S08E02

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. Today we're taking another dark turn into the murky underbelly of Victorian London. Home to Assassin's Creed Syndicate, the setting for today's episode is a place that ought to have been a shining beacon in the gloom, a place that was home to the Metropolitan Police Force. Formed in 1829, following the examples of Paris and Glasgow, London was the third city to establish a police force. We're going to explore a name that has become synonymous with London's Metropolitan Police to this day, Scotland Yard. But what did a Victorian police station look like and what went on inside? Picture the scene. The year is 1868, the 31st year of Queen Victoria's reign. You find yourself walking along Whitehall on a typically smoggy day in London. Horse-drawn carriages painted in deep black speed pastry. Their rickety wheels platter against cobblestones lining the street floor. You can hear the distant holler of newspaper sellers in Trafalgar Square just up the road, failing to convince passers-by to part with their cash. As you walk, you're passed by all sorts of people, milkmaids hauling huge tin barrels, workmen covered in soot and dust and a surprising number of well-dressed politicians. But this is no coincidence. Whitehall is the beating heart of the city, the place where real power lies. You turn left and up into an open courtyard lined with trees swaying in the gloom. The yard is surrounded by iron railings and gas lampposts popmarked with flecks of rust. Parked up at the side are more carriages, but these have bars welded across the windows. The word police is painted in searing white across the wooden side panels. Milling about, there are several men dressed in dark blue tailcoats and capes. One of them wears a belt from which hangs a long and hefty truncheon. Another has a shining polished whistle hung around his neck. On their heads, they all wear steel ring helmets embossed with a star and crown, the mark of a policeman. At the opposite end of the courtyard stands an imposing building with a grand arched doorway. This is Great Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the newly founded Metropolitan Police Force. Blue clad police officers walk in and out like ants scurrying about their work. Its brick walls, the colour of red ochre, are cut through by rows upon rows of white rimmed windows. You walk in and are instantly greeted by a bustling hive of activity. A cacophony of clicks fills the air as telegraph receivers relay a multitude of messages. Uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives talk in hushed tones. The room is packed with desks littered with reams of paper as officers diligently note down shreds of information that might later bear importance. On a balcony up above, you catch a glimpse of the holding cells used to detain delinquents and troublemakers who breach the peace. A piercing screech cuts through the hubbub as a policeman swings a cell door shut. The prisoner protests, but the metallic clink of the lock seals his fate. He's spending the night in Scotland Yard. You walk on past the cells and approach a row of offices. The head of you is a wooden door slightly ajar. Thin beams of light cascade out of the gap. You peer in and see two figures. One is wearing the distinctive navy blue uniform that marks him as a police officer. The other, too, is dressed in a black tailcoat, a top hat, and wields a long thin cane. The man in black hands a thick wad of banknotes to the officer, but the wad is far too thick and the policeman is far too smug for this to be his usual wage packet. It can only be one thing. This is a backhander, a bribe, the unmistakable mark of corruption, so much for Scotland Yard being a shining beacon in the gloom. You begin to move away, not wanting to attract attention, but it's too late. The man in black has spotted you through the crack. You've been caught. The constable raises his whistle to his lips and then all hell breaks loose. This is how Scotland Yard is introduced to us in Assassin's Creed Syndicate. So to further explore the history, today I'm joined by Dr. Jonah Miller, lecturer in early modern British history at King's College London. Together we'll delve into when and how Scotland Yard became the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, what role it played in shaping Victorian London and most importantly why it's called Scotland Yard despite being over 300 miles away from the Scottish border. Join us as we cross the contours of time and hear the real echoes of history resonating from Assassin's Creed Syndicate. Jonah, thank you so much for joining us on Echoes of History. I can't wait to find out more about Scotland Yard. Great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. To start us off with, maybe people in London know precisely what we're talking about when we say Scotland Yard, but for those of us who live in the murky darkness beyond London, what are we talking about when we say Scotland Yard? What do we mean? Well, Scotland Yard is a place, but it's also a way of referring to an institution. So it's a place, it's in Whitehall and it's where the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police were for most of the 19th century. So Scotland Yard kind of became synonymous with the police and with detectives as a whole. And today we need to be a little bit careful because the Metropolitan Police isn't the only police force in London. So Scotland Yard actually means something really, really specific in London. So the Metropolitan Police force was set up in 1829 and it's the first modern, organised, professional, hierarchical police force in Britain, not the first in the UK because several earlier versions were