Policemen and Their Moustaches: (Self-)Fashioning Professional Identity in Nineteenth Century Newcastle-Upon-Tyne

Abstract

In April 1861, a local newspaper commented favourably on permission being granted to allow the policemen of Newcastle upon Tyne to wear moustaches, and on the moustaches they subsequently grew. The article demonstrates that these moustaches had an important role to play in the visual construction and performance of social, collective, and professional identities for individual members of the police force in Newcastle in 1861. It suggests that in requesting permission, acting upon it, and in the type of facial hair that they grew, the policemen revealed how they saw themselves, and how they wanted to be seen. This offers an opportunity to hear a voice often excluded from historical narratives, that of the ‘ordinary’ policemen in the provinces, exercising an agency that might be unexpected in the mid-nineteenth century. The article argues that their moustaches enabled Newcastle’s policemen to express a sense of belonging to their local force and their awareness of being part of a larger, nationwide phenomenon, evidence of the development of a police culture with a positive and specifically fashioned self-image. As such, it contributes an unusual perspective on police professionalisation and identity in an important period of change.

Keywords:

• police
• professionalisation
• moustaches
• identity
• self-fashioning
• Victorian England
• Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments received on an earlier draft of this article from Dr Alun Withey. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

1 The Newcastle Journal 16 April 1861.

2 The Newcastle Journal 16 Apr 1861, 2.

3 The permission is recorded in the Borough of Newcastle upon Tyne, Watch Committee Minute Book, 15th March 1861, vol 2, p. 99; Tyne & Wear Archives MD.NC/274/2 (hereafter WCMB).

4 Much research has focused upon the beard; for example, Christopher Oldstone-Moore, ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain’, Victorian Studies, 48.1 (2005), 7-34. Facial hair is addressed more broadly in Alun Withey, Concerning Beards Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England, 1650–1900 (Bloomsbury, 2021). Alun Withey and Jennifer Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Jennifer Evans and Alun Withey, New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair. Framing the Face (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) offers a multi-disciplinary approach.

5 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing the New Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 21.

6 On the activities of a London police constable, see Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby: A History of British Policing from the 18^th Century to the Present (Quercus, 2009), 119–134.

7 Discussed in Joanne Klein, Invisible Men. The Secret Lives of Police Constables in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, 1900–1939 (Liverpool University Press, 2010).

8 For a review of accessible police records, see Ian Bridgeman and Clive Emsley, A Guide to the Archives of the Police Forces of England and Wales (The Police History Society, 1989); for Newcastle City Police, see 100–101.

9 WCMB.

10 For an overview, see Alun Withey and Jennifer Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Evans and Withey, Framing the Face, 1–11.

11 I thank Dr Alun Withey and the anonymous reviewer for raising these possibilities.

12 The term ‘new police’ was used in the mid-nineteenth century to distinguish the various ‘new’ police forces from previous arrangements for policing. On how far the ‘old’ and ‘new’ police differed in reality, see David Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1997) and David Taylor, ‘“Drops in the Ocean”: The Politics and Practice of Policing the West Riding of Yorkshire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Northern History, 59.1 (2022), 98–115.

13 WCMB, 160.

14 Emsley, Great British Bobby, 143. On recruitment, see Clive Emsley and Mark Clapson, ‘Recruiting the English policeman c.1840–1940’, Policing and Society, 3.4 (1994), 269–285.

15 Data extracted from WCMB, 2–100.

16 Thomas Alan Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales (Constable, 1978), 124.

17 See Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 84–93. See also, Klein, Invisible Men, 12–33.

18 Taylor, New Police, 53.

19 The Duty Band, a cloth band worn on the arm, indicated when the officer was on duty.

20 See Peter Joyce, ‘Recruitment Patterns and Conditions of Work in a Nineteenth-Century Police Force: A Case Study of Manchester 1842–1900’, Police Journal, 64.2 (1991), 140–50.

21 For example, in Aug 1861, see WCMB, 144, 147.

22 See Taylor, New Police, 52–53.

23 One example was written by the Chief Constable of Northumberland from 1857–1869 and updated by the Chief Constable of Newcastle (A. Browne and S. J. Nichols, The Police Officers Catechism or Handbook (Shaw & Sons, 5^th edition, 1877). The 5^th edition is a revised edition, but no earlier editions are accessible. Browne’s term of office suggests that the original edition was produced c.1860s. See also J. F. Archbold, Archbold’s Snowden’s Magistrates Assistant and Police Officers and Constables Guide 4th Edition (Shaw and Sons, 1859).

