Policing the Factory : Theft, Private Policing and the Law in Modern England

Policing the Factory describes the operation of the Bank of England police, the Post Office police, and various other private policing agencies, employed to track down and prosecute workplace offenders. The authors focus in particular on the Worsted Committee and their Inspectors, who, between 1777 and 1968, prosecuted thousands of workers in the north of England for taking home workplace scraps, or wasting their employer's time. Most of the workers prosecuted spent a month in prison upon conviction, and many more were dismissed from employment without any formal legal action taking place.

This book explores how, and under what legislative basis, the criminal law could be brought into private spaces in this period and goes on suggest that the activities of the Inspectorate inhibited the development of public policing in Yorkshire. The book presents case studies, newspaper comment, memoirs, and statistics based on detailed archival analysis of court records, to create a richly textured story which will inform and challenge contemporary debates on policing and police history.

“The issues of workplace appropriation, private policing, and the use of the law as an instrument of social control have received a considerable amount of attention in the last few decades, and in this volume Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox provide a useful summary of several ongoing debates and make useful contributions to the growing body of literature on these subjects ... Godfrey and Cox make effective use of the relevant secondary literature and have been exhaustive in their examination.” —Michael Weaver, University of Texas-Pan American, The Historian

“Policing the Factory represents a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about nineteenth-century industrialization. It is based on an excellent array of sources, including working-class autobiographies, legal records, newspaper accounts, and employer records; it includes an extremely helpful glossary of the technical terms of the nineteenth-century worsted workplace.” –Jamie L. Bronstein, USA, Victorian Studies Journal