set up in Ireland and they were kind of the inspiration for it. And it starts off just being the area of Westminster, Whitehall and a few miles around. It's not the city of London, very importantly for people who are proud of the city's traditions. The city has its own police force and then it expands. So for most of the 19th century, it's a 15 mile radius from Charing Cross is the Metropolitan Police District. And why was Scotland Yard the Metropolitan Police? Why was it located on that spot in Whitehall? Why was it put there? This is kind of one of the interesting things about what 19th century policing actually was and the legacy that it's left to us. Earlier forms of policing had been very, very localised and very much under kind of local control of parishes and wards in cities. And what really changes with 1829 is the Met was directly connected to the government, the central government, through the Home Office. So the reason that the Met headquarters were in this place called Scotland Yard, which is basically on Whitehall where the civil service was, is that originally it was basically a branch of the Home Office. So the Metropolitan Police Commissioners answered directly to the Home Secretary as they still do. And this kind of link between central government and policing is really one of the big changes in 1829. The one thing we haven't addressed yet is why on earth the Metropolitan Police located in Whitehall are called Scotland Yard? Where does that name come from? It's actually the address is number four Whitehall Place. So this is a set of kind of hillry pickledy Victorian government buildings off a little side street off Whitehall, which is the big road that connects Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square. This number four Whitehall Place backs onto a place called Scotland Yard, which is a yard, it's a courtyard. And when it was first created, there were kind of two functions for this building. One was that it was an administrative office for the commissioners. There were the commissioners and their clerks and lots of people doing lots of paperwork. And the other one, it was this police station for Division A of the Metropolitan Police, which is sometimes called the Home Division, which kind of policed Whitehall basically. And their station looked out onto the back onto Scotland Yard. So their force became known as the Scotland Yard Force and the name stuck basically. So then the whole setup began to be referred to as Scotland Yard. It's an interesting evolution of the name, isn't it? So people would maybe say, I'm going to Scotland Yard, meaning I'm going to the entranceway to the Metropolitan Police Building at Whitehall. And Scotland Yard is the bit that weirdly stuck as the name for the whole organisation. Yeah, I mean, I guess number four Whitehall Place doesn't quite roll off the tongue in the same way. And I mean, the thing that really kind of entrenches that name Scotland Yard is the creation of a detective force, which comes a little bit later. It's 1842 is the first detective as it's known. And they operate out of this kind of back set of buildings looking over Scotland Yard. So they are the people who really get associated with that name Scotland Yard, you know, so and so of the yard. And that obviously lasts well into the 20th century. Do we have any idea why a square, a yard in the middle of Whitehall is named Scotland Yard? Is there a connection to Scotland at all? There is it's a little bit murky. Whitehall was a royal palace for a very, very long time before it became the kind of centre of the civil service. And in the late medieval period and into the early modern period, this particular part of Whitehall may have been where visiting Scottish royals would stay when they came to visit English monarchs. That's the kind of the story that's usually told and it's probably more or less true, but there's really very little documentation. So it's quite hard to be certain. I mean, tenuous and murky stories being connected with Scotland Yard in the 19th century is maybe something we need to be wary of. Who then is responsible for the rise of a police force and its basing in Whitehall? Why does London suddenly need a police force? The person who is sort of most strongly associated with this is Robert Peel. So he's the one who gives police officers some of their nicknames like Peelers and Bobbies. So Bobbies is from Robert Peelers is from Peel. Yeah, exactly. Slightly oddly, this is almost more a story about Ireland than about London. Robert Peel later on in the 19th century, he becomes prime minister, but the point where we're talking about him is he's home secretary. But before that, he has been chief secretary for Ireland and what he's done in that job is create police forces. So he's created a couple of different police forces and they're the first people to be known as Peelers in Ireland. And then when he becomes home secretary in London in the 1820s, there are lots of people worrying about rising crime rates. And this is a bit of, again, slightly murky issue in that crime statistics of all kinds are difficult to interpret. Early 19th century crime statistics are especially difficult to interpret because often this is the first time that statistics are actually being gathered on a particular type of crime. So it's basically impossible to say whether the figures are going up or down, but some people think that they are going up. And Robert Peel likes setting up police forces. He likes the idea of government having a kind of set of men who can carry out orders and keep order and force law in a kind of centralized way. So he basically takes advantage of this atmosphere of some people saying that crime rates are going up and we need