Who was the leader of the Baker Street Irregulars?

Wiggins was the leader of the Baker Street Irregulars.

The Baker Street Irregulars are a group of London street boys whom Sherlock Holmes employs as informal intelligence agents. Because they can move through the city unnoticed, Holmes uses them to follow suspects, search for people, and gather information that would be difficult for a conventional detective to obtain. Wiggins is their leader and the only member Holmes specifically asks to report directly to him.

The group first appears in A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887. Holmes calls them his “Baker Street division of the detective police force” and pays them to locate a cabman named Jefferson Hope. They return in The Sign of the Four, where Holmes sends them to search London for the steam launch Aurora. Wiggins is portrayed as taller and older than the other boys, with an air of authority.

Lestrade is a Scotland Yard inspector, Mrs Hudson is Holmes’s landlady, and Baskerville belongs to the title and family of The Hound of the Baskervilles. None leads the Irregulars. The name was later adopted by the real Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Holmes literary society founded in New York by Christopher Morley in 1934, but the original fictional leader remains Wiggins.