Born in Bengal, India, on 22 January 1860, the son of an army officer of
Huguenot ancestry, Major-General Theodore Boisragon, CB, A. M. His father divorced his wife, Margaret Emma Boisragon (born Gerrard), in 1864 after she ran off with Charles William Moore, a judge in Bengal. Charles and Margaret's children included
Ethel Moore, his half-sister, who was born in 1867. Boisragon entered the
Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1878, and served in the
Royal Irish Regiment—with seven years in India, and action in the 1884-85
Nile expedition—until 1891, when he retired. He joined the colonial service in the
Gold Coast, where he initially served as Assistant Inspector of Constabulary. In 1894 he was appointed Commandant of the newly established
Niger Coast Protectorate Force, in which position he came to know
Roger Casement. In January 1897 he was only one of two survivors of a small British expedition to Benin which was attacked and defeated, the incident prompting the
Benin Expedition of 1897. Boisragon published his account of the incident as
The Benin Massacre in 1897. He then rejoined the Royal Irish Regiment as a captain in the 3rd Battalion, its
Militia battalion. In early 1901 Boisragon was seconded from the army, and appointed Captain Superintendent of the
Shanghai Municipal Police, arriving in March 1901 to take over command. He was forced to resign in the aftermath of the 1905 Shanghai
Mixed Court Riot. In 1915 Boisragon published a book for boys,
Jack Scarlett Sandhurst cadet: A story for boys, with illustrations by J. F. Campbell. He died in London on 18 March 1922. ==Family==