to do something. And he pushes through an act for the improvement of the police of the Metropolis, which is the 1829 act that creates the Metropolitan Police. It's interesting that it's an Irish template in a place called Scotland Yard that is so intimately associated with the city of London. It's a fascinating set of connections there. There are more Irish connections as you go forward as well. I mean, so the first two police commissioners who Peel chooses, Colonel Charles Rowan, who is an Irish soldier and an Irish barrister called Richard Maine. And the idea is that both of them know how police forces work because they've got experience of the Irish police forces. Maybe we'll come on to some of the later Irish connections, but it runs all the way through. Yeah, fascinating. There's a perception in London, I guess, whether the statistics back it up or not, there's a perception that crime is growing. Is this a symptom of London itself expanding as a city, the increasing urbanization of society? We're heading full steam into the Industrial Revolution period. Is there a sense that as more people pile in there, there needs to be some form of organized policing of the law in the city? Absolutely. So I mean, the population of London is going absolutely through the roof in the sort of late 18th and early 19th century. And lots of people say that the old institutions just can't handle it. They're not up to it. And so there are lots of kind of stories about like parish based night watchmen who are chasing a suspect and then they get to the border with the next parish and they have to stop. Those stories are probably not true. There are people who are kind of propagandists for police reform who like to put stories like that about. And what does happen even before 1829 is that quite a lot of the local authorities carry out police reform on a kind of micro level. So a lot of parishes and the city of London, the old corporation of London in the Square Mile, all of them in the early 19th century are sort of getting local acts of parliament passed. They're doing a kind of tinkering with their local law enforcement structures. So they do have professional officers out on the beat, particularly at night. And one of the kind of curiosities of 1829 is that there's all this big fanfare and you know, Peel announces that there's a new police for the metropolis. But at first, there are actually fewer officers on the beat after 1829 than there were before, because a lot of the old kind of parochial night watch forces get swept away and they're replaced with this new centralized force, which at the beginning doesn't have the numbers. I mean, they haven't recruited enough and they just can't operate on that scale at first. So it's sort of a curious situation where everybody is worried about the growth of London, about the perceived increase in crime. People at a local level are responding to that. But then there's this big central government intervention, which is supposed to kind of really tackle it head on, and which initially may actually be less effective than the kind of localized responses. And those local parish level police forces, presumably that if they're not put in place by the government, they're being run by parish councils, it's coming down to how good the parish council is, how interested they are in law and order, how much money they have to spend. So presumably the wealthy areas who maybe have less crime anyway are the ones who weirdly can afford to be better policed than the areas who might need better policing. And maybe that's the intended benefit of a unified police force that everywhere will get covered. Absolutely. Before 1829, the parishes that have the best, the largest at least night watch forces are places in West London where the membership of the parish, like half the people on the vestry rather than the parish council, half the people on the vestry are titled. They're perfectly happy to kind of splash a bit of cash to have lots of people protecting their property from burglars. Whereas in East London, around the docks, there are parishes where you don't have a resident Duke. And so people are paying for local law enforcement through local taxes, through parish taxes. That doesn't mean they have nobody working on the beat, but it does mean that they don't have the kind of same scale of resources as in West London. That said, what they do have is some control over local law enforcement. So if you're a parish rate payer, you pay your parish taxes, then you're effectively the boss of the night watch. I mean, you can sort of, if you bump into a night watchman at night, you can tell them head over there because I heard something going on, or you can, if you're a bit drunk, you can get them to kind of guide you home. There's a much closer connection between the sort of respectable residents of the area and the people doing law enforcement than there is after 1829. And that's one of the things that some people really complain about, that policing is kind of taken out of their hands. And suddenly it's all being run by the home office rather than by, you know, sort of upstanding parishioners. I have absolutely no desire to get political with this. I'm just struck as we're talking about how some things really haven't changed. You know, we get increasing populations in cities that lead to a perception that there's an increase in crimes, that we're currently grappling with problems of is it better to devolve power to local regional police forces, and mares and things like that? Or is it better to have it all centralised? It seems like these were things that they were thinking about and juggling with 200 years ago, and we almost haven't got entirely away from them. So not meant