The Spectacle of Security: Lock-Picking Competitions and the Security Industry in mid-Victorian Britain

Abstract

��� Lock-picking competitions first captured the imagination of the British public at the Great Exhibition of 1851. These contests pitted rival brandname locksmiths against each other in trying to circumvent the leading security devices of the day, typically before a crowd of onlookers. As such, they presented a spectacle of security – an opportunity for those present to witness the most sophisticated locks not resting dormant, but under attack from a skilled and determined mechanic taking the part of the criminal. The most celebrated of these lock-pickers was Alfred Charles Hobbs, who first arrived in Britain as a representative of the American lock-making firm Day & Newell, before rising to international acclaim by picking two locks previously considered inviolable: Chubb & Son’s ‘detector lock’, originally patented in 1818; and Bramah & Co.’s famous challenge lock, first patented in 1784. This last had stood proudly in the firm’s Piccadilly shop window for decades, alongside a notice offering two-hundred guineas to anyone who could devise an implement with which to pick it. Hobbs’s conquest of these two ‘unpickable’ locks captivated the press: one newspaper even asserted that no feature of the Exhibition had attracted greater public attention than this ‘celebrated lock contest’. 1 Yet the ‘Great Lock Controversy’, as it became known, was only the most famous of a series of lock-picking challenges and disputes which issued from the emerging security industry of the 1850s and 1860s. The history of the security industry – in Britain as elsewhere – remains largely unwritten. Focusing predominantly on state systems of crime control, historians have barely touched upon market responses to crime. 2 However, recent work has begun to shed light on the history of security more broadly defined. Eloise Moss and David Smith, for example, by examining how security companies influenced popular understandings of crime and the home, have revealed the deep historical roots of anxieties surrounding insecurity, and have highlighted the role of security entrepreneurs in shaping commonplace perceptions of risk, responsibility and prevention. 3 But historians have yet to embark upon any broader exploration of security enterprise as a significant aspect of modern social development.