Scotland Yard Part 1

Scotland Yard.

by George Dilnot.

PREFACE.

TO ROBERT.

MY DEAR ROBERT,

It is more than probable that since this book was written you have changed your uniform and your beat. You are in the North Sea, in Flanders, in Gallipoli. Nowhere can admiral or general wish a better man.

I have known you long. I have for many years been thrown among you in all circ.u.mstances, and at all times. I have known you trudging your beat, have known you more especially as a detective, have known you in high administrative and executive positions. I have seen you arrest armed murderers, have seen you tactfully reproving a drunkard, have seen you solving tangled problems of crime, have seen you charging a mob, have seen you playing with a lost baby. I do not think there is any phase of your work which I have not seen. And I want the public to know you.

You, whether you be Commissioner or constable, occupy a position of delicate and peculiar responsibility. You are poised between the trust and suspicion of those you serve, and you are never quite sure whether you will be blessed or blamed. I, who realise something of your temptations and your qualities, know how seldom you fail in an emergency, how rarely you abuse your powers.

You will forgive me when I say you are not perfect. You have your little failings, and at times the defect of one man recoils on 20,000. There are matters I should like to see changed. But, on the whole, you are admittedly still the best policeman in the world.

The war has claimed you and others of your profession. Astute commanding officers have recognised you as "men who are handled and made," and many a constable of a year ago now wears an officer's stars. There are those of you who have gained other distinctions.

There is no branch of the service here dealt with that has not sent of its best to the fighting line. None will recognise more willingly than you in the trenches that the luck has been yours. We know (you and I) that others have been, by no will of their own, left behind. It is to these, in no small degree, that the safety and equanimity of London have been due. And it is as well that here tribute should be paid to those who have endured without retort the sneers of the malicious and ill-informed as well as the multiplicity of extra duties the war has entailed upon them.

One advantage, at least, the war has conferred on you. It has exploded the ignorance of your profession to those thousands of citizens who have elected to share something of your responsibilities. They at least know something of your work; they at least know that the special constable can never replace, though he may a.s.sist, the experienced police-officer.

You always understood the Londoner; now the Londoner is coming to understand you.

I have attempted no more than a sketch of the great machine of which you form part. But if it enlightens the public in some degree as to the way they are served by you it will have achieved its purpose.

Yours sincerely,

GEORGE DILNOT.

London, October, 1915.

SCOTLAND YARD.

By GEORGE DILNOT.

"By all means let us abuse the police, but let us see what the poor wretches have to do."--KIPLING.

CHAPTER I.

THE SILENT MACHINE.

We who live in London are rather apt to take our police for granted.

Occasionally, in a mood of complacency, we boast of the finest police force in the world; at other times, we hint darkly at corruption and brutality among a gang of men too clever, too unscrupulous to be found out. We a.s.sociate Scotland Yard with detectives--miraculous creations of imaginative writers--forgetting that the Criminal Investigation Department is but one branch in a wondrously complex organisation. Of that organisation itself, we know little. And in spite of--or perhaps because of--the ma.s.s of writing that has made its name familiar all over the world, there exists but the haziest notion as to how it performs its functions.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this ignorance is that Scotland Yard never defends itself, never explains, never extenuates. Praise or blame it accepts in equal silence. It goes on its way, ignoring everything that does not concern it, acting swiftly, impartially, caring nothing save for duty to be done.

There is romance in Scotland Yard--a romance that has never been written, that may never be written. It concerns the building up, in the face of incredible obstacles, of a vast, ingenious machine which has become one of the greatest instruments of civilisation the world has ever seen.

Imagine an army of 20,000 men encamped over seven hundred square miles, with its outposts in every quarter of the globe--an army engaged in never-ceasing warfare with the guerillas of crime and disorder. Imagine something of the work it does.

In a city of seven million souls, crammed with incalculable wealth, there are less than a thousand habitual thieves--the exact number is 706--and 161 receivers of stolen goods. In spite of all its temptations, there are but seventeen thousand serious crimes in a year, while the number of more trivial offences is only one hundred and seventy thousand. Few of the perpetrators escape justice. Compare this record with that of any city in the world. Ask Paris, ask New York, ask Petrograd, and you will begin to realise how well protected London is.

