Sir Basil Home Thomson, (21 April 1861 – 26 March 1939) was a British colonial administrator and prison governor, who was head of Metropolitan Police CID during World War I. This gave him a key role in arresting wartime spies, and he was closely involved in the prosecution of Mata Hari, Sir Roger Casement and many Irish and Indian nationalists. His equating of Jews with Bolshevism led to accusations of anti-semitism. Thomson was also a successful novelist.
Early life
Thomson was born in Oxford, where his father, William Thomson (who would later become Archbishop of York), was provost of The Queen's College. Thomson was educated at Worsley's School in Hendon and Eton College, and then attended New College, Oxford, where a fellow undergraduate was Montague John Druitt, the man named as the prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper case by Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten in a Scotland Yard document dated 1894. (Thomson replaced Macnaghten as head of CID at Scotland Yard in 1913.) Thomson ended his university studies after two terms, after suffering bouts of depression, and spent some time from 1881 to 1882 in the United States, working as a farmer in Iowa.
Colonial service
In 1883, with the promise of marriage to a Grace Webber should he be financially secure, Thomson secured a cadet position at the Colonial Office, where he assisted Sir William Des Vœux, then Governor of Fiji. Arriving in Fiji in early 1884, he set about learning the Fijian and Tongan languages while appointed as a stipendiary magistrate throughout the islands. When Sir William MacGregor was appointed administrator of British New Guinea, Thomson joined his staff until he was invalided back to England after contracting malaria. Back in England, Thomson married Grace Webber in 1890, returning to Fiji with his wife in the middle of that year to serve as commissioner of native lands. When Sir John Thurston, the Governor of Fiji, dismissed the Premier of Tonga (Shirley Waldemar Baker) in his capacity as High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, Thomson was moved to Tonga, where he became assistant premier to Siaosi Tukuʻaho, the pro-British chief appointed as Baker's replacement.
In 1899, the United Kingdom and Germany signed an agreement formalising each country's rights and claims over Tonga and Samoa respectively. Given his inside knowledge of Tongan politics, Thomson was tasked with expediting the establishment of a British protectorate over Tonga, which was established on 18 May 1900 despite the objections of some native chiefs who wished to retain their traditional privileges.
Writing career
After three years at the Native Lands Office in Suva, Thomson resigned from colonial service, and returned to England in 1893, due in no small part to the deteriorating health of his wife. There he embarked on a career as a writer, drawing on his experiences in the South Sea Islands to produce South Sea Yarns (1894; written in Fiji), The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894, about his government work in Tonga), and The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath (1898). Basil Thomson used his Fijian assistants to organise the first ever done census of Fijian marriage on Viti Levu. He found that the Fijians did not marry, as claimed in the specialised literature, their mother's brother's daughter, but married any girl and recalculated her kinship status after the marriage so as to address her by the term meaning mother's brother's daughter.
Prison governorship
In the mid-1890s, Thomson read for the bar examinations at the Inner Temple, and was admitted to the bar in 1896. Instead of becoming a barrister, Thomson accepted the position of deputy governor at HM Prison Liverpool, after his name was suggested for the post due to a personal acquaintance with Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, a fellow Old Etonian who had stayed with Thomson in Tonga. Over the next twelve years, he served as governor of Northampton, Cardiff, Dartmoor, and Wormwood Scrubs prisons. From 1908 to 1913, he served as secretary of the Prison Commission.