Samuel Meredith

Captain Samuel Meredith (5 August 1794 – June 1873) was the first person to be appointed to the rank of Chief Constable in the United Kingdom when he was appointed to that rank in the newly formed Wiltshire Constabulary in November 1839. This occurred after a distinguished career in the Royal Navy.

Naval career Meredith was born in Dedham in Essex in 1796, the only child of elderly parents who lived in West Ham. His father, Joseph Meredith, had been the superintendent of the local excise officers, but he was retired by the time of his son's birth. In 1804 aged 10 years Samuel Meredith ran away from his school at Greenwich and could not be found. He was eventually traced to a ship at Portsmouth where he had asked to be taken on as the cabin boy. John S. Dyer, a family friend who was Chief Clerk at the Admiralty and Secretary of Greenwich Hospital (and who would later become his father-in-law), obtained a position for Meredith as a midshipman aboard a ship in the Royal Navy. He then sailed to the Indian Ocean and did not return home until 1809.

He married Lydia Eliza Dyer (1796–1881) on 21 June 1829. He was then a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy attached to the Plymouth division. They had two children: Mary DeSaumarey Leslie Meredith (1826–1901) and Lydia Eliza Dyer Meredith (1830–1925). Soon after the birth of his oldest daughter in 1826 he was appointed to the command of the ketch HMS Vigilant. When that posting ended Meredith requested a shore appointment, and he was given the command at Gosport in July 1830; this posting ended in 1833. From 1835 to 1838 Meredith was Inspecting Commander of the Swanage Coast Guard District in Dorset, where he was in charge of the excise men who covered the area from Lulworth Cove to Bournemouth. On his retirement from the Royal Navy in order to take up his new appointment Commander Meredith was promoted to the rank of Captain.

Dissatisfied by the lack of progress of Superintendent Foley and his men, the local magistrates asked the Home Office for assistance from Scotland Yard without the agreement of Captain Meredith. It was only after a second request was received that Detective Inspector Jack Whicher, then the most senior and well known of the detectives at Scotland Yard, was sent. He quickly arrested the dead boy's sixteen-year-old half-sister, Constance Kent.

He died in June 1873 at Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire.