Nothing worth pinching

norman dennis, 1 January 2005

Ron Bramwell speaks of his gut feeling as a police officer that crime surged after 1955 because there were more things to steal.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, England was still reaping the benefits of having a head start on all other countries in the industrial revolution, and there were many more things to steal at the end the century than there had been in the middle. Criminal Statistics 1908 summed up the period in these words:
“Crime has increased very little in the past half century, and taking into account the greater opportunities open nowadays to an indiviudal of criminal tendencies through the greater profusion of wealth and personal possessions … it may reasonably be inferred that the members of the predatory classes are appreciably fewer than in 1857 in spite of the fact that in the interim the population has almost doubled.”
The pervasive tone of the literature of Edwardian times is a settled confidence that England was indeed steadily becoming a still more crime-free and civilised society. What George Dangerfield called “The Strange Death of Liberal England” did not occur until later, when George V was on the throne.

We are talking about offences under the criminal code, not unrest in response to economic and social injustice, and for at least the first fifty or sixty years of the twentieth century it remained an inarticulated major premiss of social reform that this benign connection would continue to hold between an increase in possessions and lower crime rates, that is, that as the standard of living rose for from the bottom to the top of the income and wealth distribution, theft would continue to decline.
As compared with today, the destitute before the Great War, between the wars and during and after the Second World War tended to steal far less from the poor, the poor from the people who had a margin of comfort, the barely comfortable from those who had a bit more, and so on.
During the later years of Victoria’s reign and the reign of Edward VII, George V and George VI, on a Friday night and Saturday there was money in the mother’s purse on the kitchen table in many a working class house, and even on a Thursday there might be still a few shillings left in it–as precious to a thief, too, as pounds are today. Between the wars there was many an unlocked bicycle leaning against the front wall of the house, or left unattended at work. There was not the universal assumption that if anything of the slightest value wasn’t nailed down, somebody would take it.
The late Victorian and Edwardian streets of the respectable working class are still to be found in provincial cities and towns in large numbers. Even looking at them from the outside now (I was brought up in them) why does it now so easy to say, and be believed, that they contained nothing worth pinching on their mantle pieces and sideboards, in their cupboards and drawers or coal houses, and that is why the doors were left unlocked, or the key as public knowledge hung on a string behind the letter box, and little piles of money left on the table for the rent man or the insurance man to come in and collect from the empty house?
There is very little about crime in any of the party manifestos for the first sixty or seventy years of the twentieth century. In most of them there is nothing about crime at all. Surely this was a reflection of the fact that crime was not an issue in most people’s day-to-day lives. The rise in crime in the 1930s and 1940s (miniscule by post 1955 standards) was attributed, so far as I know without exception, to the decline in the standard of living, to the paucity of possessions, due to the Depression and the shortages of war. In the early 1950s crime levels did fall again as the post-war standard of living rose.
Among ordinary Labour Party people (and once there were a lot of them) it was very much taken for granted that given that there would be gradations of income, and given that some ordinary people would choose to spend their money on current consumption while others would choose to spend money on possessions, a rising standard of living would ameliorate, not worsen, the problem of crime, such as it was.
In making their demands that ordinary families should be enabled to afford better and more items of household equipment, a more expensive pair of boots and an extra pair of shoes in Edwardian times or a motor bike and a side car in the 1960s, and perhaps buy a better pocket watch for their waistcoat pocket or a more expensive ring or bangle, they did not think that they had better be cautious, because all these were “more things to pinch”. and that the additions or improvements to their existing stock of household and personal goods, their newly-acquired modes of transport, kitchen gadgets, garden tools, ornaments, trinkets, heirlooms, wirelesses and clocks would unleash a crime wave. They did not think that their leisure time from newly-won holidays with pay and shorter working hours would be suddenly spoilt for them by the hitherto unheard-of theft or wanton destruction of the growing crops in their allotments and council-house back gardens.
I was active in the Labour Party in Sunderland in the late 1940s, in the coal-mining town of Featherstone in the early 1950s, in two housing estates in Bristol in the mid-1950s, in inner-city Birmingham in the later 1950s and in Sunderland again since the 1960s, for much of the time in the coal-mining area of the town and for some of the time as Labour councillor for the area where I was born.
I cannot say that I ever came across anybody in Labour circles before, say, the 1970s, to whom the idea, that there was an automatic connection between more and new possessions and more crime, would have ever even occurred.
With a policeman’s experience, Mr Bramwell correctly sees that all this turns out to have been an exceptionally sad case of “the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts”.
Yes, I’ve led a sheltered life. I definitely should have got out more. Like anybody else, I spent most of my time with people who shared my view of the world. No doubt, therefore, there are Labour people who did think then that more goods would lead to more crime. They can put me right, and tell me what their thoughts were on their dilemma at the time, and not what they think now with the benefit of hindsight.
As a matter of the history of England since 1955, Mr Bramwell is right.
But also as a matter of history, it has not always been true that more possessions have led to more crime. Whether they do or not depends upon the presence or absence of other elements in the social equation.
Possessions increased within one moral environment in the second half of the nineteenth century. When they increased in the second half of the twentieth century, unfortunately from the point of view of crime levels at any rate, the moral environment was completely different.