There is a tradition about a black woman called Maria Lee, who kept a sailors’ boarding house in Boston in the 1820s. She is said to have been a woman of such great size and strength that the unruly stood in dread of her, and when constables required help, it was a common thing to send for black Maria, who soon collared the refractory persons and led them to the lock-up. So a prison-van came to be called a ‘Black Maria’. In London, the Metropolitan police’s first vehicle of any kind was a Black Maria drawn by two dray horses, acquired in 1858.
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