Transcript

NARRATOR

In their contemporary form, as international travel documents attesting to both national and individual identity, passports are of surprisingly recent origin, dating back only to the early twentieth century. Yet alongside marks, badges and tattoos, passports have long been used by different governing organisations, from estates to parishes to nations, to determine who a person is and, more often than not, what sort of a person they are.

In the late Middle Ages, beggars were commonly required to wear metal badges, permitting them to beg, a practise enshrined across Europe in sixteenth century poor laws. In 1558, for instance, the town council of Dundee enacted that:

SCOTTISH NARRATOR

No beggars be tholet within this burgh, but quhilk are born within the same. And none of them be suffered to beg, except they, having the town's seal upon their hat or cloak, be auld, cruikit, lame, or debilifcatit be great seiknes.

NARRATOR

This method of identifying vagrants and beggars was extended in England in 1697 in an act which ordered that all poor persons receiving parish relief must wear a badge in red or blue cloth in an open and visible manner. Also in England, people taken and punished as idle, wandering beggars were issued with passports. These requested they be provided with food, drink and shelter en route home to their parish of settlement.

This seemingly bizarre means of identification fits into a long tradition of branding or tattooing individuals with the mark of an offence of which they have been found guilty. For example, V for vagabond, B for burglar, D for drunkard, and AD for adulterer. It also bears close relation to the much broader practises of using clothing to mark individuals as members of particular categories. Nathaniel Hawthorne's fictional heroine, Hester Prynne, was sentenced to wear a scarlet letter A for the rest of her life as punishment for her crime of adultery. The story offers an accurate, though rather lenient, portrayal of the consequences of adultery in the Puritan legal system of the seventeenth century Massachusetts colony in which the novel is set.

Clothing was also used for less spectacular purposes of identification. The recipients of charities founded in the early seventeenth century were often required to wear badged coats, while poor children lodged in workhouses wore badges and blue caps, whereby they might be known the children of the workhouse and distinguished from all other children. Badged coats and gowns were like liveries, representing the munificence of the benefactor. The Blue Coat School Movement, founded at the end of the seventeenth century to provide pious instruction and education to the children of the poor, systemised this practise.

By the nineteenth century, branding and marking were no longer widely acceptable as means of identification. While clothing persisted as a guide to social identity, more universal means of identification were sought. Passport systems were widely used throughout nineteenth century Europe and included security paper, seals, physical descriptions or signalment and signatures in an effort to make individual identification secure. Such means were far from foolproof and a range of schemes, including Bertillon's anthropometric descriptor of the ear, were developed in an attempt to secure more objective means of identification in advance of the widespread and effective use of photography.

While passport's became so widespread in the nineteenth century that they were found irksome by many travellers, the British passport remained an elite document until 1858. Until then, British passports were expensive and issued only to acquaintances of the foreign secretary. Most British travellers obtained cheaper passports from consulates of foreign states, especially France. Fuelled by a commitment to free trade, there was an unprecedented relaxation of passport controls across most West European states towards the end of the nineteenth century. This trend was brought to an abrupt halt by the outbreak of the Great War.

In 1914, the British Nationality and Status Aliens Act was passed and international moves towards using passports to distinguish between citizens and foreign nationals accelerated. The first folded, two page booklet style documents were issued in the UK in 1915. The document has space for photographs of the bearer and his wife. It also includes date of birth, residence, profession, height, colour of eyes, hair and distinguishing marks. In 1920, under the Aliens Order, wartime restrictions were permanently extended. From then on, anyone entering or leaving the UK was required to have either a valid passport furnished with a photograph of himself or some other documents satisfactorily establishing his national status and identity.

After an International League of Nations Conference in 1920, the 32 page old blue British passport was introduced. The old blue British passport changed little until the 1980s. In 1972, new watermarked, blue security paper and laminated photographs were introduced. Eye colour and wife's maiden name were dropped. In this 1982 passport, a space for spouse's photograph is included, a practise that was discontinued in 1988. By the end of 1988, the first burgundy, machine readable passports, featuring the words 'European community' were issued.