In a large soft-carpeted room, its big double windows open to catch the breezes that blow from the river, sits the man upon whom the ultimate responsibility for all this devolves, a slim-built, erect man of sixty odd, with moustache once auburn but now grey, grey hair and shrewd hazel eyes--Sir Edward Henry.

Imperturbable, quiet-voiced, quiet-mannered, he sits planning the peace of London. He is playing a perpetual game of chess on the great board of the metropolis with twenty thousand men as his pieces against a cosmopolitan fraternity of evil-doers who never rest. He is the one man in the service who must never make a mistake.

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police sleeps on no bed of roses.

He must be as supple as willow, as rigid as steel, must possess the tact of a diplomatist, with the impartiality of a judge.

Since the days when Sir Richard Mayne built up the police organisation in its infancy, there has been no Commissioner who so nearly fulfils the ideal of a great police administrator as Sir Edward Henry. Unlike most of his predecessors, practically his whole life has been spent in the study of police science.

It is something more than forty years ago since he entered the Indian Civil Service as a.s.sistant magistrate collector. He became ultimately Inspector-General of the Bengal Police, and then commissioner of a division.

It was there that he first established the finger-print system of identification, as a police device for the registration of habitual criminals which he was to introduce later at Scotland Yard, and which has tightened the meshes round many a criminal who would otherwise have escaped justice.

The man in the street knows little of the silent man who is undoubtedly the greatest police organiser in the world. Even on this very matter of finger-prints there is a general confusion with Bertillonage--a totally different thing. The Henry system has practically ousted Bertillonage in every civilised country. If Sir Edward had done nothing but that he would have ranked as one of the greatest reformers in criminal detection. But he has done more--much more.

Fourteen years ago he resigned his Indian post to become a.s.sistant-Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department. Even then the intention was to "try" him for Commissioner.

He spent a period in South Africa during the war reorganising the civil police of Johannesburg and Pretoria. In 1903, when Sir Edward Bradford retired, he was appointed Commissioner.

He found that the vast complex machinery of which he a.s.sumed control was running a little less freely than it should. The police force was like an old established business--still sound, but inclined to work in a groove. It needed a chief with courage, individuality, ideas, initiative, and the organising powers of a Kitchener. These qualities were almost at once revealed in Sir Edward Henry.

In the force it was soon felt that a new power had arisen. The Commissioner was not only a name but an actuality. Nothing was so trivial as to escape his attention; nothing too wide for him to grasp.

He knew his men--it is said that he knows every man in the force, an exaggeration with a great deal of truth in it--and they soon knew him.

Quick to observe, quick to commend or punish, whether it be high official or ordinary constable, he has come to be regarded with unswerving devotion by those under him. The police force as he took it over and as it is now may seem the same thing to the ordinary observer.

To those who knew something of its working it is a vastly different thing.

I have pa.s.sed many years among police officers of all grades and all departments. Many of these have been veterans of from twenty to thirty years' service. They have told me of things done for the well-being of the force, the convenience of the public, and the confusion of the criminal.

Telephone and telegraphic communication have been perfected between stations, head-quarters and provincial police, the system of identification has been revised, young constables are taught their trade with care and thoroughness, higher pay has been granted to all ranks, men are housed in greater comfort, red tape has been ruthlessly cut through, the relations between police and Press have been improved; there is a wider, broader spirit in all. A clean esprit de corps, very different to that which at times long gone by has threatened the interests of the public, has sprung up.

In all these things is to be seen the hand of Sir Edward Henry. Scotland Yard is not yet perfect; there still linger relics of the old conservative spirit in certain directions; but the new method has made itself felt. Initiative is encouraged in all ranks. Suggestions and criticism from without are welcomed.

The Commissioner is a man of instant decision. Let anyone make a suggestion, and he ponders it for a second or so. Then he reaches for a pen. "Yes, that's a good idea. We'll have an order on that." And in a little the suggestion has become an official fact.

Little escapes his eye, but he is a man who makes sure. Every morning a bundle of newspapers and periodicals is delivered at Scotland Yard to be carefully scrutinised and to have every reference to the force marked with blue pencil. Where there is an accusation against a particular man, or a criticism of methods in general, special attention is directed to it. But there is rarely any need for this. The Commissioner has probably read it at breakfast. The point, whatever it is, is usually in a fair way to being dealt with before lunch.