for an act of parliament to authorize the collection of‘a pound rate’ to support
a sufficient number of watchmen to enable their stands to be in sight of each
other or at least in hearing.^71 At the same time a group of Middlesex and West-
minster magistrates petitioned Townshend to urge him in effect to interfere in
the struggle for control of parish government in Westminster in order to get ‘a
Law for regulating the Nightly Watch’ as a crucial part of the battle against
street violence.^72
Such proposals were again put before parliament in 1728 , and now with the
support of the lord mayor and aldermen of the City—so long as the City could
ensure it would be treated separately. The experience of the street violence of
the 1720 s had persuaded the City authorities that they too needed statutory au-
thority to support an effective watch. They were also likely to have been en-
couraged to take such a view by a broadening public discussion of the problems
of the night watch. Daniel Defoe, for example, criticized the watch in several
pamphlets in 1727 and 1728 concerned with property crime and broader issues
of social order. London, Defoe said, was becoming ‘a Scene ofRapine and Dan-
ger’.^73 Rogues had grown ‘more wicked than ever’—having been encouraged,
in his view, by Gay’s Beggar’s Opera( 1728 ) ‘to value themselves on their Profession,
rather than be asham’d of it’—and the watchmen were unable to control them
because they were ‘for the most Part, decrepit, superannuated wretches’.^74
Their numbers needed to be increased, in his view, and they needed to be more
active and more able-bodied than the present force. To achieve those results, he
recommended that their pay be increased—from what he had said in the previ-
ous year was six pence a night (or somewhere in the region of nine pounds a
year) to twenty pounds a year, a sum that a poor man ‘with Frugality, may live
decently thereon’.^75
Such concerns about the capacity of the watch to deal with violence on streets
that were becoming increasingly busy at night encouraged the City authorities
to join in 1728 in efforts being made yet again in parliament by members of the
social élite of Westminster parishes to obtain the kind of authority that would
enable them to make significant changes in their own night watch. Early in that
year a committee of the Common Council was struck to consider how the Night
Watch Act of 1705 ‘may be better enforced and more effectually executed’.^76
190 Policing the Night Streets
(^71) SP 35 / 61 / 52. Blackerby also recommended that the watchmen not be above the age of 50. He
thought they should be on duty roughly at the times of the City watch, and that they should go on their
‘Walks’ every half hour, another characteristic of the City system: indeed, Blackerby clearly thought the
City watch superior to that in Westminster.
(^72) SP 35 / 67 / 8.
(^73) Daniel Defoe, Augusta Triumphans: Or, the Way to make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe
( 1728 ), 48.
(^74) Ibid., 47 – 8.
(^75) Ibid., 52. In Parochial Tyranny: Or, the Housekeeper’s Complaint.. .( 1727 ), Defoe also said that apart from
the fact that in some parts of London there were too few watchmen, 6 d. a night was too little to attract
good candidates to take up the post.
(^76) Jor 57 , fo. 177.