Saunders Welch

Saunders Welch (2 February 1711 – 1 October 1784) was an 18th-century English businessman, justice of the peace for Middlesex, and policing pioneer.

Life He was born in Aylesbury and educated in the town's workhouse. An early biography of the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (husband to Welch's daughter Mary) stated that Welch was apprenticed to a trunk-maker in St Paul's Churchyard in the City of London, though another 1820s memoir refers to his receiving an inheritance and being "in person, mind and manners, most perfectly a gentleman". By 1734 he was living on Broad St Giles in the parish of St George's Bloomsbury and running a grocery, probably from his home, moving into a bigger residence on the corner of Bow Street (now known as Museum Street) around 1739. Welch selected his men from former constables, discharged at the end of their year in office, who were prepared to receive legal training and carry on the work.

After Henry's death Welch fell out with John, leaving the Bow Street office and from the 1760s onwards joining the rota of magistrates at a new "rotation office" on Litchfield Street, Struggles to make that office self-funding eroded his previously robust health, with the office stagnating by 1775. Welch spent two or more years in Italy for his health, finally dying at Taunton Deane in Somerset in 1784, though his body was brought back to the St George's Churchyard in Bloomsbury. His will left his daughter Mary twenty volumes of sermons by John Tillotson and a small sum of money to Johnson, as well as a lump sum to his other daughter Ann equivalent to the £200 annual income and £200 in jewels settled on Mary at the latter's marriage in 1772. In 1758 he also published A proposal to render effectual a plan, to remove the nuisance of common prostitutes from the streets of this metropolis.