as any kind of political comment on anything, just an observation that the world never really changes, does it? So Syndicate, the game is set in 1868. So we're 40 years into the life of the Metropolitan Police Force here. If you and I walked into Scotland Yard to report a crime in 1868, do we know what that building might have looked like? What might have welcomed us as we walked through the door? The first thing we would see, I think, would be just enormous piles of paper everywhere. It was almost immediately overwhelmed by the amount of bureaucracy required to run a kind of citywide police force. And these were old, slightly dilapidated buildings that all had labyrinthine corridors connecting them together. There's a nice quote from the Times that describes Scotland Yard as a dingy collection of mean buildings in a state of hopeless confusion. It's a sort of Dickensian image of a kind of chaotic bureaucracy. Huge stacks of paper everywhere, clerks running around between them trying to find the right document. Also, of course, a load of police officers who in 1868 have just had a kind of major reform of their uniform. They've just got helmets rather than reinforced top hats. Whoa, wait, wait, reinforced top hats. This is what police are wearing. That's amazing. From 1829 until the 1860s, the uniform of the Metropolitan Police Officer is a reinforced top hat, a cape, and a kind of a big overcoat, all dark blue. And then in the 1860s, partly because they are increasingly worried that police officers are basically not properly protected, they start getting helmets. Though that's also connected to a kind of call from some quarters for a more military style of police. So again, around the same time as you get helmets introduced, you get military style drill, you get lots of calls for police officers to be armed. This is from around the middle of the 19th century, the Colt Revolver is appearing more and more in London in the hands of suspected criminals. And there are these cartoons showing a burglar with a Colt Revolver up against a police officer with a reinforced top hat and a stick. The suggestion is the police need more defense and more equipment. So there are some people saying that the police should carry guns, there are some people saying they should at least carry cutlasses, and this is when they get their helmets. They've also just at this point recently been allowed to grow beards for the first time. So in 1829, they're forbidden to have mustaches or beards, and that's kind of relaxed in the 1860s. And also in the 1860s, this is the first time that they are allowed to appear in public, not in uniform, even when off duty. From 1829 until the 1860s, police officers have to wear their uniform all the time. And the only signifier that they're on duty is a little sort of armband, which they don't wear when they're off duty. I'd never known that that's absolutely unbelievable that you would have to wear your work uniform all the time, even when you're not at work is something I think we would find incredibly weird today. And whilst I'll say I find that weird, I'm also writing myself a note to start a petition immediately after this to bring back reinforced top hats and capes for police officers. I mean, stab vests and everything else absolutely great. Reinforced top hats and capes has got to be where it's at. This is After Dark, myths, misdeeds and the paranormal. The podcast that takes you to the shadiest corners of the past, unpicking history's spookiest, strangest and most sinister stories. I'm Maddy Pelling and I'm Anthony Delaney. Join us every Monday and Thursday and we'll take a look at the darker side of history from haunted pubs to Houdini to witch trials and arsenic laced breakfasts. Follow After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal wherever you get your podcasts, brought to you by History Hit. We're still having conversations about arming the police today, aren't we? So again, 150 years later, these are still questions that are being bandied around and questioned today that existed right from almost the beginning of the police force. While we're on the uniformed police officers, do we know what kind of equipment they would have carried? You mentioned, you know, they're not armed with pistols. There's that cartoon of them with a reinforced top hat and a stick. Do we know what actual policing equipment they would have carried that we might recognise today? Yeah, so they do. They have truncheons all the way through. They have truncheons. So that's the kind of the baseline. I guess the things that change are that periodically they do get issued with cutlasses and periodically they do also get issued with revolvers. In every instance, this is very controversial. From the beginning, there are lots of people who are very, very nervous about having a police force like this at all. This is why in the aftermath of the 1829 Act, so in the 1830s, it's really pretty touch and go. There are lots of people saying we should just go back on this, we should abolish them and go back to the old sort of localised system. The key kind of argument for that is that this is a form of military rule and it's worse in the eyes of a 19th century British person, it's French style military rule. This idea of police officers with weapons controlled by the central government is very strongly associated with France and France is associated with tyranny and despotism. It's the right of the free-born Britain to be policed by people who are not militarised agents of central government. That's why when police do turn up with weapons, it causes a big backlash and the home office is constantly trying to navigate these conflicting priorities. Another thing to say about the