Edmund Henderson — 'Police'

Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') presents Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Y.W. Henderson CB, then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, as a solitary full-length figure in a long grey overcoat, brown trousers, and silk top hat, hands thrust into coat pockets — the very image of a plain-clothes authority. The single-word caption, Police, is the joke: the man who commands London's force looks indistinguishable from any respectable civilian on the street. Pellegrini's characteristic exaggeration targets Henderson's drooping russet moustache and hollow, slightly mournful face, suggesting a bureaucrat more comfortable behind a desk than on the beat. No ethnic caricature is present. The plate ran as Men of the Day No. 99.