Publisher's Synopsis
'Why on earth', the reader who picks up his book out of some passing curiosity may ask - 'should I find the history of a little-known London police force of absorbing interest?' A fair question - the fair answer to which involves several reasons, the first being that it is a wonderful story and its own right, vividly and excitingly told. Secondly, it amounts to a concise history of the whole British police service of which, whether the reader knows it or not, every single British person is in a very real sense a part. Thirdly, it is less the history than the biography of this little-known force which began some 27 years before Peel's Metropolitan Police who are this year themselves 150 years old- a little-known force which was one of the earliest bodies of professional preventative police the world has ever known, though it was at one time the ninth largest, numerically, in the land.
Fourthly because the central part of this story has been learned from an intimate study of the ancient handwritten Minute Books of the original Dock Companies hundreds of books, each 500 pages long in spidery handwriting on what now feels more like vellum than paper. From these books have been extracted every reference to the forces of which today's P.L.A. Police Force is really a modern amalgam. The personalities revealed by these dusty pages will take a small but definitive place in the hearts and memories of all who read this book- Capt. Robert Bartlett, for example, will become as real an acquaintance as the gentleman who lives down each reader's street. Fifthly because the story embraces an aspect of British life from its early pass to its ticklish present, and peers boldly into it's uncertain future, gaining and dispensing a sense of perspective that is perhaps to rare. 63 most importantly of all because it is a book which the reader will eventually lay down feeling glad to have come across and I have read and that is something which cannot truthfully be said about every book today more is the pity tea no sugar
Peelers Press; undated. Hardcover with dust cover. SIGNED by Glyn Harwicke.Peelers. Preowned. ISBN: 0851649998