24 William C. Harris, Questions and answers framed for the instruction of constables, on joining the police (The Police Catechism) (W. Clowes and Sons, 1861). I thank Dr Helen Rutherford for this reference.

25 Klein, Invisible Men, 22.

26 Taylor, New Police, Table 3.3.

27 Taylor, New Police, 50.

28 On police recruitment and retention, see Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829–1914 (Ashgate, 2002).

29 Newcastle Guardian 4 Feb 1854, 8.

30 WCMB, 280–284.

31 Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘The Making of a Police Labour Force’, Journal of Social History (1990), 109–134; and Clive Emsley, ‘The Policeman as Worker: A Comparative Survey c. 1800–1940’, International Review of Social History, 45.1 (2000), 89–110; but see David Taylor, ‘The Standard of Living of Career Policemen in Victorian England: The Evidence of a Provincial Borough Force’, Criminal Justice History, 12 (1991), 107–131.

32 WCMB, 176; and see Helen Rutherford and Clare Sandford-Couch, ‘“13 yards off the big gate and 37 yards up the West Walls”. Crime scene investigation in mid-nineteenth century Newcastle-upon-Tyne’, in Alison Adam (ed.) Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850 (Palgrave, 2020), 161–188 (171–6).

33 Keith Smith, ‘Stumbling Towards Professionalism: The Establishment of English Policing in the Nineteenth Century’, The Oxford History of the Laws of England: Volume XIII: 1820–1914 Fields of Development (Oxford, 2010), 21–57 (36).

34 On working class masculinities and identities in urban environments, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches. Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (University of California Press, 1997), 25–30.

35 See David Churchill, Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public (Oxford University Press, 2017), 98–122.

36 Smith, ‘Stumbling Towards Professionalism’, 42. On the limitations of policing by consent see David Taylor, ‘Protest and Consent in the Policing of the ‘Wild’ West Riding of Yorkshire, c. 1850–1875: “The Police v. The People”’, Northern History, 51.2 (2014), 290–310.

37 The debate surrounding Robert Storch’s policeman as ‘domestic missionary’ indicates some of the problems in analysing popular attitudes to the police: see Robert D. Storch, ‘The Plague of Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840–57’, International Review of Social History, 20.1 (1975), 61–90; Robert D. Storch, ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850–1880’, Journal of Social History, 9.4 (1976), 481–509; V.A.C. Gatrell, 'Crime, authority and the policeman-state, 1750–1950', in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750́–1950, Volume 3: Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. by F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 243–310; and Emsley, English Police, 74–76.

38 D. Taylor, Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in Middlesbrough c.1840–1914 (Basingstoke, 2002), 95. This may explain some examples of anti-police feeling in Taylor, ‘Protest and Consent’.

39 Punch, Jul-Dec, 1851, 173; quoted in Emsley, English Police, 62.

40 Emsley, English Police, 65.

41 See Taylor, ‘Protest and Consent’; and, D. Foster, ‘The East Riding Constabulary in the Nineteenth Century’, Northern History, 21.1 (1985), 193–211.

42 Taylor, New Police, 126.

43 Smith, 'Stumbling Towards Professionalism’, 40.

44 David Churchill, 'I Am Just the Man for Upsetting You Bloody Bobbies': Popular Animosity Towards the Police in Late Nineteenth-Century Leeds’, Social History 39.2 (2014), 248–266; see also, Churchill, Policing the City, 215–240.

45 Taylor, New Police, 89–135, especially 108–127.

46 Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury 11 Feb 1860, 4.

47 Newcastle Daily Chronicle 26 Apr 1860, 2.

48 Newcastle Daily Chronicle 8 Sep 1860, 2.

49 Newcastle Daily Chronicle 30 Oct 1860, 2.

50 Newcastle Daily Chronicle 20 Nov 1860, 3.

51 Newcastle Daily Chronicle 7 Jan 1861, 2, and 8 Jan 1861, 2

52 Emsley, Great British Bobby, 145.

53 Emsley, Great British Bobby, 149.

54 Klein, Invisible Men, 22.

55 Taylor, New Police, 76, note 71. See also Chris A. Williams, ‘Policing the Populace: The road to professionalisation’, in Histories of Crime: Britain 1600–2000, ed. David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 160–179. On understandings of ‘professionalisation’ by nineteenth-century actors, see Heather Ellis, ‘Knowledge, character and professionalisation in nineteenth-century British science’, History of Education 43.6 (2014), 777–792.

