Plymouthhistory

As he left the court, Bob declared that he had not ate more than a sixpence worth of food for five
weeks. No reaction to his statement was recorded. Cowley spent the next few years being sent to
the workhouse. Yet every time he was released he would be given drink and became a morbid
source of amusement for the locals, until he died.
Bob Cowley’s story was not unique, each of the three towns had characters whose reputation
for alcohol-related court appearances resulted in notoriety, and the death of one merely witnessed
the rise of yet another. In 1862 the Plymouth magistrates were already labelling another man as
the ‘new Cowley’. But drink had more extreme consequences for some. Drunken arguments,
fights and frolics would result in serious crimes being committed and sentences obviously
increased in harshness as a consequence.
Another type of crime also prevalent in the district was smuggling. The smuggling networks
were embedded into the fabric of the entire region, not just the towns . This is because of its
prevalence throughout the centuries. Even Plymouth’s greatest heroes, Drake, Hawkins and
Raleigh, were perceived by many around the world merely as glorified pirates. Henry Whitfeld’s
huge undertaking, Plymouth and Devonport in Times of War and Peace, is inundated with
anecdotes and reports of smuggling. His very first sentence of the relevant chapter is a good
indicator as to how endemic this crime really was, ‘[e]xtremely lax was public sentiment as to
smuggling.’ Therefore if the police could enforce the anti-smuggling laws and influence a cultural
shift in the social acceptance of the crime, only then could they truly claim to be an efficient force.
But the local police would have help in combating this crime, from the original Dock police, the
Dockyard Police, then the Metropolitan Police who searched the smugglers out, and to the
customs officials who watched the stores and landing stages. The role of these particular law
enforcement agencies will be discussed in later chapters.
By 1850, overcrowding (people per house) in Plymouth was double the national average and
higher at that point in time than London and Liverpool. By the 1860s, there was 848 public houses
and beer-shops in the district, a combined population of over 130,000 people, plus thousands of
military personnel both domestic and foreign, and three separate areas of police jurisdiction. This
made the district a vibrant, but often brutal, place to be. With no suggestions of amalgamation
accepted by the various councils, bringing order to the entire district through the efforts of three
separate and distinct police forces was a challenge. Yet it was one which the superintendents and
chief constables had to meet. To fail to do so would have dire consequences on one of the largest
centres of population and arguably the most important military hub in the entire country.
Part of an unpublished thesis available in full from the electronic library resource at the
University of Plymouth, Policing in Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse, 1835-1886
©Marc Partridge.