication between police stations and headquarters was by wireless. In 1955, by which time Hoban was a fully fledged plain-clothes detective, thirty-three police cars in the city were fitted with radios, but it was to be another ten years before individual personal radio sets were issued to officers. In the mid-1950s, Leeds had had plain-clothes detectives for a hundred years, but specialization within the town’s CID did not emerge until the 1960s, with the setting up of crime squads, a drug squad in 1967 and a stolen vehicles squad in 1970. Hoban, in the early 1960s, took part in an experimental project involving undercover detectives working over a wide area and drawn from several major cities, towns and county forces. They targeted major criminals, using covert surveillance to gather intelligence, often over weeks and months at a time. It was the forerunner of the Regional Crime Squads.
Many smaller towns had their own chief constables – but less than 300 officers. Unlike Hoban’s family, plenty of police officers were tied tenants, living in police houses, including some of the senior officers. There were considerable restrictions in terms of promotion. Some smaller towns, like Dewsbury and Wakefield, had to advertise externally to obtain suitably qualified senior officers above the rank of inspector. The efficiency of the police was a key phrase during the post Second World War period, when important questions about the future were being discussed. Efficiency wasn’t simply a value-for-money term, it also called in question the ability of the police to tackle modern problems, and especially modern criminals, who were far more mobile, being prepared to live in one area of the country and commit crime in another. By the time Parliament voted for large-scale amalgamations in the early 1960s, they were long overdue. Rising crime rates were a national problem.
Once amalgamations had taken place, the actual moulding of large new forces from smaller ones carried sizeable headaches in terms of management. Some towns had given their constables special rights. For example, in Huddersfield Borough a constable could not be moved from his home without his consent. Many a police officer, either buying his own home or firmly settled with a young family in a police house, refused to be uprooted and sent to the other side of the county. West Riding officers were used to being moved, but those in the towns and cities were familiar with their back yard and had got used to it. There were other privileges. Huddersfield being a textile town, officers had uniforms made of specially woven cloth, dyed and finished in police indigo blue – top quality worsted – a reflection of the predominance of wool merchants on the local watch committee. Pride dictated that their officers be dressed in the best cloth – and the uniforms were tailor made. ‘Then we went into the West Riding,’ said one who went on to become a senior detective, ‘and it was like the army, they got the nearest bloody size. There were only two sizes – too big and too small.’
The Leeds City Force of Hoban and his colleagues, with a strength of 1,300 men, was already bigger than some of the newly amalgamated county forces like Cumbria, Wiltshire, Suffolk and Dorset. Plenty of policemen and politicians in Leeds and nearby Bradford wanted the two cities to combine into one large metropolitan force instead of being lumped together with the rest of West Yorkshire. The ever-expanding Leeds–Bradford conurbation is such that the two are for all practical purposes virtually joined together, separated only by a small tract of land; even the local regional airport is called Leeds–Bradford, though each city retains its separate identity.
Hoban’s