56 Carolyn Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community: The Formation of English Provincial Police Forces, 1856–80 (Routledge, 1984), 26–7.

57 Taylor, New Police, 75.

58 WCMB 24–25; 121.

59 Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury 12 January 1861, 5.

60 David G Barrie and Susan Broomhall, ‘Introduction’, in A History of Police and Masculinities 1700–2010, ed. David G Barrie and Susan Broomhall (Routledge, 2012), 1–34 (7).

61 The Illustrated Police News was established in 1864; the Police Service Advertiser (‘A Journal for the Police and Constabulary Forces of Great Britain and the Colonies’) and the first national police newspaper, Police Service Advertiser, were established in 1866.

62 Newcastle Daily Chronicle 20 Dec 1860, 3.

63 Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury 20 Oct 1860, 3.

64 WCMB, 99. It is not recorded who made the request for the men, most probably the Chief Officer.

65 ‘A’ Division requested permission to wear Beards in January 1863: WCMB, 293.

66 Shields Daily Gazette, 26 Apr 1860, 2.

67 See Birmingham Gazette, 27 Oct 1860, 7; Derby Mercury, 31 Oct 1860, 3; and Leicester Journal, 2 Nov 1860, 3.

68 The same report, usually attributed to ‘Our London Correspondent’ appeared in many newspapers, including in the north-east, the Hartlepool Free Press and General Advertiser, 27 Oct 1860, 2.

69 Some of these images are discussed in Jane Matilda Card, ‘From Blue Lobsters to Friendly Giants: Visual Representations of the Police, c.1840–1880’, https://legalhistorymiscellany.com/2018/08/27/visual-representations-of-the-police-c-1840-1880/ [accessed 6 February 2023].

70 Conforming to this description is a sadly undated photograph of John Hope Constable No 1.G, who joined the neighbouring borough of Gateshead police in Aug 1842, retiring in Jul 1859, aged 54. Hope had previously served with Newcastle Police – for 1 year 11 months – before being discharged in Aug 1838 (no reason is given for his discharge): https://www.gatesheadpolice.org/officers.htm [accessed 6 Feb 2023].

71 Punch’s Almanac for 1854, x. See https://magazine.punch.co.uk/image/I0000bSL7htwZ8Gc [accessed 6 Feb 2023].

72 Susan Walton, ‘From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30.3 (2008), 229–245, 232.

73 Charles Keene, ‘The Assistance of the Law’, and ‘Pic-nicing under the Poaching Act’: see https://magazine.punch.co.uk/image/I00004P4BEz1_ipo [accessed 14 Feb 2023]

74 Illustrated London News 19 Oct 1867, 8; The Penny Illustrated Paper, 21 Dec 1867.

75 The Graphic, 11 Dec 1869, 9.

76 Artworks in the collection of North Somerset Council: Isaac Pearce (policeman of Weston-super-Mare), unknown artist: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/isaac-pearce-311275/view_as/grid/search/keyword:policeman/page/6 ; Mr George Reid (policeman of Weston-super-Mare), unknown artist: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/mr-george-reid-311278/view_as/grid/search/keyword:policeman/page/6 [accessed 14 Feb 2023].

77 William Powell Frith, Derby Day (1858); © Tate Collection; https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/frith-the-derby-day-n00615 [accessed 14 Feb 2023].

78 George Hicks’ The General Post Office, One Minute to Six (1860), Collection of the Museum of London. https://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/object/102702.html [accessed 14 Feb 2023].

79 William Holman Hunt, London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales (1863), © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford http://collections.ashmolean.org/object/373039 [accessed 14 Feb 2023].

80 Frank Holl, Deserted – The Foundling (1873), collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/4599/? [accessed 14 Feb 2023].

81 Discussed in Withey, Concerning Beards, 55–78; see also Walton, ‘From Squalid Impropriety’, 232; Lucinda Hawksley, Moustaches, Whiskers & Beards (National Portrait Gallery, 2014), 67; and Christopher Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men. The Revealing History of Facial Hair (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 189–190.

