Background
John Russell Colvin was born on the 29th of March, 1807 in Calcutta, India.
lieutenant secretary civil servant
John Russell Colvin was born on the 29th of March, 1807 in Calcutta, India.
John Russell Colvin was lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces of British India during the mutiny of 1857, at the height of which he died. Colvin"s was an Anglo-Indian family of Scottish descent. He was educated at the East India Company College at Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire.
And entered the service of the British East India Company in 1826.
From 1846-1849, Colvin served as Commissioner of Tenasserim, in British (Lower) Burma. In 1853 Lord Dalhousie appointed him lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces of India.
In 1857, at the start of the mutiny, Colvin was at Agra with only a weak British regiment and a native battery, not enough force to prevail against the mutineers. Colvin issued a proclamation to the natives that was censured at the time for its clemency, but it was similar to the approach of Sir Henry Lawrence, later followed by Lord Canning.
Colvin died shortly before the fall of Delhi.
Colvin married Emma Sophia, daughter of Wetenhall Sneyd, a vicar in England. They had ten children, many of whom continued the family connection with India. Bazett Wetenhall, Elliott Graham, and Walter Mytton all passed distinguished careers in India, and a fourth, Clement Sneyd, Companion of the Order of the Star of India, was secretary of the public works department of the India Office in London.
The third son, Auckland, named after Lord Auckland, was lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces.
He published a biography of his father in the Rulers of India series in 1895, and in 1905 gave a stained glass East window to the church of Saint Mary at Soham, both as a thanksgiving for the termination of the Second Boer War, and as a permanent memorial to his father. Colvin"s granddaughter Brenda (1897–1981) was an important landscape architect, author of standard works in the field and a force behind its professionalisation.
She had no children, but another of Colvin"s grandchildren founded his own line: Clement Sneyd"s son ended up as Admiral Sir Ragnar Colvin, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Central Bank, and fathered John Horace Ragnar Colvin, the Cold War diplomat. The most recent generation is the Australian journalist Mark Colvin and Major General James Balfour Commander of the Order of the British Empire of the Royal Green Jackets.
John Colvin published The Making of Modern Egypt in 1906, and a biography of his father, in the " Rulers of India " series, in 1895.
