Cops and Robbers

• 5 Ford vans and 4 Warwick tricars as despatch vans.

• 2 Austins and 1 Arrol-Johnston as ambulances.

• 1 Austin 15hp Landaulet, 1 Renault 11·٣hp and 1 Crossley 20hp Open Tourer, to be used as needed.

On 21 February 1920, The Autocar reported that ‘the London Police are to be provided with motor cars for controlling traffic, the object being to speed up traffic generally and the confining of slow-moving vehicles to the kerb’, where one has to wonder if in London’s narrow streets they would get in the way and create bottlenecks … That statement, though, is important because it’s the first example I’ve seen of the essential dichotomy of traffic policing in the UK. The police have a dual role, to keep traffic flowing and to ensure the safety of all, whether they be pedestrians or motorists. That statement, which was printed in the magazine but obviously comes from a government announcement, shows that commerce and the free movement of the population were still, at this point, being thought of as the pre-eminent problems, and that accidents were just a sad but inevitable consequence. The opposite is, correctly, very much the case today.

The car that the Met adopted for this role was the Bean 11.9hp, which had won out after extensive tests of over 10,000 miles, and chosen because it was the most suitable and affordable. The Met ordered at least four of these cars, probably the largest single order for police cars made in the UK at that time. The force remained loyal to Bean throughout the early 1920s and had at least three other larger examples, plus two or three vans. This was absolutely the beginning of mass motor-car use by the police, and statistically this matches the wider population’s adoption of the car. In 1919 there were 109,705 private cars in the UK, and by 1924 this was 482,356. By 1930 it was 1,075,081 and by 1939 it had just been pushed to over two million. However, the war surplus commercials that were being sold off by the government at least doubled the early 1920s’ figure, although reliable statistics are harder to find on that.

Bean 11.9hp: the UK’s first Traffic car

The Bean 11.9hp was an adaptation of an Edwardian pre-war car (it seems even then that the police purchasers were conservative of mind and favoured tried-and-tested technology) called the Perry, which had been designed by Tom Conroy from Willys-Overland and launched in 1914. It’s believed that around 300 were made before World War I broke out, which curtailed production at Perry’s small facility in Birmingham. The design was purchased by Bean Cars from Dudley, just outside Birmingham, in 1919, apparently for around £15,000, which was quite a sum in 1919. They got a separate chassis of unusual strength for the period, in which was mounted an inline 4-cylinder side-valve engine of 1796cc, mated to a 3-speed gearbox. It cost around £400, nearly twice the price of a Ford Model T. However, Ford were not considered British, despite building 46,362 Model Ts at their plant at Trafford Park, Manchester, in 1920 alone.

The Bean cars’ story is a fascinating tale of ‘what might have been’, and it should have succeeded. The tale begins in 1822, when the splendidly named Absolom Harper founded the iron foundry A. Harper & Sons, Dudley. George Bean married Absolom’s granddaughter in ١٩٠١, became the company’s principal shareholder and expanded the company. They entered the car market in 1919 with a new factory built on what was then a large-scale production model by a company with a reputation for being good engineers. They had, correctly, identified that the motor industry was a good way to make money and was about to boom, so they recruited a sales manager from Austin, Mr B.G. Banks. They planned 2,000 cars for 1919 (which was a lot then for a British manufacturer starting out), 10,000 by 1921, and expansion thereafter, and they had good financial and technical backing and a link with large sales group BMTC. The Harper Bean group was capitalised at an enormous, for the era, £6 million and equipped its former munitions shops in Tipton for assembly and its former shell building shop at Dudley for bodywork. They had moving track assembly lines and in July 1920 produced 505 cars. However, financial chaos ensued and the car soon became outdated in comparison to Morris’s offerings, although Bean did produce new and larger models. They were rescued from bankruptcy in 1926 by Hadfields of Sheffield and eventually ceased making cars in 1929, their dream of being Britain’s biggest car maker shattered by Morris, Austin and Ford of America, although the firm lived on as a component supplier. Bean did build one last car in 1936, the enormous ‘Thunderbolt’, which was powered by two Rolls-Royce V12, 36.5-litre engines, each delivering 2,350bhp, and weighing 7 tons. Captain George Eyston used it to break the land speed record three times; his final record of 357.5mph was set in September 1938.

