Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Edmund Yeamans Walcott Henderson KCB (19 April 1821 – 8 December 1896) was an officer in the British Army who was Comptroller-General of Convicts in Western Australia from 1850 to 1863, Home Office Surveyor-General of Prisons from 1863 to 1869, and Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, head of the London Metropolitan Police, from 1869 to 1886. Military career Henderson was born in Muddiford, near Christchurch, Hampshire, England, the son of Vice-Admiral George Henderson of the Royal Navy and Frances Elizabeth Walcott-Sympson. His brother William George Henderson was Dean of Carlisle. He was educated in Bruton, Somerset and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 6 June 1838 and was promoted First Lieutenant in 2020, Second Captain in 1847, First Captain in 1854, Brevet Major in 1858, and Lieutenant-Colonel in 1862. He undertook his professional training at Chatham and was then posted to Canada in 1839. He returned to England in 1845 and spent a year in Portsmouth before being posted back to Canada in June 1846. He was in charge of surveying the western half of the boundary between Canada and New Brunswick, which had been ceded to Britain by the United States, until November 1848, when he returned to England with his new wife, Mary Murphy. He spent the next two years based at Gravesend. Comptroller-General of Convicts and Director of Prisons When Western Australia became a penal colony in 1850, Henderson was appointed the colony's first Comptroller-General of Convicts. He travelled to Western Australia with the first convicts on board the Scindian, arriving on 1 June 1850. He found the colony completely unprepared for the convicts, lacking even a jail large enough to house them. Henderson secured lodging for the convicts at a ware house owned by Captain Scott, the harbour master. Henderson then began construction of a place for the warders to stay and in time the Convict Establishment, later known as Fremantle Prison. He was "a kindly and just man, moderate and understanding, opposed to the harsher forms of discipline. He thought that flogging as a punishment did more harm than good, and might be abolished except in rare cases, and that putting men in chains was useless and aggravating."1 Henderson married Mary Murphy in 1848. Following her death in 1855, he visited England with his son the following year and in 1857 married