‘One Man Whom You Can Hang If Necessary’: The Discreet Charm of Nevil Macready

Abstract

The British way of using military force to preserve civil order remained remarkably unsystematic for two centuries after the first Riot Act. During that time almost no official effort was made to relate the disparate notions of ‘disturbance’, ‘tumult’, ‘riot’ and ‘disorder’ into a coherent concept of emergency. Indeed, it may be that such coherence was more or less consciously resisted as alien to the English legal and administrative mind alike. In the later nineteenth century the common-law rule of strict necessity — that the executive had the duty to repel force with force, but with only the precise amount of force necessary — was buttressed for another generation by Dicey’s persuasive formulations.¹ The deliberate imprecision of the legal view was highlighted by the Liberal lawyer-statesman R. B. Haldane (then Secretary of State for War, later Lord Chancellor) in his evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on the Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbance in 1908. The law, he said, rested on the judgment of each officer charged with preservation of the peace, who had to tread a narrow path between two precipices — ‘he has to get along and he does get along’.²