Cops and Robbers. Ant Anstead
Division (Marylebone), and the following year was transferred to the Public Carriage Office at Scotland Yard, where he spent the rest of his career. In 1901 he was appointed Chief Inspector and given charge of the branch just at the time when it was being forced to regulate motor vehicles.
He had a detailed knowledge of motor mechanics and engineering, having qualified in the subject at Regent Street Polytechnic, and kept pace with developments in this area. He produced the Police Regulations for the Construction and Licensing of Hackney (Motor) Carriages, 1906 (The Conditions of Fitness for Motor Hackney Carriages). This included the requirement for a 25-ft turning circle, something that immediately influenced the design of London cabs, and still does, and has had echoes worldwide as well. In 1906 he was promoted to Superintendent on merit. He visited nearly every town in the United Kingdom and many in Europe to observe their traffic problems and learn from their errors, without being too proud to learn from their successes. He framed ‘The Knowledge’, the test undertaken by all London taxi drivers, and devised the Bassom Scheme of London bus route numbers.
He was awarded the King’s Police Medal (KPM) in 1919 and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1920 civilian war honours list.
I’d like to have met Arthur Bassom. His obituary in the Commercial Motor contained this paragraph, which rather amused me:
‘As a matter of fact, however, he was in nearly every instance able to give better advice than he received. One of his attributes was imperturbability, and he always had the courage of his convictions. He will be sadly missed by the Commissioner of Police, the Assistant Commissioner, Mr Frank Elliott, with whom he came into daily personal contact, and his associates at the Yard.’
You could argue that he was one of the most important men in British history; his theories and actions certainly affected everyone’s life, hugely, and still do today, although very few have heard of him.
Amazingly, as the war commenced, the Met’s records show they still only had two cars – the 1903 10hp Wolseley wagonettes – so at least we can be sure the taxpayer received value from these vehicles, which did at least 11 years’ service! However, the police did have a number of commercial vehicles and forces around the country that subscribed to this principle, with commercials being used to carry messages and equipment and one or two senior officers having cars, although the records of different forces are harder to pin down and some have even been lost. This is why the Met is discussed so much when talking about this early period, and also the Met’s policing of the nation’s capital tended to create policy that other forces followed in this era to a greater or lesser extent. It’s interesting to note that in 1919 the Met actually started to keep a record of its vehicle fleet as a separate entity, acknowledging, at least clerically, that this was going to be a significant part of policing in the 1920s. Following the established principle, the first car purchased in 1919 was a Vauxhall Tourer for the use of senior officers. This model had been a popular military staff car during the war and had an established record of reliable service. It’s worth noting that Vauxhall, in this period, some six years before GM bought them, were known as makers of high-quality, superbly engineered sporting and large luxury cars. GM sent the company in a different, more volume-led, direction.
By the time the traffic department was created in late 1919 they inherited a fleet of 35 vehicles together with workshop facilities for their servicing and repair, which consisted of:
• 1 Vauxhall Cabriolet, for the Commissioner.
• 1 Vauxhall Tourer, for Assistant Commissioner ‘A’.
• 1 Austin 15hp Landaulet, for Assistant Commissioner ‘B’.
• 1 Austin 15hp Landaulet, for the Receiver.
• 1 Siddeley 14hp Tourer, for Superintendent B.3.
• 4 two-seater Humbers, for District Chief Constables.
• 11 two-seater Fords, for Superintendents on outer divisions only.
• 5 Ford vans and 4 Warwick tricars as despatch vans.
• 2 Austins and 1 Arrol-Johnston as ambulances.
• 1 Austin 15hp Landaulet, 1 Renault 11·٣hp and 1 Crossley 20hp Open Tourer, to be used as needed.
On 21 February 1920, The Autocar reported that ‘the London Police are to be provided with motor cars for controlling traffic, the object being to speed up traffic generally and the confining of slow-moving vehicles to the kerb’, where one has to wonder if in London’s narrow streets they would get in the way and create bottlenecks … That statement, though, is important because it’s the first example I’ve seen of the essential dichotomy of traffic policing in the UK. The police have a dual role, to keep traffic flowing and to ensure the safety of all, whether they be pedestrians or motorists. That statement, which was printed in the magazine but obviously comes from a government announcement, shows that commerce and the free movement of the population were still, at this point, being thought of as the pre-eminent problems, and that accidents were just a sad but inevitable consequence. The opposite is, correctly, very much the case today.
The car that the Met adopted for this role was the Bean 11.9hp, which had won out after extensive tests of over 10,000 miles, and chosen because it was the most suitable and affordable. The Met ordered at least four of these cars, probably the largest single order for police cars made in the UK at that time. The force remained loyal to Bean throughout the early 1920s and had at least three other larger examples, plus two or three vans. This was absolutely the beginning of mass motor-car use by the police, and statistically this matches the wider population’s adoption of the car. In 1919 there were 109,705 private cars in the UK, and by 1924 this was 482,356. By 1930 it was 1,075,081 and by 1939 it had just been pushed to over two million. However, the war surplus commercials that were being sold off by the government at least doubled the early 1920s’ figure, although reliable statistics are harder to find on that.
Bean 11.9hp: the UK’s first Traffic car
The Bean 11.9hp was an adaptation of an Edwardian pre-war car (it seems even then that the police purchasers were conservative of mind and favoured tried-and-tested technology) called the Perry, which had been designed by Tom Conroy from Willys-Overland and launched in 1914. It’s believed that around 300 were made before World War I broke out, which curtailed production at Perry’s small facility in Birmingham. The design was purchased by Bean Cars from Dudley, just outside Birmingham, in 1919, apparently for around £15,000, which was quite a sum in 1919. They got a separate chassis of unusual strength for the period, in which was mounted an inline 4-cylinder side-valve engine of 1796cc, mated to a 3-speed gearbox. It cost around £400, nearly twice the price of a Ford Model T. However, Ford were not considered British, despite building 46,362 Model Ts at their plant at Trafford Park, Manchester, in 1920 alone.
The Bean cars’ story is a fascinating tale of ‘what might have been’, and it should have succeeded. The tale begins in 1822, when the splendidly named Absolom Harper founded the iron foundry A. Harper & Sons, Dudley. George Bean married Absolom’s granddaughter in ١٩٠١, became the company’s principal shareholder and expanded the company. They entered the car market in 1919 with a new factory built on what was then a large-scale production model by a company with a reputation for being good engineers. They had, correctly, identified that the motor industry was a good way to make money and was about to boom, so they recruited a sales manager from Austin, Mr B.G. Banks. They planned 2,000 cars for 1919 (which was a lot then for a British manufacturer starting out), 10,000 by 1921, and expansion thereafter, and they had good financial and technical backing and a link with large sales group BMTC. The Harper Bean group was capitalised at an enormous, for the era, £6 million and equipped its former munitions shops in Tipton for assembly and its former shell building shop at Dudley for bodywork. They had moving track assembly lines and in July 1920 produced 505 cars.