Sir Frederick James Halliday was the first Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, serving from May 1854 to 1859.
George Abraham Grierson was born in 1851 in County Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin, as a mathematics student, but where he also first developed an interest for oriental languages. He studied Sanskrit and Hindustani before leaving for the Bombay Presidency in 1873. He was appointed Superintendent of the newly formed Linguistic Survey of India in 1898, which took 30 years to complete. Grierson was a prodigious author writing many publications on India and its languages. He died in Camberley, Surrey, in 1941.
Major General George Le Grand Jacob (24 April 1805-1881) was an army officer in the East India Company. At the age of fifteen he began learning languages under Dr John Borthwick Gilchrist. He became fluent in Hindi, Persian, Marathi and Sanksrit. He was in the Grenadier Regiment Bombay Native Infantry and was promoted to Lieutenant in 1823 and to Major General in 1861. He is perhaps most known for suppressing the Indian Rebellion of 1857, involving a mutiny in the 27th Bombay Native Infantry. He was one of the earliest copiers of the Asoka Inscriptions. In addition to publishing many papers on Indian history, archaeology and topography, he wrote a book titled 'Western India before and during the Mutiny' which was published in 1871. He died in London on 27 January 1881 and was buried in Brockwood Cemetery in Surrey.
Sir George Thomas Staunton was born near Salisbury, the son of the diplomat, George Leonard Staunton. Aged 12, George Thomas accompanied his father on the Macartney Embassy to China, and his Chinese language ability was sufficient for conversation. In 1798 was appointed a writer in the British East India Company's factory at Canton (Guangzhou), and subsequently its chief. He continued to study Chinese and in 1805 he translated a work of Dr George Pearson into Chinese, followed, five years later, by an English translation of a significant part of the Chinese legal code.
In 1816 Staunton was second commissioner on a special mission to Beijing with Lord Amherst and Sir Henry Ellis. The embassy was unsuccessful and shortly after it departed back to Britain Staunton decided to leave China permanently. In England he bought the Leigh estate in 1820 and constructed a new home. Staunton was a founder member of the Royal Asiatic Society and donated many items to its Collections.
Sir Gore Ouseley, 1st Baronet GCH, PC (24 June 1770 – 18 November 1844), was a British entrepreneur, linguist and diplomat. He was born in Ireland and educated at home. Whilst serving the British Government and posted in Lucknow he became a friend of the local Nawab Saadat Ali Khan and was responsible for building a palace called Dilkusha Kothi on the banks of the Gomti near Lucknow. This palace, a copy of the English Baroque stately home of Seaton Delaval Hall, stood for about fifty years until it was damaged in the Siege of Lucknow. Ouseley was made a baronet in 1808 with the recommendation of Lord Wellesley.
From 1810 Ouseley served as ambassador to Persia, the first ambassador since the time of Charles I. Ouseley was involved in negotiating treaties with Persia and Russia including the Treaty of Gulistan. He left Persia in 1814, stopping off in St Petersburg. While in Russia, he was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Russian Order of St. Alexander Nevsky.
Ouseley spent his final years in England and in 1835, he served as the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. He died in 1844 died at Hall Barn Park, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.
Graves Chamney Haughton (1788-1849) was educated in England before travelling to India in 1808 with the East India Company. He became proficient in Hindustani, studying at Fort William College. He returned to England in 1815 and in 1817 was appointed assistant professor at Haileybury College and held the post of professor of Sanskrit and Bengali from 1819 to 1827. He was supported by various prominent academics when he attempted in 1832 to be elected as the first Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University but he stood down in favour of Horace Hayman Wilson. He was a founding member of the Royal Asiatic Society and served as its Librarian from 1831-1837. He died of cholera in Paris on 28 August 1849.
Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb was a Scottish historian on Orientalism, teaching first at the School of Oriental Studies, London, and subsequently at the University of Oxford before moving to Harvard University in 1955. He was a trustee of the Gibb Memorial Trust.
Sir Harry Smith Parkes was a British diplomat who served as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary and Consul General of the United Kingdom to the Empire of Japan from 1865 to 1883 and the Chinese Qing Empire from 1883 to 1885, and Minister to Korea in 1884. He was a Corresponding Member of the Society from 1854, and later a Non-Resident Member. He was also for some time the President of the Asiatic Society of Japan.
A biography of Sir Harry Smith Parkes was included in the proceedings of the Anniversary General Meeting on 18 May 1855, published in the JRAS, Volume 17, Issue 3, July 1885.
Henry Creswicke Rawlinson was born in 1810 in Oxfordshire. He sailed to India 1827, to take up a cadetship in the East India Company's army. In 1833 he was sent to Persia with other British officers to organise and train the Persian army. It was during his duty in Persia that he first saw the great trilingual cuneiform inscription at Behistun (Bisitun) and began his work on cuneiform decipherment. In 1839 the British military officers were withdrawn as a result of a change in Persian foreign policy.
In 1841, Rawlinson joined the British military contingent in Afghanistan, where he was stationed at Kandahar as political agent (consul). When the Afghans rose against the British, he was required to organise the defence of Kandahar, which he did successfully. In 1842, on his return from Afghanistan, much of his property, including most of his papers, was lost when a river boat caught fire on the river Sutlej. In 1843, Rawlinson was posted to Baghdad as political agent, where he spent the rest of his East India Company career, and resumed work on cuneiform inscriptions. He returned to England from 1849-1851 on sick leave. But in 1851 he was entrusted by the Trustees of the British Museum with supervision of the archaeological excavations at Nimrud after A H Layard abandoned archaeology for a career in politics and diplomacy. He also conducted excavations on his own account in other places.
In 1855 he was relieved of his post at Baghdad and returned to England permanently. Almost immediately the Trustees of the British Museum applied to the Government for a special grant to fund the publication of lithographic reproductions of the cuneiform inscriptions in their collections under Rawlinson's editorship. In 1856 he was appointed a Crown Director of the East India Company. he also received a baronetcy. In 1858 he became MP for Reigate, but resigned after a few months to take up a seat on the newly-formed Council for India.
In 1859 Rawlinson was appointed Ambassador to Tehran, which involved his resigning his seat on the Council for India. He resigned from this position in 1860. in September 1862 he married Louisa Caroline Harcourt Seymour and in 1865 became MP for Frome. He held the seat until 1868 when he rejoined the Council for India, a post which he held to the end of his life.
His wife Louisa died in 1889 which seemed to have deeply affected Rawlinson. Concern for his father's well-being led to their son, Henry Seymour, resigning his post in India to continue his military career in England. Rawlinson died at the beginning of 1895.