This article uses archival research and interviews to construct a social history of the relationship between police officers and the diverse communities they served in two contrasting regions of Scotland for the period c. 1900-1970: Glasgow and west central Scotland, and the Highlands and Islands. It argues these relationships were diverse and complex, shaped by local cultural, social and economic factors. Moreover, it identifies key constitutive elements that enabled or disrupted the forging of trust and legitimacy in urban and rural areas, including discretion, 'insider' status and embeddedness with settlements, enhancing and reinforcing conclusions of other studies of more recent 'community policing' models.
Historical pageants were important sites of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain. They took place in many places and sometimes on a large scale, in settings ranging from small villages to industrial cities. They were staged by schools, churches, professional organisations, women's groups and political parties, among others. This article draws on contemporary studies of heritage and performance to explore the blend of history, myth and fiction that characterised pageants, and the ways in which they both shaped and reflected the self-image of local communities. Pageants were important channels of popular education as well as entertainment and, although they are sometimes seen as backward-looking and conservative spectacles, this article argues that pageants could be an effective means of enlisting the past in the service of the present and future.
This article examines the ways in which the First World War was represented in historical pageants during the interwar period. Pageants in this period are often overlooked as sites of commemoration and dramatic representation. Three types of pageant are identified: those that portrayed the war hyper-realistically, those which relied on symbolism and allegory to convey messages about war and peace, and those which sought to incorporate the war into the longer histories of the communities whose pasts they depicted. The article argues that 'traditional' forms of representation of the past proved to be resilient features of popular commemoration and remembrance.
For much of the twentieth century, historical pageants were one of the most widespread and popular forms of public engagement with the past. Following the success of the first modern historical pageant at Sherborne in Dorset in 1905 (see Figure 1), England succumbed to what contemporaries called 'pageant fever' or 'pageantitis'. 2 Towns and cities across the country staged historical pageants, involving hundreds or thousands of amateur performers, and watched by sometimes tens of thousands of spectators over several performances. The ubiquity of pageants in Edwardian England is now coming to be appreciated by scholars, not least due to the work of Ayako Yoshino, who has written the only monograph thus far devoted to the topic. 3 The typical historical pageant contained around ten scenes of local history. It showcased moments at which the history of the particular town had intersected with the larger national story, but also key moments in its medieval history, the latter often including the establishment of a monastery or castle, or the receipt of a royal charter. Historical pageants remained important during the interwar period, when many towns and cities staged them for the first time, notably in the industrial north and midlands of England. 4 Village, country house and church pageants were also popular, and this was reflected in their frequent appearance in the literature of the time, such as Virginia Woolf's novel Between the
Policing in Glasgow was segmented into discrete roles, linked to the proliferation of specialisms across the twentieth century. This chapter analyses the effects of encounters generated by some of these specialist units (particularly those associated with plainclothes rather than work in uniform) on relationships between police and communities. After discussing the tactics associated with the use of plainclothes by detective officers, it examines the work of the Licensing Department (or ‘vice squad’) in relation to street betting, the sex industry, and the criminalisation of homosexuality. The chapter then analyses experiments with specialist units and programmes associated with the policing of young people, demonstrating the variegated effects of plain-clothes roles on police-community relations.
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