Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

 

The Once and Future Police

alida baxter

What people who haven't lived in our area may not realise is that, for over six decades, many of the police in Soho were residents here. And that affected our relationship with them – it was bound to, they were our neighbours. Trenchard House in Broadwick Street was, after all, the section house where more than two hundred of them had rooms.

And that could mean sometimes they suffered from the same nuisances we did. When the age of the random music event hit us, and one band or another with Wembley stadium ideas and only a side street to play in set up dam busting amplifiers without warning, I could 'phone the ever phlegmatic Noise Team because it was past midnight and I was still being deafened, and be told that all the coppers in Trenchard House had already rung, because they couldn't sleep. My heart went out to them – at least I could catch up on sleep in the morning – but they weren't getting any more consideration than the rest of us.

From my childhood onwards they were to be seen walking to West End Central police station in Savile Row, or coming back home from it, and Savile Row might be on the other side of Regent Street (always a class divide) but Trenchard House was in amongst us. Up the steps and inside at a reception desk a policeman was always on duty, and could be appealed to – as I did over the years for all sorts of reasons.

Memorable was a sunny Saturday afternoon when, in my early teens, I trotted off to have my hair cut and found the hairdressers closed. This wouldn't have been so bad if my walk hadn't taken me through St. Anne's Court and back again in a matter of minutes, and St. Anne's Court in those days wasn't the Thai restaurant, fashionable bar, expensive flat enclave it is now. It was a lane patrolled by extremely pretty tarts in very high heels, and though I wasn't a patch on any of them, my having used their route was enough for a hot blooded gang of young Greeks. Italians would never have bothered me (their mothers would have killed them – I'd been at primary school with their sisters!), but the unknown Greeks, not homegrown in Soho, had gathered as I entered St. Anne's Court and when I came back within moments they grabbed me and wouldn't let go. It was so silly, in the early afternoon blazing sunlight, but I couldn't shake them off until I reached Trenchard House and managed to throw myself up the steps and into the arms of the man on duty. He parked me behind his desk and went out and used incendiary language, and did I need a cup of tea, he asked when he came back, exhilarated from his cultural exchange with their fleeing backs, and would I like somebody to see me home? Considering I'd be there in all of five minutes, it was an extra kindness I didn't need.

I particularly remember the incident because it was so unusual – Soho , as our Rector often pointed out, was actually far safer than many suburban areas, or even the country. In this he wasn't just voicing his own opinions, he was agreeing with Sherlock Holmes. As Sherlock comments, in the train to Winchester to meet the threatened young governess in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches', “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling face of the countryside”. And he explains that the closeness of neighbours and the law constitute safety.

We could hardly have been closer to the law in our neighbourhood: it was part of the fabric. And the Underground was where I got molested, coming home from school in Marylebone, not on the streets of my area: I'd emerge, pinched and fingered, from the Tube at Oxford Circus, and feel total relief. When I walked through Soho in my uniform with “Vice Head Girl” on my tiepin, nobody turned a hair.

Later, after I left school, Mayfair was the gauntlet, and Americans the most persistent. Perhaps they'd read old novels, but whatever the reason, any girl anywhere near Bond Street was fair game – or on it, in their minds. Trotting to Hatchard's bookshop in Piccadilly in my new high heels, I'd be offered everything from compliments and cash to pathetic life stories (“My wife died”) and Wimbledon tickets. I didn't just trot back to Soho , I ran.

By this time, the police were beginning to enter my life socially. There were dances at Trenchard House, but my first policeman boy friend was a plain clothes officer I was introduced to at church. He and some colleagues were preparing for confirmation, under the guidance of the current curate, an ex-journalist whose reasons for his change of profession were commendably down to earth: “I get somewhere to live and security, and I get to dress up”. We used to go out to dinner in a group, and it was the curate who'd lean over the table and deafen us with some unanswerable announcement: “I could take you all to a brothel right now where none of the prostitutes is older than twelve!”

We didn't take him up on it. But the police had their own haunts, apparently. As I soon learned, my swain knew every publican within miles and could drink after hours anywhere. I didn't have the stamina or the head for it, and tired of a romance that consisted of sitting in a pub in the small hours with some weary landlord, cringing at all too vivid descriptions of recent crime scenes.

