On May 23, 1905, Albert and Alfred Stratton were hanged “for the wilful murder, on March 27, of Thomas and Ann Farrow, of High Street, Deptford”.

The Stratton brothers were petty criminals, well known in southeast London, and had been spotted near the Farrows’ paint shop where the battered bodies were found. Witness testimony and the fact that the brothers had recently buried some cash on waste ground might not have been enough for a guilty verdict. But there was more. Found inside the Farrows’ empty cash box was one greasy thumbprint, identified as belonging to Alfred Stratton.

Testifying at the trial, Inspector Collins of Scotland Yard explained how fingerprints were classified by type and sub-type, then by counting and tracing the ridges and comparing the patterns, below. He said that there were 80,000 or 90,000 sets of prints at Scotland Yard, which meant between 800,000 and 900,000 impressions of digits. In his experience he had “never found any two such impressions to correspond”.

Despite the judge warning them to treat the new science with caution, the jury was convinced and the Strattons attained immortality of a sort as the first people to be convicted of a capital crime on fingerprint evidence.

The fingerprint bureau, then only four years old, had achieved some success in convicting burglars. Now it was on its way. In 1909, The Times ran a substantial article on its achievements, which included not only an increased conviction rate but also a general revival of police morale.

By awarding all credit for this to the Commissioner of Police, Sir Edward Henry, the article also ignited a furore, the subject of which has scarcely been resolved even now. Henry was undoubtedly responsible for introducing Scotland Yard’s system of classifying fingerprints, but did he invent it? Since people had been writing about unique fingerprint patterns since the 17th century, he was certainly not the first to have spotted their usefulness for identification.

Letters poured in to The Times from rival contenders and their supporters. First in was George Darwin, Cambridge astronomer, son of the naturalist. The article, he said, was unjust to his cousin, Francis Galton. “In 1895 Mr Galton published his book, Finger Print Directory. This book contains a great improvement on his previous classification and is in most essential points the same as that in present use in Scotland Yard.”

Ritter von Pollaky highlighted an earlier claimant: “. . . my countryman, the Austrian professor, Dr Purjonje, in the year 1823, lectured on finger-prints at the University at Breslau”.

Our own correspondent then pitched in: “Mr Galton certainly constructed a system [of fingerprint classification], but it was rejected in 1894 by a committee appointed by Mr Asquith, who was then Home Secretary. Sir E. Henry did not of course invent fingerprint registration, but he has created a system which is the only one that has stood the test of time . . . The idea itself was originated long before the time even of Mr Galton.”

Galton wasn’t having this. He wrote next, defending his system and reiterating the claim that it was essentially the same as Henry’s, below. He explained that he had become interested in fingerprinting 20 years earlier while seeking an alternative to the Bertillon system.

Bertillonage involved identification by measuring a series of body parts and was then all the rage, though highly unreliable. “I bethought myself of finger-prints,” Galton wrote, “and soon learnt that a great deal had already been written about them. More especially did I acquaint myself with the procedure of Sir W. Herschel.” Grandson of the discoverer of the planet Uranus, Herschel was a Raj official in Bengal who, Galton wrote, “required that all documents should be attested by the simultaneous impression of the blackened for and middle fingers of the right hand, by which he put a stop to the previously prevalent crime of personation”.

Though recognised as the first person to put fingerprinting to practical use, Herschel never suggested applying it to police work. A Scottish doctor, Henry Faulds, claimed the credit for this, having written about it not only in the journal Nature but also in a letter to Charles Darwin in 1880. Darwin passed the letter on to Galton, who forwarded it to the Royal Anthropological Society and probably forgot all about it. Galton’s letter to The Times omits to mention Faulds, who never got over his lack of recognition.

The last word in this correspondence came from Herschel himself. He didn’t beat about the bush: “After all that has been written, I claim that to myself was first given the idea of fingerprints affording the irresistible proof of identity.”

What of the classification system? Before his appointment to Scotland Yard, Edward Henry had been Inspector General of Police in Bengal. Impressed by Herschel’s successes, he set two of his deputies, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, the task of working one out. It was their work, unmentioned by any of these correspondents, that became the basis of the Henry system which is still in use today. 

The letters in this series can be read by following the above links

timesonline.co.uk/archive

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