The Night Watchmen

I don’t think I would have made a worthwhile night watchman. I like the idea of it, obviously: a lantern, a long coat, empty streets and everybody else tucked away indoors while I wander about keeping an eye on things.

It sounds lovely, right up until about ten minutes into my first shift when I hear something move down an alleyway. At that point, sayonara, au revoir, catch ya. The streets are on their own.

Long before police officers patrolled them, however, somebody had to be out there.

BEFORE THERE WERE POLICE

The idea of a night watch goes much further back than the Georgian and Victorian streets we probably picture. In medieval England, keeping the peace was not the job of a professional police force because there was no professional police force. Communities themselves were expected to take part.

The Statute of Winchester of 1285 formalised an older system known as watch and ward, and the detail is surprisingly specific. Between Ascension Day and Michaelmas, cities were expected to place six men at each gate, boroughs twelve men and smaller towns four or six depending on their population. They were to keep watch throughout the night, from sunset until sunrise.

If a stranger passed them during the night, the watch could detain him until morning. If there was no reason for suspicion, he could then go on his way; if there was, he could be handed over to the sheriff. Anyone refusing to stop could find the watch raising the hue and cry and involving the surrounding community in the pursuit.

So, hundreds of years before the Metropolitan Police appeared, there were already people being given the rotten job of going outside in the dark to find out what that noise was.

Watch duty could fall upon ordinary householders, and unsurprisingly people were not exactly fighting for the privilege. Those who could afford to increasingly pay somebody else to take their turn, and over time this reluctant community obligation began to develop into paid employment.

By the eighteenth century, local Acts of Parliament were being used to establish more organised salaried night watches. Several Westminster parishes obtained Watch Acts in 1735 and 1736, allowing local rates to fund regular watchmen rather than continuing to rely on householders taking turns. Similar arrangements spread through London and elsewhere, and the night watchman became a familiar part of urban life.

Although perhaps not always a reassuring one.

GOING OUT ON THE WATCH

Imagine starting work when everyone else was shutting themselves in for the night. There were no bright shop windows, car headlights or streets illuminated in the way we understand them now. Even where lamps existed, large stretches of the route could still be properly dark.

A watchman might put on a heavy coat or cloak against the weather, take his lantern, staff and whatever other equipment had been issued to him, then head onto his assigned streets. Rattles were commonly carried to raise the alarm and summon assistance, which is worth remembering when we compare them with a modern police officer carrying a radio and able to request help almost instantly.

Their job was not simply to stand somewhere looking vaguely authoritative. Watchmen were expected to keep order, challenge suspicious people, apprehend offenders where necessary, look for disturbances and raise the alarm. As the system became more formal, regulations could become remarkably detailed about how many men should be employed, what they should be paid and how the watch should operate.

There were routes to follow, properties to check, people to question and long periods in which very little probably happened at all. That part is easy to forget when we imagine historical jobs because we tend to remember the robbery, fire or arrest rather than the four hours spent walking the same streets in the cold.

It is quite a shame they did not have step counters. I imagine the numbers would have been magnificent.

THE WATCHMAN’S BOX

Thankfully, watchmen were not always expected to spend the entire night exposed to the weather. In some places they were provided with small wooden shelters known as watch boxes, giving them somewhere to get out of the cold between patrols.

One survives in the London Museum collection and dates from around 1800 to 1830. It stood beside the entrance to Furnival’s Inn in Holborn and is a proper little freestanding wooden shelter, complete with windows and the words Watchman’s Box painted on the side.

I can already tell you exactly what would have happened if I had been given one. I would have sat down for five minutes, got comfortable and woken three hours later with the lantern out and half of London burgled.

Unfortunately, this brings us rather neatly to the slight problem with the watchmen.

EVERYBODY THOUGHT THEY WERE USELESS

The night watchmen acquired a spectacularly bad reputation. They were frequently portrayed as elderly, infirm, poorly equipped, drunk, corrupt or simply asleep, and the incompetent watchman became an easy target for satirists.

Some of that reputation was undoubtedly caricature, although the system did have genuine weaknesses. Watchmen could be poorly paid; training was limited or non-existent and standards varied enormously between parishes. Some men took the work because they needed whatever employment they could get, after which society handed them a lantern and expected them to confront criminals in the middle of the night.

Perhaps we could cut them a little slack.

The caricaturists did not.

The British Museum has a wonderful satirical print from around 1828 to 1830 called The Charleys in Grief or the Funeral of the City Watch Boxes’. It depicts a procession of ancient-looking watchmen carrying a watch box as though it were a coffin while others follow behind with lanterns, rattles and staves.