What I'd glimpsed was an edge of that interesting phenomenon, the Met in the 'sixties, and drinking after hours was nothing compared to the rest of their activities.

In that decade, I worked for an extremely respectable company who handled the financial and tax affairs of some very wealthy clients. Only one person stood out from the institutions, Lloyd's names and tax exiles in the files, and that was a tall, broad man given to camelhair coats, who chatted while he waited to see the partner who dealt with him. I learned that he always carried thick bundles of notes in various wallets, and when I asked whether that wasn't dangerous, he smiled a tiny smile: it'd only be dangerous for anyone who tried to take the money off him.

When a colleague and I once sighed in his hearing about the amount of tax being subtracted from our wages, he shook his head and said nobody should be in that situation.

“I pay my boys a hundred pounds a week clear,” he told us. “Tax and all that, insurance – they don't have to bother, I deal with that.” (£100 in the nineteen sixties was the equivalent of about £1,800 to-day.)

His business wasn't clear to me, since he wasn't a client of my boss, but it did seem to involve quantities of property, and a statement of his investments that the partners once discussed showed a blinding number of gold bars.

His “boys” were known only by odd names over the 'phone, with the exception of a small man, equally keen on camelhair, who visited the firm to discuss finances with the relevant person and talked of holidays spent in one or other of his boss's Spanish villas. He occasionally mentioned the book trade, which he seemed to find funny, and was always having his house and garden improved, and bathroom and kitchen refitted.

In case anything I'm writing is reminiscent of what you may have read in “The Long Firm” by Jake Arnott, or seen in its television adaptation, please bear in mind the differing people involved in what was at that time an enterprise culture. The big man I knew in real life and the characters in “The Long Firm” inhabited the same decade and to some extent the same circles (the fictional depiction is brilliant), but Harry Starks, the central figure of the novels and TV series, doesn't resemble my sixties' acquaintance, who was clever, self-disciplined, and led a solid family life in the home counties.

One day back then, though, brought an interesting event: two men in beautifully tailored black arrived at the partners' suite without an appointment, when I was alone, and asked me if I could get hold of the shorter camelhair fan. Smiling, they gave me their names, and explained that they were the police. A whole new level of police, as far as I was concerned. Police in Savile Row suits. I arranged for coffee in good china and rang around till I located the book trade man, who arrived at a run, apologising, and had a long inaudible chat with them in one of our interview rooms.

When they left, as charming and polite as they'd been from the beginning, the short man mopped his brow and said if this happened again would I please look after the police as well as I'd done this time, and call him immediately. Just in case (in those pre-mobile days), he gave me several more telephone numbers, all local, I noticed.

It wasn't long after this that I walked home late from a Parochial Church Council meeting in Dean Street, passing the lines of bookshops and the sex cinema in Old Compton Street. The shops were almost entirely limited to books and magazines at that time, before the invention of the video, and I never bothered looking as I passed them – they were just part of the Soho scenery, like wallpaper. But what I did notice, suddenly, was a man with two Alsatians, making his way from one of them to another, and entering and leaving quickly. And I noticed even more when he paused in the doorway of one and waved at me. What was that about? Baffled, I walked on, and only realised at the entrance of my building that he and his dogs had followed at a distance and were watching while I went inside.

I was still pondering the next morning, when I got a call at the office. Short camelhair coat man rang to say he'd spotted me going by and was making sure one of the boys saw I got home safe. Any time, he said, just ask him. Those policemen had been really impressed with me.

Going by? He meant going by a bookshop? And what had his friend with the Alsatians been doing, I asked him. Collecting the takings, he explained, that happened every few hours. They never let cash accumulate – not in the shops.

Between the coppers in Trenchard House and the “boys” with Alsatians, I could see that any man who as much as planted a goodnight kiss on me was likely to be slaughtered.

Meanwhile my boss, who knew nothing of these developments, was growing more and more restive, and lost his temper forever at the suggestion that the large camelhair wearer should be introduced to the Zurich eminence who arranged Swiss bank accounts. “No!” he roared. “No! And I don't want to hear another word about those parties!”

