A LESSON FROM HISTORY

Crewe cut: a longitudinal study of crime in an English town

Apologists for crime have sometimes suggested that people need to steal in order to support themselves and their families. To exemplify their claim they often cite the sort of poverty Charles Dickens described in Victorian times. But is that an accurate and proportionate portrayal? One fascinating insight comes from a clever and detailed examination of history in microcosm, the lives and convictions of persistent offenders in the town of Crewe between 1880 and 1940.

Crewe grew up around a railway works in north west England. Three researchers combined court registers with census material, newspaper reports and employment records and built up a comprehensive, and sometimes colourful, picture of the lives of the town’s principal troublemakers. They knew people’s marital and employment status, the births and deaths of spouses and of children, their changes of address and a great deal more. They found that:

“Confounding contemporary stereotypes, the vast majority of our persistent offenders were employed (mainly as manual labourers of one kind or another), with 42% of male offenders being employed at one stage of their lives within the Railway Works. Some 15% were shopkeepers or market stall holders (the size of these concerns varied greatly, from a small market stall to a chain of grocery shops throughout the town); whilst three were farmers owning or tenanting land around Crewe. A couple of offenders were white-collar employees: an accountant and a railway clerk. Of the 18 female persistent offenders, only one-third are not recorded as being in paid employment, with the employed women working primarily as either domestic servants or seamstresses.”

Rather than lack of wealth it seemed to be lack of a meaning to life that led these people into crime. For the persistent offenders it was promotion at work that reduced their offending quite dramatically (by more than half), while others stopped offending when family responsibility persuaded them that they should mature into a more responsible role. The authors cite as a typical case one Bernard Clarey who as a young man was convicted of several counts of violence including assaulting a woman and a constable, and of breach of the peace and being drunk and disorderly. When he was aged 31 his father died, whereupon he found himself the family’s main breadwinner, and never got into trouble again. He quickly found work at a timber merchant and then at the railway works and his employment records describe him as of good character with impeccable timekeeping.

It was not a lack of money that got him into crime; on the contrary it was the need to look after his widowed mother that got him out of it. We cannot know if Mr Clarey, or indeed Crewe, was typical of Victorian England as a whole, but what is striking about this piece of historical detective-work is the importance of status rather than money as such and, for those in work, “the quality as well as the fact of employment… the speed and nature of career advancement; the enjoyment or attachment of workers for their jobs and employers.”

David J. Cox, Steve Farrall and Barry Godfrey, Persistent offenders in the north west of England, 1880-1940: some critical research questions, Crimes and Misdemeanours Vol1, No1, 2007. ISSN 1754-0445