Rare glimpses of how Yorkshire used to be policed

Until the early 1970s, the county’s largest cities maintained their own forces, with separate constabularies for the Ridings – and the evidence here shows them to have taken different approaches to learning.

The headquarters of the West Riding force in Wakefield was regarded as the Scotland Yard of the North, and in the somewhat stilted shot at the top of the page, recruits are schooled in the art of note-taking after a car accident.

Some 14 other forces used Wakefield as a training base, for detectives as well as uniformed officers, with fake murders laid on as part of the training.

Another of our pictures, from 1936, shows a class of constables sitting at desks designed for schoolchildren, being taught the rudiments of road safety.

By the 1960s, training techniques had moved on, and we can see PC Peter Farrell from the traffic department at Leeds Police barely managing to keep a straight face as Chief Insp Douglas Wright asks him to blow into one of the new breathalyser tubes, shortly before the first members of the public were made to do likewise.

The police’s own cars in Leeds at the time seem from the 1966 picture to be only slightly modified versions of those available to anyone else. Only the letters on the door and the Police sign strapped to the roof as if it were a minicab, distinguish it from the regular model.

The old forces had their roots in Victorian times, with the City of Bradford Police having been established in 1848, half a century before Bradford was officially a city. Along with its Leeds counterpart, it was among the last to remain independent.

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