I went to find the firm's mole and learned that the camelhair man spent a fortune on parties at top London hotels, where the guests were so exclusively drawn from one profession that they were known as Policemen's Balls.

Only much later did I recognise a name which had figured repeatedly amongst the 'phone numbers in the camelhair man's files, but attached to nothing: Jimmy Humphreys.

In 1972 a new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Robert Mark, had been appointed, with a mission to clean up the force. He went on to form a special unit, A10, to investigate what was going on in the CID: better late than never. Already, in 1969, “The Times” had exposed corruption on a massive scale, a story which Mark described as having “rocked the Metropolitan Police to its foundations”, and in 1972 “The Sunday Mirror” reported that the Flying Squad's Commander, Kenneth Drury, had been on holiday in Cyprus with what was described as a Soho businessman, Jimmy Humphreys. Holidays were the least of Mr. Humphreys' generous donations to helpful men in superb plain clothes' tailoring he'd paid for, and Commander Drury, having resigned, eventually went to jail for eight years.

Nor did Mr. Humphreys' notoriety end there. Only a couple of years later, he found it expedient to chat at great length and in detail about all he'd done for the chums in the force who'd made his career path smoother. Having been involved, amongst other endeavours, in the vast and staggeringly lucrative dirty book trade, he was prominent amongst those who gave evidence leading to the exposure of corrupt police officials – as a result many high-ranking detectives went to prison, and hundreds of others retired.

There were references to the incredible money to be made in that particular business, as though I didn't know already. (Who could forget all those gold bars?) But, although his connections became widely known, I never saw any reference to my old firm's clients.

Soon much had changed in my life, not just in the cleaned-up Met. The uniformed men (whom Sir Robert Mark had always trusted) still lived at Trenchard House, and walked back and forth to West End Central. And that station remained the place where you went for help, or if something was lost or stolen: once, struggling with parcels in Regent Street , I dropped my handbag, only to find within an hour that it had been handed in at West End Central's counter. Those police were a constant and comforting presence.

But it was at a literary party that I next met some as potential chums. There were a jovial pair who had worked on the disappearance of Lord Lucan, and the murder that had preceded it, and, as they told me, interviewing the peer's mother had been an interesting experience. Always firmly on the side of her son, she had shaken her head, exasperated, at the idea of murdering a nanny – “In these days, when one simply cannot get staff!”

Many of their anecdotes were unrepeatable, for legal reasons, but I also met a City of London policeman – a variety that was new to me, because I'd never been farther East than Fleet Street.

And I began to learn things about the history of the police force that I'd never known. What I'd always thought was that Sir Robert Peel was the Home Secretary (later Prime Minister) who'd first conceived the idea of such a force and then formed it, which was why policemen were called “bobbies” or “peelers”, and that it was his project alone, welcomed by a grateful law-abiding population and disliked only by criminals.

But it seemed that it wasn't quite like that. To begin at the beginning, as we should, there was Henry Fielding. To me he's best known as the author of “Tom Jones”, but he began by writing plays – such savage political satires a Licensing Act was brought in to control them – and, forced to give up his career as a playwright, he went back to the law (for which he'd been educated), and despite the scandals he wrote of and lived through, in 1748 he was appointed London's Chief Magistrate. Together with his younger half-brother John, in 1749 he formed a small band of detectives known as the Bow Street Runners. (Amazingly, this was the same year in which “Tom Jones” was published.)

The Bow Street Runners have been called London 's first police force, and certainly they have a vital place in its story. But, in addition, the brothers administered justice, often without charge to the desperately poor, and worked in the cause of judicial reform, and to improve prison conditions. Only five years after his appointment, though, Henry Fielding died.

Law and order in the metropolis seems to have been a total mess, when considered from a twentyfirst century perspective. Throughout London , parishes were policed by “watchmen”, but no parish was connected with another, and each had its own personnel, watch house, organisation and methods. The only united force (following on from the Runners) was the Bow Street Horse and Foot Patrol, formed in 1805 in an attempt to deal with the daunting numbers of highway robberies.

