Early years Whicher was born in 1814 in
Camberwell, London, the son of Rebecca and Richard Whicher, a gardener. He was baptised on 23 October 1814 at the church of
St Giles in Camberwell. After working as a labourer he passed the physical and literacy tests and joined the
Metropolitan Police on 18 September 1837 as a police constable with the number E47 (Holborn Division). Whicher was 5' 8" tall, with brown hair, pale skin and blue eyes. He married Elizabeth Harding (born 1818), and they had a son, Jonathan Whicher (born 1838), who died young. By 1841 he was living in a police dormitory at a
stationhouse in
Gray's Inn Lane in
St Pancras. In August 1842 he and seven other men joined the newly formed
Detective Branch at
Scotland Yard. Whicher received the new number A27 (Whitehall Division) and was promoted to detective sergeant shortly after. Whicher was reportedly described by a colleague as the "prince of detectives".
William Henry Wills, Dickens's deputy editor at
Household Words magazine, saw Whicher involved in police work in 1850 and described him as a "man of mystery". In May 1851 Whicher was accused of entrapment when he and Inspector Lund saw John Tyler, a convict who had been transported to
Australia as a criminal and had recently returned, in
Trafalgar Square. Whicher and Lund watched Tyler meet William Cauty, another known criminal, and sit with him on a bench in
The Mall opposite the
London and Westminster Bank in
St James's Square. Whicher and Lund watched the two as they returned to the same bench every day for six weeks and watched the bank. Eventually, on 28 June 1851 they caught the two red-handed as they ran from the bank having robbed it.
The Times criticised the police for allowing the crime to take place rather than preventing it. Whicher also pursued criminals who counterfeited coins, forged signatures on
cheques and money orders, as well as pickpockets and conmen. Whicher was promoted to detective inspector in 1856. When Italian revolutionaries organised by
Felice Orsini tried to assassinate
Napoleon III in 1858 in Paris, Whicher took part in the hunt to track them down. In 1859 he investigated when the Reverend James Bonwell, the married rector of St Philip the Apostle in
Stepney and his lover Miss Lizzie Yorath, a clergyman's daughter, were charged with murdering their illegitimate son. Bonwell had paid an
undertaker 18
shillings to bury the dead child secretly in a coffin with a deceased stranger. The couple were found not guilty of murder but were censured by the jury, and in 1860
Archibald Tait, the
Bishop of London, sued Bonwell for misconduct. In early 1860 Whicher caught Emily Lawrence and James Pearce, who had stolen £12,000 worth of jewellery from jewellers' shops in Paris by examining valuable items on trays and then
palming them. 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 the local
chief constable,
Captain Samuel Meredith R.N. It was only after a second request was received that Whicher, then the most senior and best known of the detectives at Scotland Yard, was sent. Her father Samuel Saville Kent (1801–1872) engaged the services of an experienced
barrister to defend his daughter. Constance Kent was released on bail and the case against her was later dropped due to lack of evidence. The nightgown, a crucial piece of evidence, was never found, and Superintendent Foley never told Whicher about its original discovery. The national newspapers strongly supported the young Constance and were critical of Whicher. He returned to London where he was seen as a failure because he had failed to solve the case; thus his reputation was damaged and took some time to recover. The substance of the confession was that she had waited until the family and servants were asleep, had gone down to the drawing-room and opened the shutters and window, had then taken the child from his room wrapped in a blanket that she had taken from between sheet and counterpane in his cot (leaving both these undisturbed or readjusted), left the house and killed him in the privy with a razor stolen from her father. Her movements before the killing had been conducted with the child in her arms. It had been necessary to hide matches in the privy beforehand for a light to see by during the act of murder. The murder was not a spontaneous act, it seems, but one of revenge against the second Mrs Kent for her treatment of Constance's mother – and it was even suggested that Constance had, at certain times, been mentally unbalanced.
Later years From August to October 1862 he and Superintendent Walker of A Division were in
Warsaw at the request of the
Russian Empire. and by May the following year he had temporarily retired from the Met due to ill-health. This became permanent on 18 March 1864, with the official reason for his early departure given as "
congestion of the brain". Following the death of his first wife, Whicher married Charlotte Piper (1812–1883) in 1866 at
St Margaret's, Westminster. He had become a private detective by early 1867 and in that role was involved in the
Tichborne case, discovering that the Claimant
Arthur Orton had immediately visited his family in
Wapping on his return to London in 1866. In the 1881 census he is listed as a retired police officer. He died in 1881 at home at 2 Cumberland Villas,
Lavender Hill, London and was buried in
Camberwell Old Cemetery. In his will he left £1,569 2s 6d (equivalent to £180,000 in 2019 prices); among his
executors was
Chief Superintendent Adolphus Williamson. ==Media portrayals==