
Charles Warren (7 February 1840 – 21 January 1927) was an officer in the British Royal Engineers and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service from 1886 to 1888, succeeding Edmund Henderson and preceding James Monro.
Biography[]
Charles Warren was born in Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales in 1840, the son of a general. He joined the Royal Engineers in 1857 asa lieutenant, and he surveyed Gibraltar from 1861 to 1865, conducted Biblical archaeology in Palestine during the 1870s, excavated the site of Jericho at Tell es-Sultan, and returned to Britain in 1870 to write a book about archaeology. He was later sent to South Africa to survey the border between Griqualand West and the Orange Free State, and he was wounded during the Transkei War of 1877-1878. In 1882, he was sent to Sinai to discover what happened to Professor Edward Henry Palmer's expedition, finding that they had been robbed and murdered and bringing their killers to justice before being knighted on 24 May 1883. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in December 1884, and he suppressed Boer freebooter states in the Warren Expedition of 1884, employing the first three observation balloons ever used by the British Army in the field.
In 1885, he narrowly failed in his bid for Parliament as a Liberal Party candidate in Sheffield Hallam, where he ran on a radical manifesto. However, he was appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service shortly after, as his investigation of Professor Palmer's murder appealed to the heads of Scotland Yard. He did not get along with Conservative Home Secretary Henry Matthews, 1st Viscount Llandaff, and he also lost the support of the radical press after 1887's "Bloody Sunday" at Trafalgar Square. His biggest difficulty was handling the Whitechapel murders, and he was blamed for failing to track down Jack the Ripper and resigned the night before the murder of Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November 1888. He went on to become a Major-General while commanding the British garrison in Singapore from 1889 to 1895, and he commanded the 5th Division during the Second Boer War, failing to relieve Ladysmith at the Battle of Spion Kop. He was recalled in August 1900 and never again commanded troops in the field, but he and Robert Baden-Powell cofounded the Boy Scouts in 1908. He died in Weston-super-Mare in 1927.