Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/549

 the carrying out by convicts of the breakwater and works of defence at Portland, the docks at Portsmouth and Chatham, and additional prison accommodation. At the International Prison Congress in London in 1872 Du Cane fully described the British system of penal servitude. Du Cane's main triumph as prison administrator was the reorganisation of county and borough prisons, which had long been mismanaged by some 2000 local justices and largely maintained by local funds. Du Cane in 1873 submitted to the secretary of state a comprehensive scheme for the transfer to the government of all local prisons and the whole cost of their maintenance. The much needed reform was legalised by the Prison Act of July 1877, when Du Cane, who had been made C.B., civil division, on 27 March 1873, was promoted K.C.B., civil division, and became chairman of the (three) prison commissioners under the new act to reorganise and administer the county and borough prisons. On 1 April 1878 these prisons came under government control. Their number was soon reduced by one-half, the rules made uniform, the progressive system of discipline adopted, the staff co-ordinated into a single service with a regular system of promotion, structural and other improvements introduced, and the cost of maintenance largely reduced. Useful employment of prisoners was developed and the discharged prisoner was assisted to earn his living honestly.

Du Cane also successfully inaugurated the registration of criminals. In 1877 he produced the first 'Black Book' list, printed by convict labour, of over 12,000 habitual criminals with their aliases and full descriptions. A register followed of criminals having distinctive marks on their bodies. Du Cane's suggestion to Sir Francis Galton that types of feature in different kinds of criminality were worthy of scientific study first prompted Galton to attempt composite portraiture (Memories of My Life, 1908). Du Cane encouraged the use of Galton's finger-print system in the identification of criminals. He retired from the army with the honorary rank of major-general on 31 Dec. 1887, and from the civil service on 23 March 1895. An accomplished man of wide interests, embracing archaeology, architecture, and Napoleonic literature, he was a clever painter in water-colours. A set of his sketches of Peninsular battlefields was exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition at Chelsea in 1890. He died at his residence, 10 Portman Square, London, on 7 June 1903, and was buried in Great Braxted churchyard, Essex.

He was twice married: (1) at St. John's Church, Fremantle, Western Australia, on 18 July 1855, to Mary Dorothea, daughter of Lieut.-colonel John Molloy, a Peninsula and Waterloo veteran of the rifle brigade, of Fairlawn, The Vasse, Western Australia; she died on 13 May 1881; (2) at St. Margaret's, Westminster, on 2 Jan. 1883, to Florence Victoria, widow of Colonel M. J. Grimston, of Grimston Garth and Kilnwick, Yorkshire, and daughter of Colonel Hardress Robert Saunderson. By his first wife Sir Edmund had a family of three sons and five daughters. A crayon drawing, done in 1851, is in Lady Du Cane's possession at 10 Portman Square.

Sir Edmund contributed largely to periodical literature, chiefly on penology, and frequently wrote to 'The Times' on military and other subjects. To the 'Royal Engineers Journal' he sent memoirs of several of his brother officers. In 1885 he published in Macmillan's 'Citizen' series The Punishment and Prevention of Crime,' an historical sketch of British prisons and the treatment of crime up to that date.

 DUCKETT, GEORGE FLOYD, third baronet (1811–1902), archæologist and lexicographer, born at 15 Spring Gardens, Westminster, on 27 March 1811, was eldest child of Sir George Duckett, second baronet (1777–1856), M.P. for Lymington 1807–12, by his first wife, Isabella (1781–1844), daughter of Stainbank Floyd of Barnard Castle, co. Durham. His grandfather Sir George Jackson, first baronet (1725–1822) [q. v.], assumed in 1797 the surname of Duckett, having married the heiress of the Duckett family. After attending private schools at Putney and Wimbledon Common, young Duckett was at Harrow from 1820 to 1823, when he was placed with a private tutor in Bedfordshire. In 1827–8 he gained a thorough knowledge of German at Gotha and Dresden. Matriculating on 13 Dec. 1828 as a gentleman commoner of Christ Church, Oxford, he devoted himself chiefly to hunting, and left the university without a degree.

Joining the West Essex yeomanry, Duckett on 4 May 1832 was commissioned a sub-lieutenant in the second regiment of life guards. On his coming of age in 1832, 