An illustrated history of the British Transport Police
The M C & NW branch hosted a zoom meeting on Monday October 17th titled “An Illustrated History of the British Transport Police”. It was presented by Bill Rogerson MBE, who has been involved with that organisation for more than half a century.
He joined the force as a Constable in 1971 and worked in Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Heysham Harbour, Crewe and Holyhead. He retired in 2001 and came back as a Community Partnership Coordinator, establishing relationships with external organisations and doing such things as visiting schools to promote safety on the railways. He is currently Honorary Secretary of the British Transport Police History Group, one of the aims of which is to preserve the historical records and artefacts of the BTP and its predecessors wherever railway and dock police forces were operational.
Bill explained that the BTP is a national special police force which polices the London Underground, the DLR, the Glasgow subway, some Metro Tram Systems and the Emirates Cable Car over the Thames as well as more than 10,000 miles of railway track across Great Britain.
Although the BTP per se was only formed in 1949 after the nationalisation of the railways, his presentation covered the history of railway policing beginning in the nineteenth century. Many individual railway companies had previously had their own police forces and his impressive collection of old photographs depicted officers, their changing uniforms, equipment and liveries. He explained how the organisation was amongst the first to recruit women and ethnic minorities when they had to replace men lost to the military during World War I, how the Police Federation was formed after the war and the further testing times presented by World War II.
He mentioned 2 particularly difficult challenges faced during that conflict – the bomb explosion in Balham Underground station in October 1940 which killed 68 people after which it took 3 months to remove and identify the dead, and the Bethnal Green tube disaster in March 1943 when 173 people were crushed to death on a staircase as they attempted to escape a German bombing raid.
In 1957 the Maxwell-Johnson enquiry was the precursor to major reorganisation and the force got its first Chief Constable in 1963. The Beeching cuts later that decade led to a major reduction in the size of the force, and in 2014 its divisional structure changed.
Nowadays the force has its headquarters in Camden, it has 3 divisions each headed by a Chief Superintendent and employs more than 3,000 police officers. These officers have the same rank structure and powers of arrest as those in regional police forces and there is a regular interchange of officers between them.
We look forward to hosting Bill again at some time in the near future to hear more of his anecdotes about his years spent with the BTP.