W. L. Melville (William Lauriston Melville) Lee

Born in 1865, William Lauriston Melville Lee studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and later served in the British Army, reaching the rank of major. He is most closely associated with A History of Police in England, first published in 1901, a substantial account of the development of policing in England and Wales.

The book helped secure his lasting place as a writer of historical nonfiction. Contemporary and later records also connect him with public life in Headington, Oxford, where he lived at Stoke House for many years and was later remembered locally as Major Melville Lee.

Some later sources describe him as having worked in military intelligence during the First World War, but the clearest confirmed facts from the material found here are his military career, his authorship of A History of Police in England, and his life in Headington. He died in 1955 and was buried in Headington Cemetery.