You'd imagine, if you shared as I did the popular misconception, that the solitary saviour who responded to this chaos was Robert Peel, but do enough research and you'll find that belief ignores the immense work of a Lord Mayor, Alderman Matthew Wood. He gets the briefest possible Wikipedia mention, but from 1815, when he was first elected, and for the next twentyfive years, he fought to reform the City's policing.

Describing himself as a Radical Reformer, Wood inspected every watch house and examined every man “as to his health and his age” (so many being decrepit or drunk), submitting plan after plan proposing the hiring of patrols with proper rounds, or beats, and at a proper wage. (This last was vital, as the watchmen's pay was so small that they needed to augment it with other occupations, and freely admitted ignoring offences which might necessitate appearing in court and losing a day's work elsewhere.)

What repeatedly foiled Wood's plans, and bills introduced in Parliament before his time, was the (to us extraordinary) resistance to relinquish any rights to a paid, London-wide force. If we think Members of Parliament may be a bit dodgy in our time, a quick look at what they were like in the late eighteenth and early nineteen centuries is enough to convince us the present incumbents are saints.

One of the problems was that so few had the power to elect so many – less than 6,000 voters could elect 254 members, and the corruption in Parliament itself was rife. What was actually going on was unrecognisable as a democracy: in the country as a whole there were less than forty democratically controlled boroughs.

And in London the wealthy and powerful City was the biggest stumbling block to the formation of a capital-wide, unified force. This was precisely why a bill of 1785 “for the further Prevention of Crimes and for the more speedy Detection and Punishment of Offenders against the Peace in the Cities of London and Westminster , the Borough of Southwark and certain parts adjacent to them” had foundered. The bill was regarded by the City as a threat and “utterly subversive not only of the Chartered Rights of the City of London but to the constitutional liberties of all his Majesty's subjects”.

Incredibly, that attitude prevailed for the next thirty years, in the face of an ever-increasing crime rate and all the problems Matthew Wood was later so painstakingly to uncover. Committees in 1812, 1818, 1822 and 1828 had all been strongly in favour of police reform, but all had come to nothing because of the NIMBY attitude towards a London-wide force.

Robert Peel, Home Secretary since 1822 and Chairman of that year's Committee, became convinced that the only way to get round the immensely powerful City was to allow it autonomy – the new Metropolitan Police were not to have jurisdiction over the wealthy, touchy square mile. The bill he introduced in 1829 “for the Improvement of the Police of the Metropolis” passed into law.

But not without its subsequent critics: the fact that the City had been left alone was a matter, for some, of bitter resentment, because it was believed that criminals would simply run there for asylum. Impervious, those with the power to do so made plans to ensure perpetual isolation from the hoi-polloi controlling crime in the rest of the capital: in 1839 The City of London Police Act enshrined in law their right to their own force as an independent body, and staved off permanently any attempt to merge it with the Met.

Go to an online map these days, and you'll still see their tiny red-coloured area, surrounded by the mass of the rest of London . The contrast fascinates me. (Oh, and by the way, there's a City of London Police Museum at 37 Wood Street, small – consisting of only one room – but extremely interesting and well worth a visit, especially as entry is free.)

But back in 1829, whatever Peel's regrets over the concession he'd had to make (and apparently he did later express some), the Metropolitan Police had at last been formed and its uniformed men were on the streets. Bow Street is famous as one of its first stations in 1829, but Vine Street was another, opened in the same year, and said to have been the busiest in the world. Vine Street, after all, served the West End and Soho.

Tucked away in a tiny turning behind and between Regent Street and Piccadilly, for almost a century and a half victims and criminals alike visited it. This was the station to which the Marquess of Queensbury was taken, when he libelled Oscar Wilde: the results were to ring round England.

And, during the First World , this was the station to which my mother went, very afraid. My grandmother had been born abroad, like so many Soho residents, and took her youngest little girl with her when she had to report regularly, as an alien: the results of this only rang round our family, but my mother never forgot the experience.

In Savile Row, the modern West End Central station was designed and erected between 1939 and 1940 by Sir John Burnet, Tait and Lorne, in collaboration with the Chief Architect of the Metropolitan Police, G.M. Trench. And after all their work, it was very soon damaged by a bombing raid, in September, 1940. A dull but reassuring great block of a building, it was supposed to take over completely from Vine Street , and not long afterwards that minute turning was renamed Piccadilly Place . But shortage of space in Savile Row's offices meant that the old station was reopened as late as 197l, and Piccadilly Place became Vine Street once more, so that the station could have back its original name. Although the station has now finally been closed, Westminster City Council has stopped playing all-change with the street sign, and Vine Street it remains.

