Historic crimes at Glasgow Police Museum

National World - LocalTV

We visited Glasgow Police Museum in the Merchant City to find out more about Scottish policing and historic cases.

Transcript

00:00Once things are put into books, they become fact in people's eyes.

00:05And a lot of the history, etc., in bygone days, especially in the 19th century,

00:13was published in England, London particularly, where all the people doing that sort of stuff lived.

00:21So the research north of Watford was non-existent,

00:26so they really just thought this was where things started and accepted it.

00:32It's commonly believed that the first police force was founded in London,

00:35but it wasn't, it was actually founded here in Glasgow.

00:38Scottish policing dates back to 1617, when the first constables were appointed,

00:42though borough police forces were not established until the 19th century.

00:46The role of these earliest police officers was to replace the town guards of citizens or old soldiers.

00:51The first Police Act was passed here in Glasgow in 1800.

00:55Glasgow appointed their first detective in 1819.

01:01His name was Peter McKinley.

01:03He had been promoted to lieutenant, which was a supervisory role,

01:07but he was one of three at that time made lieutenants, but he was appointed criminal officer.

01:13And that meant that one of his responsibilities was to deal with the crime

01:18and to interview the people and investigate.

01:22Two years later, he got an assistant in 1821,

01:27and they formed the Glasgow Criminal Department,

01:30and that was a forerunner of what we know today as the CID.

01:34And it gradually grew into quite a formidable force,

01:42and they were able to deal with a lot of crimes, a lot of criminals as well,

01:51because they had to be controlled too,

01:55and surveillance put on them if they were suspected, et cetera.

01:59So they needed numbers.

02:01And in the 1930s, there was a forensic department opened in Glasgow

02:08which dealt with the scientific side of things, fingerprints and all these kind of things,

02:15and they moved through the Second World War.

02:20Now, women were brought into the police,

02:23and there was a woman appointed as a policewoman in 1915, Emily Miller.

02:30And after the First World War, the numbers of policewomen gradually grew,

02:35and by 1924, they had 11 policewomen,

02:39but they were always in plain clothes and they were attached to the CID

02:43to investigate crimes involving women and children.

02:48And it was a very successful way of doing it,

02:51and by the time the Second World War ended,

02:55some of the policewomen were given uniforms and put out to divisions

03:01to do similar work there,

03:03but also as a way of having a woman officer available for interviewing women and children.

03:11So it's an evolution rather than an instant idea.

03:15Now, everything takes time in most big organisations,

03:18and although the 19th century remained the same pretty much,

03:25the 20th century certainly brought in change,

03:28and we are seeing the benefits today.

03:32In 1811, there were three English criminals who came up to Glasgow,

03:37and they took a room in a boarding house,

03:41and they would go out at night and break into the Paisley Union Bank in Ingram Street,

03:47where the locked boxes, there's no big safes in these days,

03:52and it was big strong boxes,

03:54and they had blank keys and tried to work out how to get into them,

03:58and then they would send the keys down to London to a blacksmith who filed pieces off them

04:03and sent them back up by coach,

04:05and they did this for about three or four weeks until they had the keys that fitted.

04:09And on the 13th of July, 1811, they decided to break in and steal the money.

04:15So they did that, and they got away down to London,

04:19and it was £45,000 in gold, silver, and banknotes.

04:23Now that's the equivalent to £12.5 million today.

04:27So they got down to London, and the Glasgow police didn't know who had broken in

04:33until the lady who had rented the room to them

04:36said that one day she had been sent to the coach house with a package

04:41by one of the men to send by coach to London.

04:45So they looked at the register in the coach house and found that it went to the blacksmith

04:50as the addressee,

04:52and they contacted the Bow Street Runners,

04:57who were court officers down in London who did warrants, etc.,

05:03and they arrested them, but unfortunately they paid them money to get away.

05:09So that meant that the three men were on the loose again.

05:13But in 1819, one of the men, James McCool, came to Edinburgh,

05:19and he was trying to bank some of the banknotes from the robbery,

05:23and the chief of police at Leith, who had been a Bow Street Runner,

05:28heard he was in town and arrested him for the robbery.

05:32And he was tried at Edinburgh High Court and found guilty and sentenced to death.

05:37But unfortunately he took poison a few days before and cheated the hangman.

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