62 Before the BobbiesWatch authorities began to make greater use of what the twentieth century
calls management techniques; Jeremy Bentham was one of the first critics of
government administration to draw an analogy between business and gov-
ernment. For Bentham, as L.J. Hume argues, there was little difference
between the task of a ruler and a manager:Managers, like rulers, had to accept responsibility for decision making, for
the issuing of appropriate instructions, for the engagement of the motives
of the subordinate personnel in the least burdensome manner possible,
and for the oversight of all activities and procedures in order to ensure
that their decisions and instructions were being translated into action.^30Th achieve this kind of managerial oversight and thus greater accountability,
local watch authorities turned to more hierarchical forms of organization to
improve the supervision of the watch. Some vestries also worked to make
street policing more impartial and less corrupt. Better salaries and more
discretionary rewards were used to provide incentives for diligence, while
increased supervision and stricter discipline were to punish any lapses.
There had always been a certain degree of hierarchy in the structure of
parochial police forces. Watchmen were subordinate to beadles and con-
stables; those officers to the watch committee, and so on. By the tum of the
century, parish authorities increasingly used salaried officers to act as super-
visors or inspectors of the watch. One of the most common problems for
watch authorities was keeping the watch alert and attentive. Given the rates
of pay for watchmen, it was not uncommon for men to take on this work as a
supplement to a day job. Staying awake could thus be a real problem. The
sleepy, inattentive watchman was stereotypical even in Shakespeare's time,
hence the comic value of the night watchman in Much Ado about Nothing
who says: 'We will rather sleep than talk. We know what belongs to a
watch.'^31 By the late eighteenth century, this image still appeared. A letter
addressed to Richard Brinsley Sheridan appeared in the Daily Universal
Register (subsequently The Times) in early 1785. The author urged him to
continue with his efforts to reform the 'Police of Westminster' and, among
other things, 'remove the sleeping watchmen from their dormitories'?^2 It is
difficult to judge just how widespread this problem actually was. But in the
climate of the late eighteenth century, when demands for vigilance were
increasing, keeping the watch alert became one of the main tasks of super-
visory officers.
These men were employed because the unpaid members of the watch
committee or the vestry were unwilling or unable to perform the nightly
task of supervising the watch. For example, in 1785, the Watch Committee of
the Liberty of the Rolls, Westminster, recommended 'That an Extra Man be
employed to superintend and see that the watchmen are on their Duty, Cry
their Time Regular, and [are] not confining Themselves to their Box or any