Donald Swanson

Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson (1848 - 24 November 1924) was born in Thurso in Scotland, and was a senior police officer in the Metropolitan Police in London during the notorious Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

The son of John Swanson, a brewer, Swanson was a good scholar and on leaving school he worked for a period as a teacher, but realising that that career offered him few prospects, he decided instead to join the Police.

Swanson joined the Metropolitan Police on 27 April 1868, and was given the warrant number 50282. He married his wife Julia (born c.1854) in 1878 at West Ham in Essex. By November 1887 Swanson was Chief Inspector of the CID in the Commissioner's Office at Scotland Yard. He was promoted to Superintendent in 1896. Swanson was involved in preventing Fenian terrorist attacks in London during the 1870s and 1880s. Other cases he was involved in include recovering the stolen jewels of Lady Dysart and a stolen Gainsborough painting, as well as acting against 'rent boys', blackmailing homosexual prostitutes in 1897, and in preventing the Jameson Raid from starting a war in South Africa. He arrested Percy Lefroy Mapleton, the railway murderer, in 1881. He retired in 1903.

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