A Guide to the Archives of the Police
Forces of England and Wales
Ian Bridgeman
Clive Emsley
FORWARD BY THE PATRON OF THE POLICE
HISTORY SOCIETY,
LORD KNIGHTS, CBE, QPM, DL
Clive Emsley and Ian Bridgeman have performed a great service in bringing out this comprehensive guide to the police archives of England and Wales, and revealing the wide range that these cover. Given the ravages of time, police mergers, weeders and weevils, coverage is necessarily uneven so that, for example, nothing survives in the Gloucester police archives which dates from before 1929 whereas Cambridge has records going back to 1822.
The Cambridgeshire Constabulary is also exceptional in the number of documents which it has retained from the 1830's and 1840's, since police records do not generally pre-date the compulsory establishment of the new police following the 1856 Police Act.
Many of the surviving records have already been deposited in local record offices, but what this guide reveals for the first time is the very wide range of the material which remains in police archives - some of it in a very poor state of preservation and much of it unindexed. In particular, most forces - for obvious internal, bureaucratic reasons - seem to have retained their personnel registers which, since they often run consecutively for a hundred or more years, provide an invaluable source for research into family, medical or migration history.
Unfortunately, police stations do not always make ideal quarters for such valuable but fragile records. Space is often at a premium, as of course is the financial support necessary for proper conservation. What is badly needed is a co-ordinated archive policy dealing with the criteria for selective weeding and retention and the support system necessary for police records as a whole. This guide is the first important step in that direction. Similarly, the existence and growing support for the Police History Society itself is a good indication that attitudes towards the value of police records are beginning to change, as more and more people become interested in the genesis and history of a service which plays such an important part in society today. The Police History Society are to be congratulated on the publication of this guide.