In Westminster City Archives lies a small notebook. It’s almost identical to the lined exercise books you can still get today, only it’s covered in a dark blue, thin, leather. Inside, the writing is a mix of pen and pencil, scribbling and basic maths calculations, as though the writer is trying to add up his day’s spending in odd spaces on the page. The content is otherwise a bit odd. There are short passages, random sentences, hidden amongst write-ups of court cases and strange incidents.

It is the dates that give the game away. This is not a 21st century book, but a 19th century one, and what it contains gives a fascinating insight into the life, background and insecurities of one Victorian policeman, who trod a beat around the Paddington area of London. Luckily for the historian, this policeman proudly asserted his name throughout the notebook – Henry Frederick Bendell, Metropolitan Police Constable No 90.

This was a man who had a 27 year career with the Metropolitan Police, and who, after a period of semi-retirement on his police pension, returned to serve during World War 1, to relieve younger policemen so that they could go away and fight. By the time he returned, though, the world had changed, and he struggled to cope.

But to start at the beginning. In the latter half of the 19th century, there was a perception that the policeman was a somewhat dull, methodical and unintelligent creature. The detectives were beginning to change perceptions of the police to some extent, but were seen as very much superior in terms of background and intelligence. The humble plod was drawn primarily from a working class background, and the snobbery of Victorian society therefore saw him as somewhat inferior.

Henry Frederick Bendell proved their point in one way – he was certainly from a labouring class family. Born in Gussage, Dorset, on 31 July 1861, he was the son of William, an agricultural labourer. He was brought up in a rural community, the eldest of several children. His parents – William and his wife Charlotte – were on a limited income, and needed the children to work as soon as possible to supplement their family’s money. The 1871 census, shows ten-year-old Henry already working, as a shepherd’s boy.

It would have been easy for Henry to stay in Gussage, where he would no doubt have followed his father into labouring work. However, he clearly had ambition, and by 1881, he had left home. Although it’s not possible to categorically find him in the census of that year, there is a Henry Bendall listed as a soldier in Aldershot – and it seems feasible that a young man from a rural community might be tempted to join the army, and then move from one form of service to another, the police force.

Henry was now of an age to marry, and in 1882, he wed Carrie Rosetta Eates, from the Colden Common area of Hampshire. The year before, she had been working as cook to the vicar of Eastleigh – she was in service, suggesting that like Henry, she was from a fairly humble background. By the time they married, Carrie was heavily pregnant. Although there was stigma surrounding children born out of wedlock in Victorian society, it was by no means unusual, although again, it was more acceptable amongst those in the lower classes of society. The Bendells’ first child, a little girl they named May Bertha Minnie, was born on 13 October 1882 in her mother’s home parish.

The period from May’s birth to the end of the decade was a formative one in Henry’s life. Now a husband and a father, he had to provide for his new family. He may have worked as a policeman elsewhere, perhaps in the Windsor area, but in 1886 he made a life changing decision, to join the Metropolitan Police as a constable, being based at Paddington Police Station. At the same time, he started his notebook, and this gives us a real picture of his life and attitudes.

Part of the purpose of the notebook appears to be for Henry to practice and improve his handwriting. He therefore copies out passages from other documents, Biblical passages, articles from newspapers, and cases he had originally dealt with and written up in the course of his work duties. There are frequent misspellings, most of which he notes, scribbles out, and replaces with the correct spelling. On occasion, he fails to spot his errors, and leaves them in place – such as the rather lovely ‘galopping’ instead of ‘galloping’. They indicate a man who has a sense of inferiority about his background and education, but who wants to improve himself.

Most of the cases he deals with seem to involve one of two types of offence: drunk and disorderly behaviour, or problems with hansom cab drivers. Horses gallop; cab drivers crash into each other in the dark; bicycle riders ride without lights, causing chaos. Women get drunk; men loiter and obstruct others in the street.

Amongst these cases, are other ones that have taken his interest. There is a tale of domestic abuse leading to an attempted suicide, which was then an offence. Bendell had read this case in the autumn of 1886. It involved a 20-year-old woman, Mary Ann Bird, who had appeared at the Stratford Petty Sessions, charged with trying to kill herself by cutting her throat with a razor. Mary had been married to Joseph Bird for 13 months, and was his second wife. He gave evidence in court that it had been a Sunday morning, about nine o’clock, when he had noticed his wife reading a newspaper. He commented to her, “My first wife used to clear away the breakfast things before she read a newspaper”“, before snatching the paper from her hands.

Did Henry read this and sympathise with a young woman who realised that she was never going to meet the standards of her dead predecessor, or that she had married a man who wanted to tell her what to do, and control her, even stopping her reading a paper? Did he shudder at the desperate girl trying to assert control over her life by slitting her throat, or feel upset on her behalf when she then was charged with an offence and forced to appear before the magistrates? Whatever his feelings, he deemed the case significant enough to write it up in his notebook.

During the time Henry was at the Met in London, his family grew. May was added to by Ernest Henry, born in 1889, Daisy Florence in 1890, Basil William in 1893, Ivy Rosetta in 1898, and James Edward in 1902. Unlike their father, these children all benefited from a good education. Their family moved around London, living in Paddington, Kensington and Maida Vale, but continuity was provided by Henry’s job. He was eventually discharged from the Met on 6 June 1909; after 27 years of service, he was entitled to a pension of £58 5s 4d.

In 1911, the Bendells were living in Dorset – Henry, after retiring from the Met, had retreated to his home county, presumably for a gentler pace of life. However, he was still fairly young, and so he was still working, having a second career as a publican. He was living with Carrie and their surviving children. The signs were that the Bendells would now, after an often frenetic life in the capital, were now ready for a period of calm in the rural south-west.

Then war intervened. Young men from London were needed to fight, and so Henry Bendell volunteered to rejoin the Met, in order to release younger policemen for active service. The London he returned to was a very different place, though. In 1918, Henry resigned from the police again after having a mental breakdown said, by his daughter Daisy (in a sad note in a page her father had left blank in his notebook) to have been caused by the stress of hearing air raid sirens.

To recover, Henry returned home to Swanage. Sadly, however, another tragedy occurred. It was 1918, and the Spanish Flu epidemic was in full force. Henry, his health already compromised by his traumatic experience in the Met, caught the flu, and it developed into pneumonia. He had gone to visit one of his daughters in Dunstable – both May and Ivy lived there – and died there, on 25 February 1919.

Henry’s notebook still survives, and its good condition makes it hard to believe that it was written by a man who died 99 years ago. Its pages are a testament to a man who desired to have a better life than that of a rural ag lab, but who was never confident about his education and ability, continuing to practice his writing and his maths in his spare time, recording both in his little notebook. He was a man who was methodical in his recording of cases; diligent; disturbed by some of the cases he came across, and sensitive. Although he had a wife and children, he never gives the impression of security in his life. He was, though, very much of his time, and his recording of speeding drivers and loiterers in Paddington seems more ‘his’ sort of thing than the world he returned to two decades later, when war turned everything on its head.