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 commission saw the introduction of police dogs to the force, but he is best remembered today for his championship of the method of fingerprinting to identify criminals. Early life Henry was born in Shadwell, London to Irish parents; his father was a doctor. He studied at St Edmund's College, Ware, Hertfordshire, and at sixteen he joined Lloyd's of London as a clerk. He meanwhile took evening classes at University College, London, to prepare for the entrance examination of the Indian Civil Service. Early service in India On 9 July 1873, he passed the Indian Civil Service Examinations and was 'appointed by the (Her Majesty's) said [Principal] Secretary of State (Secretary of State for India) to be a member of the Civil Service at the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal'. On 28 July 1873 he married Mary Lister at St Mary Abbots, the Parish Church of Kensington, London. Mary's father, Tom Lister, was the Estate Manager for the Earl of Stamford. 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. Inspector-General of Police On 2 April 1891, Henry was appointed Inspector-General of Police of Bengal. He had already been exchanging letters with Francis Galton regarding the use of fingerprinting to identify criminals, either instead of or in addition to the anthropometric method of Alphonse Bertillon, which Henry introduced into the Bengal police department. The taking of fingerprints and palm prints 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