HASLEMERE Town Council has agreed to pay £125 toward the cost of a new blue plaque for the town hall commemorating the Haslemere Riot of 1855.

The Haslemere Society will pay the remaining half, but whether the current plaque remains is yet to be decided.

A minute’s silence marks the annual remembrance in July each year for the first Surrey police officer, Inspector William Donaldson, to be killed in the line of duty.

He was murdered outside Haslemere Town Hall 160 years ago by a gang of drunken navvies, who had been drinking in the King’s Arms public house in the High Street, a site which is now occupied by Raymond Reid Photographic and Hamptons estate agents.

During a drunken rampage Inspector Donaldson, his constable James Freestone, and local doctor Henry Bishopp, were involved in the arrest of a navvy, who was jailed in what is now the town hall.

The inspector was murdered during a riot which broke out when the navvies tried to break into the jail.

The murder in 1855, four years after the Surrey Police was formed, happened during the time of the building of the railway, when workers were lodging in the town.

A plaque on the wall of the town hall was unveiled in 1994 to commemorate the event. It marks the spot where the policeman fell. During the annual ceremony, members of the public, councillors and serving police officers walk around the town hall three times in memory of the three people who tried to uphold the law.

Inspector Donaldson is buried in St Bartholomews’s churchyard, and a plaque in his memory is also dedicated to him in the church, and at Surrey Police’s Guildford headquarters.