Dorothy Peto

Dorothy Olivia Georgiana Peto (15 December 1886 – 26 February 1974) was an English police officer. She was a pioneer of women policing in the United Kingdom who served as the first attested woman superintendent in the London Metropolitan Police, from 1930 to 1946.

Life Peto was born in Emery Down, near Lyndhurst, Hampshire. Her father, Morton Kelsall Peto, was a builder and noted landscape artist, and her grandfather was Sir Morton Peto, 1st Baronet. She was educated at home and began writing novels. She was not successful in this endeavour and in 1914 joined the National Union of Women Workers women patrols, an unofficial organisation which patrolled the streets to maintain public morality and decency during the First World War.

She was Assistant Patrol Organiser in Bath and from January 1915 was deputy director of the NUWW's patrol training school in Bristol. In 1917, she succeeded Flora Joseph as director of the school and in 1918 also became director of the Federated Training Schools for Policewomen and Patrols, which also included the schools in Liverpool and Glasgow Her arguments along these lines continued and in 1943 she increased the number of policewomen further by drawing the commissioner's attention to juvenile delinquency, broken homes and the general problems created by the Second World War. These memoirs are actually more a description of the development of the force rather than Peto's personal memoirs of her particular role or life.