Welsh Journals

impressive array of documentation. Throughout, her dramatically narrated story and penetrating analysis are sustained by important new evidence from both the public records and provincial archives. The crucial process which Dr. Morgan has chosen to highlight is the one that saw a nineteenth-century tradition of policing, in which local control was vital and Home Office direction largely non-existent, give way by the end of the period under discussion to what was in everything but name a national police-force largely financed and totally controlled by the Home Office. Her sources allow her, quite effortlessly, to prove her important argument that it was industrial unrest which almost entirely accounted for this quite essential development in the evolution of the modem British state. But what is even more fascinating in her account is the way in which at every stage she examines the various other possibilities that were considered by politicians and even more by those highly influential civil servants like Sir Edward Troup and Sir John Anderson, who are clearly shown here to be the real architects of our contemporary domestic law and order arrangements. As industrial tension mounted, so there appeared to be a stronger case for the use of troops to quell disorder. In all probability stung by the failure of the Home Office to protect strike-breakers in the very important strike at Houlder Brothers, Newport, in 1910, Churchill proceeded in 1911 to suspend Army Regulations so as to by-pass local authorities in his attempt to crush the national rail strike. But as police forces themselves became more effective, so more cautious politicians were able to move away from this precedent of suppression by military occupation. Dr. Morgan is able to show that in the years of industrial crisis that followed the first world war it was always the police rather than the military who played the decisive role in opposing strikers and confronting demonstrators. Effective policing necessarily became dependent on the recruitment of large numbers of special constables. At times of real crisis there tended to be a rather frantic recruiting of civilian volunteers into various ad hoc agencies, but at every stage the notion of a permanent citizen guard was decisively (and one can only say mercifully) rejected. Whenever the police became caught up in labour unrest, much of the tension grew out of differing interpretations of the law with regard to picketing and intimidation. From the Right there were demands for reform, but nothing was done mainly because the police themselves were largely content to rely on the ordinary criminal law. And so it was, with an increasingly efficient and centrally controlled police force, that Britain came through this era of industrial tension. It was a police force that very effectively limited the occurrence of civil disorder in the country as a whole and was frequently able to adopt quite bold measures, such as the banning of marches and meetings, confrontation with demonstrations and the arrest of militants, as it attempted to protect property and the rights of non-strikers. As she considers her chosen period and especially as she makes the comparison with other countries, Dr. Morgan comes to the conclusion that Britain had 'coped reasonably well' and that its record was 'reasonably humane'. There are other people, and this reviewer is amongst them, who would be tempted to be a little more enthusiastic about the British record