# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Halliday, Frederick James

​HALLIDAY, Sir FREDERICK JAMES (1806–1901), first lieutenant-governor of Bengal, son of Thomas Halliday of Ewell, Surrey, was born there on Christmas Day 1806. A younger brother. General John Gustavus (b. 1822), long served on the Mysore commission. Halliday entered Rugby in 1814, and completed his education at the East India College, Haileybury, 1823-4. He was appointed to the Bengal civil service and arrived in Calcutta on 8 June 1825. Halliday first served as junior assistant to the company's agent in the Saugor division, and assistant registrar of the Sadar (supreme) court. He was joint magistrate and deputy collector in Bundelkhund and afterwards in Noakhali and Balu (1831-5); from Feb. 1835 magistrate and collector at Dacca, and next at Cuttack; and from April 1836 secretary to the board of revenue. In May 1838 he was appointed judicial and revenue secretary in Bengal, and, in addition, from March 1840 to 1843 he was junior secretary to the government of India both in the same and in the legislative departments. In 1849 he was made secretary in the home department by Lord Dalhousie, who held a high opinion of him and was distressed when, in July 1852, after twenty-seven years' uninterrupted service, ​Halliday was compelled by ill-health to take long leave home. He was on sixteen occasions examined by the Parliamentary committees on the renewal of the East India Company's charter, granted in 1853.
Returning to India, he took his seat on the governor-general's council on 5 Oct. 1853, on the nomination of the court of directors, Bengal, hitherto directly administered by the governor-general, was constituted on 1 May 1854 a lieutenant-governorship, and Dalhousie appointed Halliday as 'the fittest man in the service ... to hold this great and important office' of ruler of a territory comprising 253,000 square miles, with a population inadequately estimated at forty millions. Sir John Kaye credited him with natural ability, administrative sagacity, and a sufficiency in council which had won him general confidence (Hist. of Sepoy War, 9th edit. p. 58). Halliday sought with vigour to reform the administration of Bengal, the most backward of the great provinces of India (Sir John Strachey's India, chap. xxii.). In a valuable minute (30 April 1856) he submitted a scheme for the complete reorganisation of the police, and carried much of it into effect. Road communications were improved and extended, and Halliday supervised the up-country administration by prolonged and difficult tours in all directions. On several matters he came into conflict with members of the government of India, and in a private letter (6 Jan. 1856) Dalhousie was constrained to confess that 'he has so managed that I beheve he has not in Bengal a single influential friend but myself' (Dalhousie's Private Letters, 1901). In hearty sympathy with the policy of educational advance laid down in the despatch of Sir Charles Wood, first Viscount Halifax [q. v.], Halliday appointed a director of public instruction for Bengal in Jan. 1855, placed the presidency college on an improved footing, and in 1856 initiated the Calcutta University, the act of incorporation being passed in the following January.
A rebellion in June 1855 of the wild Santal tribes, who were suffering from the extortions of money-lending mahajans, was, in spite of preliminary protests from the supreme government, suppressed by martial law (Nov.-Dec). The Santal country was placed under special officers and the five districts named the Santal Parganas. Halliday was also faced by agrarian difficulties. By the Act of 1859 — known as the 'Magna Charta of the ryots' — he restricted the landlord's powers of enhancement in specified cases, gave occupancy rights to tenants of twelve years standing, and improved the law relating to sales of land for revenue arrears.
Bengal was not the chief centre of the Sepoy mutiny, but Halliday was closely associated with its suppression. His influence over the governor-general Canning was great, and to facilitate constant communication he removed from his official residence, Belvedere, to rooms overlooking Government House, Calcutta. There was no member of the government whom Canning 'so frequently consulted or whose opinions he so much respected' (Kaye). It was under his strong persuasion that Canning allowed British troops to replace the Sepoy guard at Government House in August (Sir H. S. Cunningham's Earl Canning, 1891, p. 126). In his final minute (2 July 1859) regarding the services of civil officers. Canning credited Halliday — the 'right hand of the government of India' — with effectually checking the spread of rebellion in Bengal, Halliday's 'Minute on the Bengal Mutinies' (30 Sept. 1858) gives full particulars of his activities (see Buckland's Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors). He was included on 18 Mar. 1858 in the thanks which had been voted by both Houses of Parliament to the governor-general and others. He was also thanked by the East India Company (10 and 17 Feb. 1858), and the court of directors acknowledged his services in detail in a despatch dated 4 Aug. 1858. Retiring from the lieutenant-governorship on 1 May 1859, he was created (civil) K.C.B. a year later.
