Henry Stafford Northcote, 1st Baron Northcote


Baron Northcote of Exeter (1846-1911),
governor-general of the Australian commonwealth, born on 18 Nov. 1846 at 13 Devonshire St.,Portland Place, London, was second son of Sir Stafford Henry Northcote, first earl of Iddesleigh [q.v.] ; his mother was Cecilia Frances, daughter of Thomas Farrer, and sister of Thomas Farrer, first Lord Farrer.
He went to Eton in 1858 and Merton College, Oxford, in 1865, graduating B.A.in 1869 and proceeding M.A. in 1873. On leaving Oxford he was appointed to a clerkship in the foreign office on 18 March 1868.
In Feb. 1871 he was attached to the joint high commission, of which his father was one of the members and which sat at Washington from Feb. to May 1871, to consider the Alabama claims and other outstanding questions between Great Britain and the United States. The negotiation having residted in the Treaty of Washington of 8 May 1871, he became secretary to the British member of the claims commission which was constituted under the 12th article of that treaty, and assistant to the British claims agent in the general business of the commission. The commission sat at Washington from Sept. 1871 to Sept.
1873. In Nov. 1876 Northcote became an acting third secretary in the diplomatic service. When Lord Salisbury went as British plenipotentiary to the Constantinople conference at the end of 1876, Northcote accompanied him as private secretary.
In Feb. 1877 he was made assistant private secretary to his father, who was then chancellor of the exchequer, and he was private secretary from October 1877 to 15 Mar. 1880. On that date he resigned the public service to stand in the conservative interest for Exeter, the city near which the home of his family lay. He was duly elected and represented Exeter in the House of Commons from 1880 till 1899. From June 1885 till Feb. 1886, in Lord Salisbury's short first government, he was financial secretary to the war office. In Lord Salisbury's second government he held the post of surveyor-general of ordnance from August 1886 to Dec. 1887, resigning his appointment in order to facihtate changes at the war office. He had been given the C.B. in 1880, and in Nov. 1887, after his father's death, he was made a baronet.
He was a charity commissioner in 1891-2,
and in 1898 was appointed a royal commissioner for the Paris Exhibition of 1900.He was also for a time chairman of the Associated Chambers of Commerce, and became well known and much trusted in business circles. In 1899 he was appointed to be governor of Bombay, and in Jan. 1900 he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Northcote of the city of Exeter,next month being made G.C.I.E.
On 17 Feb. 1900 Lord Northcote landed at Bombay, where he served as governor for three and a half years. His tenure of office was marked by ' a famine of unprecedented severity, incessant plague, an empty ex-chequered and bad business years generally '
(Times of India, 5 Sept. 1903). Famine did not completely disappear till 1902-3, and plague was stUl rife when Northcote left India. He faced the situation with selfdenj'ing energy. Immediately on arrival at Bombay he inspected the hospitals,
including the plague hospitals, and within a month of his landing went to Gujarat,
where the peasantry were in sore straits from the effects of the famine. The district of Gujarat depended largely upon its fine breed of cattle which was in danger of dying out from scarcity of fodder, and one great result of the governor's visit was the estabHshment, largely on his initiative,
of the cattle farm at Charodi, known as the Northcote Gowshala, to preserve and improve the breed. His sympathy with and interest in the small cultivators of the Bombay Presidency were shown by what was perhaps the chief legislative measure of his government, the passing of the Bombay Land Revenue Code Amendment Act, which aroused much criticism on its introduction in 1901. The object of the act was to protect the cultivators in certain famine-stricken districts of the Presidency against the money-lenders, by \viping out the arrears of revenue due from the holder on condition of his holding being forfeited to the government, and then restored to him as occupier on an inalienable tenure.
He took other steps in the direction of land revenue refonn, doing much to bring the somewhat rigid traditional policy of the Bombay government into harmony with the views of the government of India. In municipal matters, too, he made improvements, though the most important mimicipal act passed in his time--the District Municipahties Act, by which local self-government in the Moffussil was much enlarged--was a legacy from his predecessor, Lord Sandhurst. Northcote travelled widely through the Bombay Presidency, and he paid a visit to Aden. He was a warm supporter of schools and hospitals, but his efforts were hampered by the impoverished state of the public finances. ' So far as he was able. Lord Northcote drew on his privy purse for money which the State should have furnished, and especially in the administration of reHef and in the assistance of charitable undertakings was he able to take a more personally active part than any of his predecessors ' {Bombay Gazette Budget,
29 Aug. 1903).

Book Source:Serle, Percival (1949). "Northcote, Henry Stafford". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson

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