Using the Ealing Studios film The Blue Lamp (1950) this article considers
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imagination and how this has impacted upon attitudes to the police and their place
within notions of ‘Englishness’. Drawing on a range of primary
and secondary sources, I extend Clive Emsley’s (1992) seminal work on
‘the indulgent tradition’ of the English police by analysing
how, in the immediate post-war period, a convergence of circumstances enabled
The Blue Lamp to break with previous popular cultural representations.
The article offers a series of insights into the deep cultural and interpretive work
that had to be undertaken by Ealing Studios to produce PC George Dixon, the iconic
image of the English ‘bobby on the beat’. It also suggests that
despite this ‘Ealingization’ of the English
‘bobby’, for box office reasons audiences were also offered the
metropolitan spectacle, glamour and turmoil of the chaotic life of the violent young
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