An investigative inheritance
One private detective from the City of London may have learned his skills from his father
A short piece today about an longstanding private detective, who perhaps learned from his father how to investigate.
Edward Russell is the man in question; born on 23 January 1839 in the Newgate Street area, he was a Londoner born and bred. He was baptised nearly a year after his birth at St Sepulchre without Newgate, the son of George and Harriet Anne Russell.
His father, George, was born around 1807 in Westminster, and the 1851 census records him and his family - included 12-year-old Edward - living in the parish where Edward was baptised. George was, at this point, a police officer. By 1861, he had been made a police sergeant in the City of London police, and press reports from the early 1870s record him busy apprehending suspects.
Although Edward isn’t recorded living with his parents in 1861, in 1871, he was back home with them. Home was now 19 Duke Street in the parish of St Bartholomew the Great. George, now 64, was a detective sergeant, and his daughters were all working - as school teachers and shop workers - but Edward was now working as a private inquiry agent - a private detective.
It is likely that he learned his skills from listening and talking to his father. He would have heard about the cases that George worked on, and read about his father in the local newspapers.
In 1874, Edward married Martha Stevenson, a Bristol-born nurse, and the couple settled in Clerkenwell. He continued to work in this area as an inquiry agent until his death in 1903, aged 64. There is little mention of him in the press, but he must have been quite successful, given that he worked a private detective for over 30 years. Many of the private detectives I’ve mentioned on this substack would have loved to have as secure a career as this policeman’s son.