Some years ago, I became aware that Timothy Cavanagh had written a memoir called Scotland Yard Past and Present in which he documented his life as a ‘peeler’, a Victorian nickname for a policeman, writes Stephen Bourne …
The term ‘peeler’ was inspired by Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary who created the Metropolitan Police Service in 1829.
Cavanagh’s memoir was published in 1893, some years after he had retired, but the only copy I could find was in the British Library. With some detective work, I recently managed to acquire a rare first edition for just £17.
Reading Cavanagh’s descriptions of his life as a ‘peeler’ brought to mind some of the scenes in the novels of Charles Dickens.
When Cavanagh joined the Metropolitan Police in 1855, and began his career as a police constable, he was sent to work in one of the poorest areas of London. At the age of nineteen, Cavanagh was posted to Stone’s End Police Station in the Borough. This was one of the most notorious and poverty-stricken parts of Southwark. This was in an area depicted in several of Dickens’s novels.
The police station, which opened in 1844, was situated in Revel’s Row, under the walls of the Queen’s Bench Prison. This was near the junction of the present Borough Road and Borough High Street.
In Revel’s Row, most of the houses adjoining the police station were brothels. In Dickens’s 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby, it is described as a row of “mean and not over-cleanly houses.” A short distance away Marshalsea Prison had existed in Borough High Street until 1842. It was well known to Dickens from his own childhood, his father was imprisoned there for a short time, and he featured it in Little Dorrit.
Five years prior to Cavanagh joining the police, Dickens witnessed the horror of a public hanging at the nearby County Gaol in Horsemonger Lane (now Harper Road).
Cavanagh was born in Hammersmith on 21st April 1836 to Irish parents, Michaelis and Mariae. He was christened Timotheus. His father was a shoemaker from Limerick.
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Cavanagh left his job as a warehouse clerk to join the Metropolitan Police in March 1855, the time of the Crimean War. After training, he presented himself for duty at Stone’s End Police Station in ‘M’ Division (Southwark) on 25th June 1855. The dormitory, which he shared with other constables, looked into the station yard where a Black Maria (the prison van) and the superintendent’s horse were kept. Having familiarised himself with the station, Cavanagh commenced his first night shift at 9pm.
He said: “I felt a bit curious and anxious as to how I should get through the night…My beat was on one side of Union Street, and included some of the worst slums in the Borough.”
Cavanagh recalled that there was one street he didn’t like the look of at all, “neither were the odours emanating from it at all agreeable. However, police duty is police duty, and likes and dislikes had to be borne equally.” This was Ewer Street, close to Union Street and Cavanagh said that it was inhabited at the time “by the lowest type of thieves and prostitutes, with a few Borough Market porters thrown in.”
Cavanagh described some of the inhabitants of his beat as “Poor squalid creatures, men and women saturated up to the neck with what was termed gin…the ribaldry, horseplay, was something appalling. Men and women skull-dragging each other all over the place; pokers, flat-irons, bellows in free use everywhere. Women pulling the hair out by the roots from others. Shrieks of Murder, Police, Fire, Robbery filled the air.”
However, young Cavanagh was advised by one of the locals not to intervene. “It will be all over in a minute,” he said and it was. Cavanagh wrote: “He was right; the row collapsed as suddenly as it commenced.” And he added: “I now began to feel I was somebody. Yes, I was a policeman!”
Towards the end of Cavanagh’s first night shift he discovered huddled in a doorway “a poor wretched unfortunate in a helpless state from drink and, apparently starvation. I had never met with such a human mass of wretchedness and filth.”
After about half-an-hour’s tugging and dragging he managed to get her to Stone’s End and into a cell, but “I couldn’t get that woman out of my mind. She seemed to haunt me. I was only nineteen years of age, and being of a very sensitive nature I wondered how it was possible for any poor creature to get to such a deplorable state of degradation.”
Cavanagh described the cells at Stone’s End which were about twelve feet by six: “I had to put a dozen women, and in another of the same size an equal number of men. The ventilation of these cells consisted of a small grating near the ceiling and an opening in the door six inches by ten, through which a small can of water could be passed. There was only one place of convenience in each cell, and this had to be made use of by all its occupants in the presence of each other. Nothing more disgusting, nothing more revolting could possibly be imagined. It was simply sickening. It was, to me, really heart-breaking.”
Following his first night on duty, he wrote: “I was only too glad to get to the station yard, and to hear from the inspector the welcomed word, dismissed.”
On a lighter note, Cavanagh described some of the antics or ‘skylarking’ of some of the forty police officers (all single men) who were stationed at Stone’s End. In his memoir Cavanagh described the time they became boisterous and threw eggs at each other in the station kitchen.
“The uproar was so great,” he said, “that nothing could be heard in the neighbouring Police Court.”
He added: “Life in a police station would be very dull indeed if it were not for an occasional bit of by-play. We all know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…when a bit of larking (of course within proper bounds) is put a stop to among the single men in a Section House, the prestige of the service is sure to suffer. You can’t stop it.”
In 1857 Cavanagh was posted to a police station in Whitehall and promoted to Sergeant. In 1860, at the early age of twenty-four, he was promoted to Inspector.
In his memoir, Cavanagh says that his health ‘broke down’ in 1869. It has to be assumed that he retired from the force because in the 1871 census he entered his profession as ‘lodging house keeper.’ He had married in 1859 and had several children.
In 1867 it was decided that a new police station was needed at Stone’s End and in January 1868 premises were obtained in nearby Borough High Street. This is the site of today’s Southwark Police Station, which was built in 1940.
As for Cavanagh, he died at the age of 60 on 12th September 1896 in the Royal Portsmouth Hospital. We are thankful that he left an historical document which gives us a rare first-hand insight into the day to day life of a policeman in the Victorian era.
