The Bow Street Runners

The Bow Street Runners.

We tend to think that there was always a police force in every country, but this just isn’t the case. Prior to this, in the Middle Ages, there would be a sheriff (a ‘shire reeve’, a man appointed by the king to serve for a year’s time, without pay, to keep the peace of the shire. A reeve is essentially a local official, the chief magistrate of a town or district in Anglo-Saxon England.), and it was the sheriff that asked people close to the crime who they thought did the deed. More often than not, everyone knew who did it (‘Aye, Rafe of the Strand was known to accost men on Cornhill Street…’) And if there was a crime happening, it was up to the citizenry to call out the ‘hue and cry’ to chase after the culprit.

From Chaucer’s The Reeves’ Tale.

The ‘First Finder’ was obligated to call out the hue and cry, the first one to come across a dead body, for instance. And it was up to the jury to do the investigating, a jury appointed of important men and shop owners to ask around. London, after all, was divided into parishes, and it was assumed that you knew your neighbors and what they got up to.

This worked for a time, but as London grew in population and square miles, this system simply was unsustainable. There was the Watch, of course, men hired by the Lord Mayor to literally keep watch over the city at night, and to nab anyone out after curfew (meaning when the hearth fires were to be put out). But this still wasn’t enough, even if the Watch was a few men together.

Bow Street Runners. Not fellows to play games with.

Later, there were those called ‘thief-takers’, gangs of men who went after thieves and burglars. Or those they thought were the culprits. And extracted money from them in order to look the other way. Or sometimes staging robberies so they themselves could collect rewards. This obviously was not the best strategy and innocent people were caught up in the corruption. Something had to be done.

It wasn’t until Henry Fielding, novelist and magistrate (known for such works as ‘Tom Jones’ and the play ‘Tom Thumb’), founded a force in 1749 at the Bow Street Magistrate’s Court in Westminster. He gathered six gentlemen that he knew and trusted to take on this new task. He and his brother John trained more men into a real force to be reckoned with. The term ‘Bow Street Runners’ wasn’t used by them. In fact they thought it a little insulting, but it was popularly known by that moniker.

The group was disbanded in 1839 to be replaced by the Metropolitan police force, also known as Scotland Yard by the name of the street the offices were situated.

When Sherlock Holmes got the idea to hire street urchins as his eyes and ears in London, he called them his ‘Baker Street Irregulars’. Why didn’t he call them his ‘Baker Street Runners’? It seems like a good idea, on the face of it. His own police force. But the reason he chose ‘Irregulars’ has its origins in military terms. An irregular is a force outside the conventional structure. In other words, his personal militia. Though they were generally not assigned the capture or kill part of a militia, the name ‘Irregulars’ seemed like a better choice. They hunted down those people he wanted to know more about. They discovered their lairs or what boat they had taken for their get-away, or simply a name. Deducing will only get you so far.

And so it stuck. Baker Street Irregulars conjures up a London long gone. But its name is remembered well, even though they only appeared in three stories of the 60. And so it was my conceit to bring to life one of my own irregulars who aged out of Holmes’ street boys as too conspicuous, who began his own detecting agency just like his mentor Sherlock Holmes in my An Irregular Detective Mystery series.