82 Henry Morley and William Henry Wills, ‘Why Shave?’, Household Words Volume VII No 177 (printed 13 August 1853).

83 The Queen’s Regulations and Orders for the Army (HM Stationery Office), paragraphs 1695–196.

84 See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (Psychology Press, 1994), 79–207; and Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford University Press, 2016).

85 T L Hewitson, Weekend Warriors From Tyne to Tweed (Tempus, 2006), 83–92 (90).

86 See Withey, Concerning Beards, 60–70.

87 Thomas S. Gowing, The Philosophy of Beards. A Lecture, Physiological, Artistic and Historical (J. Haddock, 1854), 9.

88 For example, ‘The Effects of Arts, Trades and Professions, and Civic States and Habits of Living on Health and Longevity’, Edinburgh Review 111 (January 1860), 5.

89 ‘The Uses of Hair’, Lancet 76 (3 November 1860), 440; quoted in Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men, 188.

90 Mercer Adam, ‘Is Shaving Injurious to the Health? A Plea for the Beard.’ Edinburgh Medical Journal 7 (1861), 566–573, 568.

91 See Jacob Middleton, ‘Bearded patriarchs’, History Today (February 2006), 26–27.

92 Adam, ‘A Plea for the Beard’, 571.

93 For example, a lengthy critique attributed to an unnamed ‘a medical correspondent’ in the Scotsman, reprinted in the North and South Shields Gazette (10 October 1861), a newspaper read in Newcastle.

94 Withey, Concerning Beards, 65.

95 See Withey, Concerning Beards, 58, and 123–139. On the growing popularity of the moustache, see Walton, ‘From Squalid Impropriety’.

96 Newcastle Courant 27 Jan 1854.

97 Reported Newcastle Daily Chronicle 25 Jan 1860, 2. Held on 24 Jan 1860, it attracted several letters to the newspaper prior to the lecture: see Newcastle Daily Chronicle 17 Jan 1860, 3, 18 Jan, 3, 30 Jan 1860, 3.

98 Newcastle Daily Chronicle 28 Jan 1860, 2.

99 Durham Chronicle 5 Apr 1861, 7.

100 On mechanics’ institutes and reading rooms in the mid-Victorian period, see Brendan Duffy, ‘The Progress of Education in the Northern Coalfield Before 1870’, Northern History, 55, 2 (2018), 178–205.

101 Withey Concerning Beards, 55–78 and 175–186 (177 and 181).

102 Withey, Concerning Beards, 175–186.

103 Neville Parker, ‘The Moustache: A Semiscientific Study’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 4.1 (1970), 49–53.

104 Sharon Twickler, ‘Combing Masculine Identity in the Age of the Moustache, 1860–1900’, in Evans and Withey Framing the Face, 149–168 (157).

105 Walton, ‘From Squalid Impropriety’, 240.

106 Watch Committee Minute Book vol 1, 14 Mar 1836, 14 (Tyne & Wear Archives MD.NC/274/1).

107 On fashion, facial hair and dress, see Withey and Evans, ‘Introduction’, 10.

108 Chiara Battisti and Leif Dahlberg, ‘Focus: Law, Fashion and Identities’, Polemos. Journal of Law, Literature and Culture, 10.1 (April 2016), 1–12. See also, Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, ‘Dress and Identity’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 10.4 (1992), 1–8.

109 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2.

110 Several chapters in New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair address its role in the construction of specific identities: see M. Victoria Alonso Cabezas, ‘Beardless Young Men? Facial Hair and the Construction of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Self-Portraits’, 91–108; Morwenna Carr, ‘‘We’ll Imagine, Madam, You Have a Beard’: Beards and Early Female Playwrights’, 189–212; Sharon Twickler, ‘Combing Masculine Identity in the Age of the Moustache, 1860–1900’, 149–168; and Alice White, ‘Whiskers at War: Moustaches, Masculinity and the Military in Twentieth-Century Britain’, 169–187.

111 Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, 3–4.

112 Andrew Wynter, ‘The Police and Thieves’, Quarterly Review, 1856, vol. XCIX, 160–200, 171.

113 Michael Hau, ‘The Normal, the Ideal, and the Beautiful’, in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire, ed. Michael Sappol and Stephen P. Rice (Berg, 2010), 149–170, 167.

114 See Joanne Begiato, ‘Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Culture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (2016), 125–147.

