Elias Bower of Scotland Yard: A Family Legend

George Johnson: I’m from Utah so have an interest in geneology but I also have a thing about Scotland Yard in the early days. I had heard about Detective Bower so I bought this book because it seemed just right for my summer reading. I wasn’t disappointed. It gives real great detail on his career and how things work over there in the “detecting business”. It also builds the profile of this terrific detective’s family life and background. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about his life and family and could see how things came together for him to join the Yard. It is a great tribute to the man that his kinda-grand daughter took so much trouble and effort to put together this book about him. Highly recommended.

From the title one would imagine the book would be about Elias Bower. This is not the case. Most of it is about the writer's own family, and how she went about researching their history. Elias Bower was only related to her by marriage, and, as he is the only person of interest in the whole lot, the one she catches on to to try and make the book interesting.

This is predominantly a personal account of the family history enquiries conducted by the author into her ancestor Elias Bower, a Detective Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard who investigated the 1903 Moat Farm murder of Camille Holland, and the 1912 Eastbourne murder of Police Inspector Arthur Walls, both of which were milestone ballistics cases involving the firearms experts Edwin and Robert Churchill, before the days of forensic science laboratories. He was also involved in a number of interesting fraud cases and an early example of blood grouping by the use of serology. On his retirement, Eli left the Metropolitan Police to become Head of the Port of London Authority CID. His son David also joined the police.Although not written primarily for its details of the crime investigations, there are some interesting details of cases that may not have been known to crime historians. The book fleshes out the family history and circumstances of a famous detective who was prominent in the golden years of Scotland Yard, one of the determined characters on whom the safety of Londoners at the time relied.