Keeping it among colleagues

Chandler & Selby was a London agency established by two former Met police colleagues

In the 1920s and early 1930s, several very experienced and well respected Scotland Yard detectives retired, and decided to become private detectives. Two pairs of former police detectives even formed two detective agencies in London, and today, I'm looking at one of them: Messrs Chandler & Selby.

My investigations into them started with one family's 1921 census entry. The Chandler family, at the time, were living in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex. There was father James, mother Clara, and daughter Gladys. James was 53 years old, and recorded himself as a private detective, the employer rather than employed by another agency, and based at 8 Southampton Row in central London. 22-year-old Gladys' entry gave more details about her father's job, though, for she worked as a clerk for 'Chandler and Selby Private Detectives, 8 Southampton Row.'

James Chandler is well recorded both in the census and in the newspapers, not for his private detective work, but for his police career. Originally from Redhill in Surrey, he was brought up by his mother Hannah, a laundress and charwoman. She claimed to have been widowed by the time James was three, but there is no evidence of her being married or living with James' father. Her job and status suggests a poor childhood for James. In 1886, at the age of 18, James joined the Metropolitan Police, and it changed his life. He worked his way up the career ladder, becoming known as 'Jerry' to the thieves of North London, and being involved in the apprehension of several high-profile murderers. When a young woman named Charlotte Cheeseman was murdered on Tottenham marshes in January 1902, it was Chandler who tracked down her killer, George Woolfe. Woolfe would be hanged in May that year. Chandler was also - along with so many other officers - involved in the Jack the Ripper cases, and helped rescue seven people from a burning building in Hackney.

James Chandler was one of the officers working to investigate the perpetrator of the Whitechapel Murders in 1888

After 25 years' service, in July 1911, Chandler retired from the Met. Although he promptly moved from Dalston to the Essex seaside, he was not ready to give up work altogether, and so he established his private detective agency, commuting into London to go to his office. The agency survived for at least a decade, although it seems to have closed prior to the Second World War. James Chandler, however, survived until 1952.

It will be noted, of course, that his agency was not just Chandler's, but Chandler and Selby's. It was a joint venture for many years, and employed other former police detectives: one was likely to have been William Brewster Kemp. Kemp was a larger than life character - literally, he was said to have been over 20 stone in weight, and tall - and not the most unobtrusive of detectives. He was known as 'the lawyer of Scotland Yard', and served 26 years before retiring in 1913. He had health issues caused by the London fogs, and died of pneumonia in 1919, aged 53. At his funeral, a wreath was left from 'Messrs Chandler and Selby, 8 Southampton Street [sic], Bloomsbury'. I suspect that after retirement, Kemp had found work with his former colleagues at Chandler and Selby.

We know who Chandler was, but who was Selby? There's nothing in writing to state this clearly, but it could have been Met detective Walter Selby - at least originally. Walter Thomas Selby was substantially older than James Chandler, having been born in Bermondsey in 1843. He was a long-time Metropolitan police constable, living in Clerkenwell for years. By the time his youngest son Alfred married in 1913, Walter's occupation was 'detective'. Alfred had not qualified his father's occupation with reference to the police, so Walter may well have retired and joined James Chandler as a partner in his private detective agency. Walter Thomas Selby died in late 1918, but the agency remained Chandler & Selby.