Francis Burgess

Francis Burgess (1793–1864) was an English barrister, the first police commissioner for Birmingham, England, and subsequently chief police magistrate of Van Diemen's Land (from 1856 known as Tasmania), and served as a Member of the Van Diemen's Land Legislative Council.

Early years

Burgess was born in 1793, the son of Bridget, (née Scott) and Francis Burgess of St. Martin's parish, Leicester.

He joined the 54th Regiment aged 18, as an ensign, serving in Holland in 1813, and at the Battle of Merxem, where he was wounded. —as the first police commissioner for the (then) borough of Birmingham, reporting directly to the Government in London, at a salary of £900 a year. He developed innovate techniques for policing the borough; he introduced its first mounted patrols, and deployed plain-clothes officers at events where pickpockets were likely to operate.

On 12 August 1842 a new Police Act transferred responsibility for the police to Birmingham Town Council. Burgess was succeeded by Richard Stephens, as the first Superintendent of the Birmingham Borough Police. He sailed, with his wife and family, from Sheerness on the barque Asiatic, arriving in Hobart on 23 September. At the time, Tasmania had a large population of criminals, due to Transportation. representing the electoral division of Cambridge Murray (1824?–1906) inspector of schools, secretary to the Council of Education, Shakespearean scholar, elocutionist and theatre critic Gordon Walter Haines (1833?–1876) surveyor of the Tasmanian Lake district

His oldest son Francis Jacques, a captain in the 74th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, was killed in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Two other daughters predeceased him. Amelia died on 14 September 1881.