Many policemen had enlisted to fight in WWII or been called up, some had not come home and, of those who did, some were incapable of returning to their previous job. In London the crime rate had risen by 57% during wartime, aided by the black-out and a shortage of police. This continued post war, exacerbated by continued rationing and a thriving black market, which nurtured the rise of organised crime.
There was a general shortage of policemen and not enough men decided to join – there were many other employment options for them – so the police forces decided to recruit women. This was particularly true of London’s Metropolitan Police, which had, some years before, set up A4 Branch, a woman’s branch of the force. The Met ran a recruitment drive to attract women, even as it discriminated against them (starting pay for men was £5.10s, for women £4. 9s) because they needed more officers.
My book ‘A Death in the Afternoon’, the second in the Clapham Trilogy, is set in 1948 and it follows, among other elements, the fortunes of a woman, Faye Smith, who joins the Metropolitan Police Force. My protagonist becomes a detective, a branch of the Met which has a long history, from Fielding’s Bow Street Runners in 1753 through the creation of the Detective Branch in 1842, which became the Criminal Investigation Branch (CID) in 1878. In 1948 there were some woman police detectives, but not many, so Faye would have been very unusual. I had to give her a senior ranking male ‘sponsor’ to make her rapid transfer to the plain clothes branch in any way close to possible. She is, nonetheless, a woman in a man’s world.
Women, often the wives of serving officers, had been employed by the force since the close of the nineteenth century, as ‘matrons’, whose job was to guard female prisoners. It wasn’t until 1915, however, that women were recruited as police constables with full powers of arrest. My protagonist shares a surname with that very first woman PC, Edith Smith, who served in Grantham, Lincolnshire. The first WPCs appeared on London’s streets in 1919 patrolling in pairs. They were, however, followed by two male constables at a certain distance behind, ready to go to their aid if required. By 1920 there were forty-three police authorities in England and Wales, employing two hundred and thirty-eight WPCs[1].
Yet many woman recruits weren’t given powers of arrest and were used to perform ‘domestic’ tasks, like paperwork, driving and looking after women and children who had been arrested. In London, Dorothy Peto, an early campaigner to have full female representation in the police, became Staff Officer in charge of the women’s section. Two years later, in 1932, she became the first female Superintendent and headed the newly formed A4 Branch, the Women’s Branch of the Metropolitan Police. During her tenure she expanded the number of women police from less than 60 to over 200 and, when she retired, in 1946, the Met’s Woman’s Branch had over half the female police in the country.
A real achievement, but to put it into context, there were over fifty-two thousand police officers in England and Wales at that time, so Peto’s section had less than half a percent. Nonetheless, things were moving forward and the ‘marriage bar’, preventing married women, or those who got married, from serving, or continuing to serve was abolished in 1946. In 1948 women were permitted to join the Police Federation.
Peto’s focus was on dealing with juvenile crime and indecency, especially given the social problems caused by WWII. Specialist roles developed, like the SSO, the Sex Statement Officer, who took the statements of sex workers and from women who had been assaulted, abused or raped. I have a character in the novel, Lydia, who is an SSO, but who wants very much to do more than take statements and make the tea. In 1946, Peto’s successor leading A4, Elizabeth Bather, who was the first female Chief Superintendent, wanted to expand the role of women police officers beyond the ‘domestic’, including beat patrolling independently of male PCs and entry into the detective branch. She appears in the novel and encourages Faye but also warns her what she is up against and how she will be judged. Faye is within the hierarchy of a special squad, a necessary dramatic licence, but it was only in 1973 that women police were integrated directly into the Metropolitan Police force, not in their own hierarchy of command.
Prejudice and misogyny were common, in the police force, as in society, which routinely treated a married woman as an adjunct of her spouse. Until 1948 and the British Nationality Act, for example, a married woman was not allowed nationality independent of her husband, so, until that time, if a British woman married a Frenchman, say, she would become French[2]. Many other professions still operated a ‘marriage bar’ which prevented women from having careers, they would have to leave their chosen profession when they married.
Corruption was another issue, which was endemic in the police force at this time.
Organised crime in London had suborned serving police officers, the press, politicians and even members of the judiciary, it was said. This was often through direct threats and bribery, but also through the provision of favours in the Soho clubs where drugs and sex were supplied and the recipients subsequently called upon for reciprocation. This interweaving of politics, law enforcement and gangland corrupted public life, from the glamorization of the gang bosses (each had ‘their’ journalists writing in the press) through the awarding of public contracts (for building and haulage) to the failure to pursue certain criminals.
Low level corruption occurred in most police stations, such as turning a blind eye to the selling of illegal contraband, for example, in return for some of those goods, or taking items from shops which had already been broken into. During my research for the books I spoke with the child of a police officer serving in the 50s and 60s, who recalled the sweets and ‘treats’, comics and magazines which were always plentiful at home, despite continued rationing. It was only as he grew older that he realised these had come from newsagents and confectionary shops which had already been burgled. The shops would be cleaned out by the police officers arriving at the scene and the shop owners would claim it all on their insurance, blaming it on the thieves who had broken into their shops for the money in the till or otherwise on the premises.
Only in 1972, with the appointment of Sir Robert Mark specifically to stamp out corruption, was corruption tackled in a cross-force way. In one south London station almost all the serving detectives resigned on or close to the date of his appointment. I have called this station Standish Lane in the novels.
Misogyny and bad behaviour directed at women was, however, still the order of the day. Jackie Malton, retired Detective Chief Inspector and the supposed model for Jane Tennison, heroine of the Prime Suspect books by Lynda La Plante, recalled the ‘initiation ritual’ for women police officers recently on Radio 4. When she joined the CID in 1975 male colleagues would forcibly restrain a woman inductee while her skirt was lifted, knickers pulled down and her buttocks stamped with the CID station stamp[3]. There was no comparable initiation ritual, Malton states, for the male joiners.
My character didn’t have to endure that, but there are echoes of Faye’s fictional experience in real life even today. The Casey Report of 2023 found a culture of misogyny, homophobia and racism in the Met and the misogyny extended to female police officers within the force, something with which Faye would be familiar. Plus ça change perhaps, but in 2025 35.4% of all police constables in England and Wales are female.[4]
A Death in the Afternoon is published by Hobeck Books (paperback £10.99, ebook £3.00) and ISIS Audiobooks. Festival Days (Book Three) will be available in April 2026.
[1] British Association for Women in Policing.
[2] See Hansard Tuesday 11th May 1948
[3] BBC Sounds, Radio 4, Lady Swindlers
[4] The Workforce Development Trust