Like most of the Midland’s motor industry, Bean eventually became part of British Leyland and began to cast engine blocks, axle cases, etc. In 1988 Beans Engineering became freshly privatised and bought Reliant … which went bust in 1995, taking Beans with them. The Tipton factory was purchased by the German engineering group Eisenwerk Brühl, who invested heavily and at their height made 40,000 tons of cylinder blocks yearly. However, the business suffered from financial problems because the German group had not managed to recoup the investment and left the company in debt. For a second time, the management team purchased the business, which then became Ferrotech. By then one of the most modern and efficient foundries in Europe, the new business became a large supplier of castings to MG Rover, but when they went into administration in 2005, Ferrotech failed to find replacement work and the factory closed its doors for the last time in August 2005. Thus ended the story of heavy industry on this site.

The police both in and out of London benefited from those ex-war office commercials, too. In 1919, the Metropolitan Police was split up into four detective areas and each division was allocated two ex-Royal Flying Corps Crossley Tenders, a design that would now be called a pick-up. These are again significant because they were the first vehicles allocated to do real detection and arrest work, rather than just being used to transport people or equipment between different police facilities, although in my head Crossley Tender will always be the ‘Lesney Model of Yesteryear’ that I was fascinated by as a kid and is a model vehicle that I still own now.

Crossley Tender – the first proper police cars were pick-up trucks!

Crossley of Manchester are actually one of the oldest names in the British motor industry and were the first company to make a four-stroke internal combustion engine in the UK. Amazingly, they were making units under licence from Otto and Langen of Deutz in the early 1860s, some years before the ‘car’ was invented.

Crossley came to car manufacture in a slightly circuitous way. Having become well known for the quality of their engines and other engineering products, early pioneer car dealers Charles Jarrott and William Letts asked them to make a high-quality British car to address a perceived gap in the market. Ironically, the first Crossley, which was announced in 1904, actually used mainly Belgian and French components which Crossley assembled. It was well received, however, and the firm expanded their car-making while Jarrott publicised the marque by making a record-breaking drive from London to Monte Carlo in 37.5 hours, a record that was broken by C.S. Rolls only a month later using one of his own 20hp Rolls-Royce Tourist Trophy models. Wonderfully, Jarrott complained that Rolls had done this by breaking speed limits that he had obeyed!

The legendary 20hp series was launched in 1908 and remained in production until 1925, albeit gradually modified, rather in the way that Porsche evolved the design of the air-cooled 911, becoming the 20/25 in 1912 and the 25/30 in early 1919. Designed by A.W. Reeves, it was launched as a fully equipped short-chassis touring car for £495 (in an era when coachbuilding was still common on larger cars especially) and featured a side-valve 4-cylinder engine of 4531cc and a 4-speed gearbox.

The War Office purchased a batch of six 20hp Tourers and were impressed enough to think about ordering more with differing body styles. By the time World War I broke out, the nascent RFC had around 60 (figures vary slightly), and by the time the war finished, 6000! Any childhood fans of Biggles’ Great War adventures will recognise this. In all, well over 10,000 Crossleys of all types were used by the military in World War I as staff cars, ambulances, RFC Tenders and vans. Most of these were sold off cheaply when hostilities ceased and, having contributed greatly to the war effort, then contributed to the commercial motorisation of Britain as traders abandoned horses for ex-War Office Crossleys of one sort or another. This of course meant that the examples used by the Met blended in, in a similar way to how a Ford Transit would today. So successful and highly regarded was the basic design that Crossley bought back a few, especially staff cars, and refurbished them to 25/30 specification. They continued this operation until 1925, alongside production of new examples which finished in the same year.