115 For a critique of the concept of agency, see Lynn Thomas, ‘Historicising Agency’, Gender & History, 28.2 (2016), 324–339. 

116 Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘Shedding the Uniform and Acquiring a New Masculine Image. The Case of the Late-Victorian and Edwardian English Police Detective’, in Barrie and Broomhall, Police and Masculinities, 141.

117 Withey, Concerning Beards, 7. On Victorian notions of masculinity, see John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: 1800–1914,’ Journal of British Studies, 44, no. 2 (2005), 330–31.

118 Withey and Evans, ‘Introduction’, 4–5.

119 For an overview of research on the relationship between facial hair and constructions or representations of masculinity, see Withey and Evans, ‘Introduction’.

120 Joanne Bailey, ‘Masculinity and Fatherhood in England c. 1760–1830’, in What Is Masculinity?: Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. John Arnold and Sean Brady (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), 173.

121 Joanne Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900. Bodies, emotion, and material culture (Manchester University Press, 2020), 101. This ‘hypermasculinity’ is discussed in several contributions to Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, (eds.) Anna Maria Barry, Joanne Begiato, and Michael Brown (Manchester University Press, 2019). On the male soldier as a fundamental representation of masculinity, see Ann-Dorte Christensen & Morten Kyed, ‘From Military to Militarizing Masculinities’, NORMA (2022) 17.1, 1–4.

122 On physical presence in the construction of police authority through masculinity, see Francis Dodsworth, ‘Masculinity as Governance: Police, Public Service and the Embodiment of Authority, c. 1700–1850’, in Public Men: Political Masculinities in Modern Britain, ed. Matthew McCormack (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 33–53.

123 Stephanie Ward, ‘Miners' Bodies and Masculine Identity in Britain, c.1900–1950’, Cultural and Social History, 18.3 (2021), 443–462 (450). On working-men’s agency in constructing gendered identities, see Begiato, Manliness, 3–4.

124 Francis Dodsworth, ‘Men on a Mission: Masculinity, Violence and the Self-Presentation of Policemen in England, c.1870–1914’, in Barrie and Broomhall, Police and Masculinities, 123–140, 137.

125 On links between police authority and displays of strength or aggression, see Clive Emsley, ‘“The Thump of Wood on a Swede Turnip”: Police Violence in Nineteenth-Century England’, Criminal Justice History, 1985, vol. 6, 125–49; and Clive Emsley, Hard Men - The English and Violence Since 1750 (Hambledon Press, 2005), 135–6.

126 As noted above, themes relating to the history of masculinity and ‘manliness’ in the nineteenth century deserve deeper analysis than is possible here.

127 Begiato, Manliness, 6, 22.

128 Begiato, Manliness, 168.

129 Clive Emsley, A Short History of Police and Policing (Oxford University Press, 2021), 124.

130 Withey, Concerning Beards, 187.

131 John H. Rumsby, ‘Of No Small Importance. A Social History of the Cavalry Moustache’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 96 (386) (2018), 152–168 (166).

132 Begiato, Manliness, 103.

133 On facial hair in both individual and group identities, see Twickler, ‘Combing Masculine Identity’, and White, ‘Whiskers at War’.

134 Broomhall and Barrie, ‘Introduction’, 13.

135 Battisti and Dahlberg, ‘Law, Fashion and Identities’, 7.

136 For other examples, see Begiato, Manliness, 169–202.

137 Broomhall and Barrie, ‘Introduction’, 8.

138 Begiato’s Manliness is an important step in addressing this.

139 Taylor, New Police, 44.

140 Taylor, New Police, 127.

141 Emsley, Great British Bobby, 40.

142 Roach-Higgins and Eicher, ‘Dress and Identity’, 5.

143 On uniform as an indicator of ‘special status’, see Gary Watt, Dress, Law and Naked Truth. A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form (Bloomsbury, 2013), 110.

144 Roach-Higgins and Eicher, ‘Dress and Identity’, 1. On facial hair as a component of dress, see Withey and Evans, ‘Introduction’, 10 note 2; 4.

145 For further examples, see Begiato, Manliness, 41.

146 Watt, Dress, Law, 80.

147 Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (PAJ Publications, 1986), 77.

148 Withey, Concerning Beards, 176.

149 Roach-Higgins and Eicher, ‘Dress and Identity’, 1.