Basil Thomson

Sir Basil Home Thomson, KCB (21 April 1861 – 26 March 1939) was a British intelligence officer, police officer, prison governor, colonial administrator, and writer. Thomson was born in Oxford, where his father, William Thomson (who would later ecome Archbishop of York), was provost of The Queen's College. Thomson was educated at Worsley's School in Hendon and Eton College, and then attended New College, Oxford where a fellow undergraduate was Montague John Druitt, the man named as the prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper case by Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten in a Scotland Yard document dated 1894. (Thomson replaced Macnaghten as Head of CID at Scotland Yard in 1913.) Thomson ended his university studies after two terms, after suffering bouts of depression, and spent some time from 1881 to 1882 in the United States, working as a farmer in Iowa.[1]