Unfortunately, Crossley never built a car that captured either the government’s or the public’s imagination in the same way again and eventually ceased making cars altogether in 1937. They continued to make trucks, though, and were acquired by the Associated Commercial Vehicles Group, better known as AEC, in 1948, who acquired Maudslay at the same time. The Crossley name faded away in 1956 and eventually became part of the British Leyland melting pot. It was a sad end for the marque that had been the backbone of the British military’s move to motorisation during World War I and subsequently provided the UK’s earliest police patrol and response vehicles. Rest in peace, Crossley.

The Crossley also played its part in the formation of the Flying Squad, formed in October 1919 after a post-war crime surge; it became known as ‘Sweeney Todd’ in rhyming slang quite quickly, then just Sweeney, and initially consisted of just 12 officers. Manchester City Police followed London’s lead in forming what was originally called a ‘Mobile Patrol Experiment’ and patrols were made using a horse-drawn carriage that had been borrowed from a railway company. However, it was soon re-organised and issued with Crossley Tenders, the first vehicles used in Britain for actual police work rather than just moving things and people between police facilities. The Crossleys were heavy and fairly simple beasts that were apparently quite easy to skid in wet weather, but they did provide a good basis for patient underworld observational work and were used successfully in this role. They were much loved by the officers who used them because they were reliable and capable workhorses. Most were fitted with van-type backs, or, at the very least, a canvas tilt. They were actually liveried at times with false trade names to appear as delivery vehicles or furniture removal vans to aid their undercover work, the first time this was ever done in the UK and probably even around the world. These disguises were easy to believe because, as discussed, war-surplus vehicles were very common in the early 1920s, although apparently it was quite some while before most criminals cottoned on to the fact that the police also owned some of these vehicles. However, by the mid-1920s these vehicles had become outmoded and had begun to be replaced.

By May 1926, just as the TUC called a General Strike that plunged the country and the government into conflict with the unions, the Met’s fleet consisted of 202 cars:

• 6 Austin saloons, used by the Commissioner and his assistants.

• 2 Austin ambulances.

• 6 Bean saloons, used by HQ personnel.

• 5 Bean saloons, used by CID.

• 4 Bean saloons, used by District Chief Constables.

• 12 Bean saloons, used by Superintendents in outer areas of the Met’s jurisdiction.

• 4 Bean saloons, used as spares by whoever needed them.

• 18 Bean vans, used on inner and outer dispatch services.

• 4 Bean vans, used for accumulator service.

• 6 Bean vans, used as spares by whoever needed them.

• 17 Tilling Stevens, used as prison vans.

• 1 Dennis, used as a prison van.

• 52 Crossley Tenders for many and varied uses from Flying Squad to radio testing and everything in between

• 41 Triumph Solos and Combinations, used by sub-divisional and Detective Inspectors for patrolling.

• 24 Chater-Lea Combinations, used by sub-divisional Inspectors and Inspectors for patrolling.

And that is the last list of cars you will see in this book – you’re welcome!

The General Strike is important in the history of the police car because it marked the very beginnings of police officers being moved around to deal with troubles, something I became all too familiar with in my time as a police (and especially PSU/Riot) officer. This particular role depended on motorised transport to get officers to scenes quickly, and the lack of this sort of capability within various UK police forces was soon exposed nationally to both the government and media. From this time on, policing fleets got bigger and bigger across the UK. At the early stages of researching this book we did look at trying to come up with a definitive list of cars that the police have used, but we gave up quite quickly, simply because it encompasses pretty much everything, with local forces sourcing cars individually and in some cases buying used as well as new, especially immediately after World War II. No records exist for many forces, and in the early days local philanthropic lords of the manor would sometimes even loan cars to the police as a gesture of public spirit, which meant that police officers were sometimes seen in the most unlikely of vehicles, from station wagons to Rolls-Royces. I can’t imagine a member of the public today lending their car to the police to borrow. I wouldn’t!