In Soho , though, there's no end in sight to the changes we continue to experience.

Take Trenchard House, previously described by British History Online as the best of the buildings in its section of Broadwick Street, designed by Stanley G. Livock and built between 1938 and 40 as a police hostel, with what were regarded at the time as almost sensationally good facilities: accommodation consisted of single rooms, with only showers and bathrooms being shared, and amongst the amenities were catering, a bar, squash courts, a gymnasium, and even laundry provision. If you ferret online, you'll find a touching photograph taken there of a rather gaunt policeman, in his shirt sleeves, polishing his belt.

But online is the only place it exists now. None of us in Soho knew we could lose it, but we did. Just as we lost our local hospital, the Middlesex in Mortimer Street , Fitzrovia, with its murals and central garden; just as we very nearly lost Marshall Street Swimming Baths. And the reason always comes down to the same thing: they occupy that priceless commodity, West End land.

During the 1990s the policemen were decanted from Trenchard House, until it was finally closed in 1999, ostensibly unfit for purpose. By that time it almost was, but surely it would be refurbished – that was all it needed? No, it stood empty, and if you want an interesting coincidence, the historic Marshall Street Swimming Baths (just around the corner from Broadwick Street) had already been closed in 1997, and left to become ever more derelict, as Westminster City Council rubbed its hands at the size of the plot and what they could sell it for.

In that they were foiled: the fact that it was Grade II listed, petitions, celebrities rallying to the support of local residents, nothing swayed the Council until it was established that the land, purchased and designated in the nineteenth century, could not be used for anything but a “wash house” or its equivalent. The delay meant that the amount of renovation necessary had become colossal, and it was thirteen years after closure that the Baths finally reopened in 2010.

But no such historic protection came to the rescue of Trenchard House. Its sale was announced in 2004, but what was actually going to happen to it remained uncertain. The Council finally announced having granted permission to demolish it in 2012 – somewhat belatedly, as we'd already been circularised about its redevelopment in 2011, and the purchasers and plans involved hadn't changed. After that it took an incredibly long time to knock down its supposedly frail walls, but in 2013 diggers at last began scooping its innards out, revealing just how much space it had occupied, and how solidly it had been built. The sight was more than unpleasant: for many of us it was heartbreaking.

The police who used to live amongst us, who were our neighbours, were gone; and on the other side of Oxford Street something very similar happened to other crucial residents. In 2012 “Fitzrovia News” started reporting that all over the area dozens of hospital staff were being evicted as property developers wanted vacant possession of their flats. Doctors and nurses who, some for ten years and more, had worked shifts at nearby hospitals, discovered that their landlord (the charitable arm of the very hospital they worked for) had sold off their homes.

The £59 million project that is to replace Trenchard House will include, it is promised, a large proportion of “affordable flats”. But as I write this it is known that you need an income of at least £100,000 a year before you can afford an “affordable home” – and that figure is rising every second. By the time the development's finished, what chance is there that a displaced nurse will be able to move in, or a young uniformed constable?

The years when the police were a far less common sight coincided with an upsurge in drug-dealing that affected everybody. In a taxi, being brought home on a sunny afternoon, I wouldn't hear whom the driver had last had in his cab but what he'd seen openly going on as he drove through Soho.

When a homeless girl disappeared from her long-established place near our building, I asked a “Big Issue” seller if he knew what had happened to her, and he told me that she was a prostitute now – “It's to pay for the drugs,” he told me. “She was never into that, but they're everywhere on the streets.”

And not just on the streets – in the residents' flats. To the horror of my friends and acquaintances, they found themselves next door to crack houses and dealers. And I discovered just what that can be like when I had to call the police because a man set up home on my doormat at midnight, and explained to the officers who turned up, thankfully quickly, that he was waiting for his heroin – spelled both ways, in his eyes, because his dealer was a woman who'd just moved into a flat on my floor but didn't have the comfort of a mat to sleep on.