militarisation thing is things like barracks. The police officers live in station houses which look quite like military barracks and the fact of the blue uniform, which is now embedded in our police mythology, is all about suggesting that police officers are not soldiers. They don't have a red uniform and the blue is supposed to be a kind of softer, more civilian friendly way of showing that these are figures of authority. Did they carry handcuffs during this period? Did they have the famous whistle? We think of Victorian policemen blowing their whistle to attract help or all of those kinds of things around at this time too. Handcuffs go way back. They predate the creation of the new police forces. The whistle, I'm not sure exactly when the whistle comes in. In the early 19th century, they tend to have a rattle. I mean not totally dissimilar to a kind of toddler's rattle. A thing that you shake and it makes a very loud noise. Further back in time there are bells, so there's a kind of crossover between the watchman and the bellman. There are various ways that police officers can use these kind of instruments to call on each other. But yes, the whistle does appear at some point in the 19th century. I'm not sure exactly when. And you mentioned a little bit earlier that we've also entered the period in which there are detectives, so non-uniformed police officers. Do we have any idea of how London has reacted to plainclothes police? Because if you're expecting your police force to be in their uniform all of the time, even when they're not on duty, how do they translate that into a force that don't wear any uniform at all and don't identify themselves as police men? They're not popular. The story, I guess, really starts before the actual creation of a detective branch when the Metropolitan Police in the 1830s, they send some officers in plainclothes to spy on radical political meetings. So there's a guy called Sergeant Oppai who goes to spy on the meetings of the, it's called the National Union of the Working Classes. He basically becomes an adjunct provocateur, so he pretends that he's a kind of out of work painter and starts suggesting that they kind of blow up government buildings and do really radical dangerous things. He's then recognized when he's on duty in uniform by one of his supposed comrades from the National Union of Working Classes and this becomes a massive scandal. It triggers a royal commission to investigate the Metropolitan Police and there's a whole sort of newspaper explosion about the idea that there are these spies everywhere who are going to kind of control people and suppress their political rights and lead them to do crazy things like blow up buildings. So that's the back respond. And then when you actually get detectives in 1842, essentially to combat that there's a huge propaganda effort to say that these aren't spies. These are a kind of useful branch of the police system and they can help us make sure that burglars and murderers are brought to justice. And part of that propaganda campaign is Charles Dickens who writes lots of articles. I mean he's best friends with one of the first leading inspectors who's Charlie Field and Charlie Field and Dickens kind of have dinner together and they talk a lot about detective work and Dickens writes these articles for newspapers describing, accompanying Charlie Field out walking around the East London slums at night and then we have Inspector Bucket in Bleak House who's the kind of iconic Victorian detective and that sort of leads to the subsequent 19th century boom in detective fiction. And that is all in a way part of this propaganda effort to say it's all right to have plain clothes, police officers, they're not spying on you, they're not trying to kind of trick you into doing something that will land you in prison. They are actually useful parts of the system. It feels like if we walked into Scotland Yard, if we stepped into Syndicate, 1868 we walked in there, we're going to be entering a fairly chaotic building, a labyrinth full of paper, bustling with people, men with newly grown beards because they're allowed to now, some in uniform, some out of uniform. So it feels like a fairly recognisable police force but maybe a more chaotic experience than we might expect it to be today. Yeah I think so. The detective branch does exist at this point and it is operating out of Scotland Yard but it's not really been kind of separated off from the main metropolitan police structure at this point. So I think you might not really be able to tell the difference between a detective and one of the clerks. There's more of a sense that this is basically a government office which occasionally has people in uniform kind of charging through it rather than what you might associate now with walking into a police station where you're kind of very clearly moving into a space where everybody has a different role in society. This is more like a kind of a branch of the home office but just has these sort of slightly odd birdie men in uniform. And so outside of the station, the building of Scotland Yard, in Syndicate you will encounter police officers roaming around the streets all of the time. Do we have any concept of how they policed London? Are there surviving instruction manuals? Do we know how violent they were? Did they arrest people in the same way that we do today? Obviously they must have had different policing methods. Do we know how effective they were? Did people support this idea of a police force once it had got itself established? There are lots of surviving instructions and the thing that's really striking about them I guess and the thing that becomes very controversial is that the way that the new police, as well as being