Sitting on top of the watch box are a tankard and a bottle.

The joke required very little explanation. These men were not protecting London; they were apparently drinking and sleeping their way through it.

THE CHARLIES

Then I discovered they had a nickname: Charlies, sometimes written Charleys.

The precise origin is uncertain. One explanation links it to Charles I, during whose reign the paid watch was expanded in London. Another is that Charlie itself became associated with somebody foolish or unreliable, which, given the reputation of the watchmen, would have been particularly unkind.

Whatever the origin, the name stuck strongly enough to become part of the language of London policing.

Picture one of them walking now, with his coat pulled around him against the weather and a lantern casting a small pool of light onto the street. He might have a staff in one hand and a rattle somewhere about him as he passed shuttered houses and sleeping families.

Every so often his call of “All’s well” would carry through the streets, letting those still awake know that the watch was passing.

Hopefully, Charlie actually was awake.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THEY FOUND TROUBLE?

This is the part that makes me reconsider some of the criticism.

Imagine that you have been walking the same streets for hours. It is cold, you are tired and almost nothing has happened, then you realise somebody is trying to break into a building. There is no radio clipped to your coat, no patrol car two streets away, no telephone and no control room waiting for an update.

You have a rattle.

Good luck, Charlie.

A watchman’s ability to deal with trouble depended heavily on other people hearing the alarm and coming to help. The watch formed part of a much wider local system involving constables, parish officials and members of the community rather than operating as the independent professional police service we would recognise today.

Despite all the jokes about them, these men were still expected to approach people they believed might be criminals, in the dark, with limited equipment and often for very little money.

I have changed my mind. I would not last ten minutes.

NOT EVERY CHARLIE WAS USELESS

William Anthony rather ruins the stereotype.

Born in 1789, he is believed to have been one of the last of London’s old Charlies and spent around fifty years patrolling Spitalfields and Norton Folgate. He became known as an effective and determined watchman, and surviving accounts describe an unbroken sequence of “All’s well” during his service.

Fifty years is difficult to get my head around. People would have grown up hearing him outside at night. Children who heard his call from their beds could have become adults, had children of their own and still known the sound of the same man passing through the streets.

I love finding people like this in the records. William Anthony was not a king, politician or famous criminal. He was simply a man who went to work at night for decades, and history happened to keep his name.

There must have been thousands of others whose names disappeared.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain’s towns and cities were changing rapidly. Populations were growing, industrial areas were expanding and the patchwork of parish watches, constables and other local arrangements was increasingly being questioned.

Glasgow is particularly interesting because it began developing a different model before London’s Metropolitan Police existed. The Glasgow Police Act of 1800 established a professional city police force, but the old and new systems initially existed alongside one another. When the new force assembled in November that year, there were only a handful of police officers but sixty-eight watchmen, dressed in long brown coats with their personal numbers painted on their backs. Each carried a lantern and a long stave, and the watchmen manned sentry boxes while police officers patrolled the city.

I find that image fascinating because policing did not simply switch from one system to another overnight. For a while, the old watchman with his lantern was standing beside the beginnings of modern policing.

London’s major change came in 1829, when Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police. The new officers formed an organised professional force and gradually became recognisable as the predecessors of the police officers we know today, while the Charlies increasingly belonged to another world.

Even then, the change was not instant. Older systems survived in some places and institutions, and there could be real resistance to replacing them.

Middle Temple provides a wonderful example. In 1857, 121 barristers petitioned against the introduction of outside police into the Inn, arguing that they were perfectly content to leave protection of their property to Middle Temple’s own watchmen.

Which is rather lovely after spending several hundred words accusing the poor men of being drunk in boxes.

Apparently, some of them were doing something right.

WHEN THE STREETS WENT QUIET

There is something about this job that stays with me, perhaps because we know what came afterwards. Modern policing eventually acquired telephones, radios, vehicles, control rooms, street lighting, cameras and an entire infrastructure built around keeping watch. The old night watchman had almost none of it.

His working world might extend only as far as the light from his lantern, but he would have known his streets because he walked them night after night. He knew which doors should be shut, which houses should be quiet, and which sounds belonged there. Some watchmen were probably every bit as useless as the caricatures suggested; some undoubtedly slept, drank or took bribes. Others simply put on their coats each evening and walked the same streets while everybody else went to bed.

Most of their names have gone.

For a few hours each night, though, they were the people who stayed awake.

All’s well.