John Alexander (chief clerk)

John Alexander (Wooler, 28 December 1830 – 3 October 1916, Sevenoaks) was Chief Clerk to Bow Street Magistrates' Court,[1] then called Bow Street Police Court (as seen in Alexander's summons to James McNeil Whistler),[2] and simultaneously, as was then the custom, Editor of the Police Gazette in England[3] from 1877 until his retirement in 1895.

John Alexander
John Alexander formally dressed in a garden with wife Mary Elizabeth (née Thwaites), about 1875.
Born(1830-12-28)28 December 1830
Wooler, Northumberland
Died3 October 1916(1916-10-03) (aged 85)
Sevenoaks, Kent
Resting placeWooler, Northumberland
55:32.7586N 2:0.7496W
NationalityEnglish
EducationRoyal High School, Calton Hill, Edinburgh
OccupationChief Clerk to Bow Street Police Court
EmployerUK Home Office
Spouse(s)
​
(
m. 1846⁠–⁠1923)
ChildrenJames Finlay, Lucy Winifred, Gladys Mary, Elsie Margaret
Parents
  • James Alexander (1796-1863)
    (father)
  • Margaret Finlay (1797-1865) (mother)

Family

John Alexander was born in Wooler, Northumberland, son of country physician and surgeon James Alexander (1797–1863).[4] He was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh. Both his sisters married famous doctors: Christina Margaret (1833–1907) married Sir John Struthers, best known for his drawings of the beached Tay whale;[5] Margaret Agnes (1841–1911) married John Ivor Murray, who built a hospital in Shanghai and became Colonial Surgeon in Hong Kong.[6]

His wife, Mary Elizabeth Thwaites (1846–1923) was the eldest daughter of the engineer and founder of the Vulcan Iron Works at Bradford, Robinson Thwaites.

Career

John Alexander oversaw many famous trials of the Victorian period including the Fenians (who dynamited Clerkenwell Prison and attacked the House of Commons, London Bridge, and the Tower of London among other places), and Johann Most the German anarchist.[7]

gollark: (also I may eventually want to use ARM)
gollark: On the one hand I do somewhat want to run osmarksforum™ with this for funlolz, but on the other hand handwritten ASM is probably not secure.
gollark: > Well, the answer is a good cause for flame war, but I will risk. ;) At first, I find assembly language much more readable than HLL languages and especially C-like languages with their weird syntax. > At second, all my tests show, that in real-life applications assembly language always gives at least 200% performance boost. The problem is not the quality of the compilers. It is because the humans write programs in assembly language very different than programs in HLL. Notice, that you can write HLL program as fast as an assembly language program, but you will end with very, very unreadable and hard for support code. In the same time, the assembly version will be pretty readable and easy for support. > The performance is especially important for server applications, because the program runs on hired hardware and you are paying for every second CPU time and every byte RAM. AsmBB for example can run on very cheap shared web hosting and still to serve hundreds of users simultaneously.
gollark: https://board.asm32.info/asmbb/asmbb-v2-9-has-been-released.328/
gollark: Huh, apparently some hugely apioformic entity wrote a bit of forum software entirely in assembly.

References
  1. Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court, 9 January 1893, Page 62ref f18930109 http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/ccc/browse.jsp?path=sessionsPapers%2F18930109.xml
  2. Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, Bow Street Police Court, 00136, 12 December 1890 http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/inst/display/?rs=1&instid=BowSt
  3. "The British Almanac. Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge". Law and Justice: Metropolitan Police Courts. Cassell, London, for the Company of Stationers. 1882. p. 75. Retrieved 30 September 2012.
  4. Public Records Office 1841 Census HO 107/833/12 (parish of Wooler)
  5. "Sir John Struthers 1823–1899" (PDF). Living in the past. Dunfermline Heritage Community Projects. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 October 2015. Retrieved 30 September 2012.
  6. John Ivor Murray, M.D., F.R.C.S.EDIN., Obituary, The British Medical Journal, 8 August 1903, pages 339–340
  7. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (accessed 27 January 2018), Trial of Johann Most. (t18810523-541, 23 May 1881).
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