centralised and run by the home office, the way that the new police are different is that they basically launch a kind of an assault on working class street life. So they go for street gambling, they go for people playing games and causing obstructions with traffic, they go for sex workers, they go for essentially any activity that looks disorderly and that interferes with sort of idealised middle class version of the city where everybody who's moving around the city is on legitimate business and is kind of going about making money. It's this very Victorian industrial era commercial attitude to what London life is supposed to be like and lots of working class people don't fit into that idealised image and this means that in the early years in particular the kind of interference Metropolitan Police bring to street life to, I mean they're raiding pubs all the time because they're unlicensed premises and to gambling as well in particular, that kind of interference makes them extremely unpopular with lots of working class people. Sounds like they're becoming the fun police at this point. Yeah absolutely, absolutely and I mean there is a kind of backing down essentially. I mean in part they're being given a completely impossible touch which is to stop the huge number of people in this rapidly growing city from spending their leisure time more or less as they want and it's just not possible. After the first sort of decade or so or maybe the first couple of decades the instructions do sort of start to emphasise you really shouldn't be interfering where it's not absolutely necessary. You shouldn't be interfering where there isn't some kind of breach of the peace going on. You know you don't need to crack down on every 12 year old boy who has set up a little stall for people to gamble on a dog race. The notorious example is street boys as they were called playing with hoops which is an image we sort of associate more with the early 20th century but is very much a Victorian pastime running through the streets with hoops and there are cartoons of police officers arresting boys for running around with these hoops and it's clearly taking the piss out of police. I mean the idea that they're spending their time and therefore spending taxpayers money pursuing these really pretty harmless activities rather than as people would say now focusing on you know proper crime. So that dynamic that sense of you know why are you going after kids on the streets who aren't really doing any harm rather than the really serious criminals that's a very old dynamic. Yeah again and one that hasn't entirely gone away has it there are still arguments today about what the police should be doing shouldn't be doing where they should spend their time and what they should investigate. So I'm amazed by how relevant some of these early policing questions still are today. So Scotland Yard isn't in Scotland Yard anymore and yet we still call it Scotland Yard we still associate that place with the institution. Why do you think that has stuck and I mean something that is going to maybe leap out at lots of people is Scotland Yard's involvement in something like Jack the Ripper murders in the later 19th century. They become really closely associated with that. Ultimately it's a case that never gets solved and yet as an institution they survive those kinds of problems still exist today and we still call it Scotland Yard. Why do you think it became so immortal? I don't know. I think there's a couple of things maybe one is that the police were a new thing in the first half of the 19th century and people kind of calling them all sorts of different things. I mean so there's the pain you know there's the peelers and the bobbies they're also a lot more very rude names or sort of hostile names. I mean they get called bludgeon men they get called blue locusts they get called all sorts of things. What's the rudest name they get called? What's the most insulting one you can think of? There are some that I probably shouldn't say. So the blue locusts one actually has some sort of interesting layers to it. It's a name that some working class people call the police particularly in the north of England but also in London and it's really the idea that police officers are locusts in the sense that they don't do any work and they eat everything up and this is because from the point of view of a working class person in industrial Britain what the police do is they walk around all day. They're not in a factory or a shipyard or even doing the kinds of portering and all the kind of heavy lifting labour that goes on in London moving things from one place to another. They're just walking around and they're paid from taxation so there's this sense that you know they're taking our money and they're not doing anything. So the blue locust is a real kind of emblematic name of that sort of working class hostility to the police. But the thing about Scotland Yard I think the name is that it's a name that doesn't highlight the connection with central government so it's quite a nice name from the point of view of the Met. They're quite happy to kind of hang on to it because it isn't you know number four Whitehall Place which makes you think of Whitehall which makes you think of the Home Office or the Civil Service and it means that they're not called the government police or the state police or any of these things that they're desperately trying to avoid being called. So Scotland Yard is actually quite handy for them because it sort of doesn't have any of those associations. That's a really interesting point that hadn't occurred to me because they don't have to mention as you say the connection to government Whitehall the Home Office they don't have to