Note 34 — PART I. THE RELIEF

The Rt. Hon. Sir George Grey, K. C. B., ‘Soldier, Explorer, Administrator, Statesman, Thinker, and Dreamer,’ to quote James Milne, was born in 1812, and died in 1898. He was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, being accorded a public funeral.

Governor of South Australia, when twenty-nine, he was subsequently twice Governor, and, later, Premier, of New Zealand; appointed as the first Governor of Cape Colony, 1854-59, Sir George Grey, by a daring assumption of personal responsibility, ‘probably saved India,’ as Lord Malmesbury said, by diverting to India British troops meant for China, and also despatching re-enforcements from the Cape—the first to reach India—on the outbreak of the Mutiny.

He was active in English public life in 1868-70, and in Australian affairs in 1870-94 (Milne’s Romance of a Proconsul).

Referring to Sir George Grey’s masterly despatches, with their singularly clear and definite analysis of the conditions of South Africa, Basil Worsfold (History of South Africa, in Dent’s Temple Series) says, ‘In so far as any one cause can be assigned for the subsequent disasters, both military and administrative, of the British Government in South Africa, it is to be found in the unwillingness of the “man in Downing Street” to listen to the man at Cape Town.’

* At a very late stage of passing the ‘Autobiography’ through the Press, a controversy relating to this famous statement has been raised, the result of which, so far, seems to demand its qualification, to some extent.—Vide The Times, Aug. 27th, 1909, et seq.