31 Dec. stated his own view of his case to a representative of Reuter's agency. On 19 Jan. 1901 he was placed on retired pay as a lieutenant-general. He skilfully elaborated his defence and complained of his treatment by Lord Roberts in ‘The Work of the Ninth Division’ (1901).
Settling at Bagshot, Colvile, on 24 Nov. 1907, while riding a motor-bicycle, came into collision at Frimley with a motor-car, and died almost immediately of his injuries at Brompton Sanatorium. He was buried at Lullington, near Burton-on-Trent, where his ancestral estates lay.
He was twice married: (1) on 6 Aug. 1878 to Alice Rosa (d. 1882), eldest daughter of Robert Daly and granddaughter of John Daly, second Baron Dunsandle; (2) in 1886 to Zélie Isabelle, daughter of Pierre Richard de Préville of Château des Mondrans, Basses Pyrénées, France, by whom he had one son.
Colvile was a skilful writer and effectively narrated his experiences as a traveller in little known lands as well as a soldier. He published, besides the work cited: 1. ‘A Ride in Petticoats and Slippers,’ relating to Morocco, 1880. 2. ‘The Accursed Land,’ a description of the land of Edom near the Dead Sea, 1884. 3. ‘The History of the Soudan Campaign,’ for the war office, 3 parts, 1889. 4. ‘The Land of the Nile Springs,’ 1895, chiefly an account of the fight against Kabarega in Uganda. 5. ‘The Allies, England and Japan,’ 1907.
[Burke's Peerage; Hart's and Official Army Lists; Celebrities of the Army, edited by Commander Charles N. Robinson, R.N.; R. H. Vetch, Lieut.-General Sir Gerald Graham, 1901; The Scapegoat, a selection from articles in The Review of the Week, 1901; Journal, Roy. Geog. Soc., Jan. 1908; The Times, 26 Nov. 1907; The Times History of War in South Africa, vols. iii. and iv.; Sir F. Maurice, Official History of War in South Africa, vols. i. and ii.]
COLVIN, Sir AUCKLAND (1838–1908), Anglo-Indian and Egyptian administrator, born at Calcutta on 8 March 1838, was third son of the ten children of John Russell Colvin [q. v.], lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces, by his wife Emma Sophia, daughter of Wetenhall Sneyd, vicar of Newchurch, Isle of Wight. Three of his brothers, Bazett Wetenhall Colvin, Elliott Graham Colvin, and Sir Walter Mytton Colvin (see below), all passed distinguished careers in India, and a fourth, Clement Sneyd, C.S.I., was secretary of the public works department of the India office in London.
Educated at Eton from 1850, Auckland went in 1854 to the East India College, Haileybury, and arriving in India on 17 Jan. 1858, he was posted to the Agra provinces. After serving the usual district novitiate, Auckland went to headquarters in May 1864 as under secretary in the home, and afterwards in the foreign department of the government of India. He returned to his own province in July 1869 as a settlement officer, and did good work in the revision of the Allahabad district settlement. He officiated as secretary to the government of the North-West Provinces in April 1873, and from the following June as commissioner of excise and stamps. The lieutenant-governor, Sir George Couper [q. v. Suppl. II], resented some brilliant criticism of the local government in the ‘Pioneer’ (Allahabad), which was attributed to Colvin's pen or inspiration. In the spring of 1877 Couper sent Colvin back to district work as collector of Basti. From November 1877 he officiated for a short period as commissioner of inland customs under the government of India, and he was afterwards collector of Bijnaur.
Colvin's opportunity came when in January 1878 he was transferred for employment in Egypt, serving first as head of the cadastral survey, and then from 24 May as British commissioner of the debt, in place of Major Evelyn Baring (now Lord Cromer). Again in June 1880 he succeeded Major Baring as English controller of Egyptian finance, with M. de Blignières as his French colleague. From time to time he acted as British consul-general in Sir Edward Malet's absence, and he was acting for Malet when the mutiny of 9 Sept. 1881 broke out. By his advice and persuasion the timorous Khedive Tewfik confronted Arabi, the rebel leader, in the square of the Abdin palace, and succeeded in postponing the insurrection (cf. Colvin's official minute, 19 Sept.; Cromer, Modern Egypt, i. 206–8). In various ways, and not least by his work as Egyptian correspondent of the ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ he influenced public opinion at home, and forced the reluctant hands of Gladstone's government towards acceptance of responsibility in Egypt. Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Colvin's bitterest opponent, in his ‘Secret History of the English Occupation’ (1907), pays unwilling homage to the resource with which Colvin conducted the struggle. After the British occupation Colvin became financial adviser to the Khedive, who conferred on him the grand cordons of