Car registration

The Roads Act 1920 had established the Road Fund licence and introduced tax discs to windscreens. This scheme was run by local councils, which meant it was fairly easy to register a car with a number plate that was also being used elsewhere because there was no central list of vehicles at this stage. The criminal fraternity exploited this regularly (as I discussed on the Channel 4 show The Lost Lotus, following my restoration of a mysterious Lotus Elite); a UK-wide system of checks was not properly introduced until the DVLA started to computerise information in the mid-seventies. This legislation, and consequent government revenue, was needed though, because by 1930 vehicle numbers had risen to a million (when the UK population was around 45 million, around 20 million less than it is as I write this book in 2018), but drivers were not educated in how to handle their cars in terms of etiquette, skill or plain common sense. Road deaths and casualties were rising alarmingly, and while the prevailing attitude was a feeling that ‘one took that risk if one drove’, the government felt they had to do something. Cars in this period were improving rapidly as well, getting cheaper and faster every year, with better handling and brakes. I’ve driven vintage cars (can I just say, vintage actually has an official meaning in the car world, referring to cars from post-1918 and up to 1930. Everything seems to be described as vintage these days, from Mk1 Escorts to 60s plastic handbags. Gosh, I sound like my dad!) and while they may seem, to modern eyes, very heavy to drive and possessing very poor brakes, they are much more usable than their pre-Great War cousins. It’s quite possible to cruise at motorway speeds in the larger-engined vintage cars (remember vintage also encompasses Austin 7s and similar economy cars, but somehow the term ‘vintage car’ produces a picture of a Bentley in the mind’s eye, or is that just me?) and they have 4-wheel brakes which, if properly adjusted and maintained, can actually stop a car reasonably well.

This increase in the performance of cars (and, perhaps perversely, the improved brakes as well, for humans will often go faster in a car that has good brakes! Indeed, legendary designer Alec Issigonis has been cited as saying ‘putting a dagger on the steering column would lead to a great improvement in driving standards’ and he was only half joking) led to the 20mph speed limit being so widely ignored as to be laughable, and the Road Traffic Act 1930 effectively removed speed limits, which caused much public debate. However, in short this was done because the speed limits then were just not enforceable and had become a joke. In fact, it was stated in Parliament in 1931 that, ‘the reason why the speed limit was abolished was not that anybody thought the abolition would tend to the greater security of foot passengers, but that the existing speed limit was so universally disobeyed that its maintenance brought the law into contempt’. So many people were breaking the speed limit that the police could not cope and the government dealt with this not by increasing the police’s budget or improving the equipment at their disposal, but by getting rid of the law! The police had realised the situation was untenable and had by then been lobbying politicians to deal with this unenforceable law, and, certainly in the post World War I era, enforcing it with a light touch – code for often not enforcing it at all because they simply did not have the manpower to do so, although officers seeing driving they considered reckless or dangerous certainly did intervene, at their discretion …

What the government did was bring in the Road Traffic Act 1930, the first paragraph of which read:

‘An Act to make provision for the regulation of traffic on roads and of motor vehicles and otherwise with respect to roads and vehicles thereon, to make provision for the protection of third parties against risks arising out of the use of motor vehicles and in connection with such protection to amend the Assurance Companies Act, 1909, to amend the law with respect to the powers of local authorities to provide public service vehicles, and for other purposes connected with the matters aforesaid.’

[1 August 1930.]