Halliday was inevitably exposed to the censure which Canning's clemency in restraining the spirit of revenge provoked. Halliday stoutly defended in an official minute his own educational policy, to which Sir George Russell Clerk [q. v. Suppl. I] and others attributed the revolt. But more persistent was a personal controversy in which Halliday was involved for some thirty years with a subordinate officer, William Tayler [q. v.], commissioner of Patna, Behar. With Tayler, Halliday's relations were strained before the Mutiny. Tayler had printed 'for private circulation' a violent 'Protest against the Proceedings of the Lieut.-Gov. of Bengal in the Matter of the Behar Industrial Institution' (Calcutta, 1857). Subsequently Halliday doubted the prudence of Tayler' s procedure at the opening of the outbreak, and with the approval of the governor-general removed him from his commissionership (4 Aug.). Halliday appointed a Mahommedan to be ​deputy commissioner at Patna, and non-official Europeans resented so strongly Canning's sanction of the appointment that it was made one of the grounds in the Calcutta petition for Canning's recall. Anglo-Indian opinion rallied to the side of Tayler, whose published attacks on Halliday continued (see The Patna Crisis, 1858). Finally Tayler refused assurances of future good conduct, and, resigning the service on full pension on 29 March 1859, pursued his agitation for redress of alleged wrong till his death in 1892. The open controversy scarcely closed before 14 June 1888, when a motion by Sir Roper Lethbridge for a select committee on Tayler's case was opposed by the under-secretary for India (Sir John Gorst) and defeated by 164 to 20 (cf. Parliamentary Payers: Halliday's Memorandum, 1879, No. 238, and Tayler's reply, 1880, No. 143; vide also 1879, No. 308, and 1888, Nos. 226, 247, and 258). 'The Times' and the historians of the mutiny, Malleson and Mr. T. Rice Holmes, vehemently denounced Halliday's treatment of Tayler, while Sir John Kaye supported Tayler with reservations. The controversy is more judicially reviewed by Mr. G. W. Forrest in his 'History of the Indian Mutiny' (vol. iii. 1912), who shows Tayler to have been mistaken, theatrical, and insubordinate.
Meanwhile on 29 Sept. 1868 Halliday was appointed to the council of India, and there being no statutory limit of tenure, remained a member until his resignation on 31 Dec. 1886. His salaried public service had then extended over sixty-one years.
Halliday was a musician of unusual capacity, performing on the contra basso. He gave and took part in concerts when lieut.-governor of Bengal, earning the sobriquet of 'Big Fiddle.' In later years his great stature and commanding figure made him conspicuous in many an orchestra at high-class concerts at the Crystal Palace and elsewhere. Retaining Ms faculties and memory unimpaired when a nona-genarian, he could vividly describe in the twentieth century as an eye-witness the last suttee (widow-burning) near Calcutta, just before the practice was prohibited by the regulation of 1829. He died on 22 Oct. 1901 at his residence, 21 Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, and was buried at Brompton cemetery.
He married in 1834 Eliza, daughter of General Paul Macgregor, of the East India Company's army. She died in 1886, and had a numerous family. The eldest son, Frederick Mytton, Bengal C.S., was sometime commissioner of Patna and member of the board of revenue; another son is Lieut.-general George Thomas, late of the Bengal cavalry; and a grandson, Sir Frederick Loch Halliday, is commissioner of pohce, Calcutta.
[C. E. Buckland's Bengal under the Lieut.-Governors, Calcutta, 1902, i. 1-162; Mutiny histories by Kaye, Malleson, Forrest, and Holmes; Sir W. Lee-Warner's Life of Dalhousie, 1904; Dalhousie's Private Letters, 1910; Parl. papers on Tayler's cass, cited above, and Tayler's books and pamphlets; Parl. Debates, 1879, 1880, and 1888; India List, 1901; The Times, 24 Oct. 1901.]
F. H. B.