William Haldane Porter

Sir William Haldane Porter CB (15 May 1867 – 12 September 1944) was a British civil servant, who was responsible for the creation of the Aliens Branch of the Home Office.

Josias Leslie Porter, hailed from yeoman Scottish settler stock with family lands overlooking Lough Swilly at Burt in county Donegal.

He had been a Presbyterian Church of Ireland missionary to the Jews in Palestine based at Damascus between 1849 and 1859, writing several published illustrated books on the subject and a definitive autobiography of his father-in-law Rev Henry Cooke.

Sir William was nearly forty years of age when at Hove Parish Church, Sussex he married Sybil Osborne Pochin, who was descended in her maternal line from the Ashby family of Quenby Hall, Leicestershire, of Toft, Lincolnshire on 6 June 1906.

Before his time at the Home Office, Haldane Porter had combined some practice at the Bar with journalism both in northern Ireland as well as in London where though an Ulster Tory in politics he was for a while sub-editor with the Daily Chronicle.

He served as a parliamentary agent for Lord Iveagh, heir to the Guinness family title, at a time when Labour won the seat for Hoxton and Haggerstone, London.

The Royal Commission on Immigration was set up in 1902 in response to the influxes of poor Jews migrating to the east end of London hounded by pogroms from eastern Europe and Russia.

A Home Office memorandum of 20 November 1905 recorded that: “Mr Haldane Porter was selected as Secretary to the Inner Departmental Committee appointed to consider and report what rules and orders ought to be made to give effect to the provision of the Aliens Act 1905 on account of the special knowledge which he had acquired by several years’ work on the question of alien immigration and his expert knowledge upon this subject has been invaluable to the committee.

The result was an elite male-only force with a working knowledge of languages for interview purposes and a somewhat cynical view of human nature and character, sufficient to distinguish the genuine travellers from the false.

Even years after retirement, at the age of 73, by then residing in Dublin in the neutral Irish Republic, he was called back to supervise the reception of French and Belgian refugees fleeing in 1940 into British channel ports from their occupied countries.

Many of the procedures which Porter put in place remained operational until the present time, as did the associated jargon, thereby forming the basis of the later Immigration Service (now called the United Kingdom Border Force).