Crime waves in post-war Britain

Abstract

Reading the newspapers and listening to television news in 1980, we could be forgiven for believing that 'crime' and disorder are now an inescapable and overwhelmingly serious reality in our cities, a significant factor in everyday experience, and, what is more, that they are problems of relatively recent origin, an expression of a very contemporary loss of Authority in civic life. It is perhaps instructive, then, on this Centenary occasion, to remind ourselves of the "crime situation" that obtained one hundred years ago in this part of industrial England at the time of the opening of the classes at Firth College on Leopold Street and the beginning of the University in Sheffield. 1880 was the year of a bitterly contested General Election in Britain, and here in Rotherham anti-Tory feelings were such as to provoke a mass riot on 9 April in front of the Ship Hotel, Westgate, with the Riot Act being read and the Streets being cleared by the Hussars (we are told) "at full gal!op up Main Street". The handful of West Riding constables who were stationed in the town joined in, "making free use of their batons" and, contemporary • accounts continue, a "grand melee ensued" [ 1 ]. According to the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, the riot was a product of the anxieties created by the unexplained presence of a large body of police and the 21st Hussars from Leeds from 11 a.m. onwards and the associated presence in the town of "young gentlemen of no particular occupation", virulently opposed to a further term of Tory Government under Disraeli, and who gathered outside the Ship Hotel (the Tories' committee rooms) [2]. The background to this riot was the recent decline in the economic situation of both the artisan and lumpenproletarian classes in Northern England, a decline had continued for some time, resulting in "large numbers" of skilled cutlers and toolmakers emigrating to the United States [3], and was only to be reversed in the mid-1880's with the wave of commercial and industrial expansion consequent on the imperial activities of British capitalists throughout the world.