The use of torture by the police and courts in twentieth century England

Torture, the judicial infliction of pain, was used in Britain as late as the 1960s

We are so accustomed today, not only in this country but also in most of the developed world, to the idea that deliberately inflicting pain on another person is utterly wrong and abhorrent, that it is easy to forget that torture was still going strong in Britain for the greater part of the twentieth century and that our modern sensitivity on the matter is a very recent development. Torture, in the sense of the authorised use of severe pain, was in use both as a method of punishment and to obtain information and confessions until well into the 1980s. Indeed, any soldier, police officer or judge from Britain in the mid-twentieth century would feel that he could not do his job properly unless it was accepted that pain had a useful part to play in the investigation of crime and its deterrence. A single statistic might make this clearer. In 1917 alone, 6,135 youths were flogged in England and Wales by order of the courts. More than 15 young men a day were being sentenced to be flogged and both the ‘cat’ and birch were being freely imposed by magistrates and judges.