England’s Futile Efforts to Create a National Police Instruction Book, 1920s-1950s

By December 1962, the Home Office Instruction Book Committee was officially dead after four decades of intermittent work to create a police instruction book common to all police forces in England and Wales. Despite repeated assurances from the Association of Chief Constables that “such a book was wanted” and constant revisions of sample chapters, the chief constables themselves could not agree on a common format or content. The London Metropolitan Police also resisted participating in such a scheme. By the 1960s attention shifted to producing a national manual to help police officers pass promotion examinations. This paper will explore why, despite repeated calls for a national instruction book, this endeavour failed to go anywhere.