Four London police carrying a man face down, by the arms and legs, with the caption “Death from the ‘frog’s march,’ Eastend.”
15 October 2020
Frog-marching is a police tactic for moving a recalcitrant prisoner from place to place. The name seems odd to us today because the present-day tactic doesn’t seem to have anything to do with frogs. But that’s because exactly what frog-marching consists of has changed.
The tactic originated in London, and the earliest reference to it is in the 18 April 1871 Evening Standard:
They did not give the defendant the “Frog’s March.”
While that snippet doesn’t tell us what frog-marching was, we fortunately do have this better description from a New York newspaper on 27 March 1874
The “Frog’s March.”
The London police have a method of dealing with prisoners, which has not yet been introduced here, though it doubtless will be as soon as it is known. The London method is called the “frog’s march” in which the prisoner is carried to the station, with the face downwards and the whole weight of the body dependent on the limbs. This has called forth severe remarks, and has done much to embitter the relations between the “police and the public,” but the barbarous proceeding still continues.
So, the phrase comes from the resemblance of the prisoner to a frog crawling on its belly.
Being frog-marched in this fashion is, as the above quotation notes, rather painful, especially if done over a distance. Outcry against this tactic eventually caused police to abandon it, but the term stuck around, being applied to a different method, as described in John Ferguson’s 1931 crime novel Death Comes to Perigord:
Cæsar slewed him round, and forcing both arms behind his back, got ready to frog-march him to the door.
While still far from gentle, the present-day version of frog-marching is comparatively more humane.
Sources:
“The ‘Frog’s March.’” Commercial Advertiser (New York), 27 March 1874, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. frogmarch, v., frogmarch, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. frog-march, v., frog-march, n., frog-marching, n.
Image credit: Illustrated Police News (London), 6 April 1889, 1. Public domain image. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.