Police order books, instructions and manuals

In the early 19th century, individual policemen and police stations were expected to keep books of regulations, orders and policy decisions by the police committee or chief constable. Orders were issued regularly and were initially copied by hand into general order books but later copies were simply pasted into the volume. From the mid-19th century onwards, printed manuals and instruction books began to replace these, produced by individual constabularies or by national police bodies. Some constabularies continued the practice of keeping general order books for long-term instructions, as well as special order books for instructions relating to specific events.

The type of information these contain ranges from conditions of service of police officers and disciplinary procedures to regulations, orders and instructions on dealing with reports of crimes or incidents. General order books may contain information about how records are to be maintained or details of new or changed legislation. Special order books may contain details about which officers would police individual polling places during a local or parliamentary elections or during strikes.  They may contain police intelligence about potential crimes, guidance on identifying suspicious activities and can also contain evidence of how suffragettes, refugees, foreign nationals (‘aliens’), trades unions and others were policed. They may include notification of the dismissal of police officers following disciplinary proceedings. One example includes the instruction ‘The officer or Constable shall, on joining the Police Force, become a member of the Glasgow Police Sick and Funeral Society’ (Glasgow City Archives, SR22/60/1 1857 Regulations, orders and instructions, City of Glasgow, p.7).

For those researching the history of policing, instruction books and manuals are a more concise and readable source than station records, memoranda books and administrative files. Although sometimes a surviving copy may be annotated by an individual officer, they have no real family history value. For school projects on police and crime they are less informative than chief constables’ annual reports and less visually appealing than posters etc from scrapbooks.