William Edward Maxwell

Sir William Edward Maxwell

Sir William Edward Maxwell KCBE , CMG , (born August 5, 1846 , † December 14, 1897 on the high seas near Gran Canaria) was High Commissioner in British Malaya , Governor of the Straits Settlements and Governor of the Gold Coast .

Life

William Edward Maxwell was born on August 5, 1846 as the youngest son of Sir Peter Benson Maxwell, Chief Justice of the Straits Settlements, and Frances Dorothea, the only daughter of Francis Synge of Glanmore Castle, co. Wicklow born. From 1860 to 1864 William Edward Maxwell went to the Repton School and then from 1865 to 1869 an employee of the Supreme Court of Penang and Singapore. He received his license from the local bar in 1867 and was appointed Police Magistrate and Commissioner of the Court of Requests in Penang in September 1869 . In February 1870 he was transferred to Malacca in the same capacity, to Singapore in 1871 and to Wellesley Province in 1872.

In 1870 he married Lillias Grant Aberigh-Mackay, the daughter of a chaplain.

In May 1874 he was appointed acting judge of the Penang Supreme Court and in September he was appointed assistant government agent for Wellesley Province. In November 1875 he accompanied the Larut Field Force as deputy chief of police on the punitive expedition against the murderers of James Wheeler Woodford Birch , the British resident of Perak . " Mentioned in Despatches " he was awarded a medal. Maxwell became assistant resident in Perak and in February 1878 a member of the State Council of Perak. In 1881 he was admitted to the Inner Temple bar . The following year he was assigned to visit the Australian colonies and report on the local Torrens land registration system . The system created by Robert Richard Torrens in the middle of the 19th century had proven itself in the legally secure transfer and administration of basic rights. Maxwells recognized the value of the new system and paved the way for the introduction of the Straits Settlement with his report The Torrens System of Conveyancing by Registration of Title in the Straits Settlements (1883) .

On his return to the Straits Settlements, Maxwell was appointed land registry officer on March 1, 1883. In 1883 he was officially announced as a member of the Executive and Legislative Council. The following year he traveled to the west coast of Atchin on behalf of the State Department, where he obtained the release of the survivors of the British ship "Nelson" , who had been held there for ten months. For this success he was awarded the Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George . From 1884 to 1889 he was an advisor to the incumbent resident of Penang. In 1889 he became British resident of Selangor. In 1892 he was appointed Colonial Secretary of the Straits Settlements and from February 1894 to January 1895 he was acting governor.

In March 1895 Maxwell was named governor of the Gold Coast Crown Colony . Upon his arrival, the colony was on the verge of war with the Asante , whose prosperity had resulted from the slave trade and who refused to make reparations to Britain resulting from the lost Ashanti Wars . On January 17, 1896, a military expedition under Sir Francis Scott Kumasi took Kumasi without resistance and took the Asante king Prempeh prisoner. Sir Maxwell, who had been accepted into the Order of the British Empire as Knight Commander in 1896 , traveled to England in the summer and lectured at conferences in Liverpool and Manchester on the future of the Gold Coast and the Kingdom of Asante. He returned to the Gold Coast in October but fell ill with malaria. He died on the way back to England and was buried at sea on December 14, 1897 near Gran Canaria. He left his wife and six sons; the eldest of them, William George Maxwell , became colonial administrator in Malaya.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ OxfordDNB: entry for Maxwell, Sir William Edward ; Accessed January 9, 2014
2. ^ Greg Taylor, The Law of the Land: The Advent of the Torrens System in Canada , 79; Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History; University of Toronto Press, 2008; ISBN 0802099130 , ISBN 9780802099136
3. ↑ http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=straitstimes18830601-1.2.18 (different content)
4. ↑ http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=straitstimes18940303-1.2.27 (different content)
5. ↑ http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=singfreepressb18950614-1.2.23 (different content)

Remarks

1. ^ Original title: Commissioner of Land Titles

predecessor	Office	successor
Cecil Clementi Smith	Governor of the Straits Settlements 1893–1894	Charles Bulls Hugh Mitchell
William Brandford Griffiths	Governor of the Gold Coast 1895–1897	Frederic Mitchell Hodgson