use the word metropolitan which implies some widespread power and authority. They don't even use the word police if they call themselves Scotland Yard so all of the words that might have a negative connotation for an early police force can be circumvented by just naming it after the place where it is. I've never thought of it like that but it actually works doesn't it? The place itself actually I mean you mentioned the Whitechapel murders and the place itself does kind of get more attention in the 1880s partly because of the Whitechapel murders and just lots and lots of talk about what the detectives are doing but also because Scotland Yard is bombed in 1884 by so-called Fenians by Irish nationalists they sort of don't place the bomb in quite the right place so they they blow up an empty office which is attached to Scotland Yard and they also blow up a neighboring pub called the Sun with nobody in it. The landlord of the Sun then makes loads of money by charging people to come and see the wreckage of his pub but that kind of draws lots of attention to Scotland Yard as a place and as a kind of I guess a British institution which is seen as being under attack from Irish nationalism and in fact it's in the aftermath of that bombing that what's called the Special Irish Branch which later becomes Special Branch is created. So that sense of the Metropolitan Police being a kind of core British institution that has to be protected partly comes from that kind of 1880s moment at the same time as they're being criticized that length for failing to do anything about the Whitechapel murders. Just to round off our conversation about the idea of Scotland Yard and the place of Scotland Yard I guess why is it not at Scotland Yard anymore presumably at some point it has to move for some reason. Yeah so this is 1890 when basically they move because I mean the stacks of paper get too high and there are so many clerks that they start kind of colliding with each other in the corridors. Essentially they outgrow the buildings and so they move to what is called New Scotland Yard which is a building on the embankment. So this is part of the story of Victorian London that you know part of the Thames kind of disappears under the Victoria Embankment and it's initially a site that was supposed to be a new national opera house but then the person who's kind of trying to do that runs out of money and so the Met step in and say we'll buy this. It's a sort of grand red Victorian building somebody calls it a very constabulary kind of castle. So New Scotland Yard they have this huge building to themselves and that sort of works for about 70 years into the 20th century but then in 1967 essentially the same problem occurs again which is that there's too much paper and too many people too many administrators so they move again to what is now New Scotland Yard but probably ought to be called New New Scotland Yard which is the present site with the kind of big rotating sign that you see on the new. That's my image of New Scotland Yard so it's interesting to know where that emerged from and the steps that have been gone through to get there. So Assassin's Creed Syndicate is the first game in which players have to deal with a police force who are trying to prevent you from what you're trying to do everywhere else. You've kind of had a free reign to run around. To what extent do you think the emergence of a police force helped to shape 19th century London and redefine people's attitudes to law and order on the streets? It's part of the reshaping of the city and it's part of this drive by government to make London which in the 18th century was an incredibly chaotic city to make it orderly and to kind of constrain the huge mass of people to kind of conform to certain ideas of how people are supposed to behave in urban space. And this is why for example, I mean we didn't mention this earlier but this is why one of the kind of signature moves of the Victorian police officer is to say move on, to move people on. But what this is really about is kind of stopping blockages in the circulation of the city system. Anybody whose activities don't fit with the kind of idealized model of how the city is supposed to operate, they become the targets of the new police. And it doesn't work in a sort of basic way. I mean they don't manage to kind of make London an incredibly orderly and perfectly harmonious city. But it does mean that people are now kind of navigating this system in their daily lives. So people see police officers on the beach all the time. They become part of the kind of furniture of the city. It means that the government and the state if you want are kind of very, very present in everyday life in a new way. And have been ever since I guess to this very day. Well thank you so much for joining us Jonah. It's been absolutely fascinating to explore the beginnings, the origins of the idea of a name of Scotland Yard, the transitions that it went through and the kind of 19th century impact that they had, the appearance of the officers. It's been absolutely incredible to trace all of that. And I am definitely off to start a petition for the return of reinforced top hats and capes for all police officers. I think that is something we're missing today. But thank you so much for joining us Jonah. It's been brilliant. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Next time we'll be exploring a key driver of the seismic changes that drove the development of London and England during this period as we take a closer look at the Industrial Revolution. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts and if you're enjoying it you can leave us a review to make my day too. See you next time among the Echoes of History.