I don't know what we'd have done without the Met Safer Neighbourhood Team which had recently been established at an office right in the middle of Soho , in Peter Street , and all of whose members we got to know by name. Of course 999 remained the number to ring in an emergency, but if you wanted to talk about any issues that alarmed you, you could do so – there was a telephone number for the unit, an email address, you could make an appointment to visit it, and if you couldn't get to them, they'd come to you.

With addicts ringing our entry phones and hammering on our doors as they tried to find the lady with the supplies, our lives were nightmarish. It was nothing to see the woman concerned strolling around the landing smoking crack. Many of us made statements, and when a court case was imminent, officers in a van parked outside our building, for our protection. The dealer was evicted – swiftly, as her tenancy was very new and still probationary.

But it was far from the last event of the kind. A lull, and then someone else began dealing, picking up the trade with the addicts whose supply had been cut off. And this time it took much longer not for the police to deal with the problem, but the lawyers. Meanwhile, a crack house in a block of flats around the corner from our building was triumphantly closed, only for another to open.

What was happening was far different and far more frightening than anything in the old days when Soho was known for pornography and vice. Then there'd been a complete division between those involved in the trade and the rest of us, and one side never bothered the other. Now we weren't just being bothered, we were being driven out of our minds.

But the Team were in amongst us, faces we recognised, just as we had in the past. And a slow, painstaking clean-up began to succeed at last. A cannabis factory we hadn't even known existed was found and closed down, patrols were sent out to vulnerable places, like our cul de sac, making us safer. And most significant of all, a street which had once been the site of a fruit and vegetable market was dealt with. Having become over time a terrifying gauntlet so notorious that crack cocaine dealers commuted to it to make sensational profits, it was now cleared up: the “Evening Standard” reported on the night when three days of operations in Soho culminated in sixty officers arresting “primary dealers” in Rupert Street .

By then, one of my neighbours and I had begun meeting a sergeant from the Soho Team occasionally for coffee, and he told us he and his colleagues regarded what had been done about Rupert Street as the success they were happiest about and most proud of.

We couldn't foresee what was to happen, not as a riposte from criminal heavies, but as part of a Government's plan. Who could have envisaged cuts to the police budget so drastic “The Telegraph” would report in 2012 on the danger to public safety, as 7,000 officers' jobs had been lost already, with far worse to come, or that the same newspaper would carry a warning in 2013 from the president of the Police Superintendents' Association that Neighbourhood policing, a core function of the force in this country, was at risk from the cuts.

Nobody believes an exemption will be made for Soho , where a return to the situation as it was ten years ago is absolutely dreaded. The lease on the office in Peter Street has only a year to run, and no-one knows what will happen to our Safer Neighbourhood Team after that.

“The Telegraph” isn't alone in reporting concerns that bobbies on the streets may disappear: “The Independent”, in 2013, has featured the news that five forces will struggle after the anticipated loss of nearly 32,000 jobs across England and Wales .

There was a time when milkmen were to be seen delivering their bottles to every doorstep in Britain; will the copper on his beat vanish from our streets as inexorably as the milkman and his cart did? It looks horribly likely. And make no mistake, it's a terrible prospect.

Some reading this may think I have a rosy-tinted view of the police, and am blind to the failures, corruption and racism which we seem to hear of almost daily. But nobody who remembers the Met in the 'sixties can have any illusions. The 'sixties, did I say? Go back more than a century, and you'll find Peel's force was imperfect from its beginning, and that many of the watch men who preceded the bobbies were dissolute beyond belief.

My attitude is best summed up by two comments – neither my own. One is what was said by the famous Methodist public speaker, Donald Soper, when heckled about the scandalous faults of the clergy: he answered that, regrettably, when it came to recruitment the church had only the laity to draw on,

And another quote that I believe relevant is what the critic Milton Shulman said of our television – “it's the least worst in the world”.

So, no, I don't think for one moment that the police are perfect, but neither are the public from whom they are recruited. And the least worst in the world – well, that's about right.

And I don't want to lose any more of them. Or return to a pre-Peel chaos. Let's just hope we don't.

© Alida Baxter

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