Something for Theresa May to think about
John Barrell: The Bow Street Runners, 7 June 2012
The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 272 pp., £65, February 2012,978 0 19 969516 4 Show More
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 272 pp., £65, February 2012,
“... 1794 the runners were working for the Home Office, employed in the surveillance of radicals. When Thomas Hardy, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, was arrested prior to his trial (and eventual acquittal) for high treason, among those who came for him, at six in the morning when he and his wife were asleep, were the two most high-profile runners in ... ”