44 Before the BobbiesThere were some basic similarities between the night watch established in
the West End in the 1730s and those set up in the other regions of greater
London. Local officials were forced to admit the inadequacy of relying on
amateur or voluntary local services. They found that they did not have
sufficient authority to enforce either personal service or informal rates and
subscriptions. They turned to parliamentary legislation, which provided the
needed legal power to levy and collect rates and to establish a basic system of
professional law enforcement and street administration. All these authorities
obtained their funding for the night watch by rating the owners and/or
occupiers of property, often borrowing on the security of those rates. The
turnpike trusts paid their watchmen mostly from tolls, but a few were also
granted the power to levy a rate on property adjoining the roadway.^87
Central government continued to play the role of enabler of local change
and mediator of local disputes, a more passive than active stance.
The basic hierarchy of watchmen, beadles, watchhouse keepers and con-
stables, developed in Westminster, was also implemented elsewhere. The
main task of the night watch, as its name implied, was to provide protection
on tlte streets at night, not to police daytime crowds or riots. No one at the
local level felt the need initially for a police presence on the streets in the
daylight hours, except for the occasional beadle to move beggars on. Vestries,
watch committees, paving commissions, and turnpike trusts all over the
metropolis took responsibility for administering these systems, seeing to
funding, organization, and discipline in a more systematic, formal, bureau-
cratic way than had been the case. We have no way of comparing the number
of watchmen that were on the streets of the various localities while the night
watch was organized and funded on a voluntary basis to the new systems.
However the impression from the records of watch authorities is that the
numbers of men regularly on the streets at night to protect the lives and
property of London's residents increased. It is perhaps that regularity that
marks these new systems out as moving towards a more modem system of
policing. The process of night watch reform also demonstrates that eight-
eenth-century parochial government was more capable of adapting struc-
tures originally suited to more static, rural communities to meet the changing
needs of growing, urban neighbourhoods than previously thought. But as
crime emerged as a problem and topic for national debate, separate from
other issues like paving and sanitation, the night watch became a key
institutional focus of reformers at both local and, increasingly, national
levels.