Colonial Despatches

Born in 1819, William Strachey, the fourth son of a member of the Bengal civil service who had returned to England, served his own stint in the Bengal civil service from 1838 to 1843.1 After a furlough of five years, he resigned and joined the Colonial Office in 1848 as précis writer.2 Strachey was an unrepentant eccentric – he always wore galoshes and kept Calcutta time in London.3 John Cell regards him as the least valuable member of the upper level of Colonial Office servants during the 1850s and 1860s.4 He retired in 1870.5

• 1. Barbara Strachey, The Strachey Line: an English family in America, in India and at home: 1570 to 1902 (London: Gollancz, 1985), 110, 138-39.
• 2. Charles Richard Sanders, The Strachey family, 1588-1932: their writings and literary associations ([Durham, N.C.:] Duke University Press, 1953), 211.
• 3. Ibid. 211-212.
• 4. John W. Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Policy-Making Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 23.
• 5. Colonial Office. Colonial Office List, 1881, 470.