Samuel Meredith (police officer)

His father, Joseph Meredith, had been the superintendent of the local excise officers, but he was retired by the time of his son's birth.

John S. Dyer, a family friend who was Chief Clerk at the Admiralty and Secretary of Greenwich Hospital (and who would later become his father-in-law), obtained a position for Meredith as a midshipman aboard a ship in the Royal Navy.

From 1835 to 1838 Meredith was Inspecting Commander of the Swanage Coast Guard District in Dorset, where he was in charge of the excise men who covered the area from Lulworth Cove to Bournemouth.

[4] Following his appointment Meredith placed an advertisement in the Wiltshire Gazette on 19 December 1839 to recruit police men who should be..."under forty years of age.... stand five feet six inches without shoes [be able to] read and write and keep accounts... to be free from any bodily complaint, of strong constitution and generally intelligent".

When in June 1860 the body of three-year-old Francis Saville Kent was found dumped in an outside privy used by the servants in the garden of his family's house in the small village of Rode (then in Wiltshire), local Police Superintendent Foley believed that the nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, who had responsibility for Francis Kent, who slept in her room, was involved in the murder.

[6] 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 Captain Meredith.