The Act required all police forces to institute motor patrols to improve driving behaviour by example, advice and ultimately legal sanctions and prosecution. There was a budget for this which was initially quite small, and because of this motorcycle combinations were often the chosen vehicle for such patrols. However, accidents proved this to be an unwise choice and they were quickly phased out of mass use in favour of cars. Some three-wheelers, especially the BSA, which, like the Morgan had two wheelers, at the front and was thus reasonably stable, were quite popular in various police forces for a short while after they were launched in 1929, until four-wheel cars came down to their price point and higher speeds made officers ‘nervous’. These patrols naturally became engaged in other activities – preventing crime and dealing with emergency situations – and the line of the responsibilities became blurred. Judged on immediate results, the Act has to be looked at as a failure, for Britain’s worst ever year for road casualties was 1934 when there were 7,343 deaths and 231,603 injuries recorded. However, in hindsight it was actually a very far-sighted and prescient piece of legislation that built on Britain’s reputation for policing by consent and sought to educate the public into safer behaviour and only punished them if they really refused to come into line. I think it’s important here to underline just how different the prevailing attitude to risk was in this era compared to what is, today, sometimes disparagingly called our health and safety nonsense. These modern regulations are a good thing, despite the press they sometimes get, because they actually make us think about risks and encourage us to take steps to minimise them – that can be anything from making sure your car has good brakes and tyres to putting your seatbelt on. In the 1930s these sensible steps evoked a society-wide mocking and were largely seen as not making any difference; but hey, smoking was good for you then as well …

Health and safety in racing

Oddly, motorsport has a very important role in changing this attitude and creating society-wide acceptance of the concept of risk management that gained social traction during the 1970s. Even in the 1960s, when Jackie Stewart started seriously to question why racetracks had trees on the side that would kill you if you skidded off and hit one, he was greeted by derisory calls of ‘coward’ from drivers and racing journalists alike, who, having recently fought in a war, even said things like ‘this is safe, at least no one is shooting at us’. Jackie had thought it through, though; he was getting paid for his skill and courage, not to take what he quite rightly considered to be stupid pointless risks. After all, the racing and skill needed were the same whether the circuit had safe (ish) barriers or very dangerous trees. Jackie blew every other driver away on a wet Nürburgring and won three World Championships, so no one could credibly call him a coward, but it took a long time for that seemingly utterly sensible piece of thinking to become the societal norm. Jackie undoubtedly has a place in the history books for his racing achievements as one of the greats; however, it’s his innovative thinking, which has became so mainstream as to seem obvious now but was revolutionary in the 1960s, and his tireless work on safety that are by far his biggest contributions to both motor sport and the world as a whole. His work had a massive impact on us all in one way or another. However, it’s arguable that the government’s determination to save us from ourselves when it came to motoring started with the Road Traffic Act 1930, and you could, thus, call it the very glimmer of health and safety culture.

First ever driving tests

Like so many other motoring firsts, the first ever driving test was taken in France, under the Paris Police Ordinance of 14 August 1893. It was introduced on a voluntary basis in Britain on 13 March 1935 but did not become official in Great Britain until 1 April 1935, and was not compulsory until 1 June 1935. The first driving test pass certificate in the UK was awarded on 16 March 1935 to the rather ironically named Mr R.E.L. Beere of Kensington.

As the Road Traffic Act came into effect, the UK police were becoming a motorised force and one major development was in its fledgling stages, which would totally change policing and the way in which the police used vehicles. The technology was called … radio.

Radio was first used by the British police in 1923. Again, the Crossleys enter our story here because the very first radio experiments were conducted using these cars with hilariously large bedstead-type aerials fitted. Nottingham and Lancashire Police were also at the forefront of this, only a year after the Met.

The introduction of police boxes had shown that communication was key to keeping pace with faster society, so it was logical that the next move should be radio. However, in the 1920s talking radio was not yet available; instead, police vehicles used Morse code radio telegraph. There were plenty of (mainly) men around in this era who understood this because it had been taught in the military, so that was the basis of the system fitted to cars. Its reflection of the change in health and safety culture is very evident. Today you are, quite rightly, not allowed to drive even an automatic car with a small mobile phone. These police drivers were expected to drive a car with a crash gearbox while tapping out a Morse code message, listening and translating while wearing a headset. The job of radio operator soon became the norm as the equipment was moved to the back seat.