Alexander Nimmo Rutherford (1876-1948) was admitted a messenger-at-arms, taking the oath and signing the roll of the officers of arms at the Lyon Office. Rutherford & Macpherson dates its start to that very day in 1899. Before it was made the law in 1987 that only a commissioned sheriff officer could become a messenger-at-arms, the longstanding practice was that only an experienced sheriff officer would, following examination, be admitted to the higher office. The young Mr Rutherford was rather distinguished in having been admitted a messenger-at-arms by the Lord Lyon before becoming a sheriff officer. The event was reported in the newspapers:
Mr Alexander N. Rutherford, assistant to Messrs Younger & Younger, messengers-at-arms, Glasgow, was yesterday, at Edinburgh, after examination, admitted by the Lord Lyon as a messenger-at-arms to officiate in the county of Lanark.
No doubt the choice of the Dundee Courier and the Dundee Advertiser to include that announcement was because the firm of Younger & Younger, although having had its head offices in Glasgow since 1890, had been founded in Dundee. The name Younger & Younger was repeated, again and again, in many of the newspapers of 1899, as I quote:
YOUNGER & Younger, 158 Bath Street, Glasgow, and at London and elsewhere…offices in Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Dublin and Belfast; Private investigations, domestic, commercial or financial, requiring tact, discretion and secrecy, undertaken.
Amongst other boasts, they were advertising wonderful results in ‘elucidating mysteries’, having ‘at command the most expert staff (male and female) of private detectives in Britain’. Younger & Younger failed to survive the early death, aged 34, of its remarkable founder, Alexander Macgibbon Younger, in 1902. From that year Walshaw & Rutherford was the trading name until, in moving to 102 Bath Street in 1905, Mr Rutherford practised here under his own name. With this background, we have a claim to be one of the oldest private investigation agencies in the world.
It just remains to explain that the firm name commemorates the 1 October 1947 partnership of two Alexanders, Rutherford and Macpherson, each with his own practice to contribute to the merger. Their partnership lasted one year and a day, precisely – its end falling on 2 October 1948, with Mr Rutherford’s death.
