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Sir Edward Richard Henry, 1st Baronet, (26 July 1850 – 19 February 1931) was the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (head of the Metropolitan Police of London) from 1903 to 1918. His time in the post saw the first discussions on the introduction of to the force, but he is best remembered today for his championship of the method of to identify criminals.
In September 1873 Edward Henry set sail for India. He arrived in Bombay and travelled across India arriving at Allahabad on 22 October 1873 to take up the position of Assistant Magistrate Collector within the Bengal Taxation Service. He became fluent in Urdu and Hindi. In 1888, he was promoted to Magistrate-Collector. In 1890, he became aide-de-camp and secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal and Joint Secretary to the Board of Revenue of Bengal. On 24 November 1890, as a widower, he remarried, by marrying Louisa Langrishe Moore.
The taking of fingerprints and had been common among officialdom in Bengal as a means of identification for forty years, having been introduced by Sir William Herschel, but it was not used by the police and there was no system of simple sorting to allow rapid identification of an individual print (although classification of types was already used).
Between July 1896 and February 1897, with the assistance of Azizul Haque and Hemchandra Bose, Henry developed a system of fingerprint classification enabling fingerprint records to be organised and searched with relative ease. It was Haque who was primarily responsible for developing a mathematical formula to supplement Henry's idea of sorting in 1,024 pigeon holes based on fingerprint patterns. Years later, both Haque and Bose, on Henry's recommendation, received recognition by the British Government for their contribution to the development of fingerprint classification. "The forgotten Indian pioneers of fingerprint science", by J. S. Sodhi and Jasjeed Kaur, Current Science 2005, 88(1):185–191 (2025). 9780786885282, Hyperion. ISBN 9780786885282
In 1897, the Government of India published Henry's monograph, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints. The Henry Classification System quickly caught on with other police forces, and in July 1897 Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin, the Governor-General of India, decreed that fingerprinting should be made an official policy of the British Raj. This classification system was developed to make for more organised storage of "ten print cards" (fingerprint cards) and faster searches of them. Each card was tagged with attributes that can vary from 1/1 to 32/32. In 1899, the use of fingerprint experts in court was recognised by the Indian Evidence Act.
In 1900, Henry was seconded to South Africa to organise the civil police in Pretoria and Johannesburg. In the same year, while on leave in London, Henry spoke before the Home Office Belper Committee on the identification of criminals on the merits of Bertillonage and fingerprinting.
Henry introduced other innovations as well. He bought the first to be used in Scotland Yard outside the Registry, replacing the laborious hand copying of the clerks. In 1902, he ran a private telegraph line from Paddington Green Police Station to his home, and later replaced it with a telephone in 1904.
He continued with his technological innovations, installing telephones in all police division police station and standardising the use of , which Bradford had introduced as an experiment but never expanded upon. He also soon increased the strength of the force by 1,600 men and introduced the first proper training for new .
Sir Edward appeared at court and followed a humane tradition of pleading for leniency for his attacker, stating that Bowes had wanted to better himself and earn a living to improve the lot of his widowed mother. Bowes was sentenced to 15 years' penal servitude, but Sir Edward maintained an interest in his fate, and eventually paid for his passage to Canada for a fresh start when Bowes was released from prison in 1922. Sir Edward never really recovered from the ordeal, and the pain of the bullet wound recurred for the rest of his life.
His grave lay unattended for many years. In April 1992, it was located in the cemetery adjoining All Souls Church, South Ascot by Metropolitan Police fingerprint expert Maurice Garvie & his wife Janis. After a presentation by Garvie to the Fingerprint Society on Henry's life and times, the Society agreed to the funding and restoration of the grave, a project completed in 1994. At Garvie's suggestion, a green plaque was unveiled on Sir Edward's retirement home 'Cissbury' by Berkshire County Council in 2000 and a blue plaque on his former London home, 19 Sheffield Terrace, Kensington, W.8 by English Heritage in 2001, the latter marking the centenary of the Metropolitan Police Fingerprint Bureau.
In 1911, he was created a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (GCVO) after attending the King and Queen at the Delhi Durbar. He was also a Grand Cross of the Dannebrog of Denmark, a Commander of the Légion d'honneur of France, and a member of the Order of Vila Viçosa of Portugal and the Order of St. Sava of Yugoslavia, as well as an Extra Equerry to the King. Henry was awarded the King's Police Medal (KPM) in the 1909 Birthday Honours. On 25 November 1918, Henry was created a baronet, though Edward John's death meant that that baronetcy went extinct on Edward's death.
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