Crime & Punishment

In Bengal in the 1890s, Sir Edward Henry, a civil servant, had seen fingerprints used on government documents to identify illiterate contractors. He began to develop a system to classify fingerprints, and in 1899 he appeared before a Home Office committee to explain how this could be used to identify criminals.

In 1900, his Classification and Uses of Fingerprints was published, and in 1901 he was appointed to the CID. Within months, he had established the Fingerprint Investigation Bureau, and by 1902 the first conviction on fingerprint evidence was secured. At the Old Bailey, Harry Jackson was found guilty of stealing billiard balls from a house which, unfortunately for him, had freshly painted windowsills. These prints were the first ever entered in courtroom evidence (see ‘My Family Hero’ on page 98 for more about this case).

Medical forensics was not lagging behind, although here British experts relied on Continental advances. In 1901, in Germany, tests were first devised to differentiate between human and animal blood, and in the same year, also in Germany, further tests were being developed that would ultimately recognise different blood groups.

This period was perhaps safer than any time before. The Criminal Registrar noted that the previous decade had “witnessed a great change in manners: the substitution of words…for blows…a decline in the spirit of lawlessness”. The historian VAC Gatrell has suggested that the falling crime rate reflected an era when policing was able to obtain “a peculiar and transient advantage…over ancient forms of popular lawlessness”.

Judith Flanders