# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Wyllie, William Hutt Curzon

​WYLLIE, Sir WILLIAM HUTT CURZON (1848–1909), lieutenant-colonel in the Indian army and of the government of India foreign department, born at Cheltenham on 5 Oct. 1848, was third and youngest son of the five children of General Sir William Wyllie, G.C.B. [q. v.], by Amelia, daughter of Richards Hutt of Appley, Isle of Wight, and niece of Captain John Hutt, R.N. [q. v.] Both his brothers served in India—John William Shaw Wyllie [q. v.] and Francis Robert Shaw Wyllie, some time under-secretary to the government of Bombay.
Educated at Marlborough and Sandhurst, he entered the army in Oct. 1866 as ensign 106th foot (the Durham light infantry). Arriving in India Feb. 1867, he joined the Indian staff corps in 1869, and was posted to the 2nd Gurkha regt. (the Sirmoor rifles), now the 2nd King Edward's own Gurkhas. He was specially selected for civil and political employment in 1870, when he was appointed to the Oudh commission and served under General Barrow and Sir George Couper [q. v. Suppl. II].
In Jan. 1879 he was transferred to the foreign department, serving successively as cantonment magistrate of Nasirabad, assistant-commissioner in Ajmer-Merwara, and assistant to the governor-general's agent in Baluchistan, Sir Robert Groves Sandeman [q. v.]. He went through the Afghan campaign of 1878–80, including the march on Kandahar, with Major-general Sir Robert Phayre. He received the medal and was mentioned in the viceroy's despatches. After the war he was military secretary to his brother-in-law, William Patrick Adam, governor of Madras [q. v.], from Dec. 1880 until Adam's death in the following May, and until Nov. 1881 he was private secretary to Mr. William Hudleston (acting governor).
He married on 29 December 1881 Katharine Georgiana, second daughter of David Fremantle Carmichael, I.C.S., then member of the council, Madras, who survives him.
Wyllie had charge of Mulhar Rao, the ex-Gaekwar of Baroda, from Dec. 1881 to Nov. 1882. He then became assistant resident at Haiderabad. Subsequently he was assistant commissioner, Ajmer-Merwara, 1883; first assistant in Rajputana, 1884; additional political agent, Kotah, April 1885; boundary settlement officer, Meywar-Marwar border, Nov. 1886; political agent, Kotah, Jan. 1889; officiating commissioner of Ajmer, July 1891; officiating political agent, Jhallawar, in addition to Kotah, 1891–2; resident western states of Rajputana (Jodhpur), 1892–3; resident in Meywar (Udaipur), Nov. 1893 to Feb. 1898, when he officiated as resident in Nepal. Later in 1898 he attained one of the highest appointments in the service, viz. that of agent to the governor-general in central India. In May 1900 he was transferred in the same capacity to Rajputana, where he remained during the rest of his service in India. He was made C.I.E. in 1881, and he attained his lieutenant-colonelcy in 1892.
Throughout his long and varied services in the native states of India, and more especially in Rajputana, where seventeen of the most strenuous years of his life were spent, he gained by his unfailing courtesy, his charm of manner, and above all by his high character and strength of purpose, the most remarkable influence over the chiefs and officials of the principalities under his administrative charge. In addition Wyllie had the reputation, so dear to all Rajputs, of a keen sportsman and a skilful and daring rider, who held as a trophy the blue riband of Indian sportsmen, the Hog-hunters' Ganges cup, which he won in Oudh in April 1875.
His example stimulated all who served under him, and it was owing to his energy and to the confidence placed in him by the princes and people of Rajputana that the calamity of famine during the years 1899–1900 was successfully overcome by the measures of relief which he organised.
In March 1901 he came home on being selected by Lord George Hamilton for the post of political aide-de-camp to the secretary of state for India. His knowledge of India and long association with ​the ruling chiefs and their courts admirably fitted him for the important and often delicate duties of the office, which included that of advising the secretary of state for India on political questions relating to the native states. Arrangements for the reception of Indian magnates at the English court were in his charge, and heavy work devolved upon him at King Edward VII's coronation in 1902, in which year he received the decorations of K.C.I.E. and M.V.O. He became C.V.O. in June 1907.
His official position brought him into close contact with Indian students, in whose welfare he was always deeply interested. He also took an active part in the work of associations and charities for the benefit of Indians. To these objects he devoted himself unsparingly.
It was while attending, with Lady Wyllie, an entertainment given to Indians by the National Indian Association at the Imperial Institute, London, on the night of 1 July 1909, that Wyllie was assassinated, almost under the eyes of his wife, by Madho Lal Dhingra, a Punjabi student, who suddenly fired at him with a revolver, killing him instantly. This insane outrage upon an innocent and true friend of Indians was the precursor of similar crimes committed in India. Dr. Cawas Lalcaca, a Parsi physician of Shanghai, who bravely interposed to save Wyllie, was also mortally wounded. Dhingra was convicted of the double crime at the Central Criminal Court on 23 July, and was hanged at Pentonville prison on 17 August.
Wyllie's tragic death was felt as deeply in India as at home. Flags were put at half-mast, and public offices were closed throughout Rajputana and central India on reception of the news; and on the day of Wyllie's funeral (in Richmond cemetery) a salute of thirteen guns was fired from the palace fortresses of Rajputana. Viscount Morley, the secretary of state in council, recorded ‘his high appreciation of Wyllie's admirable services,’ and his ‘profound sense of the personal loss’ sustained by himself and his colleagues ‘by the blind, atrocious crime.’ He also granted a special pension of 500l. to Lady Wyllie ‘in recognition of her husband's long and excellent service to the state, and in view of the circumstances in which he met his death.’ Memorial funds were raised both in England and in India. From the English fund a marble tablet erected in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral was unveiled by Earl Roberts on 19 Oct. 1910, in the presence, among others, of the three successive secretaries of state (Lord George Hamilton, Viscounts Midleton and Morley) whom Wyllie had served at the India office. An inscription beneath a portrait medallion was written by Lord Curzon of Kedleston. The balance, 2551l., the ‘Curzon Wyllie memorial fund,’ was entrusted to the Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Limehouse, on the governing body of which he had served. A brass tablet was also placed in the central hall of the home. At Marlborough College there was founded a Curzon Wyllie memorial medal to be given annually to the most efficient member of the officers' training corps. In India the Curzon Wyllie Central Memorial Fund committee have erected at a cost of 2000l. a marble aramgarh (place of rest) in Ajmer, Rajputana, to provide shade and rest and water for men and animals. A portrait by Mr. Herbert A. Olivier, exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1910, was presented to Lady Wyllie by the same committee; a replica has been placed in the Mayo college for chiefs at Ajmer. Local memorials have also been instituted in many of the states of Rajputana and central India.
[India List, 1909; Indian Magazine and Review, August 1909; The Times, 3, 4, 5, 7, 24 July and 18 Aug. 1909; 20 Oct. 1910; 13 March 1911, and other dates; Annual Reports, Strangers' Home for Asiatics, 1909 and 1910; Homeward Mail, 3 July 1911; personal knowledge.]
F. H. B.